Japan and the international humanitarian system: In the periphery by design,principle or strategy?

Introduction

Japan has been at the periphery of the international humanitarian system, at least for the past two decades. This marginal role is manifest at financial and recognition levels. Despite being a major official development assistance (ODA) donor, its humanitarian funding is erratic, varying significantly from year to year, well below American and European levels of support. According to the Financial Tracking Service managed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),

¹ funding can be over a billion dollars in years of more generous contribution, such as in 2013 and 2016. In those years, the country appears among the top five donors. Yet, there are also years like 2018 when contributions are less than half that quantity, and the country does not even make it to the top ten donors, placing lower than smaller countries like Norway or Kuwait. While yen devaluation has played a role, the instability of Japan's humanitarian funding has continued for more than a decade (OECD, 2010, 2014, 2020).

Moreover, the recognition of Japan in the international humanitarian system is literally in limbo. On the one hand, the post-Cold War humanitarian system is usually portrayed as Western-dominated, with the United States (US), the United Kingdom, and the European Union as the main donors, and managed by United Nations (UN) agencies, especially the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Program (WFP) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), as well as large international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) from the West (Barnett and Walker, 2015: 135–136). These actors set the norms underlying the humanitarian diplomacy paradigm, according to which donors are convinced by diplomatic means to allow and support humanitarian action which humanitarian organizations are in charge of implementing (Régnier, 2011). ² In this version of the system, “Western media… Washington, London, and the Scandinavian capitals… are best able to place humanitarian priorities on the international agenda.” (Egeland, 2013)

On the other hand, there has been growing attention to emerging donors and other non-traditional actors whose presence will disrupt and revolutionize the old system. These accounts usually include Brazil, China, the Gulf countries, India, and Turkey (Binder et al., 2010; Sezgin and Dijkzeul, 2015), motivating renewed attention toward the role of donors and the position of humanitarianism in foreign policy (Willitts-King et al., 2018). These actors may or may not act through the traditional humanitarian aid implementers, undertaking their initiatives bilaterally—what is sometimes called “humanitarianism as diplomacy” (O’Hagan, 2016). Humanitarianism as diplomacy is usually viewed with skepticism, a means by which to promote states’ interests, so Egeland (2013) urges that “emerging and de facto economic powers outside of the Western hemisphere must be engaged to promote and protect humanitarian operations.” Humanitarian diplomacy normalizes the idea of a system belonging to West-dominated humanitarian actors courting Western donors while expecting a buy-in from emerging economic powers.

Neither Western nor an emerging donor country, Japan's position in the international humanitarian system has slipped through the cracks of the system's conception. This is a perplexing outcome given Japan's overall clout in international cooperation and the country's privileged position in the early nineties when it could have influenced the newly consolidating system. At that time, Japan was the world's largest donor and the only country to date to have ever disputed the leading position of the US. As the top donor, Japan was accused of free-riding on the international community's peace and stability and was pressured to expand its contributions to global governance (Hoshino, 2017). These were the circumstances under which Sadako Ogata became the head of UNHCR in 1991, and Japanese diplomats became the third (1996–1998) and fifth (2001–2003) Under-Secretaries-General in charge of humanitarian affairs. These appointments came along with resources and capacity-building efforts at the national level to support their performance. Understanding why the country failed to maintain a prominent position in the system offers precious insights as to how humanitarian governance works and the prospects of its transformation. ³

In the following pages, I provide an analytical framework that allows for a better grasp of the driving forces affecting the evolution of Japan's humanitarianism. I highlight the main features of the country's historical contributions, contrasting its direct work in crises with its engagement with the humanitarian system. Finally, I suggest how Japan can influence the ongoing changes in this sphere of international cooperation which have been accelerated by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on global governance.

An analytical framework to understand state humanitarianism

Understanding Japan's position in the humanitarian system requires an examination of the country's involvement in humanitarian diplomacy and humanitarianism as diplomacy. This is because the role of the state in liberal humanitarianism has been a source of disagreement, as its direct agency does not receive meaningful consideration. In other words, we need to single out the characteristics underlying the humanitarian diplomacy paradigm to analyze the country's behavior vis-à-vis the system. Still, we must also understand the state's independent engagement in humanitarian crises, regardless of the system. Careful attention to both approaches is critical for several reasons: humanitarian crises have long existed, and state efforts to respond to them precede the present system. Indeed, the post-Cold War system is a relatively new phenomenon in humanitarian history, still unconsolidated, contested, and not the exclusive way to participate in humanitarian action.

