For more than three decades, the multifaceted alliance between the United States and Japan has contributed significantly to the security of Japan and the maintenance of peace and security in the Far East. With the end of the Cold War, new sources of potential threats have arisen at a time when Japan's national self-confidence has been shaken by nearly a decade of economic stagnation, a highly fluid political situation, and an inadequate institutional structure for crisis management and strategy formulation. Osius examines how Japan is trying to redefine its identity from a nation whose constitution renounces war as a sovereign right to a normal country involved in United Nations peacekeeping operations and regional military relationships. In his initial chapters, Osius focuses on the purpose of the security alliance and argues that U.S.-Japanese interests coincide enough not only to sustain the alliance, but also to warrant strengthening and promoting it. He then examines the challenges and opportunities for an enhanced alliance over the next decade. Together, he maintains, the United States and Japan can address broadly defined security concerns, such as energy supply, weapons of mass destruction proliferation, transborder crime, piracy, and illegal narcotics, as well as environmental issues, infectious disease, economic development, and humanitarian and disaster relief. However, if it is to thrive, the U.S.-Japan alliance must remain dynamic rather than static and must be nurtured, sustained, and enhanced by both parties. An important analysis for policy makers, scholars, and students of U.S.-Japanese political and military relations and Asian Studies in general.

Japan's new politics challenge some basic assumptions about U.S.-Japan alliance management. CFR Senior Fellow Sheila A. Smith explores this new era of alternating parties in power and reveals the growing importance of Japan's domestic politics in shaping alliance cooperation.

The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Past, Present, and Future explains the inner workings of the U.S.-Japan alliance and recommends new approaches to sustaining this critical bilateral security relationship.

Despite the enduring importance of the U.S.-Japan security alliance, the broader relationship between the two countries is today beset by sobering new difficulties. In this comprehensive comparative analysis of the transpacific alliance and its political, economic, and social foundations, Kent E. Calder, a leading Japan specialist, asserts that bilateral relations between the two countries are dangerously eroding as both seek broader options in a globally oriented world. Calder documents the quiet erosion of America's multidimensional ties with Japan as China rises, generations change, and new forces arise in both American and Japanese politics. He then assesses consequences for a twenty-first-century military alliance with formidable coordination requirements, explores alternative foreign paradigms for dealing with the United States, adopted by Britain, Germany, and China, and offers prescriptions for restoring U.S.-Japan relations to vitality once again.

Since the end of World War II, Japan has not sought to remilitarize, and its postwar constitution commits to renouncing aggressive warfare. Yet many inside and outside Japan have asked whether the country should or will return to commanding armed forces amid an increasingly challenging regional and global context and as domestic politics have shifted in favor of demonstrations of national strength. Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan’s reluctance to remilitarize that foregrounds the relationship between demographics and security. Japan’s Aging Peace demonstrates how changing perceptions of security across generations have culminated in a culture of antimilitarism that constrains the government’s efforts to pursue a more martial foreign policy. Le challenges a simple opposition between militarism and pacifism, arguing that Japanese security discourse should be understood in terms of “multiple militarisms,” which can legitimate choices such as the mobilization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces for peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief missions. Le highlights how factors that are not typically linked to security policy, such as aging and declining populations and gender inequality, have played crucial roles. He contends that the case of Japan challenges the presumption in international relations scholarship that states must pursue the use of force or be punished, showing how widespread normative beliefs have restrained Japanese policy makers. Drawing on interviews with policy makers, military personnel, atomic bomb survivors, museum coordinators, grassroots activists, and other stakeholders, as well as analysis of peace museums and social movements, Japan’s Aging Peace provides new insights for scholars of Asian politics, international relations, and Japanese foreign policy.