Abstract
This article examines the causal associations between domestic Japan’s socio-psychological indices and people’s perceptions toward territorial disputes with China and South Korea. The triangulation analyses do not support most of the hypotheses except the explanatory variables of age, level of educational attainment, and Japan’s future projection: The higher the age group, the stronger the territorial sovereignty conviction; the higher the level of education, the weaker the support for the Japanese government’s hawkish policy; and the more pessimistic the future confidence of Japan, the bigger the threat perception of China. The causality could be established only when the probability level was relaxed from 0.05 to 0.10. This research finds a weak overall causal association between domestic state of affairs and territorial perceptions. The public opinion on territorial claims remains more or less the same largely independent of domestic socio-economic conditions. This observation leads to a call to revise the conventional conflict cycle theory (i.e., status quo > provocation > rise of tension > conflict relaxation) in order to reflect more of simultaneous and interactive nature of inter-state conflict (i.e., action [tension/status quo/reconciliation] > reaction [tension/status quo/reconciliation]). The intra-state affairs have become more vulnerable to unexpected and hard-to-control contingencies which defy the procedural progression of conflict management. This implies that the elites can no longer monopolize the decision on foreign affairs.
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Notes
Considering the disputing nature of territories, the order of the area names is alternated. The same applies to the order of naming of disputing countries.
One of the anonymous reviewers notes of preceding existence of negative perceptions toward China among the Japanese public and its ready-to-support nationalization decision well before the September 2010 collision incident. She/he notes that, “the negative view of China among the Japanese public had and has been formed in a continuing process since perhaps the middle of the 1990s, and that particular incident was just one of many incidents and events between China and Japan shaping public opinion on China in Japan. Even without that “unexpected” incident, the Japanese people might still have supported the nationalization, given their predictable anti-Chinese sentiment.
The author holds a South Korean name, and that could have stirred suspicions toward the research intentions and goals in conducting an opinion poll on the controversial issues of intra-state territorial disputes.
The total is larger than 100 % because of the questionnaire request to name three sources of information.
Rising conservatism among the Japanese youths has been noted by existing studies including Kohno’s [20], and my findings contradict such tendency. I cannot speculate on the reasons, but tentative guess would include their lack of war memories, unstable socio-economic prospects compared to the generations above, and high accessibility to SNS.
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Acknowledgments
This research was possible with the funding from Northeast Asia History Foundation in South Korea (2012). The author bears the sole responsibility for any errors as an individual researcher and wishes to make it clear that Hiroshima City University, a public educational institution of Japan, has nothing to do with this project. I am thankful for Professor Yoichiro Sato and his colleagues at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University for their kind assistance during the second round of data collection. I also thank Mr. Seungmin Kuk at University of California, San Diego for his assistance with statistical analyses. This paper benefitted a lot from the very thoughtful comments from three anonymous reviewers and Professor Gordon Cheung, the journal editor. The continuous encouragement from Professor Heonik Kwon at the University of Cambridge was indispensable to complete this research.
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Kim, M. Japanese Perceptions of Territorial Disputes: Opinion Poll Surveys in the Southwestern Part of Japan. East Asia 32, 341–360 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-015-9243-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-015-9243-5