Moreover, it is well-recognized that the system does not provide a solution to humanitarian problems and only covers the “relief” aspect of humanitarian crises. Humanitarians themselves describe it as being a temporary band-aid in need of more comprehensive approaches (Egeland, 2013). For this reason, states continue to have a significant presence during humanitarian crises through recovery and prevention efforts in ways that the humanitarian diplomacy paradigm will not recognize as humanitarian. This situation has been discussed since the conception of the system as a “continuum” or “nexus” of cooperation approaches, attracting widespread attention from donors and implementing agencies (Gómez and Kawaguchi, 2016). Therefore, understanding states’ humanitarianism should not be limited to their role as donors, but also encompass broader patterns of engagement. In this section, I elaborate on this analytical framework, which I use to organize the rest of the article.

The present humanitarian system started with the UN General Assembly resolution 46/182 (UN General Assembly, 1991) about the coordination of emergency humanitarian assistance at the global level. The resolution officially created a humanitarian pillar inside the UN, pushing donors to create specific divisions to deal with humanitarian affairs in the following years (Gómez and Kawaguchi, 2016: 5–6). The creation of the humanitarian system brought along a quantitative change in terms of funding. The government's budget for humanitarian action doubled in 1991, to more than US$4 billion (Development Initiatives, 2005: 5). Since then, the upward trend has not stopped, reaching US$22.6 billion in 2018, more than three-quarters of the total humanitarian funding (Development Initiatives, 2019). As a share of all the ODA, humanitarian funding moved from less than 2% in the eighties to more than 10%. Its growth has outpaced that of development funds (Development Initiatives, 2018).

Funding came with strings attached, so there were growing fears about the “bilateralization” of humanitarian action at the turn of the century. According to Macrae et al. (2002), bilateralization implied a shift away from multilateralism towards NGOs, increased earmarking benefitting the most visible emergencies, increased presence of donors in the field, more coordination by donors, and tougher contractual and managerial regimes. While some saw this change as a way to pressure ineffective UN agencies into improving their performance, bilateralization also allowed for geopolitical calculations to trump basic humanitarian values (Weiss, 2013). Humanitarian diplomacy is part of the resistance against donor interference. Such resistance by humanitarian actors resulted in some agreed-upon principles to promote Good Humanitarian Donorship (GHD), endorsed in 2003 by 17 donors. The GHD initiative stressed the importance of upholding humanitarian principles, reaffirmed the “central and unique role” of the UN in providing leadership and coordination, and described good practices in the relationship between donors and the implementing humanitarian organizations, including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs. ⁴ The emphasis is important because the GHD principles and good practices were not limited to improving states’ involvement in crises, but also sought to normalize the donor-implementer division of labor.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) adopted these principles as the referent for its peer-reviews of donors’ development programs one year later. ⁵ Japan was an observer of this process in 2003 and endorsed the principles in 2010. It received the first feedback on its humanitarian assistance from the OECD as an annex to that year's peer-review report (OECD, 2010). A fully-fledged chapter was only present in the following evaluation in 2014. Japan's experience adapting to this new paradigm of state humanitarianism underlying humanitarian diplomacy is the focus of the following section. ⁶

On the other hand, Japan's humanitarianism as diplomacy can be traced back to the larger picture of international cooperation, starting in the fifties (Kato, 2016). The experience of being a recipient of many types of international help after the Second World War, including humanitarian support, was crucial in informing the country's aid philosophy (Nishikawa, 2005). As early as 1973, there were already funds specifically for emergencies (Takeda, 2013). Humanitarian concerns were one of the overall justifications for the country's international cooperation, literally stated since the seventies and reaffirmed in the first ODA charter published in 1992. ⁷ In 2000, several interviewees quoted in Nishikawa (2005: 119–120) study of Japan's assistance to East Timor suggested that no distinction between emergency and developmental assistance was made. Cooperation was lumped together under the umbrella of basic human needs (BHN) satisfaction, which included Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) assistance, the main ODA-implementing organization. Therefore, while JICA is in principle a development actor, it would be a mistake to leave the agency outside of any analysis of Japan's position in the international humanitarian system. ⁸

This conflation of different types of cooperation under a humanitarian umbrella is not particular to Japan, but characteristic of the post-Second World War narrative (Hong, 2015; Paulmann, 2016; Salvatici, 2019). The association with BHN is of particular importance, as BHN remains a central referent in development thinking history. In the late seventies, the World Bank's proposition and support of BHN were partly justified on humanitarian grounds (Streeten, 1982: 17). The inclusion of humanitarian concerns in Japan's first ODA Charter was also directly linked to BHN as a priority for cooperation combining different means, such as loans and grants along with emergency aid. However, with the creation of the humanitarian system in 1991, the UN General Assembly presented emergency and development assistance organizations and practices as different, in need of phasing and coordination to address crises comprehensively (Gómez and Kawaguchi, 2016). The GHD principles further emphasize this separation, reinforcing the idea that humanitarian and developmental identities are different and demarcating territories under political and budgetary constraints. Japan's experience suggests such separation did not necessarily take place. The pressure to move from a common humanitarian umbrella inspiring international cooperation to separate identities tied by a nexus was a key challenge that pushed Japan to rethink its contribution to crises as the new century started.

Humanitarian diplomacy's narrowing down of states’ role in humanitarianism has some further implications. In the ICRC's view, integration—i.e., combining different types of assistance—is seen as a daunting challenge, menacing to subsume humanitarian action to the overriding end of guaranteeing security. ⁹ Thus, humanitarian diplomacy does not only reinforce the idea that multiple types of cooperation were already independent of each other, but also that separation is desirable. There is no space to accommodate donors’ traditional practice of implementing emergency response, peacebuilding, disaster risk reduction (DRR), poverty reduction, and other streams of cooperation under a single roof. Besides, ICRC's aversion to fitting into a security agenda suggests a narrow understanding of security, mainly associated with politics and the military. The Japanese experience will also show that a different security concept is possible and perhaps more meaningful for local communities, for whom the differentiation between humanitarianism and development makes little sense. Japan will put forward human security as an alternative approach to the quandary posed to states by humanitarian crises.

Japan and the post-Cold War humanitarian system

The post-Cold War humanitarian system has several characteristics that clashed with Japan's existing work in humanitarian crises or inhibited Japan's cooperation strengths. There are at least four of them: 1) parallel cooperation institutions, 2) prominent role of NGOs, 3) bias towards armed conflict, and 4) a visibility fetish. First, the new international humanitarian system created a division of cooperation practices that required their own management arrangements. The establishment of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs at the UN, later OCHA, and the increase in official funding for humanitarian affairs was reflected in the creation of a dedicated division at the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA). ¹⁰ This sharply defined division of labor among international cooperation institutions persists today: humanitarian affairs belong to the Ministry while JICA mainly manages development affairs.

This division has at least two critical implications playing against the visible participation of Japan in the international humanitarian system. First, there is a significant gap of capacities between the Ministry and JICA. While JICA has almost two thousand employees, including dedicated experts on multiple development sectors, and about one hundred offices worldwide implementing programs and projects, the Ministry only has a small team in Tokyo dedicated to humanitarian issues. ¹¹ Indeed, the Ministry relies on JICA for substantive advice and some managerial tasks, such as hosting Japan Disaster Relief (JDR) teams. Still, the division of labor is respected, at least on paper. When confronted with any emergency, JICA will clarify that it is not a humanitarian agency and stay outside of the Ministry's territory.

