The domopolitics of Japanese human security

Introduction

In the relevant literature, Japan’s approach to human security has generally been hailed as an expression of the country’s progressive foreign policy, its liberal internationalist commitment and its ‘good offices’ in the United Nations (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy, 2007: 15; Bosold and Werthes, 2005; Soeya, 2005; Evans, 2004; Newman, 2004; Timothy, 2004). As the 2001 Diplomatic Bluebook held, by ‘positioning human security as the cornerstone of international cooperation in the 21st century, Japan is working to make the new century a human-centered century’. ¹ Moreover, an account given by Takemi Keizo, a Japanese politician and scholar, reveals that Japan’s approach to human security was linked to the country’s ‘pacifist foreign policy’: ‘What is now required of Japan is the formulation and projection of a new future-oriented pacifism that enhances and promotes Japan’s standing as a responsible member of the international community.... This is a task ... based on the pillar of human security’ (Takemi, 2002: 47; emphasis added).

The insertion of human security as an idea into Japanese foreign policy and its establishment as one of the latter’s key pillars has been associated with UN developments related to human security. Turning human security into one of Japan’s key foreign-political principles has been seen as marking the end of the country’s chequebook diplomacy (Gilson, 2000; Hsien-Li, 2010). It has been said that Japanese human security is concerned with development and humanitarianism, and not with national security (Edström, 2003: 220). For this reason, it has been perceived as a set of ideas and tools aimed at improving the lives of individuals and communities. Within the mainstream understanding of Japanese human security, there is a general belief that the Japanese approach has always rested on humanitarian and non-military solutions and has not been primarily shaped by political motives. Indeed, this alleged neutrality has been hailed as one of its advantages over Western-centred articulations of human security, most notably that of Canada (Acharya, 2001). One of the most oft-used examples of the well-balanced and non-controversial quality of Japanese human security, in both governmental and academic discourses, has been its ability to optimize and make better use of Japanese official development aid (ODA) (Hoshino, 2007: 227; MacFarlane and Foong Khong, 2006: 158; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2002a).

One of the central areas in which Japanese human security has been depicted as a case of progressive foreign policy has been the cooperation between the Japanese government and Japanese NGOs. The mainstream narrative concerning the nature of Japanese human security suggests that the Japanese government began the cultivation of its interaction with NGOs during the late 1980s and that this interaction continued throughout the 1990s. It has been pointed out that although the government was initially quite rigid in this area, the post-1998 period, which saw the introduction of a new regulative framework, has been a time of NGO empowerment and emancipation (Gilson and Purvis, 2003: 202–5; Kuroda, 2003: 230–4). In the words of Hook et al. (2001: 289), the ‘activities [of NGOs] ... have come to embody the type of human security stance that the Japanese government is trying to promote’.

Also, the mainstream narrative on Japanese human security commonly discusses the sociopolitical values on which Japanese human security has allegedly been built. There have been two discourses related to this issue, although at times they were interwoven: a universal/liberal-values discourse and an Asian-values discourse. The link between Japanese human security and universal values has mainly been manifested through the notion of human rights (Ogata, 2003). Simultaneously, the official and academic discourses on Japanese human security have been imbued with the notion of ‘Asian values’. The Asian-values discourse is a perfect example of a culturalist explanation that tries to scientifically account for a certain type of practice (here, human security). Discussing the concept of ‘Asian human security’, Tow and Trood (2000: 26–7) have asserted that Asian cultures tend to favour communitarianism and that this can be explained through reference to Sino-Confucianism, this being the system of ideas on which these societies are grounded. Similarly, Sucharithanarugse (2000: 51) has spoken of the process of ‘Asianising human security’ and maintained that the backbone of such a paradigm is ‘security that “cares”’. Thus, Japanese human security has been considered a representative of the so-called Asian paradigm of human security. The existing narrative, which is inspired by the United Nations Development Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994), makes a crucial distinction between a ‘broad approach’ to human security that attempts to reduce structural violence and a ‘narrow approach’ to human security that tries to remove direct violence (Abdus Sabur, 2003: 40; Bosold and Werthes, 2005; Chen, 1995; Duffield, 2007: 120; Gasper, 2005; Paris, 2001; Commission on Human Security, 2003).

It is intriguing to observe the academic fixation on certain ‘essences’ that have supposedly shaped or even constituted Japanese human security. This obsession can be found at the policymaking level as well as at the academic level, with the practices of one level reinforcing those of the other in a circular fashion. Heuristically speaking, the conventional understanding of Japanese human security has considerably reduced our ability to assess the notion and its related practices critically, and especially our ability to appreciate its potential and limits in both empirical and theoretical terms. Thinking in terms of policymaking categories that are often cast in a binary language of opposites (e.g. narrow/broad, hard/soft, human/national) is not a particularly productive starting point here. The existing culturally and normatively based explanations of Japanese human security have suffered from at least two severe deficiencies: (i) a homogenization of the alleged ‘Asian’ experience and the related depiction of Japan as the epitome of human security of the Asian continent; and (ii) a complete analytical separation of the ‘domestic side’ and the ‘international side’ of Japanese human security when the two sides are actually in a close relationship.

