CIAO DATE: 04/02

The Domestic Context of the Alliances: The Politics of Tokyo

It is now almost a cliché to say that domestic politics and foreign policy are closely connected.1 Yet however trite this expression, nonetheless it is true. Japan's international behavior and particularly its security policy cannot be fully understood without analyzing its domestic poli-tics. In post-World War II Japan, security policy has been the dominant theme of domestic politics and source of ideological divide.

Once one starts to take domestic conditions into account, however, one is immediately reminded of the fact that no ready-made theories exist. Traditional decision-making "mod-els" such as Graham Allison's "organization process" model or the "bureaucratic politics" model are limited to offering some useful concepts, categories, and heuristic hypotheses. The recently more popular "two-level games" approach remains in the same theoretical state; that is, it too is limited to offering useful concepts such as "win-sets" and some tentative hypoth-eses.

This paper is informed by no path-breaking theoretical ideas. I would like to offer a fairly straightforward attempt to describe and, hopefully, explain the impact of Japan's domestic politics on the alliance between Japan and the United States. My theoretical categories are quite mundane: actors with their preferences and their power resources, issues, and emerging patterns of politics. Essentially, my analysis is reduced to the following three questions. First, who are the relevant political actors in Japan that affect the alliance with the United States? What are their policy preferences with respect to the U.S. alliance? What resources does each actor utilize when it interacts with the others? Second, what are the domestic political issues with regard to the Japan-U.S. alliance? What aspects of the alliance become political issues that excite domestic politics? Third, what kind of pattern of politics emerges out of the inter-action of various actors on various issues?

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