The Ministry's leading role in humanitarian affairs reflects the humanitarian diplomacy paradigm. MoFA emphasizes the centrality of the UN and is the mechanism through which it engages the most on humanitarian affairs. In 2018, from the US$457.2 million reported to OCHA's Financial Tracking Service, 91.1% went to the UN: 25.5% to the UNHCR, 23.3% to WFP, 12.7% to UNICEF, and about 6% each to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the International Organization for Migration, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the UN Development Programme. ¹² Reliance on multilateral actors has some impacts on the overall performance of the country's cooperation. On the one hand, the centrality of the UN muddles up humanitarian affairs with how Japan positions itself throughout the UN system. The OECD (2014) pointed out that Japan requested “some UN agencies to have an office in Japan, and for regular (at least annual) senior-level UN official visits to Japan, and continued pressure on agencies to hire Japanese nationals as staff.” On the other hand, having the humanitarian window at the ministry level hinders strategic interaction between the UN agencies and the developmental work of JICA, which mainly implements on its own, in close partnership with partner governments.

Reliance on multilateral institutions also results in the outsourcing of humanitarian management to UN agencies, reducing the need to have a national humanitarian assistance policy. While other donors usually have one, the ODA Charter covers all types of cooperation in Japan. After the Great East Japan Earthquake hit Japan in 2011, the government drafted a humanitarian aid policy, but party politics tainted the effort. ¹³ The OECD (2014: 79) peer-review observed that the policy had “not fundamentally changed the way that Japan approaches its humanitarian programme.” Recent cooperation policies make no mention of this policy, so its actual implications are uncertain.

Second, despite the consolidation of institutions at the UN level, a large share of humanitarian assistance is implemented through INGOs. In 2017 they received about one-quarter of the states’ direct humanitarian funding, US$4.1 billion, and 85% of humanitarian funding from private sources, US$5.7 billion (Development Initiatives, 2019). INGOs receive even more as implementers for UN agencies. As stated in the introduction, these organizations are mainly Western and have been consolidating since the second half of the twentieth century (Barnett, 2011). Still, for Japan, it has been a taxing challenge to nurture NGOs of a similar size and scope. The first Japanese humanitarian NGOs originated in the seventies, following the independence of Bangladesh, the Vietnam War, and the subsequent Indochina refugee crisis (Kuroda, 2003). By 1989, the government had noted the weakness of Japanese NGOs and created a subsidy framework to boost their capacities (Osa, 2012). Failure to effectively respond to refugee needs in Kosovo led to the creation the Japan Platform (JPF) in 2000, a mechanism to provide emergency funding from the government and the private sector to NGOs registered in Japan (Ohashi, 2016).

Twenty years after the creation of JPF, the mechanism plays a notable role in supporting humanitarian action but has not managed to reach the scale of Western counterparts. Initial fears about JPF becoming a tool for the government to control NGO action did not materialize (Ohashi, 2016). However, deploying personnel to crisis zones remains difficult, particularly because of the government's strict security restrictions on Japanese nationals, which recipients of JPF money must closely follow. Politics are also present in the earmarking of resources to specific crises, particularly those relevant to the country's geopolitical interests. These local and global politics are part of humanitarian diplomacy's distrust of the state, which is a constant challenge for the MoFA. Besides, JPF resources did not grow to the level of other major donors: the annual budget between 2015 and 2018 has been around US$55 million, mostly government money, distributed among the 43 registered NGOs. ¹⁴

The low level of funding for Japanese NGOs is usually attributed to the absence of a culture of donations, but that is not accurate. Japan's private contributions to UNICEF in 2017 were over US$140 million, the largest in the world; private donations to UNHCR in 2018 were US$ 35 million, while Doctors Without Borders, an emblematic international humanitarian NGO, gathered in the same year about US$ 81 million from Japan. ¹⁵ Moreover, the Japanese Red Cross collected about US$186 million in the same year, so general public support exists and could even be more significant than that of the government. However, as Osa (2012) suggests, the legitimacy of humanitarian actors plays an important role when gathering private funding, so Japanese private money mainly goes to well-established, highly reputable international organizations. ¹⁶

Third, humanitarian diplomacy is biased towards armed conflict situations, the context that the ICRC focuses on. Indeed, O’Hagan (2016: 665) affirms that the distinction between humanitarian diplomacy and humanitarianism as diplomacy is irrelevant most often for disasters. Major landmarks in the history of humanitarianism confirm this bias, starting with Biafra, the Indochinese refugee crisis, famine in Ethiopia, Kurds emergency in northern Iraq, the Rwanda Genocide, the Balkans, Darfur, famine in Somalia and the ongoing situation in Syria. Only since the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 have disasters started gathering more international attention. Underlying this bias is the central but problematic importance of politics in responding to armed conflicts, which falls under the authority of MoFA.

Action after conflicts has been challenging to Japan for multiple reasons, including low tolerance to risks associated with deployments in dangerous settings and constitutional restrictions to the use of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF). That is why in the late eighties, financial contributions were Japan's primary cooperation tool. However, over-relying on monetary support did backfire during the Gulf War, mainly because of the fourth characteristic of the international humanitarian system described at the beginning of this section: its visibility fetish. Presence on the ground, faces, and flags widely covered by mass media are essential parts of the humanitarian business (Andersen and de Silva, 2018; Paulmann, 2019; Weiss, 2013). Despite shouldering about 20% of the Dessert Storm campaign, Japan failed to get recognition because of the lack of human contribution (Hirata, 2002: 171–172; Hoshino, 2017). This diplomatic failure resulted in legal reforms that allowed the deployment of the SDF and a broader, long-term commitment to civilian peacebuilding. Both peace missions and the developmental approach to armed conflicts were then (and even now) considered outside of the humanitarian system—e.g., Harmer (2008)—rather, a part of humanitarianism as diplomacy. The OECD (2010) even recommended that Japan distinguished humanitarian action from peacebuilding, which used to be included together in JICA thematic guidelines. ¹⁷

Finally, Japan is not very successful in promoting its humanitarian image through the UN agencies’ work it sponsors. After Sadako Ogata's prominent role at the head of the UNHCR, there are no examples of world-famous Japanese humanitarians. Through interviews at US, European and British offices in charge of humanitarian affairs and country missions undertaken for another project (Hanatani et al., 2018), it was evident that other donors present multilateral support as their own support more actively than Japanese counterparts. Since 2007 all Under-Secretaries-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinators have been British citizens. UNICEF and WFP are closely linked to the US, and no Japanese have headed any major UN humanitarian agency for more than two decades. Indeed, the 2018 report of the Advisory Board for the ODA stresses the challenge of ensuring the visibility of Japan through international organizations and the need for new initiatives to enhance it. With low visibility, struggles to respond to armed conflicts, the lack of big NGOs, and fractured cooperation institutions, it is not difficult to understand why Japan was relegated to the international humanitarian system's periphery.

Human security and the old-fashioned humanitarian spirit

Pushed to the periphery of the humanitarian system and its diplomacy, Japan came up with a new vision for its cooperation articulated around the human security idea. The new vision replaced humanitarian concerns with a more comprehensive approach to crises. Human security frames international support as a continuum of efforts, not as disparate actions. The introduction of human security coincided with the return of Sadako Ogata to Japan, which paradoxically did not result in a strengthening of the national humanitarian sector. Instead, her eight-year presidency at JICA resulted in a closer commitment and engagement of the development agency with humanitarian crises. She was familiar with human security ideas, which she had been already advocating during her two terms at UNHCR (Hammerstad, 2014). She further emphasized the concept through the work of the Commission on Human Security (2003). Human security's operationalization manifested more concretely through the “seamless assistance” approach, which implied assistance “that spans everything from prevention of conflict and natural disasters to emergency aid following a conflict or disaster, assistance for prompt recovery, and mid-to-long-term development assistance.” ¹⁸ Seamless assistance was never meant to bring humanitarian issues under JICA's roof, which to date remain MoFA's jurisdiction. What seamless assistance does is reaffirm her dictum that humanitarian problems have no humanitarian solutions, pushing JICA to engage more on crises and their management cycle. Operationalizing human security also included more field presence, in Africa mainly, as a way for JICA staff to get first-hand experience of crises and their implications for cooperation. ¹⁹

The comprehensive approach to humanitarian crises was vividly present in Japanese support after disasters. Traditionally supporting infrastructure projects, Japan was already involved in the recovery of areas affected by disasters from the outset of its cooperation history, as early as the sixties (Kamidohzono et al., 2016: 209). Then, following the experiences after the refugee crisis in Indochina and the 1985 earthquake in Mexico, the JDR was created to coordinate official disaster relief support (Yanagizawa, 2013). ²⁰ Simultaneously, cooperation for prevention, mitigation, and preparedness against disasters also became prominent. Japan's dominance in disaster cooperation is evident in how all world conferences on DRR were held in the country: in Yokohama (1994), Kobe (2005), and Sendai (2015). Japan's own experience confronting disasters has been a factor behind the country's leadership, as well as the generous funding. Kellett and Caravani (2013) report how between 1991 and 2010, Japan contributed 64% of all the budget coming directly from donors for DRR; in some years of the nineties, it was more than 80%.

The world conferences on DRR focused from the beginning on prevention and, thus, were biased against relief. The proposal of an international decade for disaster reduction emerged from the scientific community and had a technical nature (Lechat, 1990). The 1994 Yokohama Strategy and Plan of Action for a Safer World recognized the entire crisis management cycle but emphasized that prevention was better. ²¹ All the conference recommendations revolved around prevention, and the word “humanitarian” was only mentioned to introduce the UN Under-Secretary General of Humanitarian Affairs in charge of the Decade. This bias against relief was moderately reduced in the subsequent frameworks, which now included relief as one of the priorities for action and acknowledged the roles and contribution of OCHA and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. This partial accommodation of humanitarian relief reflects the fact that, despite Japanese efforts, all other donors include DRR as part of their humanitarian portfolio—as is the case of OECD statistics too. ²² Nevertheless, the DRR regime has evolved in a demand-driven fashion, with national governments at its center, for whom the humanitarian-development nexus makes little sense.

Despite the bias against relief, traditional humanitarian support plays a key role in Japan's seamless assistance. Along the diplomatic goal of visibility, JICA primarily uses JDR deployments as the entry point for its recovery experts. Through recovery planning, the agency commits to the support of disaster-affected areas for several years—the most prolonged JDR missions will not last more than a couple of months. ²³ The large JICA teams in charge of recovery and prevention supported by the Japanese DRR community, mainly with a science and engineering background, are the ones behind the country's position and contributions. In sum, while relief is included in practice and action, the different size of the contributions reflects the country's priorities for action.

The human security approach has been evolving concerning violence and armed conflicts too. After being pressured to maintain a military presence in the early nineties, Japanese law was modified to make SDF deployments possible, taking place multiple times since then. ²⁴ The SDF have participated in Peacekeeping Operations in Cambodia, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Sudan, Haiti, South Sudan, and Egypt. The SDF also took part in the political mission in Nepal in 2007 and have provided humanitarian airlifts in Rwanda, Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The operations vary in size with some consisting of only a few individuals and others, like the South Sudan mission, deploying almost four-thousand troops between 2011 and 2013 before the new outbreak of conflict in Juba forced Japan to withdraw. One of the main limitations of these deployments is that, while troops can take part in the operations, they are forbidden from using force because it goes against the country's constitution. Therefore, deployments are limited to logistics and engineering, which creates some frictions inside missions as such restrictions reduce flexibility.

Despite these efforts, the heart of Japan's contributions to peace, especially peacebuilding, takes place through JICA (Honda, 2017). The agency was pushed to contribute to post-conflict reconstruction in Cambodia in 1992, followed by activities in Palestine, the Balkans, and East Timor (Kamidohzono et al., 2016). However, JICA's contributions in those days were not presented as peacebuilding but as reconstruction and development efforts. Preparations to include peace as part of the agency's work started in 1999, resulting in the first thematic guidelines in 2003. These were the guidelines that included humanitarian action as part of peacebuilding, objected to by the OECD-DAC peer evaluators. Then, an office in charge of peacebuilding was created in 2004 as part of the Planning Division, later becoming part of its core operations. Today, peacebuilding is in the title of the Agency's division in charge of infrastructure.

In the beginning, peacebuilding was development-cooperation-as-usual taking place in conflict-affected areas. While it is not possible for JICA to tie relief with recovery as in the case of disasters, several innovations have been introduced to enlarge the agency's toolbox over the years, including quick impact projects, community action plans, and even sports integration (Kamidohzono et al., 2016). Humanitarian demining has also been an important part of the country's efforts. The long-term, wide-ranging involvement in Mindanao, the Philippines, from top diplomatic support to permanent JICA field presence, epitomizes Japanese peacebuilding contributions. In the course of three decades, peacebuilding has fully integrated into development cooperation (Honda, 2017).

The similar trends seen for both disasters and conflicts show how development guides Japan's international cooperation after humanitarian crises. While the country pays lip-service to humanitarian diplomacy, the core of its contributions can be described as humanitarianism as diplomacy, or rather as a human security approach to development cooperation. Indeed, Honda (2017: 102) suggests that peacebuilding became an ODA priority in 2003 thanks to JICA's concern, despite a lack of interest on the ministry side. ²⁵ JICA staff would joke that in Afghanistan, where the country invested a vast amount of resources, it was too dangerous to deploy the SDF, so the government sent JICA. Being absent from the humanitarian diplomacy narrative should not be misunderstood as a lack of humanitarian commitment. On the contrary, Japan's experience questions the extent to which humanitarian diplomacy should remain the dominant understanding of the humanitarian system.

Human security displaced humanitarianism from the cooperation policy since 2003. The approach transformed crisis contribution into something more palatable for JICA, which remains reticent in seeing itself as humanitarian out of principle and because of the area demarcation with MoFA. The human security approach also allowed the government to pursue a more prominent role in high UN politics, such as the so-far unsuccessful push for UN Security Council reform. It has also helped to accommodate demands of security contributions from the US alliance and engender aspirations of more proactive contributions to peace. Human security remains at the core of the most recent Development Cooperation Charter of 2015 ²⁶ and informs the National Security Strategy of 2013 ²⁷ . It could be argued that the connection to traditional security stretches Japan's approach beyond the humanitarian ethos, no matter how much the country avows to international standards for civil-military cooperation, or its commitment to seamless assistance. In practice, JICA remains the most crucial cooperation implementer and “development” the leading identity, encompassing “peacebuilding and governance, promotion of basic human rights and humanitarian assistance,” as the 2015 charter makes clear. Development is the essence of Japan's humanitarianism.

Japan and the new humanitarian system

Japan's peripheral position in the present international humanitarian system results from multiple design, principle, and strategy factors. Japan's way of working did not fit the relief-centered vision of humanitarian diplomacy, which was biased toward armed conflicts, and was hungry for visibility. MoFA and the public still pour most of their “humanitarian” funds into UN agencies, the Red Cross movement, and MSF, among others. Still, the bulk of Japanese contribution to humanitarian crises is its development cooperation. This way of working reflects the old humanitarian spirit of international cooperation which utilized different tools to support affected populations throughout the entire crisis management cycle. The human security approach helped transform Japan's international cooperation, enabling JICA to ingrain crisis support into its DNA without becoming “humanitarian”, especially as humanitarianism became an excluding identity. This broader, seamless approach is Japan's signature, successful with disasters but still challenging and underappreciated in armed conflicts.

After thirty years, the narrow understanding of humanitarianism is critically contested in the Asia Pacific and beyond (Gómez, 2021). The liberal international order underlying humanitarian diplomacy seems to be in critical condition, if not already dead (Ikenberry, 2018; Mearsheimer, 2019). The demise of US hegemony affects the central role of the UN in humanitarianism, as the COVID-19 crisis made painfully evident. Paralysis at the UN Security Council and delegitimization of the World Health Organization showed how global support could become unreliable during an acute emergency. Disagreement between the US and China threatens to hinder multilateral efforts to address suffering around the world.

Moreover, the rise of middle-income countries and new economic powers reclaiming the ownership of crisis management raise doubts about the role of INGOs (Gómez, 2018, 2019b; Tan, 2011). In this sense, the COVID-19 crisis has also shown that each country is on its own and that nurturing local capacities is the only option as countries disrupt the international flow of protective equipment and medical treatments. Violent conflicts and forced displacement do not show better prospects. The dismal result of humanitarian intervention in Libya dealt a fatal blow to Responsibility to Protect propositions. Still, alternatives for responding to atrocities in Syria, Mozambique, and Myanmar need to be found. Displacement crises at US and European borders show that the liberal expectations of the humanitarian diplomacy paradigm were challenging even for their proponents. A profound rethinking of humanitarian crisis management is urgently needed.