In this article, I seek to overcome this blind spot and approach Japanese human security differently. That is, I approach it through an analysis that pays attention to the tight links between discourses and practices of counter-terrorism, international development and humanitarian assistance, refugee policy, and NGO regulation. Two arguments are developed. First, I maintain and show that these issue areas have so far not been examined together as far as Japanese human security is concerned. That this is the case has led to an obscuring of some of the important peculiarities of Japanese human security, most importantly its strong affinities to national security and non-liberal bureaucratic control. Second, I argue that once the international and domestic sides of Japanese human security are put under the microscope together, Japanese human security can no longer be understood as resting on either liberal values or a combination of liberal values and ‘Asian’ values. Instead, I suggest that it needs to be studied through a domopolitical diagram concerned with national security – that is, governance in the image of the home, linking citizenship, the state and territory in a novel way. Japan has been a marginal case in critical security studies literature in general and critical human security in particular, but it too presents important limits to the belief that human security needs to be propelled by a (neo)liberal political economy. Thus, the case of Japanese human security is a story of a bureaucratic authoritarianism that has successfully penetrated new issue areas and geographical spaces. The result of this has been a merging of the non-liberal rationality of developmentalism with the rationality of social control. In addition to secondary data, personal interviews conducted by the author in Japan in 2008 and 2010 are used to support the arguments empirically.

Domopolitics and its usefulness to Japan’s case

The Japanese approach to human security – as much as the ‘comprehensive national security’ that it superseded – has been intertwined with national security concerns from its very outset. This is what I call the domopolitical diagram of Japanese human security. As Deleuze (1988: 35) maintained, ‘every society has its diagram(s)’. A diagram of power is said to be ‘something at work in many different institutions and situations, spread out in several countries, working in a manner not given in the map of social policies’ (Rajchman, 1999: 47).

William Walters (2004), who also coined the neologism ‘domopolitics’, conducted some innovative research on domopolitical diagrams of power. Domopolitics is defined by Walters as ‘an analytic’ of government that maps the contemporary ‘reconfiguring of the relations between citizenship, state, and territory ... and the kinds of rationalities, subjectivities, knowledges and spatialities that it sets in motion’ (Walters, 2004: 240–1; emphasis added). In particular, it examines the efforts to rationalize ‘a series of security measures in the name of a particular understanding of home’ (Walters, 2004: 241). Walters argues that the diagram of power through which domopolitics operates is completely different from that of (neo)liberal political economy. In fact, they are in many respects opposing poles: ‘whereas political economy is descended from the will to govern the state as a household, domopolitics aspires to govern the state like a home’ (Walters, 2004: 237; emphasis added).

Unlike neoliberal political economy, which serves as the basis of a neoliberal rationality of government and is preoccupied with increasing subjects’ efficiency and effectiveness, domopolitics traces its origins to the Latin word domus, meaning ‘home’ or ‘house’, and is based on different reasoning. Domopolitics has ‘powerful affinities with family, intimacy, place: the home as hearth, a refuge or a sanctuary in a heartless world’ (Walters, 2004: 241). Furthermore, domopolitics uses the mixed binary tactics of ‘warm words’ of home and ‘the danger words of a chaotic outside’ (Walters, 2004: 241). The result is a configuration of ‘Us vs Them’. One can thus say that domopolitics is diagrammatically concerned with running the state as a warm home rather than an efficient household: ‘consequently, domopolitics and liberal political economy exist in tension with one another’ (Walters, 2004: 237).

The Japanese form of domopolitics has been informed by the traditional family system known as ie. Japan has been understood as a corporatist/conservative country that has been ‘strongly committed to the preservation of traditional familyhood’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 27). However, the system of ie has been unique to Japan and differs from other Asian family systems and cultural values (Bird, 2007: 184–5). What ie shares with domus is the emotional and physical bond to people and places implied by the notion of ‘home’ (Jeremy and Robinson, 1989: xi). However, the basic objective of the members of an ie is ‘to preserve the continuity and prosperity of their ie’ (Vogel, 1971: 165). While this system, resting on strong patriarchal control and inequality among its members, was officially abolished in 1947 and replaced by a more ‘democratic’ family system, a number of social anthropologists and sociologists have used the concept of ie to make sense of contemporary sociopolitical practices and groups (see Ochiai, 2007: 355–79; Hendry, 1998; Tanaka, 1995; Yoshino, 1992).

The metaphor of ie has been applied to various groups, ranging from the Japanese nation to Japanese companies. As Rebick and Takenaka (2006: 4) point out, ‘Japanese law, since the beginning of the Meiji period [i.e. 1868], has underpinned this system by stipulating that all Japanese belong to the ie (thus, non-Japanese residents do not belong to one), as reflected in the population registration system’. A feature that further reinforces the strong division between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in ie-based domopolitics is the latter’s verticality: it ‘refers to a family lineage with a (theoretically) eternal existence, stretching from the distant past into the future’ (Rebick and Takenaka, 2006: 4). Whereas the metaphor of the nuclear family and ie-based practices have been studied in Japanese public administration and management literature (see Chen, 2004; Gordon, 1998; Shimotani, 1997; Suzuki, 1997; Hardacre, 1991), their application to the Japanese security/development/immigration nexus is novel.

Producing human (in)security: Rebuilding their homes, denying their entrance

During the late 1990s, the bureaucratic importance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan for the construction of a Japanese human security governmental programme became central. Apart from its ‘intellectual leadership in human security’, as one interviewed ministry official put it, ² the ministry was put in charge of the coordination of development aid, and it also had the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), an implementing agency, under its jurisdiction until the latter became autonomous in 2003. As interviews conducted with a number of JICA officials suggest, JICA has successfully tried to increase its human security influence, and it has also begun to be interested in activities traditionally reserved for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially the conceptual and policy formulation of human security. These processes coincided with the appointment of Ogata Sadako, who had previously served as UN High Commissioner for Refugees and as co-chair of the UN Commission on Human Security, to the position of president of JICA in October 2003. As one JICA official put it, ‘the human security wind came to JICA with Ogata’. ³

This section focuses on the domopolitics of Japanese human security as an example par excellence of the parallel bureaucratic productions of human security and human insecurity. It is maintained that it is not possible to understand a complete domopolitical diagram of power merely through an examination of its international side – in this case, Japan’s state/home-building activities – and that one must complement such an examination by an analysis of the domestic side – here, Japan’s use of counter-terrorism measures to prevent immigration – if one is to achieve a true understanding of the diagram. As the latter has been completely ignored in the existing literature on Japanese human security so far, the domopolitical diagram of human security has remained hidden. Only when the two sides are analytically juxtaposed does the domopolitical diagram appear in its entirety.

