Papers by Atsuko Watanabe
International Political Sociology, 2024
Originally a biogeographic term, “Indo-Pacific” is increasingly replacing “Asia-Pacific” in polit... more Originally a biogeographic term, “Indo-Pacific” is increasingly replacing “Asia-Pacific” in political discourse. This is not merely a linguistic matter but also has political implications. However, the meaning of “Indo-Pacific” remains unclear, and its implications are contested. While it has attracted the attention of a wide spectrum of political pundits, the regional designation “Indo-Pacific” is used to describe a space of global cooperation and geopolitical competition. This study makes two contributions by reexamining this debate. First, it helps lift the fog around the Indo-Pacific to gain a deeper understanding and encourage reflection on its current rise. Thus, it is situated within a growing body of literature that excavates the complex history of the Indo-Pacific by revisiting its Japanese wartime origins. Second, drawing on the emergent literature on multiplicity, this study shows how the term has historically invoked two different kinds of international relations in Japan. This suggests the importance of examining multiple socio-spatial imaginations internalized by diverse collectivities in the social space of international politics that goes beyond modern European state borders. Introduced by the Japanophile German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, the term was originally used to express the area of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a region that aimed to create a world order that differed from the Western one. This significantly contradicts contemporary usage by the Japanese government, which claims that universal values exist in the region.
E-International Relations, 2023
this article, from an intellectual historical perspective, discusses how Japanese IR has underwri... more this article, from an intellectual historical perspective, discusses how Japanese IR has underwritten the Euro-/American-centric IR, and why this tendency is persistent to date. My interest is not presenting a distinctive national school. As I have claimed with Felix Rösch, I do not believe there is such a thing as uniquely Japanese IR (Watanabe and Rösch 2018). Rather, I want to consider in what sense IR can be pluralised and therefore, globalised. This article engages the question of a Japanese contribution to Eurocentric IR, drawing on two debates. First, in line with recent contributions on globalising IRT that focus on what is neglected, silenced, and/or not heard (Bilgin 2016; Çapan and Zarakol 2018), the article explains how and why post-war Japanese IR has largely overlooked its own voices.
Telos, 2023
This essay considers the question of how people can conceptually transcend boundaries without act... more This essay considers the question of how people can conceptually transcend boundaries without actually exceeding them. This puzzle links to the debate over Western-centrism in the social sciences and International Relations (IR). Like other disciplines, IR scholars rely on the term “global” to forge a new space which can encompass rapidly diversifying scholarship. To this end, scholars are trying to weave a newly integrated narrative. However, the global is a space that each of us only imagines. This paper discusses two forms of religious pluralism: those of British-born theologian, John Hick (1922-2012) and Japanese novelist, Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996), in order to explore the possible implications of the term, ‘global’. The former proposed to conceive of God as the Real. By contrast, the latter, aspiring to become a Catholic while retaining his Japanese-ness, imagined God as an agency rather than existence. By discussing both intellectuals, this paper suggests one way to envisage the global as a co-constructed imaginative space that never takes a concrete shape. Envisaged this way, we do not need to transcend boundaries to share a sense of belonging.
This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by earlycareer women international relatio... more This forum critically reflects on discrimination faced by earlycareer women international relations (IR) scholars in the Asia-Pacific region in their workplaces and beyond. By taking a self-ethnographic perspective, six contributors from five countries provide an engaging overview of difficulties they face in their everyday lives. Against the backdrop of this diverse and globalizing region, the contributors are all academic migrants in search of employment and learning opportunities within the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. They lead migratory lives by frequently crossing ideational and material boundaries to contribute to a more diverse IR knowledge base, and they encounter numerous difficulties and forms of discrimination. This forum has two aims. First, in reflecting on the contributors' own lived experiences, it highlights the diversity of issues faced by early-career women scholars in this region. Second, it calls for novel, more inclusive forms of solidarity that appreciates diversity as plurality across any divides.
