Historical Memories and Security Legislation: Japan's Security Policy under the Abe Administration

In Japan, two political issues came to the forefront in the year marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. While usually dealt with separately, the Statement by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, issued on August 14, 2015, and the security legislation based on the concept of a “Proactive Contribution to Peace” both relate to the question of how we view Japan's place in international society. This article examines how both these issues support Japan's commitment to maintaining its identity as a peace-loving nation and its responsibility to contribute to international peace and prosperity.     

日本安倍政府对东盟的现实主义外交刍议

日本安倍政府“巧妙”利用与东盟建立友好合作关系40周年的重要节点,通过频繁的政治互动与密集的经济合作,深化了日本与东盟在地区政治、经济、安全等各个维度上的政策拟合度。不仅如此,迫于现实与战略层面的利益考虑,安倍政府试图借助政治拉拢与经济控制,把东盟塑造成“遏制中国发展”的潜在战略盟友。但由于存在过分强调主观意志、工具主义与利益至上等严重的局限性,日本安倍政府对东盟的外交战略注定无法达到预期效果,也难以在现实层面拉拢东盟构筑对华包围圈。     

Moving Beyond 100 Years: The “WA Approach” to National Party Survival

Since its formation in 1913, the Western Australian branch of the National Party has faced many challenges to its survival. Electoral reform removing rural malapportionment in 2005 prompted changes in strategic direction, including abandoning coalition with the Liberal Party and creating a discrete image, branding and policy approach. Holding the balance of power after the 2008 election, the party adopted a post‐election bargaining strategy to secure ministries and funding for its “Royalties for Regions” policy. This “WA approach” is distinctive from amalgamation and coalition arrangements embraced elsewhere in Australia. This article updates progress of the strategy following state and federal elections in 2013 and finds that it has been a success measured by increased votes, seats and policy influence and expansion into regional Western Australia to displace Labor. However, its applicability to other branches of the National Party is likely to be limited.     

论安倍内阁中东派兵的决策、突破与目标

在美伊两国关系对立及中东地区局势紧张的背景下,2020年初,日本海上自卫队部队前往中东地区进行情报收集。此次中东派兵,其决策过程完全是在安倍首相主导下完成的,且基于中东平衡外交的立场而决定日本"独自派兵"。它既体现了冷战后日本海外派兵的延续性,又在法律依据、日美同盟、政策路径等领域取得了新突破。通过中东派兵,安倍内阁试图实现多重战略目标,派兵本身所蕴含的象征性意义远大于其具体实效。     

Poverty and Its Possible Cures: Abe Isoo and Kawakami Hajime

This article explores the views of two eminent Meiji intellectuals, Abe Isoo (1865–1949) and Kawakami Hajime (1879–1946), regarding poverty and its possible cures. Both men addressed this subject at a time which saw the rapid development of monopoly capitalism in Japan. Politically, this period was typified by the social and political oppression that followed the Public Order Police Law (1900) and the High Treason Incident (1910). The latter marked the beginning of the “winter” of the socialist movement in Japan. Abe, the father of Japanese socialism, and the younger Kawakami, a bourgeois economist and later a Marxist, were two of the more prominent intellectuals concerned with poverty. This article outlines their thoughts on poverty and its possible cures in the period between 1903 and 1916 as expressed in their most representative works on the issue, Abe’s Saikin no shakai mondai (Current Social Problems), (1915) and Kawakami’s Bimbô monogatari (The Tale of Poverty), (1916).     

Living Beyond Apartheid: The Territorial Ethics of Reconciliation

This essay explores the ethical murkiness of interpersonal reconciliation in the post-liberation era, focusing on the problem of material, and specifically territorial, restitution—an aspect of justice which critics say was the missing component of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace alongside Bessie Head’s A Question of Power offers a window into the knotty relationship between reconciliation and redistribution, a relationship which, these novels insist, must be accounted for in reassessing directions for the future and defining new political horizons. Theories of post-apartheid interpersonal ethics, this essay argues, are incomplete and unachievable without a territorial dimension. While Coetzee shows territorial demarcations to be the silent shaper of human interaction and a constant snag in the fabric of the “new” South Africa, Head goes outside the boundaries of the apartheid state to envision the ethical restructuring of human relations through transformative practices of cooperative farming. While ethics is fundamentally about a relation to the other, these novels suggest that land distribution must be factored into the interpersonal equation.     

The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations

The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations. By Benjamin Gregg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). pp.viii + 283. US$59.95 (hb).