At the centre of the domopolitical diagram of Japanese human security has been the extension of Japanese homeland security and national security concerns into (post-)conflict environments. While Afghanistan is used to illustrate the domopolitics of Japanese human security in this section, a similar configuration can be seen in other Japanese attempts at nation-building within the Asia-Pacific region. The first signs of the emergence of a domopolitics of Japanese human security discursively modelled on the system of ie appeared at the beginning of 2002. This was a period in which the Japanese military, supported by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and the neorevisionists around him, was active in (post-)conflict environments. The deployed domopolitical discourse emotively connected the historically layered ‘warm words’ of home (the evolution of the US–Japan ‘partnership bond’) and ‘the danger words of the chaotic outside’ (terrorism originating in Afghanistan) with the seemingly logical result of a military solution to Afghanistan’s problems, as can be seen from an early post-9/11 speech made by Prime Minister Koizumi:

Next year will be the 150th anniversary of Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan, which ended 250 years of Japanese seclusion.... Since then, our relationship has gone through a number of trials.... Tomorrow I will attend a memorial ceremony in honor of the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11th.... September 11th destroyed families, and it destroyed our assumptions about how the world operated. It thrust before us basic issues of how to protect our values, our citizens and our civilized society.... We enacted legislation that allowed us to dispatch Japanese self-defense planes for airlift support and self-defense ships to refuel U.S. and U.K. vessels.... The battlefield of Afghanistan must be turned into a nation. That is the daunting task we face. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2002b)

Although 9/11 and the US-led incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq briefly boosted the Japanese military (Fackler, 2010; Ferguson, 2009; Southgate, 2003: 1599–1601), the real winner of the Japanese push into (post-)conflict spaces has been the bureaucracy controlling human security and ODA: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA. Outside of the centre of visibility, early attempts by JICA and the foreign ministry to neutralize and subsequently appropriate the monopoly on domopolitical language could be discerned. Ogata Sadako played an important role in this development, being a human security gatekeeper between the UN and Japan. While she was still co-chairing the UN Commission on Human Security, she was also appointed Special Representative of the Prime Minister of Japan on Afghanistan Assistance and co-chaired the International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance to Afghanistan, which was held in Tokyo in January 2002. A few months later, the Japanese government introduced to Afghanistan a Japanese Regional Comprehensive Development Assistance Programme that was known as the Ogata Initiative. The aim of the Initiative was defined as to ‘grope to the desirable modality of comprehensive development for the reconstruction, and to achieve seamless transition from humanitarian assistance to recovery and reconstruction assistance’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2002c). When Ogata was put in charge of JICA in 2003, she drew on the conceptual grounding previously introduced by her to argue for a shift from short-term humanitarian relief to recovery and reconstruction assistance, which was a part of the wider peacebuilding programme.

In the context of Japanese human security, Japan’s national security interests have been defined not in military or economic terms, but in domopolitical terms – that is, in terms of the relationship between citizenship, the state and territory. The argument that the Japanese production of human (in)security has not rested on liberal political economy at all and has only tactically and selectively referred to liberal values can be attributed to the lack of circulation of human security between the country’s inside and its outside. In fact, the nation-building efforts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA in Afghanistan, framed in human security language, have not led to changes in Japan’s profoundly non-liberal immigration practices. On the contrary, they have reinforced the domopolitical discourse on ‘our homes vs their homes’ through a bureaucratic emphasis on keeping the country’s borders (selectively) closed. Therefore, one of the social consequences of the involvement of the Japanese human security/ODA bureaucracy in the (post-)conflict reconstruction of Afghanistan has been the prevention of any immigration from Afghanistan to Japan. As Walters reminds us, domopolitics features both a positive and a negative aspect:

[Domopolitics is] a will to domesticate the forces which threaten the sanctity of home. Domopolitics is not reducible to the Fortress impulse of building walls, strengthening the locks, updating the alarm system. It contains within itself this second tendency which takes it outwards, beyond the home, beyond even its own ‘backyard’ and quite often into its neighbours’ homes, ghettos, jungles, bases, slums. Once domopolitics extends its reach, once it begins to take the region or even the globe as its strategic field of intervention, then the homeland becomes the home front, one amongst many sites in a multifaceted struggle. (Walters, 2004: 242; italics in original)

Rebuilding the house of Afghanistan in order to suppress breeding grounds for terrorists became one of the biggest tasks for JICA and Japan’s foreign ministry. Thus, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA have also gradually appropriated the counter-terrorism agenda. A mere three months after the occurrence of 9/11, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – again with Ogata’s personal participation – organized an international symposium on ‘Human Security and Terrorism’, which was dramatically subtitled ‘From Afghanistan to the Future of the World’. An early attempt to create a single series of human security/ODA/peacebuilding/counter-terrorism measures can already be seen in the final report from the symposium, which maintained that ‘the history of Afghanistan illustrates the consequences of a lack of human security’, and continued with the assertion that ‘the reconstruction of Afghanistan should be regarded not only as a response to terrorism, but also as the construction of Afghanistan as a nation with a long-term vision’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2001a; emphasis added). The idea that human security/ODA/peacebuilding needs to be used to stop the growth of terrorism has been singled out by the Afghanistan Study Group Japan in its 2008 report revisiting the Japanese experience: ‘improving human security ... in [local] communities to make them resistant to terrorism is the most effective way to counter terrorism’ (Afghanistan Study Group Japan, 2008: 2; emphasis added).