CfP EWIS Workshop, 2018
Workshop Summary This workshop aims to explore unequal treaties in the nineteenth century that co... more Workshop Summary This workshop aims to explore unequal treaties in the nineteenth century that contributed to the current world political order with the intention to investigate the resulting extraterritoriality, i.e. Westerners were exempt from local jurisdiction, for contemporary international politics. For example, in Japan, the first of these treaties were the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty and the Japanese-American Convention of Kanagawa in 1854. In the following decade, several more such treaties were signed with mainly European states like Austria-Hungary, Prussia, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Conventional contemporary narratives argue that extraterritoriality epitomised for these countries that they were not considered an equal partner within the international, albeit Western dominated society, and that they had to undergo a series of political, socioeconomic , and technological reforms to be no longer treated as an "abnormal" state. Such 'unequal' treaties were concluded between Western and Non-Western countries, but also within non-Western contexts only. As our workshop intends to excavate, reinvestigating these treaties is important not just to understand the modern historical narratives of these countries, but it also has wider implications for contemporary international relations, as they played a prominent role in constructing the current Western dominated world order. Furthermore, it also helps to gain a deeper understanding about contemporary forms of inequality around the globe and consider pathways to sustain more global equality within and among people and in consideration of natural environments. Despite this importance, these treaties have not yet received a comprehensive historical and political assessment. However, a reconsideration encourages scholars to challenge dominant geopolitical readings in which the Western domination of world politics was consolidated. Moreover, this intellectual negligence is due to the problématique of modern science that has established a Eurocentric structure of knowledge. Challenging this dominant picture of modern international politics is this workshop's ambition. In doing so, we do not intend to search for an alternative world political order, but investigating the plurality of the historical context in which the unequal treaties were signed enables the provision of a deeper understanding of how the current world political order evolved, highlighting the significant role unequal treaties played in it. From reconsidering them and the question of extraterritoriality, we also strive to derive greater understanding about contemporary global inequality. We invite contributions from all theoretical backgrounds and all geographical focuses, but we are particularly interested in contributions that address one or more of the following questions: In what way did unequal treaties concluded in the nineteenth century contribute to the development of the contemporary hierarchical, largely Western dominated world order? What role did specific countries and/or individuals play in bringing these treaties about and in ending them? How did extraterritoriality affect specific groups of people? What was the role of inequality between the states in the formation of the current world order, both materially and discursively? Can a reconsideration of these unequal treaties help us to envision a more equal and peaceful world order, more suitable for twenty-first century realities and if so how?
Political Geography, 2018
This paper demonstrates one way to reconsider pluralism in international relations theory through... more This paper demonstrates one way to reconsider pluralism in international relations theory through Japan's appropriation of European geopolitics. It is argued that the absence of non-Western theory often suggests the absence of non-Western subjectivity in world politics. In this debate, Japan, the sole non-Western country that abuses geopolitics to become a colonial empire, is a conundrum, particularly in terms of the relation of power and space. This paper shows how geopolitical theory can be differently interpreted by local political practices and its historical language, and how such mutations have been overlooked in the wider debate by examining conceptual divergence in the theory. Japanese geopolitics during the Second World War, called Daitōa Chiseigaku (Greater East Asia Geopolitics), envisaged the state as a territory without borders, in contrast to common assumptions in Anglophone international relations theory that modern Japan followed the European imperial order of territorial states. By excavating this story of Japanese geopolitics, this paper neither wants to assert another Japanese exceptionalism, nor to exhaust the hidden richness of Japanese theory to propose an alternative geopolitical discourse. Rather, it wants to reconsider the ways in which even state-centric geopolitical theory can be diverse in order to better understand the complex development of the map of modern states.
European Journal of International Relations , 2017
This article addresses the question of how spatial difference manifests itself in International R... more This article addresses the question of how spatial difference manifests itself in International Relations discourses in an effort to theorize difference in international politics. In doing so, we focus on the concept of security in particular and demonstrate a paradox in its conceptualization. Despite the aspiration to capture global diversity, contemporary security discourses largely leave out the moment of subjectification in knowledge-construction. Rather, a form of subjectivity construction is promoted in these discourses, which is reliant on the other. In contrast, this article considers the unsynthesizable cognitive void between the self and the other through the work of the Japanese political scientist Maruyama Masao and his basso ostinato concept. By drafting it as a heuristic device to avoid the potential of determinism for which basso ostinato was criticized, we apply it to the concept of comprehensive security with the intention to demonstrate that ostensibly similar concepts can have different meanings in different times and spaces. In doing so, we aim to transcend the resulting misunderstandings that obstruct International Relations scholarship from contributing to what Amitav Acharya calls ‘Global IR’.