Calls to take advantage of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit to radically modify the system from the top went unheard, so it has been up to each region to promote change in creating their own “humanitarian” institutions. The large East Asian region has been a pioneer in this respect, thanks to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ continued work and its country members’ leadership (Caballero-Anthony et al., 2021; Gómez, 2021). The creation of the China International Development Cooperation Agency is also an opportunity to transform how humanitarian affairs are managed in the region and beyond. The post-COVID world can be the critical juncture opening the way to a new system.

Japan's human security approach can offer an alternative for action in this new crisis environment. One prominent reason is the centrality of local ownership in crisis management under this approach. Humanitarianism as diplomacy depends on the direct interactions between national actors because support after crises is not top-down charity but horizontal solidarity. The human security approach recognizes the need for a legitimate political authority (Chinkin and Kaldor, 2017) under which all local and international efforts to address crises must strive to be sustainable. Indeed, the centrality of the local is also an acknowledgment of how most resources supporting emergencies actually come from inside affected countries. The humanitarian diplomacy model which assumes a vertical hierarchy of donors and recipients mediated by humanitarian actors is not realistic.

Increased local capabilities entail less need for massive human or in-kind support, making monetary support much more suitable (Gómez, 2019a). That would make contributions with a longer-term perspective much more appealing and valued as humanitarian. Indeed, Japan is already experiencing the benefits of this change concerning support for refugees. The country has historically had a dismal performance accepting refugees, for instance, receiving only 0.2%—i.e., 20 persons—of the global number in 2017 (Miyashita, 2019). To compensate, Japan has been committed to proactively supporting host communities around the world, particularly in Jordan and Uganda, using all the tools available to JICA including loans and grants and partnerships with other actors. This experience was the main topic of the country's only side-event at the World Humanitarian Summit, framed as a contribution to the humanitarian-development nexus and showcasing commitment towards refugees. The absence of public backlash because of its inability to improve refugee reception numbers suggests that support adapted to each country's strengths may now be welcome, in clear contrast to the pressure the country endured thirty years ago.

The change towards a human security approach is not the panacea. Humanitarian diplomacy conceals the unwillingness of international actors to commit to long-term operations with fragile societies. Without such commitment, contributions to preventing further relapses into crisis are difficult to achieve. The human security approach emphasis on local ownership of emergencies makes such a long-term commitment to the full crisis management cycle even more challenging to achieve, particularly in disaster situations (Hanatani et al., 2018). As local actors appear more capable, it is easier for international cooperation to move back to business as usual. Finding ways in which the emotivity of emergencies can be connected with bouncing back better and minimizing the effects of further crises in the long-term is a needed counter to this trend that Japan can promote from its experience. Such attention to the full disaster management cycle has more opportunities to gather attention in a regional order in which the humanitarian-development division of labor is disregarded.

Ownership of crisis can also make it particularly difficult to reach populations that are vulnerable because of their governments. Japan was heavily criticized in the eighties for its support to autocratic regimes in the region (Ohashi, 2016), and the present approach towards refugees from Myanmar has been portrayed in a similar fashion. The treatment of minorities in China, as well as other issues of concern in middle- and high-income countries, pose a similar challenge. Besides, the degree of commitment required to such a seamless approach makes it difficult to have a broader global presence, so Japan is once again seen as focusing on the Asia Pacific. Efforts in South Sudan were an attempt to show otherwise (Kawaguchi, 2018), but then structural restrictions about working in unstable environments interfered with the plans. All in all, Japan's commitment to humanitarian crises through human security shows an alternative to the narrow model of humanitarianism behind humanitarian diplomacy. It does not disavow the role of traditional humanitarians, but brings people back to the centre, and the need to confront threats in an integral way. Living up to the commitment to security with a human face and leaving no one behind should be the focus of global attention in the emerging humanitarian system.