In many respects, JICA and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ near-monopolization of the counter-terrorism agenda through the merger of human security/ODA with peacebuilding has meant a return to and an expansion of the chequebook politics that the bureaucrats tend to prefer. After $500 million was pledged for rebuilding Afghanistan’s government and infrastructure in 2002, JICA and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have mainly focused on the implementation of two complementary programmes – the Ogata Initiative and the Japanese DDR agenda (‘disarmament, demobilization and reintegration’) – while being assisted by UNDP. As far as the Ogata Initiative is concerned, its focus has been on the resettlement and reintegration of returning refugees and internally displaced persons – that is, the agenda Ogata was previously in charge of in her role as UN High Commissioner for Refugees. That the plight of Afghan refugees in Afghanistan has been taken seriously can be seen in a Japanese report on the peacebuilding process:

At present the focus of support for refugees and displaced persons is shifting from relief projects to resettlement support. Deciding at the individual level whether such a person can return home now, investigating what is necessary for this purpose, and providing the required assistance is an enormous task. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2002d)

In a complementary fashion, the ‘New Beginnings Program’ for DDR attempted to reintegrate former combatants, and more recently it has shifted its attention to demining activities and the disbandment of illegal armed groups (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2001b: 7). The major return to chequebook politics took place in November 2009, when the Japanese government announced that it was committing a massive $5 billion to (post-)conflict reconstruction (Kambayashi, 2009). This move has correctly been perceived as dropping the flag for the Japanese military, which was subsequently withdrawn from the Indian Ocean (Yon, 2009).

However, the result of JICA and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ involvement in peacebuilding as a way of fighting terrorism has been a situation that one could term domopolitical divergence – the parallel productions of human security and human insecurity. Specifically, the domopolitical divergence has been characterized by the juxtaposition of a relative, if modest, increase in security for those Afghanis who had stayed in Afghanistan and have seen their communities rebuilt with the help of JICA, and the heightened insecurity for those who had attempted to leave the country behind and restart their lives in Japan, which they originally perceived as a sanctuary. As what follows suggests, an examination of Japan’s nation-building efforts in (post-)conflict spaces without a complementary analysis of the country’s immigration policies prevents the emergence of a full domopolitical diagram of Japan’s human (in)security.

Japan’s (post-)conflict reconstruction of Afghanistan has been linked to the country’s rigid anti-immigration posture, as both share the same counter-terrorism domopolitics of national security. As far as the domopolitical discourse is concerned, an original division has been made between the ‘safe home’ (Japan) and ‘dangerous terrorist havens’ (Afghanistan). This language, however, subsequently underwent a shift, in the sense that a direct connection began to be made between these two opposites:

Looking at the situation of terrorism in the world, significant progress has been made.... However ... there is concern over an increasing number of home grown terrorists. These circumstances prove that the threat of international terrorism still remains very serious. This is the same also in South East Asia, and the threat of terrorism persistently exists.... Japan believes that, to protect people and states from such terror, we need to enhance counter-terrorism measures and capability. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2007a)

In the wake of this discursive shift, the configuration of related practices has also changed, and the link has been sustained through the unexpected use of ODA not only for the peacebuilding in Afghanistan that is aimed at removing the root causes of terrorism, but also for immigration control and the Japanese homeland counter-terrorism agenda:

Apart from the ratification [of international counter-terrorism conventions and protocols], Japan has also used ODA programs to enhance its capacity building assistance for countering terrorism to the countries in need in the areas such as law-enforcement, port security, aviation security, immigration, customs and CBRN [i.e. chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear] terrorism. Japan has provided expert training or granted necessary equipment and facilities in these areas. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2007a; emphasis added)

The Japanese counter-terrorism agenda, partially funded from ODA sources, has served well the aims of the Japanese bureaucracy of social control, and it further entrenched the country’s tough and utterly non-liberal ‘closed country’ immigration regime. Unlike Japan’s exemplary care for refugees in Afghanistan as a part of the peacebuilding process, its treatment of those who fled Afghanistan and headed for Japan via the Immigration Office has been shocking. Japan began accepting refugees only in 1982 when it ratified, after a full 30 years of legal evasiveness, the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and enacted the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law. However, the ratification has changed little in terms of the presence of the ‘closed country’ immigration regime. As Isozaki Yumi (2002), a Japanese journalist concerned with this issue, points out,

Japan’s refugee policy ... is based on the principle that ‘we may send money out, but we will not let people in.’ Ever since Japan signed the International Convention on Refugees ... it has managed through skilful use of honne (true sentiment) and tatemae (outward stance) to avoid confronting the refugee problem.

Presumably, while still in her previous position as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ogata Sadako was well aware of the asylum rules and also knew from experience that flouting them had become the norm after Bosnia. Indeed, her own UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) had promoted ‘in country’ solutions to refugees, such as turning them into internally displaced persons. This marks a shift within UNHCR from ‘reactive, exile-oriented and refugee specific’ activities to the ‘proactive, home-land oriented and holistic’ practices of recent times (UNHCR, 2000: 4; see also Lui, 2002). In short, UNHCR has developed its own ‘comprehensive’ domopolitics, which can be seen as complementary to the Japanese domopolitics.

While the available data on people who seek asylum in Japan are scattered and fragmentary (the Immigration Office of Japan’s Ministry of Justice claims that it does not record all related statistics), they clearly show that Japan has been by far the greatest outlier among the most economically developed countries in this respect, with a ratio of one asylum-seeker for every 75,000 citizens (OECD, 2011). When it comes to refugees, since 1982 Japan has accepted a mere 508 refugees out of the 7,292 who applied for asylum (Knight, 2009). More than half of all the applicants were from Afghanistan, Iran, Burma/Myanmar, Pakistan and Turkey (the Kurds) – that is, from countries with a long history of infringements of their citizens’ human rights (Ito, 2007). Moreover, comparisons of Japan with Canada and Norway – two other notable countries with a human security profile – are revealing. Canada has one asylum-seeker for every 1,000 citizens and has led the G-8 in terms of per capita asylum-seekers (O’Neil, 2010). Additionally, it accepted 400,000 refugees between 1990 and 2009 through its Refugee and Humanitarian Resettlement Program, with Afghanistan currently being the number one source country (Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2007, 2011). As for Norway, it has recorded one asylum-seeker for every 300 citizens and has led the OECD in per capita asylum-seekers (OECD, 2011). Additionally, Norway, with a population of 5 million, accepted 105,000 refugees between 1990 and 2009 (Statistics Norway, 2011).

The above numbers reflect how starkly different the approaches of Canada and Norway to asylum-seekers in general and to refugees in particular are from that of Japan (Canadian and Norwegian multiculturalism vs the Japanese ethnically based nation-state modelled on the system of ie domopolitics). Even before 9/11, the Japanese Ministry of Justice routinely refused to grant immigrant status to political asylum-seekers from Afghanistan. In one case, its decision to throw out the refugee-status applications filed by nine Afghan asylum-seekers caused international outrage, as they had been rejected by Japan for failing to present evidence that they had been victims of political persecution by the Taliban regime (Mainichi Daily News, 2001). This approach blatantly contravened an earlier UNHCR recommendation that had stated that one’s ability to provide compelling evidence for experienced sufferings ought not to be used as a determining factor to decide on whether a refugee would receive asylum. One of the asylum-seekers attempted suicide after an immigration bureaucrat told him, ‘I don’t believe a word you are saying’ (quoted in Mainichi Daily News, 2001).

Post-9/11 domopolitical discourses and practices further widened the gap between the treatment of Afghan refugees in Afghanistan and their treatment in Japan. Afghan asylum-seekers and refugees in Japan have begun to be portrayed as a potential security threat (‘dangerous terrorists’) rather than as economic asylum-seekers. The Tokyo Immigration Bureau, for instance, detained a number of Afghan asylum-seekers immediately after 9/11 as a part of a wider wave of raids against illegal immigrants from Afghanistan and other Muslim countries (Isozaki, 2002). As Kawakami Sonoko of Amnesty International Japan maintained in this context, ‘terrorism looks like an excuse to revive to the old system for monitoring foreigners. We worry that the real point of these measures is just to keep foreigners out of Japan’ (quoted in Fackler, 2007). Similarly, Doi Kanae, a lawyer representing Afghan asylum-seekers, pointed out the difference between the Japanese treatment of Afghan refugees in Afghanistan and their treatment in Japan:

the Japanese government is saying it is going to provide a large amount of financial assistance for Afghan reconstruction. But inside this country, it is providing new threats to those who are applying for refugee status, having fled from the Taliban. (quoted in Japan Times, 2002)

In order to counter the sharp increase of Afghan asylum-seekers making their way to Japan, Japanese bureaucrats of social control joined forces with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA, and through the use of ODA/human security they have invested heavily in a strategy of reintegrating Afghan refugees back into Afghanistan (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2001b). One of the objectives has indeed been to keep them from eventually coming to Japan to seek refuge there. ⁴

Domopolitical administration of NGOs: From Ko-be to Afghanistan and beyond

However surprising it may seem, Japan’s recent bureaucratic diagram of domopolitical administration of NGOs came into being 20 kilometres away from Kōbe, Japan, on Tuesday 17 January 1995, at 5:46 Japanese Standard Time. It was at this time that the Kōbe Greater Area was struck by the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, also known as the Kōbe earthquake. With a severity of 7.2 on the Richter scale, the earthquake caused the deaths of 6,430 people, while over 300,000 were made homeless, and the economic costs were estimated at $100 billion. An earthquake of such magnitude had not been seen in Japan (which itself is seismically active, as showed by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, along with the subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster) since 1923, when the Great Kanto hit the Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures (Schwartz, 2003: 14). This contingency – and particularly the much-flawed response of the Japanese bureaucracy to this challenge, which effectively turned a natural catastrophe into a man-made disaster – has been identified as the key turning point in the emancipation of Japanese NGOs vis-à-vis the state bureaucracy. As Yamamoto (1999: 98) maintained, ‘the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake clearly was a major turning point in the development of civil society in Japan’. Similarly, Özerdem and Jacoby (2006: 29) have argued that ‘today, the earthquake represents, for many, a rupture in the traditionally passive structure of Japanese civil organisation’.

The three key questions for this section, then, are to what extent the Kōbe earthquake really influenced the subsequent development of the relationship between civil society (and more specifically NGOs) and the bureaucracy of the Japanese state apparatus; whether the impact has really been accompanied by the emancipation of Japanese NGOs vis-à-vis this bureaucracy; and what the reverberations were in terms of the bureaucratic administration of Japanese NGOs active in delivering human security in (post-)conflict spaces. In response to the questions posed, several points will be argued in this context: First, the following section will attempt to establish a novel connection between the three questions; second, it will be held that the main transformation of the relationship between Japanese NGOs and the state bureaucracy after the Kōbe earthquake has consisted in the creation of a new juridical technology of power through the enactment of the 1998 Non-Profit Organization Law; third, and counter-intuitively, it will be argued that although, as the literature suggests, the impact of the catastrophe on NGO–bureaucracy relationships has been tremendous, the legal corollary of the contingency has been much the opposite of what was expected, namely, the expansion of the mechanism of capture of the state apparatus; and, fourth, it will be claimed that extending juridico-bureaucratic discipline to the administration of NGOs active in human security has been one of the facets of the Japanese human security domopolitics analysed in this article. Finally, the section will analyse the connection between the domopolitical ‘care and protection’ of NGOs by Japanese bureaucracy and the expanded developmentalist rationality of control. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which significantly contributed to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, are not specifically discussed here as their political repercussions have changed very little of the information that is contained below. On the contrary, those events have actually further reinforced the arguments and observations made here.

The slow and inefficient official reaction to the Kōbe earthquake revealed the extent of Japanese bureaucratic compartmentalization. While this has been puzzling for foreign specialists in crisis management, as ‘Japan’s disaster management systems have often been taken as a best practice example by many around the world’ (Özerdem and Jacoby, 2006: 29), systematic observers of Japan were less surprised, since they factored in the traditional Japanese reliance on an institutionalized complex of bureaucratic rituals (Furukawa, 2000; Farrell, 1999). As recalled by Iokobe, a civil society expert with personal experience of the Kōbe earthquake,

when it was reported from Ministry of Finance sources that the government would not provide relief assistance from public funds for individual quake victims for fear of conflicting with the letter of the law, we shuddered at the unchanged horror of officials who considered it their responsibility to the state to put the logic of the bureaucracy above the lives of citizens. (Iokibe, 1999: 90; emphasis added)

The stolid reaction of the state apparatus stood in stark contrast to the empathetic and caring reaction of Japanese citizens. The volume of civil volunteerism was unprecedented, as approximately 1.3 million citizens made for the affected area and spontaneously engaged in relief efforts.

Moreover, the Kōbe earthquake laid bare the nature of what Pekkanen (2006) has called Japan’s ‘dual civil society’, further separating officially recognized NGOs – the so-called incorporated non-profit organizations (NPOs), which were slow in their reaction, as they had to wait for bureaucratic approval of their actions – and those that were unincorporated. An example of bureaucratic discipline at play has been provided by Deguchi (1999: 12), who mentions how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned a social group applying for permission ‘to help the children of the world’ not to engage in any activities in Kōbe on the grounds that ‘children of the world’ referred to children overseas. On the other hand, the quick and effective response of non-incorporated groups burnished their anti-government image, which they inherited from their predecessors – the citizens’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Deguchi, 1999: 15). The increase in the attention of the mass media to the non-profit and voluntary sector as a whole after the Kōbe earthquake, as well as the NGOs’ growth in numbers, has invariably been seen as the Japanese part of what Lester Salamon et al. (1999) called a ‘global associational revolution’. Even the official term ‘NPO’ – that is, a specified non-profit and voluntary corporation (tokutei hieiri katsudō hōjin) – entered mainstream usage only as a result of the Kōbe earthquake experience (Ogawa, 2009: 2).

Allegedly, the effect of civil society’s reaction to the Kōbe earthquake has been the pluralization and emancipation of that civil society (see Schwartz, 2003; Anheier and Kendall, 2001; Bestor, 1999; Wanner, 1998). The immediate fallout seems to confirm such a view. The government came under increasing pressure from non-incorporated groups, which introduced a series of demands and were backed by favourable mass media. In Pekkanen’s (2006: 133) words, ‘although the earthquake’s epicentre was northern Awaji Island, near Kōbe in Western Japan, the aftershocks rumbled through Japanese politics until 1998’. He gives a detailed account of the sociopolitical negotiations that resulted in an overhaul of the Japanese legislative framework. It was through this overhaul that the state bureaucracy regulated the non-profit and voluntary sector. Pekkanen’s (2006: 137–52) discussion captures the processes that resulted in the passage of the 1998 NPO Law that replaced the hitherto-central Civil Code of 1898. As becomes clear throughout his analysis, the bureaucrats of social control managed to have a say over the drafting of the bill, as well as over the nature of their supervision and sanctioning of Japanese NGOs. While Pekkanen (2006: 55–7) points to a significant increase in the number of non-profit and voluntary groups that were officially recognized after 1998, he also acknowledges that there has been mixed evidence of whether the widespread anticipations concerning the implementation of the law came to pass.

Although the 1998 NPO Law led to an increase in officially recognized NGOs in Japan, it would be naïve to think that this trend has been universally linked to their emancipation. In fact, the enactment of the NPO Law has marked the expansion of bureaucratic reach, as more NGOs became part of the ‘official’ non-profit and voluntary sector and the accompanying creation of a new juridico-bureaucratic technology of power. The wider incorporation of NGOs in providing service delivery – both domestically and internationally – has been linked to the changing economic fortunes of Japan, which has just passed the second ‘lost’ decade. As a result, NGOs, rather than governmental agents, became important providers of public goods. While the initial impetus was economic, the fact that the new juridico-bureaucratic technology of power regulating NGOs has been informed by a developmentalist rationality of government meant that there has not been an emphasis on rendering NGOs effective and efficient agents. What follows is an analysis of their insertion into human security delivery in (post-)conflict spaces.

The incorporation of Japanese NGOs into human security/ODA/peacebuilding has not been driven by a neoliberal political economy, but by a domopolitical diagram of power. At the centre of the domopolitical administration of Japanese NGOs by the country’s bureaucracy resides the image of the traditional family system ie. One can discern it at the heart of the post-1998 juridico-bureaucratic technology of power. This author’s experience of discussing the relationship with both bureaucrats and NGO personnel (see below) convinced him of the heuristic utility of ie in depicting the key characteristics of the relationship.

Indeed, the most important step in the creation of an ie-based domopolitical technology of power has been the legal capture of NGOs, which was achieved by luring them to join the ‘official’ sector by offering them the (previously denied) advantages of becoming officially recognized NPOs. As Ogawa (2009: 172) argued in this context,

the concept of the NPO was strategically introduced to the society in a very timely – and, in a sense, tactical – manner. The NPO, or the third sector, was officially instituted in Japanese society, gaining popular support. NPO generation has been recommended amid a rosy discourse in line with the associational revolution.

The strategic aim of the 1998 NPO Law has therefore been the production of official NPOs. Many NGOs working in the field of human security have welcomed the new legal framework and become official NPOs, stabilized and fettered to the purposes of the state apparatus. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of NGOs have been wary of the Japanese bureaucracy and continued their existence as ‘informal entities’ (minashi hōjin) outside of the system of bureaucratic ‘support’. Thus, the Japanese duality in the non-profit and voluntary sector has remained in place, and two effects of this have been recognized: ‘independent civil society groups have found it hard to grow large, and large groups have found it hard to remain independent’ (Pekkanen, 2006: 160).

The bureaucracy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA devised a unique way of producing official NPOs oriented toward human-security delivery in (post-)conflict spaces. For this purpose, it has created an intermediary: the Japan Platform. The Japan Platform has played a dual role: first, it was recognized as a specified non-profit corporation (tokutei hieiri katsudō hōjin) (Japan Platform, 2000a: 1); and, second, it served as the hub for humanitarian and international development NGOs. With regard to the latter role, it has featured 32 entities within its NGO Unit (as of August 2011), including five Japanese NPOs and international NGOs listed by JICA (2008: 31–2) that were among the top twenty in terms of budget size: World Vision Japan, Peace Winds Japan, the Shanti Volunteer Association, the Association for Aid and Relief (AAR), and Japan Emergency NGOs. Various types of humanitarian and development NGOs have become part of the same scheme: originally independent NGOs with a history of fleeing from bureaucratic reach, such as AAR; international NGOs that have been able to obtain the status of a specified non-profit corporation in Japan after the NPO Law was enacted in 1998, such as World Vision Japan; and, finally, recently established Japanese NGOs such as Peace Winds Japan.

Complementarily, the Japan Platform has served as one of the centres through which the Japanese bureaucracy has projected its human security domopolitics. It can be understood as a specimen of domopolitics that has had various different parts of the globe as its strategic field of intervention (mainly Southeast Asia and Africa). The domopolitical practices and discourses of the Japanese bureaucracy have been concerned with the ‘care and protection’ of ‘our small and vulnerable NGOs’, and that was the reason for the insertion of the Japan Platform into the relationship. Although the geographical spread of the activities of NPOs associated with the Japan Platform has been diverse, more often than not the NPOs have followed governmental priorities concerning the sites of these human security/peacebuilding engagements. The Kosovo crisis (in 1999) was one of the constitutive moments, as the Japan Platform was founded in this context:

In Kosovo, a massacre of ethnic Albanians aggravated [the situation].... Right after the incident, several Japanese NGOs started to examine the possibility of refugee assistance in Kosovo.... The examination revealed, however, that Japanese NGOs were not able to implement effective aid activities independently; since the respective NGOs had neither sufficient financial foundation nor staff-members with considerable on-the-job experience to implement aid independently.... Taking into account the lessons learned ... a new framework, a ‘Japan Platform’ conception was formulated. The objects of the framework is that NGOs, business community, and a government agency (Foreign Ministry) work together ... with a tripartite cooperation system, based on equal partnership, making the most of the respective sectors’ peculiarities and resources (Japan Platform, 2000b; emphasis added).

Consequently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has used the Japan Platform to ‘improve the quality of humanitarian aid conducted by Japanese NGOs’ (Japan Platform, 2000a). Two of the most prioritized civilian populations of war-torn countries in recent times have been those of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2007b: 8) material points out, Japanese NGOs belonging to the Japan Platform have carried out emergency and reconstruction projects in these countries.

The most revealing of this author’s interviews concerning the workings of the Japan Platform was one conducted with Osa Yukie, chairperson of the Japan Platform’s NGO Unit and Chairperson of AAR Japan, in 2008. She explained that the original tripartite cooperation system between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, businesses and NPOs has been tipped in favour of the ministry’s interests. This could be seen from the foreign ministry’s ability to tightly control NPOs associated with the Japan Platform, as well as from the fact that the push of Japanese human security to (post-)conflict spaces has not particularly suited the interests of the country’s business sector. In the words of Osa, while companies have been ‘happy to fund emergency relief operations, they have tried to avoid (post-)conflict reconstructions of places like Afghanistan or Sudan due to their political and economic sensitivity’. ⁵ Though originally an NGO specializing in emergency relief, AAR Japan has started to take on a peacebuilding agenda thanks to governmental funding (in the words of Osa, ‘you use the human security language only when you need governmental funding.... We don’t need to be told what human security is about’), and one recent example of this has been AAR’s activities in Afghanistan. According to Osa, the same has been true of the Japan Platform: although it was founded for the provision of emergency assistance, it has become much more ambitious in the sphere of peacebuilding over time.

The sheer extent of the domopolitics of Japanese human security that governs NPOs associated with the Japan Platform has been exposed through interviews conducted by the author with Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA bureaucrats and NGO personnel in 2008 and 2010. There are several striking features that show how ie-based the domopolitics actually is. When speaking about the foreign ministry and JICA bureaucrats, NGO personnel often came up with references to the ‘father being in charge of things’; similarly, when the author discussed NGOs with bureaucrats, they very often referred to NGOs as ‘troublesome children who need to be supervised’, and several pointed out the perceived suitability of women for the non-profit and voluntary sector (‘if a woman wants to work, it’s a suitable job for her’, as one interviewed JICA bureaucrat put it). ⁶ Clearly, there was a perceived – and accepted – asymmetry in the relationship on both sides. Additionally, when interviewed bureaucrats were asked why the officially recognized NPOs are so tightly controlled in their human security/peacebuilding work, the usual answer was that the non-profit and voluntary sector is unable to take care of itself and succeed in the hostile environment outside of Japan. In the words of one interviewed JICA official:

Firstly, we must teach NGOs that human security is important for their work. Secondly, our job is to decide where NGOs will be active. While some NGOs disagree now, they won’t in the future because it’s very important for JICA.... Thirdly, NGOs participating in peace-building must be supervised and protected by us as they are feeble, and they cannot directly compare and compete with big and strong Western NGOs. That’s our task – to protect them. Also, we need to make sure that we promote Japanese NGOs so they can be on a par with foreign NGOs like Oxfam, CARE or World Vision. ⁷

The bureaucratic rationalization of the necessity to continuously nurture (and discipline) the selected originally Japanese NPOs active in the delivery of human security clearly indicates an ie-influenced domopolitics. This domopolitics has taken on a developmentalist function through which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA have attempted to construct an alternative to the neoliberal political economy that has shaped the practices of many ‘Western’ NGOs.

Conclusion

This article demonstrated that Japanese human security has been a multifaceted struggle. First, there was the emphasis on ‘in country’ solutions to the problem of refugees and the exemplary work of the Japanese bureaucracy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA towards this goal. Second, the draconian practices of the bureaucracy of social control made it almost impossible for refugees to resettle in Japan, and after 9/11 these practices were further reinforced by the invocation of counter-terrorism measures and an emphasis on homeland security. Third, there was the bureaucratic selection of originally Japanese NPOs for privileged ‘support, care and protection’ in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ and JICA’s human security/ODA/peacebuilding plans for (post-)conflict spaces such as Afghanistan. When examined together, all three of these areas merged to form a domopolitical diagram of Japanese human security. As Walters (2004: 241) has it, ‘we are in the presence of domopolitics’.

The previous discussion of the domopolitics of human (in)security demonstrated that discourses and practices related to Japanese human security/ODA, controlled by the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JICA, have become increasingly complementary to the aims of the bureaucracy of social control and homeland security. From an individual’s point of view, especially that of a refugee viewing Japan as a sanctuary, the domopolitical diagram of Japanese human security has been concerned with the production of both human security and human insecurity. Whereas it has aimed at improving human conditions and security in Afghanistan, it concurrently produced human insecurity for Afghan refugees who tried to start new lives in Japan. Therefore, one can argue that the domopolitics of Japanese human (in)security comprised two contradictory and yet domopolitically linked series. Their reversed pairing is particularly interesting: a warm/benign human security/ODA/peacebuilding series was directed at the reconstruction of an ‘Afghanistan full of dangerous terrorist havens’, and an utterly hostile series was aimed against humanitarian and political refugees fleeing from Afghanistan and their desperate effort to get into the ‘free and prosperous Japan – a hearth’. In this perverse pairing, the Japanese bureaucracy cares about where refugees are located rather than about refugees as such. Analysing both series together thus laid bare the disciplinary contours of Japan’s bureaucracy, most notably its complete lack of liberal circulation of security between the inside and the outside of the country. Thus, Japanese human security has been propelled by and linked to a Kafkaesque ‘great paranoid bureaucratic machine’:

Each time that power presents itself as a transcendental authority, as a paranoid law of the despot, it imposes ... a discontinuous repartition of blocks, with spaces between each one.... [T]hese blocks, instead of distributing themselves around a circle ... align themselves on a hallway or a corridor: each one thereby forms a segment, which is more or less distant, on this unlimited straight line. But that doesn’t yet bring about a sufficient change.... And, in fact, if it is true that each block-segment has an opening or a door onto the line of the hallway – one that is usually quite far from the door or the opening of the following block – it is also true that all the blocks have back doors that are contiguous. This ... isn’t only a ‘mental’ topography: two diametrically opposed points bizarrely reveal themselves to be in contact. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 72–3)

Finally, as the analysis also suggested, it has been the role of the Japanese bureaucracy to determine the nature, extent and destinations of NPOs’ involvement in human security/ODA/peacebuilding. The response to 9/11 coincided with the emergence of the post-1998 juridico-bureaucratic regime, through which many newly created and/or registered NPOs have been inserted into the delivery of human security, ODA and peacebuilding. Therefore, the discussion is not really about Japan’s catching up with the neoliberal West, but about a completely different rationality of government and a completely different diagram of power: the Japanese bureaucratic control and developmentalist rationality carried out in the name of ie domopolitics. Thus, the Japanese disciplinary bureaucracy’s domopolitical ‘care and protection’ of NPOs involved in human security/peacebuilding has been unique to that country, and it adds important theoretical and empirical lessons to the existing literature on human security.