Book Chapters by Atsuko Watanabe
Critical International Relations Theories in East Asia: Relationality, Subjectivity, and Pragmatism, 2019
This chapter considers the role of geography in an articulation of political subjectivity in inte... more This chapter considers the role of geography in an articulation of political subjectivity in international politics. It specifically focuses on ocean in contrast to land, drawing on the modern Japanese experience. In Western geographical traditions, as Phil Steinberg (2001) states, the ocean has been largely perceived as “non-territory,” despite being essential to the construction of territorial states. But is this binary conception of ocean applicable to a country outside of Europe? As one way to address this question, this study examines the historically transforming discourse of the self-identification of the Japanese state and sheds light on the semantic contradiction in Japan’s Pacific Ocean. Though seldom examined in IR, the ocean has contributed to the historical construction of Japan, not only as a European-type modern state, but also as a pre-modern Asian country. In this transition from one world system to another, the ocean in the Japanese geographical imagination has come to be contradictory as the ocean has been perceived as connection and blocking. This chapter demonstrates that this contradiction is not just a Japanese creation, but a product of complex historical interactions between the Japanese self and others.
Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations, 2018
Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations, 2018
The Question of Space: Interrogating Spatial Turn between Disciplines
This chapter introduces a different conception of space and place in an intellectual tradition ot... more This chapter introduces a different conception of space and place in an intellectual tradition other than the West. By his conception of place known as ‘Logic of Place’ (Basho no Ronri), Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), the leading philosopher of the Kyōto School in Japan, defined place – but not space – as nothingness, boundless and therefore universal and encompassing all spaces. This understanding fundamentally inverts the conventional modern Western perception of space (not place) as a universal category. Modern Japan historically is known as a successful consumer of European knowledge. Born into this country in the late nineteenth century, a period when it assertively imported almost any kind of knowledge from the West, Nishida attempted to relate the act of knowing to place and the body. Being discontent with the ontological distinction in Kantian philosophy between the knower and the known, and between the object and the subject, he came up with a different conception by eliminating these binaries.
presentations by Atsuko Watanabe
Conference Presentations by Atsuko Watanabe
Talks by Atsuko Watanabe
Classical geopolitics is the theory that was originally developed in the late nineteenth century ... more Classical geopolitics is the theory that was originally developed in the late nineteenth century Europe and disseminated some parts of the world including wartime Japan. Japanese geopolitics has been an abandoned field of study due to its anathematic past, despite its significance in wartime intellectual life. Meanwhile, Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. Its utmost example is the concept of the state, by which the world is assumed to be divided into bounded territories. The present study challenges this ground by taking interdisciplinary approaches in which contributions of academic literature in the West and studies of intellectual history in Japan are carefully bridged. It shows how political theory as text travels inter-regionally by interrogating the way how Japan imported classical geopolitics as the theory of the modern state however to explain regional developments in which the states were considered to be dissolved in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations. It is, therefore, a study that focuses on the transformation of power, knowledge and subjectivity in time and space.
Books by Atsuko Watanabe
Japanese geopolitics has been an abandoned field due to its anathematic past, despite its signifi... more Japanese geopolitics has been an abandoned field due to its anathematic past, despite its significance in wartime Japan’s intellectual life. This book is the first attempt to comprehensively introduce Japanese geopolitics. Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. In this story, Japan is regarded as an enthusiastic importer of Western knowledge. The book challenges this ground by examining how European geopolitics, the theory of the modern state, travels to Japan in the first half of the last century, and demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations of the world by examining a range of historical, political, and literary texts. Thereby, the book, focusing on the transformation of power, knowledge and subjectivity in time and space, provides a detailed account to reconsider the formation of contemporary world order of the modern territorial states.
In an ever more globalized world, sustainable global development requires effective intercultural... more In an ever more globalized world, sustainable global development requires effective intercultural co-operations. This dialogue between non-western and western cultures is essential to identifying global solutions for global socio-political challenges.
Japan and International Relations, critiques the formation of non-western IR by assessing Japanese political concepts to contemporary International Relations discourses, to better understand knowledge exchanges in intercultural contexts. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this dialogue, from international law and nationalism to concepts of peace and Daoism, this collection grapples with postcolonial questions of Japan’s indigenous IR theory.
Japan as Potential: Communicating across Boundaries for a Global International Relations: An Introduction, Felix Rösch and Atsuko Watanabe / Part I: Challenging International Law and towards a Global IR? Investigations into Japan’s Entry into the Westphalian System of Nation-States / Chapter 1. How Did Two Daos Perceive the International Differently? Atsuko Watanabe and Ariel Shangguan / Chapter 2. Japan's Early Challenge to Eurocentrism and the World Court, Tetsuya Toyoda / Chapter 3. Kōtarō Tanaka (1890-1974) and Global International Relations, Kevin M Doak / Part II. Empire-Building or in Search for Global Peace? Japanese Political Thought’s Encounter with the West / Chapter 4. Unlearning Asia: Fukuzawa’s Un-regionalism in the Late Nineteenth Century, Atsuko Watanabe / Chapter 5. Pursuing a More Dynamic Concept of Peace: Japanese Liberal Intellectuals' Responses to the Interwar Crisis, Seiko Mimaki / Chapter 6. Rethinking the Liberal/Pluralist Vision of Japan’s Colonial Studies, Ryoko Nakano / Part III. Local(ized) Japanese Political Concepts for a Twenty-First Century IR / Chapter 7. Who are the People? A History of Discourses on Political Collective Subjectivity in Post-War Japan, Eiji Oguma / Chapter 8. Amae as Emotional Interdependence: Analyzing Japan’s Nuclear Policy and US-Japan Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, Misato Matsuoka / Chapter 9. The Pitfalls in the Project of Overcoming Western Modernity: Rethinking the Lineage of the Japanese Historical Revisionism, Hiroyuki Tosa / Part IV. Forming an Imagined Community, yet Reaching People Globally? Japanese Popular Culture in Historical Perspective / Chapter 10. From Failure to Fame: Shōin Yoshida’s Shifting Role in the Mythology of Modern Japan, Sean O’Reilly / Chapter 11. Hayao Miyazaki as a Political Thinker: Culture, Soft Power, and Traditionalism beyond Nationalism, Kosuke Shimizu / Chapter 12. Who’s the Egg? Who’s the Wall? – Appropriating Haruki Murakami’s ‘Always on the Side of the Egg’ Speech in Hong Kong, Michael Tsang / Conclusion: Is there any Japanese International Relations Theory? Atsuko Watanabe and Felix Rösch /
Opening innovative ways to rethink global politics through the lens of Japanese political theory, this book explores the implications arising from the classic twin IR banners of anarchy and sovereignty, and instead focuses on the notions of difference and dialogue in order to elucidate the value-added of a global IR. It combines Japanese political thought and International Relations theory in a fresh and stimulating way, taking its cues from a close reading of historical and legal, as well as popular cultural sources. To this end, Rösch and Watanabe have succeeded in bringing together the best possible team of scholars in the fields of international law, international political theory and Japanese political theory, in particular from within Japan, but also from the anglophone world. The quality of this coherently structured volume is outstanding. It is a must read both in IR and political theory, as it has something to offer for different audiences: experts on Japanese external relations and readers interested in theories of IR, as well as those looking for novel sources on philosophical and anthropological thought on the contested notion of the global. This is scholarship of the finest kind!
Dirk Nabers, Professor for International Political Sociology, University of Kiel
--------------------------
This book aims to overcome a difficulty that International Relations, the most international, but not necessarily global social science, is facing: by viewing Japan as ‘a potential’, it tries to put a global International Relations into practice. While this book looks at modern Japanese thought from an encompassing perspective, the chapters are surprisingly consistent in their concerted effort to elicit global implications from this local perspective. Dedicated students who are striving for going beyond conventional research and education will profit from reading this book.
Shigeto Sonoda, Professor of Sociology, University of Tokyo
Journal Articles by Atsuko Watanabe
PS: Political Science and Politics, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected higher education globally. Overnight, entire degree programs h... more The Covid-19 pandemic has affected higher education globally. Overnight, entire degree programs had to be moved online. While this meant that also teaching and learning in political science and International Relations went into an "emergency e-learning" mode, as a recent teacher spotlight in PS: Political Science & Politics put it, moving online also offered opportunities. One such opportunity is collaborative online international learning (COIL) that enables students from different universities in different countries to work on one common project. As this paper argues, working together collaboratively online not only helps to mitigate the pandemic's physical restrictions and sustain a global space of learning but it also provides for a particular active and affective learning in an intercultural virtual environment that substantiates classroom experiences even in a post-pandemic higher education. To demonstrate this argument, this paper reflects on the experiences of a British-Japanese COIL project that investigated political responses to Coivd-19.
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Papers by Atsuko Watanabe
Book Chapters by Atsuko Watanabe
presentations by Atsuko Watanabe
Conference Presentations by Atsuko Watanabe
Talks by Atsuko Watanabe
Books by Atsuko Watanabe
Japan and International Relations, critiques the formation of non-western IR by assessing Japanese political concepts to contemporary International Relations discourses, to better understand knowledge exchanges in intercultural contexts. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this dialogue, from international law and nationalism to concepts of peace and Daoism, this collection grapples with postcolonial questions of Japan’s indigenous IR theory.
Japan as Potential: Communicating across Boundaries for a Global International Relations: An Introduction, Felix Rösch and Atsuko Watanabe / Part I: Challenging International Law and towards a Global IR? Investigations into Japan’s Entry into the Westphalian System of Nation-States / Chapter 1. How Did Two Daos Perceive the International Differently? Atsuko Watanabe and Ariel Shangguan / Chapter 2. Japan's Early Challenge to Eurocentrism and the World Court, Tetsuya Toyoda / Chapter 3. Kōtarō Tanaka (1890-1974) and Global International Relations, Kevin M Doak / Part II. Empire-Building or in Search for Global Peace? Japanese Political Thought’s Encounter with the West / Chapter 4. Unlearning Asia: Fukuzawa’s Un-regionalism in the Late Nineteenth Century, Atsuko Watanabe / Chapter 5. Pursuing a More Dynamic Concept of Peace: Japanese Liberal Intellectuals' Responses to the Interwar Crisis, Seiko Mimaki / Chapter 6. Rethinking the Liberal/Pluralist Vision of Japan’s Colonial Studies, Ryoko Nakano / Part III. Local(ized) Japanese Political Concepts for a Twenty-First Century IR / Chapter 7. Who are the People? A History of Discourses on Political Collective Subjectivity in Post-War Japan, Eiji Oguma / Chapter 8. Amae as Emotional Interdependence: Analyzing Japan’s Nuclear Policy and US-Japan Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, Misato Matsuoka / Chapter 9. The Pitfalls in the Project of Overcoming Western Modernity: Rethinking the Lineage of the Japanese Historical Revisionism, Hiroyuki Tosa / Part IV. Forming an Imagined Community, yet Reaching People Globally? Japanese Popular Culture in Historical Perspective / Chapter 10. From Failure to Fame: Shōin Yoshida’s Shifting Role in the Mythology of Modern Japan, Sean O’Reilly / Chapter 11. Hayao Miyazaki as a Political Thinker: Culture, Soft Power, and Traditionalism beyond Nationalism, Kosuke Shimizu / Chapter 12. Who’s the Egg? Who’s the Wall? – Appropriating Haruki Murakami’s ‘Always on the Side of the Egg’ Speech in Hong Kong, Michael Tsang / Conclusion: Is there any Japanese International Relations Theory? Atsuko Watanabe and Felix Rösch /
Opening innovative ways to rethink global politics through the lens of Japanese political theory, this book explores the implications arising from the classic twin IR banners of anarchy and sovereignty, and instead focuses on the notions of difference and dialogue in order to elucidate the value-added of a global IR. It combines Japanese political thought and International Relations theory in a fresh and stimulating way, taking its cues from a close reading of historical and legal, as well as popular cultural sources. To this end, Rösch and Watanabe have succeeded in bringing together the best possible team of scholars in the fields of international law, international political theory and Japanese political theory, in particular from within Japan, but also from the anglophone world. The quality of this coherently structured volume is outstanding. It is a must read both in IR and political theory, as it has something to offer for different audiences: experts on Japanese external relations and readers interested in theories of IR, as well as those looking for novel sources on philosophical and anthropological thought on the contested notion of the global. This is scholarship of the finest kind!
Dirk Nabers, Professor for International Political Sociology, University of Kiel
--------------------------
This book aims to overcome a difficulty that International Relations, the most international, but not necessarily global social science, is facing: by viewing Japan as ‘a potential’, it tries to put a global International Relations into practice. While this book looks at modern Japanese thought from an encompassing perspective, the chapters are surprisingly consistent in their concerted effort to elicit global implications from this local perspective. Dedicated students who are striving for going beyond conventional research and education will profit from reading this book.
Shigeto Sonoda, Professor of Sociology, University of Tokyo
Journal Articles by Atsuko Watanabe
Japan and International Relations, critiques the formation of non-western IR by assessing Japanese political concepts to contemporary International Relations discourses, to better understand knowledge exchanges in intercultural contexts. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this dialogue, from international law and nationalism to concepts of peace and Daoism, this collection grapples with postcolonial questions of Japan’s indigenous IR theory.
Japan as Potential: Communicating across Boundaries for a Global International Relations: An Introduction, Felix Rösch and Atsuko Watanabe / Part I: Challenging International Law and towards a Global IR? Investigations into Japan’s Entry into the Westphalian System of Nation-States / Chapter 1. How Did Two Daos Perceive the International Differently? Atsuko Watanabe and Ariel Shangguan / Chapter 2. Japan's Early Challenge to Eurocentrism and the World Court, Tetsuya Toyoda / Chapter 3. Kōtarō Tanaka (1890-1974) and Global International Relations, Kevin M Doak / Part II. Empire-Building or in Search for Global Peace? Japanese Political Thought’s Encounter with the West / Chapter 4. Unlearning Asia: Fukuzawa’s Un-regionalism in the Late Nineteenth Century, Atsuko Watanabe / Chapter 5. Pursuing a More Dynamic Concept of Peace: Japanese Liberal Intellectuals' Responses to the Interwar Crisis, Seiko Mimaki / Chapter 6. Rethinking the Liberal/Pluralist Vision of Japan’s Colonial Studies, Ryoko Nakano / Part III. Local(ized) Japanese Political Concepts for a Twenty-First Century IR / Chapter 7. Who are the People? A History of Discourses on Political Collective Subjectivity in Post-War Japan, Eiji Oguma / Chapter 8. Amae as Emotional Interdependence: Analyzing Japan’s Nuclear Policy and US-Japan Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, Misato Matsuoka / Chapter 9. The Pitfalls in the Project of Overcoming Western Modernity: Rethinking the Lineage of the Japanese Historical Revisionism, Hiroyuki Tosa / Part IV. Forming an Imagined Community, yet Reaching People Globally? Japanese Popular Culture in Historical Perspective / Chapter 10. From Failure to Fame: Shōin Yoshida’s Shifting Role in the Mythology of Modern Japan, Sean O’Reilly / Chapter 11. Hayao Miyazaki as a Political Thinker: Culture, Soft Power, and Traditionalism beyond Nationalism, Kosuke Shimizu / Chapter 12. Who’s the Egg? Who’s the Wall? – Appropriating Haruki Murakami’s ‘Always on the Side of the Egg’ Speech in Hong Kong, Michael Tsang / Conclusion: Is there any Japanese International Relations Theory? Atsuko Watanabe and Felix Rösch /
Opening innovative ways to rethink global politics through the lens of Japanese political theory, this book explores the implications arising from the classic twin IR banners of anarchy and sovereignty, and instead focuses on the notions of difference and dialogue in order to elucidate the value-added of a global IR. It combines Japanese political thought and International Relations theory in a fresh and stimulating way, taking its cues from a close reading of historical and legal, as well as popular cultural sources. To this end, Rösch and Watanabe have succeeded in bringing together the best possible team of scholars in the fields of international law, international political theory and Japanese political theory, in particular from within Japan, but also from the anglophone world. The quality of this coherently structured volume is outstanding. It is a must read both in IR and political theory, as it has something to offer for different audiences: experts on Japanese external relations and readers interested in theories of IR, as well as those looking for novel sources on philosophical and anthropological thought on the contested notion of the global. This is scholarship of the finest kind!
Dirk Nabers, Professor for International Political Sociology, University of Kiel
--------------------------
This book aims to overcome a difficulty that International Relations, the most international, but not necessarily global social science, is facing: by viewing Japan as ‘a potential’, it tries to put a global International Relations into practice. While this book looks at modern Japanese thought from an encompassing perspective, the chapters are surprisingly consistent in their concerted effort to elicit global implications from this local perspective. Dedicated students who are striving for going beyond conventional research and education will profit from reading this book.
Shigeto Sonoda, Professor of Sociology, University of Tokyo