Asia-Pacific Week 2006 Japanese Studies Graduate Summer School ABSTRACT

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With the dawn of the 'unipolar moment' in the early 1990s, the US government began re-envisioning the structures that had underpinned the containment of the Soviet Union, including the US-Japan security alliance. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, American scholars had questioned the Yoshida Doctrine, the principle attributed to early post-war Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru by which Japan 'outsourced' responsibility for its security to the US. Thus with the end of the cold war, policymakers and scholars began developing ideas by which Japan could play a more active role in the alliance. A similar debate occurred in Japan, especially after Japan was surprised by the public outcry in the US against Japan's failure to provide assistance beyond money to Operation Desert Storm.

Despite the debates in both the US and Japan, however, little progress was made in transforming the alliance so that it could play a more substantial role in the post-cold war security environment. Only in the years following September 11, 2001 have the ideas developed during the 1990s been implemented by Washington and Tokyo. The question I will address in this paper, therefore, is why ideas for reforming the US-Japan alliance were not adopted during the 1990s.

As suggested by my title, my research will address variables at each of the three level of analysis in international relations: systemic, state, and individual. Each level of analysis provides a plausible explanation for the contrast between developments before and after September 11, and it is my goal to determine which variable is the most important in explaining the pattern of transformation in the alliance.

I will use primary documents, including government and private reports on alliance transformation, and interviews with individuals active in policy debates in the US and Japan to provide a narrative of policy discussions during the 1990s and to pinpoint the source of the difficulty in seeing ideas realized as policy.

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