Japan’s Civilizational Mislocation

Illusion, dependency, and the misreading of global order

Kazuhiro Hayashida on a nation that lost its position in a multipolar world.

The current sluggishness of Japan’s response is not merely a delay in policy judgment. At a much deeper level, Japan has mistaken its own position. A defeated nation situated in Asia perceives and conducts itself as though it were a natural core component of the West, internalizing American national interests as if they were its own principles. This misrecognition of its own standing distorts the very starting point of its judgment in all matters: towards China, towards Russia, and towards the United States.

Japan was constructed as a watchpost for the United States in Asia, and as a result, it lost its own civilizational core and forfeited the ability to assert its own principles in its dealings with others. For that reason, Japan’s diplomacy tends to become not an exercise in autonomous judgment, but a repetition of borrowed principles.

The core of this sluggishness lies in a misreading of the transformation of the world order. The world has already ceased to be in a unipolar condition and has entered a process of transition towards multipolarity, while Japan alone remains stranded within an outdated, West-centered schema. Even as American diplomatic doctrine begins to revise its traditional hegemonic course and NATO expansion, and as the importance of relations with Russia and the evolving interrelations among China, the EU, and the United States itself become increasingly evident, Japan continues to operate under the illusion that “the United States = a single will” and “the West = a monolithic bloc.” This lag in recognizing the coordinates of the world produces Japan’s misreadings and miscommunications as seen from the outside.

Japan does not view China as a civilization, but only as a regime. Here lies a decisive shallowness of interpretation. The vast population inhabiting the Chinese continent will not disappear even if the state system changes, yet Japan proceeds on the assumption that the “China problem” could be resolved if the political nature of the Chinese state were altered. The crude logic devised to control what is essentially an American colony in relation to China is treated as mere operational work, never interpreted as a theory of its own; thus, it collapses from the outset. The essence of the China problem lies not in changes of state or regime, but in the enduring civilizational population that persists in that place. Because strategies towards China are constructed without this elementary premise, Japan’s policies become reactive in the short term and utterly powerless against the opponent’s continuity. What Japan ought to confront is the Westernism that China itself is confronting—not transient policies, but the continental civilizational sphere that endures over the long term.

Japan scarcely understands how its own statements are interpreted within international institutions. What makes Japan’s current behavior dangerous is not simply its hardline tone, but the fact that it has lost its awareness of its position as a defeated nation while behaving as though it were a member of the victorious powers. Statements regarding the Taiwan issue or sanctions against Russia, issued at the direction of the United States, may appear domestically as ordinary security discussions, yet from the outside they are interpreted as a former enemy state once again beginning to stand out militarily and politically. This discrepancy is not merely a matter of impression; it connects to the postwar structural context, such as the enemy clauses, and reveals how Japan has lost sight of how legally and symbolically dangerous its domestic discourse has become. This is less a matter of slowness than of a deficiency in recognition.

Furthermore, there is a lack of crisis awareness and defenselessness towards techniques of external domination. Contemporary domination, which employs the standard methods of civilizational control by ruling powers, does not necessarily destroy internal order. Instead, it fixes the interface with the external world onto a single representative, transforming that individual’s statements and signatures into permanent obligations of the entire nation. Crucially, the authority to determine and interpret their meaning always resides with the dominating side.

Japan’s foreign policy is extremely vulnerable to this form of control. A single remark by a politician or bureaucrat is preserved in the external world as the definitive will of the entire state, later constraining Japan’s actions. Nevertheless, Japan treats such statements as nothing more than situational political remarks. This perception stems from an insufficient understanding of the structures of domination.

Japan conducts diplomacy while lacking a civilizational core. Japan, as an island nation situated at the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, originally stood at the interface between continental and maritime civilizations, formed at the crossroads of the northern Altai–Amur cultural sphere and the Yellow River civilization. In other words, Japan’s inherent strength lay not in the purity of a single civilization, but in its capacity to integrate and transform multiple civilizational cores. Yet contemporary Japan has concealed and altered this historical trajectory, and has grown accustomed to speaking through borrowed American principles. In such a condition, Japan can neither articulate the world in its own words nor express its position through principles of its own. It remains perpetually subject to external use, moving according to the schedules of other nations—this is the fundamental cause.

What is required for improvement is a redefinition of Japan’s self-conception. Japan must no longer define itself as part of the West, but rather as a buffer state at the eastern edge of Eurasia. This is not an emotional return to Asia, but a recalibration of the axis of diplomatic judgment—from a West-centered perspective embedded during the postwar occupation back towards geographic and civilizational realities.

Within the web of relations among the United States, Russia, China, the Islamic world, and the EU, Japan must move beyond the question of which civilizational bloc it should subordinate itself to, and instead enter a stage of determining which interfaces it can manage and which tensions it can mediate. In this regard, Japan must shift its China strategy from a state-based framework to one based on civilizational population. It must abandon wishful thinking premised on regime change or systemic transformation, and instead adopt strategies spanning decades grounded in geography, demography, and civilizational continuity. To this end, across military, economic, educational, and public opinion domains alike, Japan must design long-term approaches directed not at “state China” but at “civilizational China.” Short-term provocations and forceful rhetoric only expose a lack of structural understanding.

Accordingly, external statements must become subject to institutional audit. A permanent mechanism is required to preemptively assess how statements by politicians and bureaucrats will be interpreted within the frameworks of the United Nations order, the postwar order, the status of a defeated nation, and provisions such as the enemy clauses. This is not a matter of public relations, but of national security itself. A state that speaks without understanding how its words may be translated abroad into obligations or designations of enmity cannot be said to conduct diplomacy; it must restrain reflexive speech.

At the same time, Japan must move away from a structure in which the entire nation is borne by a single representative. As the structure of Western domination outlined earlier suggests, external control begins with the singularization of the point of contact. Japan must reduce situations in which the entire state becomes bound by the decisions of the prime minister’s office or a single ministry, and instead institutionalize a multi-channel diplomatic structure in which different channels mutually constrain one another. Political, diplomatic, economic, security, civilizational, and religious-cultural dimensions must be coordinated in parallel, ensuring that isolated signatures or statements do not harden into permanent obligations.

Most importantly, Japan must articulate its own framework of principles. Borrowing American universalism will not suffice, nor can Russian realism simply be transplanted as is. What Japan requires is a distinct logic proper to a state positioned at the interface of multiple civilizations—one that sustains tension while mediating between competing civilizations. It must avoid absorption into any single pole of conflict, maintain the tension between different civilizational cores, and intervene when necessary to defend its partners. Unless this capacity is explicitly formulated as a political philosophy, Japan cannot possess its own principles.

Accordingly, Japan’s sluggishness cannot be reduced to slow bureaucracy or incompetent politicians. It stems from a misrecognition of its civilizational position, a failure to understand China as a civilizational population, a forgetting of the postwar structure, a defenselessness towards techniques of external domination, and the absence of its own framework of principles—all of which delay and distort every judgment. The order of remedy is clear: first correct the nation’s own position; next update the coordinates of the world; and only then articulate Japan’s own civilizational justice. To ignore this sequence and attempt to advance policy alone is merely to repeat the same failures.

(Translated from the Japanese)