2020 Volume 2020 Issue 200 Pages 200_7-200_22
Japanese diplomacy is often regarded as a diplomacy without grand strategy. This paper doesn’t see it that way. The paper finds Japanese diplomacy rich in strategies. In general, a strategy is to make through the interaction between the international perception and identity. The paper focuses on the idea of Japanese Bridge-Building Diplomacy among many and discusses how the idea was coined and shows it had undergone various vicissitudes until the 1950s.
An early 20th century version of Bridge-Building strategy was coined by Shigenobu Okuma under the name of Fusion of East and West Civilizations. In his theory the Western civilization reached the United States and the Eastern civilization reached Japan and these two civilizations came into contact with the Perry’s arrival to Yokohama Bay in the middle of 19th century. The Japanese with this miraculous encounter, in Okuma’s theory, had a vocation to bring Western superior civilization to the East. This idea was translated into Japanese China policy and inherited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and such leaders of the ministry as Shigeru Yoshida and Mamoru Shigemitsu. Although the idea was fully performed neither in the early 20th century and in the 1950s, this paper shows the possibilities of the revival of the strategy in the coming era of the US-China confrontation in the 21th century and argues the value of inheriting the idea of Bridge Building Strategy as “unfinished self-portrait” of Japanese Diplomacy is eminent.
