In many respects, thinking about this volume began several years ago at a workshop organized by Hartmut Behr for a different project in Newcastle. Through our common interest in Japanese political thought and intellectual exchanges since the nineteenth century between Japan and Central Europe (Mitteleuropa), we quickly realized that to date no attempt has been undertaken to chart a...

“[T]he academy’s most overtly ‘international’ discipline is finally going ‘global,’” Julian Go and George Lawson (2017: 2) recently noted. After decades of essentializing international politics from a relatively small part of the world commonly identified as the “West,” International Relations (IR) has gradually moved from spatiotemporally...

It has been argued that through the appropriation of international law East Asian countries were admitted to the European international society. Although the topic itself has been relatively well investigated, the question as to why China’s entry into the international society lagged behind that of Japan has not been comprehensively addressed in...

Despite the early impact of Chinese civilization on European philosophers...

In his recent study on International Relations (IR), Atsushi Shibasaki (2015: 90) claims that “Tanaka Kōtarō was the first person in Japan to develop a comprehensive theory of...

Although Japan is geographically located at the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, it has long been questioned if Japan is part of Asia or the West. An early vocalization of this debate was asserted in the late nineteenth century by the Japanese Enlightenment thinker Yukichi Fukuzawa, who, in an editorial later called Datsu-A-ron (de-Asianization), stated that Japan should leave...

Most would agree that peace is an indispensable goal, yet globally, there is no consensus about what peace really means, indicating that peace, like other theoretical terms, is not easy to define. Famously, Johan Galtung (1964) proposed a distinction between “positive” and “negative” peace. While negative peace means “absence of war,” positive peace requires, in...

Through the reading of Japanese liberal/pluralist thinkers in colonial studies, this chapter sheds light on the dilemma of humanitarian aid and development assistance as a vehicle to sustain the liberal international order. In particular, it focuses on Inazō Nitobe (1862–1933) and Tadao Yanaihara (1893–1961), both of whom reached prominence in colonial studies in their...

On May 18, 2009, Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the oppositional Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) at that time, claimed that his party represented the views of shimin (市民 citizens). Having been informed by journalists about Hatoyama’s remark, Tarō Asō, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Japan’s then prime minister,...

While there are increasing attempts to include non-Western perspectives by decolonizing/democratizing International Relations (IR) theory, others recognize the difficulty in taking an approach to learn from other viewpoints (cf. Jones 2006; Acharya and Buzan 2007; Tickner and Wæver 2009; Chen 2011; Hutchings 2011). When it comes to dependency theory, it has even been...

In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary celebrating the end of the Asia-Pacific War, Japan’s prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, stated,

Shōin Yoshida, one of Japan’s most revered national heroes, has been repeatedly invoked in Japan as the paragon of loyalty and patriotism. During World War II, his writings—particularly his passionate poetry—were constantly in...

The meaning of the word “culture” is demanding, particularly when it is used in the contemporary International Relations (IR) context. The term is often used to distinguish different identities, allegedly illuminating idiosyncrasies embedded in a particular society or group of people. Despite the warnings of anthropologists and cultural studies specialists that culture is unfixed and...

At first sight, Haruki Murakami may escape the usual definition of a political thinker and may have little to do with politics or “being political.” It is the intention of this chapter to dispute this impression and argue that Murakami has produced political thoughts, loosely defined, and that these thoughts have made an impact in other contexts beyond Japan. Specifically, I will study...

Japanese academia is currently experiencing the resurgence of Nihongaku with several major universities such as Tohoku University, Hokkaido University, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies establishing new degree programs and research networks. This resurgence reached an apex with the establishment of a research network by Tokyo University’s Institute for Advanced Studies on...

Kevin M. Doak holds the Nippon Foundation Endowed Chair in Japanese Studies at Georgetown University. His recent publications include “The Christian Habitus of Japan’s Interwar Diplomacy,” in Japan and the Great War, edited by Antony Best and Oliviero Frattolillo (2015). His next book, Kotaro Tanaka and World Law: Rethinking the Natural Law Outside the West,...

Felix Rösch is senior lecturer in international relations at Coventry University. He works on encounters of difference in transcultural and intercultural contexts at the intersection of classical realism and critical theories. Among others, he has published with the Review of International Studies, Politics, European Journal of International...

Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations