Approaching the unsynthesizable in international politics: Giving substance to security discourses through basso ostinato ?

Modernity: Singular or plural?

Throughout the rest of his life, Maruyama further developed basso ostinato. His plan was to trace its elements from three fields: history, politics and ethics (Maruyama, 1996b: 178–179). On history, Maruyama published a paper in 1972, identifying three pivotal terms: become (naru), next (tsugi) and momentum (ikioi). A short essay on politics was published in English (Maruyama, 1988b), in which he extracted a series of concepts related to matsurigoto (governmental affairs). On ethics, Maruyama (1976) talked in the US, in which he focused on a pair of binary concepts: pure mind (kiyoki kokoro) and dirty mind (kitanaki kokoro). These basso ostinati were meant to help scholars isolate the crucial cognitive gap that arises in the process of knowledge transfer, but it remained an inaccessible concept and it has been criticized for being deterministic (cf. Kan, 1999; Kimura, 2014; Koyasu, 1986; Yamaguchi, 2000).

Before discussing basso ostinato’s potential for security studies, Maruyama’s struggle to elaborate this concept, in which his wartime experience played a decisive role, has to be further explicated. During the interwar period, Japanese scholarship still heavily debated whether world history can be conceived of as a singular or plural process. This is of importance as the former would imply acknowledgement of Western superiority. However, many scholars began to argue for the latter because of the need to justify an anticipated world war and the thrust for their sui generis identity. Until then, Japan had been aiming to escape from Asia in their efforts to avoid colonization and, in doing so, had become part of the West, as Fukuzawa Yukichi (1934: 40–43) famously maintained. This is because Meiji Japan imported elements of European political systems (Maruyama, 1961; Tsuda, 1938), turning the country into the first non-Western Westphalian state. Thereby, Japan embraced a ‘pluralistic Eurocentric institutionalism’, as outlined by Martin Hall and John Hobson (2010: 217–218), meaning that Japan acted as a wilful follower of the West by affirming the universality of its political trajectory.

In its attempt to turn into a Western state, Japan believed that it had gained the status of a great power after defeating Russia in 1905, but soon thereafter it came to realize that Western states were not going to accept Japan as an equal. Even today, Japan is (inter)nationally perceived as the ‘abnormal’ Western state (Hagström, 2015; see also, generally, Hobson and Sharman, 2005: 88). Becoming suspicious of Western claims of universalism, Japanese politicians and scholars began to emphasize their nation’s historical superiority and saw a necessity in overcoming modernity, as it was perceived as an equivalent to the West (Maruyama, 1974: xxx). Although Japanese historiography still often neglects this point, the dominant discourse during the first half of the 20th century asserted that world history had to be conceived of as plurality (Koyama, 2001; Nishida, 1982; Shimizu, 2015), arguing that there is not one world history, but many world histories. This rhetoric, helping them to argue for equality with, and later even superiority over, the West, served as a justification for pursuing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and eventually ideologized the entire Japanese society (Maruyama, 1961; Samuels, 2007; Takeuchi, 1979).

Maruyama critically reflected on this overcoming modernity debate via intellectual history. He was puzzled that, despite the importation of Western nationalism, Japan had developed a different type of modern nation-state; thus, he assessed this problem in terms of political subjectivity. Despite Japanese claims of being a modern democratic state with a constitutional monarchy, the political situation was far from it, as the ‘formation of free subjects (jiyuu naru shutai)’ (Maruyama, 1964: 20) was hampered through the aspect-structure of the kokutai, eventually leading to the abolishment of the political sphere altogether. The kokutai argued that the Tenno is a direct descendant of the sun-goddess Amaterasu (Maruyama, 1988a: 45), and this divine ancestry put the Japanese emperor at the centre of a hierarchical society based around concentric circles (Sasaki, 2012: 38–40). This discouraged the public from critically questioning political decisions (Maruyama, 1974: 171), as it is an example of taking ‘a reified present and extrapolat[ing] this back in time to render all history amenable to transhistorical, universalist analysis’ (Hobson and Lawson, 2008: 430). By a priori determining the Tenno’s rule as virtuous, Maruyama (1966a: 87) argued that ‘a system of irresponsibility’ was established, which allowed Japanese rulers to justify their political decisions as part of inevitable, predetermined historical processes. As a consequence, ‘societal intolerance’ (Maruyama, 1961: 16) existed in Japan towards dissenting voices, eventually rendering the country internally inclusive but externally ‘closed’ (Maruyama, 1992: 196).

It was this discomfort with the depoliticization of Japanese society that primarily encouraged Maruyama to work on the history of Edo Confucianism, but he also had an ‘extra-academic motive’ (Maruyama, 1974: xxxii). Strongly objecting to the dominant discourses of overcoming Western modernity, he was eager to demonstrate the universality of human history by stressing Japan’s contribution to it. At least on this point, he believed in one world history rather than in its plurality by elucidating the process of Confucianism’s internal collapse, which had provided Tokugawa Japan with its most salient source of social cohesiveness. These two motives translated into two syntheses that Maruyama tried to accomplish in his work. As discussed, the latter aspiration aimed to synthesize theory and practice. By determining the kokutai as aspect-structure, he aimed to uncover a more comprehensive picture of modernity. The former, by contrast, was a methodological task. Maruyama’s (1996a: 334) ambition was to investigate ‘how to synthesize the internal continuity within the category of thinking and the consecutive transformation of meaning within the same category’. For him, it often appeared to be continuity that plays a crucial role in this transformation. Given Japan’s exceptional homogeneity, its modern intellectual history was a demonstration of this paradox, and he had initially hoped that Mannheim’s methodology would provide an epistemological tool to simultaneously establish the two syntheses. Although his hope proved to be ill-founded, Maruyama discovered a site of ‘creative misunderstanding’ where an idea becomes meaningful through textual appraisal by locals, as argued by Jenco (2012: 99). At this site, meanings of an identical idea are never fully integrated, but remain different among multiple actors below the level of consciousness. To explain this in more detail, we have to return to Foucault’s lecture.

Creative misunderstandings? Awareness of plurality

As Foucault argued, political power expressed itself differently in Japan’s Confucian tradition in comparison to Western countries. However, Maruyama (1974) had noticed that power in Japan also diverged from the Chinese understanding because Japan had, over several centuries, developed its own unique Confucian tradition. At first glance, the Meiji Restoration had replaced this traditional political system with a Western one. However, despite this transformation, the essential power structure remained the same. Maruyama (1961: 12–15) argued that as a result of importations of different traditions of thought, an ‘unstructured tradition’ had developed in Japan. It was there that imported knowledge was modified to the extent that cannot be simply equated to the original, as it was constantly classified and (re)interpreted ‘in terms of the familiar’ (Skinner, 1969: 5) without being reified. Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge did not help Maruyama (1961: 68) in this regard as it did not account for these exceptional ‘epistemological characteristics’ in a specific community. Therefore, the issue at stake was how seemingly identical knowledge is translated in a different epistemological tradition, and how the identified gap can be filled. The various cognitions, which developed in different social contexts, cannot be presumed to compose parts of the same entity; the assumed cognitive object and the tangible cognitions do not have one-on-one relations, even if a cursory assessment initially indicates similarity (Maruyama, 1996a). It is not only an ‘adjustment of the way of looking at a problem’, but also a different way of thinking, that plays a crucial role in this subtle mutation.

Analysing from within Japanese history of thought, Maruyama gradually became convinced that it was not only a question of perspective and conditionality of knowledge that restricted free subjects to evolve in Japan, but rather fundamental structural differences rooted in everyday practices and experiences (cf. Watsuji, 2011). Renouncing his earlier wartime conviction, modernity had to become modernities. Knowledge can only turn into power after it is localized within the unique social structure as in each society the structure evolves differently. Maruyama (1996c: 131) argued that it was particularly geopolitics whose methodology allows geopolitical and geohistorical conditionalities of the society under scrutiny to be calibrated. In doing so, Maruyama aimed to expand Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge to the global space because he could focus on basso ostinato in contingent foreign knowledge encounters with local knowledge. These encounters are spatial and repetitive in function as the emergence of the intersection is considered to be deeply rooted in everyday practices. Hence, these practices are historically formed under a specific spatio-temporal condition (Maruyama, 1996c, 1997). With this concept, Maruyama tried to capture the site of creation where ostensibly repeated nodes take place, albeit in constant flux. At this intersection, foreign knowledge gradually affects and is being affected by local knowledge and, thereby, is embedded in a new geographical location. Once knowledge is attached to its new location it develops into new forms, irrespective of its origin. However, the two forms of knowledge — local and foreign — never amalgamate; they only synchronize at the site like the barely perceptible bass notes and the main theme in a piece of music.

Defining his task as ‘finding a clue of enquiring the style of thought which has been relentlessly streaming under the various modes of historical consciousness down to the modern era’, Maruyama (1992: 295–298) tried to identify the ‘category as substratum’ by extracting the banal terms mentioned earlier as keywords by exploring some of the oldest Japanese texts dating back to the 8th and 9th centuries. This, what contemporary IR scholarship (cf. Friedrichs and Kratchowil, 2009; Friedrichs, 2009; Sil, 2009) would identify as an abductive approach was a ‘sort of circular argument’ because he had identified the bass notes a priori in contemporary discourses and then projected them into the past (Maruyama, 1992: 298). However, there is a danger in proceeding in this manner. Besides the difficulty of unearthing something that belongs to a subconscious realm, any attempt to reify it in textual form can create stereotypes and subsequently be criticized as historical and geographical determinism. As Charles Taylor (in Thrift, 1996: 9) argues, ‘to situate our understanding in practice is to see it as implicit in our activity’. Pinning down this implicitness can result in mistreating subjects (and objects) — the result of discourses — as producers of discourses (Müller, 2008). Consequently, ‘the role of language in shaping experience’ (Nelson, 1992: 41) is expunged and this procedure can eventually lead to stereotypes by codifying a specific reality (Bhabha, 1983: 23). It is for this reason that it has remained a difficult concept to date, with only a few scholars attempting to engage with it. Indeed, Japanese scholarship (cf. Koyasu, 1986) has even accused Maruyama of supporting Japanese wartime propaganda. Maruyama refuted these accusations, arguing that Japan’s ‘exceptional homogeneity’ is based on its unique geography, but it does not make the motif stable. Rather, the motif is bound to change as conditions are continuously transforming (Maruyama, 1996c). Still, by extracting the terms, he risked justifying Japan’s alleged perpetual uniqueness by reifying the subject as the discourse producer.

Basso ostinato as a heuristic device

To be able to use Maruyama’s concept as a heuristic device, we start with two insights from the previous sections. First, when intellectual history is understood through historicization and geographicalization, the either-or question between ‘true’ consciousness and ‘false’ consciousness is dissolved because scholars can focus on difference itself, rather than on the validity of interpretations. As recently stressed by Qin (2016: 38), this is because every human perspective is constrained by a specific conditionality of knowledge, which is why it projects reality as much as it contributes to its distortion, and the nexus between the two brings about subjectivity. Even the possibility that people are talking about an analogous but factually different object has to be taken into consideration. Thus, when the idea of absolute truth is abandoned, the possibility arises to consider misunderstandings in a more productive way by conceiving of knowledge as ‘knowledges’ (Thrift, 1999: 303). As Mannheim (1985: 168) remarks, ‘a Weltanschauung is not of necessity a source of error, but often gives access to spheres of knowledge otherwise closed’. Indeed, cultural otherness is what ‘makes learning of any type possible’ (Jenco, 2015: 23). However, knowledge needs to address existing ‘figurations of alterity’ (Guillaume, 2003: 88) in a foreign space. The result of this process might look like the same knowledge but, in practice, it contains an unsynthesizable cognitive void, denying a linear developmental model of intellectual history in international contexts.

Second, if it is this cognitive void that enables the assimilation of foreign knowledge, it must be there where people develop their subjectivity. This conclusion was unsettling for Maruyama, who had begun his intellectual endeavour with the ambition to diminish misinterpretation of foreign knowledge because, as the second synthesis alludes, Maruyama’s research held a politicized assumption from the beginning (see, generally, Huysmans, 2002: 43). In this respect, Maruyama’s orientation contains the danger of altering this analytical device into a tool for teleological reasoning, which was his reason for refusing to think more about the importance of space for basso ostinato, although the relation was unavoidable as he conceived of modernity as modernities. As mentioned, Maruyama thought that it was the aspect-structure represented as kokutai in Japanese society that hampered the comprehension of foreign knowledge, which impeded the Japanese people from experiencing themselves as free subjects. In order to unearth the falsity of kokutai, he further elaborated basso ostinato. However, what if it was this embodiment of Japanese history that generated the misunderstanding that facilitates the whole process of comprehension of the unknown? If so, it is this ‘falsity’ that has enabled Japan to establish itself as the first non-Western modern nation-state, allowing it to join a putative universal history. In other words, it was the very idea of the kokutai that helped people to re-establish a political sphere by conceiving of Japan as part of the globe.

Therefore, foreign knowledge cannot be understood comprehensively, but is only accepted when it has gained meaning in reference to already-existing local ideas. Thus, his second synthesis — of universal theory and local practice — proved to be a failure because Japan’s experience demonstrates that knowledge can be aptly localized only through a radical but automatic adjustment. However, it was the first synthesis — of continuity and change in analysis of intellectual history — that basso ostinato can shed further light on because it depicts entangled relations that are ‘as much internal as they are external’ (Allen, 2012: 191). What comprises an assemblage is, therefore, not just the internality of an autonomous subject, but internality in relation to externality. Yet, because the linkage is only manifested in the unsynthesizable cognitive void, it remains largely unnoticed. Hence, anticipating contemporary discourses in geography (cf. Ibert, 2007; Livingstone, 2005), Maruyama perceived this process as collective and active, yet unconscious.

Due to his wartime experience, Maruyama was suspicious of this cognitive void and aimed to overcome it. His perpetual aspiration for cosmopolitanism and modernism to establish a ‘healthy’ political subjectivity in Japan led him to this conclusion. As a corollary, Maruyama realized its contradictory character. Although it rests on the irreconcilability between different basso ostinati, it links local practices to a putative universal theory. This means that this concept helps IR scholarship to understand that a universal issue can only be understood locally, where it is perceived through the lenses of site-specific knowledge, with the potential that this issue is ‘misunderstood’. This makes the process a product of multiple relations, but it contains ‘an emergent “thingness”’ (Allen, 2012: 190), giving substance to an issue of universal appeal. Knowledge is thus decontextualized and recontextualized across diverse social and cultural situations beyond territory and context (Collier and Ong, 2005). What is required, therefore, is an investigation ‘at the point where the global is inserted and translated into the local’ (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009: 6). Basso ostinato can help to rearticulate this point and, in fact, can render this distinction between the global and local altogether obsolete. This is because a ‘geography of relations’ (Allen, 2012: 192) can be mapped, helping to surpass assumptions that processes of localizing knowledge only happen in spatial proximity. Rather, basso ostinato indicates that the linkage between local and global is primarily taking place unconsciously. This is where the positive aspect of the void arises. To understand the unknown, people find a clue in reference to the known (Skinner, 1969). In this process, knowledge is automatically morphed into an indigenous idea. However, because it happens at the nascent stage of the process, it is often left unnoticed, although this cognitive gap of the unsynthesizable persists even after developing a deeper mutual understanding due to its autopoietic character.

Thick signifier and comprehensive security

In order to account for the prospects of basso ostinato, we begin by identifying how difference relates to the issues that the international community is facing. The intellectual struggle of Maruyama indicates that difference can be too subtle to notice, but it is still fundamental. It is about not just what it means, but particularly the way it means. Hence, following Patrick Jackson (2009: 658), we aim for a ‘systematic demonstration of what one gets, empirically, if one apprehends the world with a given sensibility’; it is a ‘disciplined effort to envision what the world would look like if explained and understood according to some ideal-typically elaborated set of value-commitments’.

To exemplify this further, we take up the concept of security as an example. Looking at the discipline at large, recent scholarship has asked to what extent analytical tools that were developed in contemporary Western academia are applicable to other spatio-temporal contexts (Buzan and Lawson, 2015: 378; see also Acharya, 2014). However, in order to know the effect of intercultural decontextualizations and recontextualizations, we need to first investigate the system of localization. Even with security, one of the main concepts of IR, this is not yet given, as Buzan already pointed out in 1983. For him, it is ‘an unexplored and essentially contested concept’ (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 135; see also Dalby, 1997: 6). This is because its investigation has been largely limited to questions of its referent object, as delineated by Buzan and Hansen (2009: 135). Since the linguistic turn in the 1980s, IR has conceptualized security as a practice, rather than as an objective concept. Particularly constructivist and poststructuralist scholarship contributed to this insight by demonstrating that security politics rests on the construction of an alien other (cf. Browning, 2008; Campbell, 1998; Dalby, 1988; Hansen, 2006). In many cases, their aspirations are guided by finding alternatives through uncovering the ideological function of dominant security discourses (cf. Huysmans, 2002; Neumann, 1999). In other words, security is considered to be manipulable by autonomous subjects (Müller, 2008). A corollary of this ambition has been the emphasis on overcoming boundaries, and, in doing so, many of their contributions share the ambition of Maruyama’s second synthesis. However, as already mentioned, Maruyama’s ambition had failed. The initial development of discourse is essentially beyond the control of people because it largely evolves unconsciously. It is in this sense that this putative construction is, indeed, contingent. Thus, security discourses are better characterized as ‘performativity rather than construction’ (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007: 46, emphases in original). As Ringmar (2016: 119) argues, ‘states, as well as the international system in which they interact, are imagined only as they are performed’. This means, however, that we have to shift our attention from boundaries to within the spaces confined by these boundaries (Sassen, 2013), and focus on where a specific discourse is performed. If Maruyama is right, then it is not around the boundaries where different worldviews collide, but within communities, which are connected to the outside through an unconscious cognitive gap.

To shift this focus, security has to be conceived in the more substantial sense, as Huysmans (1998) has suggested by drawing on the term ‘thick signifier’. He notes that ‘the meaning of security does not just depend on the specific analytical questions it raises, it also articulates particular understandings of our relation to nature, other human beings and the self’ (Huysmans, 1998: 228). ‘Thick’, therefore, signifies a heterogeneous assemblage of actors, histories and (im)material contexts that securitize an issue in a specific space. Basso ostinato can help to further uncover the substance of this thickness, through which IR can gain a deeper knowledge of security as a manifestation of everyday relations in a geographically defined, yet ever-changing, community. Hence, security is site-specific (Allen, 2003) and it highlights the relation between what Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams (2009: 14), in reference to Michael Barnett and Raymond Duval, call ‘compulsory power’ and ‘productive power’. While compulsory power signifies the ability to control the actions of others through the use of violence, productive power is characteristic of actors that can influence site-specific relations to their advantage (also Qin, 2016: 43). In this sense, security is ‘a result or effect of productive power, and agents of productive power in specific sites’ (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009: 14, emphases in original). Hence, productive power shifts the meaning of security, and it is affected by conceptualizations of security at the same time. Basso ostinato tells us that these shifts are connected at each site to what people perceive to be an internal continuity through elements of mundane, everyday life. However, these elements ‘may and indeed do endure in many respects, but that is not the same as saying that there is a fixed, unchangeable essence to them’ (Allen, 2012: 192).

Within these current security discourses, several different conceptions have evolved. One of them is comprehensive security, whose terminological origin can be traced back to Japanese discourses during the 1970s and 1980s. In what follows, we demonstrate how basso ostinato illuminates difference by taking comprehensive security as an example. We trace its development in Japanese scholarship and contrast it to Western scholarship in order to show how the specific meaning of a term performs differently in different spaces. ‘Comprehensive security’ first appeared as an official term in a document from 1980 titled Report of the Comprehensive National Security Study Group (Sogo Anzenhosho Kenkyu Gurupu, 1980), prepared by a group of scholars who had been commissioned by the Japanese Prime Minister Ohira Masayoshi. By referring to this form of security as sogo (total), its rapporteurs aimed to devise a more appropriate conceptualization of security with the purpose of readdressing Japan’s foreign policy in light of a changing world. At the time that this report was prepared, Japan had been struggling with the changing geopolitical conditions in East Asia, particularly after Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the following rapprochement between the two countries, and the faltering global economic situation after the second oil crisis in 1979.

In Western scholarship, however, this Japanese understanding of security has been frequently misrepresented. This is because the same notion rests on different basso ostinati, as already evidenced in the first use of comprehensive security in anglophone literature. John Chapman, Reinhard Drifte and I.T.M. Gow (1983: xvi) argue in their book on Japan’s Quest for Comprehensive Security that this concept is merely ‘a smoke-screen behind which the hawks can expand defense spending’ and it merely cloaks Japan’s economic interests. This reading of comprehensive security as the ruthless pursuit of economic interests came to be a common ground in Western scholarship to understand this ‘new’ conception. This is confirmed in an influential piece by Akaha Tsuneo (1991: 324), in which he argued that ‘in the early 1980s Japan adopted a “comprehensive security” (sogo anzen hosho) policy with greater emphasis on economic and diplomatic means than on military means for pursuing the nation’s security’. Emphasizing this economic aspect further, Richard Samuels (2007: 3) argues that Japanese pragmatism subordinates the ‘military to economic sector, deliberately practicing mercantile realism to generate prosperity and provide security at the same time’, ever since Japan encountered Western modernity after having been forced to open its country. Although presenting a more nuanced reading, Buzan and Hansen (2009: 136) still indicate a largely analogous comprehension by delineating comprehensive security as ‘[r]etain[ing] a national security focus but widen[ing] the agenda away from just military security to other concerns, particularly economic, political, and environmental threats’.

This is not to argue that these Western interpretations misread Japan’s real intentions, but they overlook a specific spatio-historical aspect of the debate because Japan’s comprehensive concept of security transcended the predominant Western reading of security at that time as the absence of military threat. Rather, basso ostinato as a heuristic device alienates ‘from the concern of our immediate life-experience’ (Rytövuori-Apunen, 2009: 644). In this way, basso ostinato unearths that this seemingly realist, and, at best, potentially new, conceptualization of security was, indeed, neither a realist conception nor new from a Japanese perspective (Hughes, 2004: 120–127). The initial report from 1980 already gave this indication by referring back to the wartime period in its conceptualization of comprehensive security. This report argued that Japan attained modernization less than a century after its forced opening, despite its cultural differences from the West. The ‘mission of Japan in world history’ is to contribute to ‘the order of building relations between the South and the North’; economic cooperation is, in this regard, ‘the only assertive way’ to ‘promote friendly relations’ (Sogo Anzenhosho Kenkyu Gurupu, 1980: Chapter II). Notwithstanding Japan’s brutal imperial regime, in which tens of thousands of women were forced into prostitution, the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere also spread among Japanese scholarship as a potential for its members to break free from European suppression through a comprehensive ‘humanistic’ and economic cooperation that could overcome both capitalism and communism (Ezawa, 1941; Royama, 1941; Showa Kenkyukai, 1939). It is in this regard that it linked to the wartime notion of kokubo (protecting the national land) in terms of ‘particular understandings of our relation to nature, other human beings and the self’ (Huysmans, 1998: 228). Indeed, this comprehensive understanding of security was already being used as a means for common development, as exemplified in a confidential document by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1936). In this document, economy does not refer to individual gains, and therefore to a selfish reference to exploitation, but is employed to depict co-prosperity through cooperation and sustainability. This holistic reasoning reflects early 20th-century statements of Japanese intellectuals, such as the one by the philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro (1937), who argued that ‘Japan fills a unique status in modern world civilization’ due to its versatile political, economic and cultural relations, and even its climate (Sevilla, 2014: 94–95).

This long-standing comprehensive understanding of security continues in Japan’s post-war security arrangements, in which Japan largely abandoned its military capability. This is evidenced in the influential ‘Yoshida Doctrine’, which evolved in light of the nuclear arms race that forced Japan to react due to its close ties with the US and its proximity to China and the Soviet Union. Named after Japan’s first Prime Minister after the Second World War, Yoshida Shigeru, this doctrine formed the basis for Japanese foreign policy after the Second World War. Commonly, it is interpreted to be a prime example of Japan’s pragmatist security policy that prioritizes economic growth (cf. Pyle, 1996; Samuels, 2007). However, reading it in this way falls short of seeing that Japan continues to employ a pre-war comprehensive understanding in which economy forms just one, albeit significant, aspect of security (Nakanishi, 2004). This continuation is further evidenced in Japan’s promotion of human security. Although this is gradually changing under current Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo (Auslin, 2016), human security has been a pillar of Japan’s diplomatic efforts since the early 1990s. Alongside Japan, Canada and Norway in particular have campaigned for human security internationally. While it may be that human security sustains Canada’s aspiration as a middle power and supports Norway’s ambitions for permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 204), it resonates with Japan’s comprehensive security, helping Japan to find ways to cooperate with a group of culturally and geographically diverse countries.

Tracing the basso ostinato of Japan’s understanding of security is an example of how, in this case, the concept of security is performed differently in different contexts, despite employing the same term. The critique and negligence of anglophone academia is a reflection of its own security-related basso ostinato, and we consequently see a cognitive void between the different basso ostinati. This is not the place to argue that one conceptualization of security is more apt for current international politics than the other. Previous scholarship (cf. Ringmar, 2012; Shani, 2008) has addressed this question for international politics at large. Rather, it helps to clarify how meaning performs. If these substantial differences, which are related to how meanings perform and how people connect security to their life-worlds, had been known before the discussion on comprehensive security emerged in the 1980s, this discussion might have taken a different, and for both sides more fruitful, direction.