The Kishi Doctrine and the Construction of a Virtual Nuclear State in Postwar Japan

This paper examines how Japan’s postwar non-nuclear globalism declined in two decades from the late 1950s. It focuses on high-growth Japan’s creation of a virtual nuclear state, a non-nuclear armed state that seeks to maintain and subtly utilize its technological advances in dual-usable nuclear power for deterrent and even compellent purposes. Challenging a conventional understanding of postwar Japan as a light-armed trading state, this study argues that Japan’s “peace state” idealism had largely disappeared by the mid-1970s except its rhetorical residues. The paper first analyzes Premier Kishi Nobusuke’s tenure as the origins of the virtual nuclear state. Kishi envisioned a high-tech nuclear Japan that could be transferrable to a middle-class nuclear-armed state. He also took the initiative to (re-)interpret Article 9 of the Japanese constitution as allowing it to possess nuclear weapons for self-defense. It next scrutinizes Japan’s search of nuclear bombs under Premier Sato Eisaku, Kishi’s younger brother. Japan then conducted incipient feasibility studies of nuclear weapons development, and approached to West Germany for nuclear collaboration in charting a foreign policy more independent of the United States. However, Japan finally joined the NPT regime fully in 1976, six years after signature. In order to understand why Japan stopped pursuing nuclear bombs, and created a quasi-nuclear state instead, the paper thirdly reconsiders Emperor Showa’s alleged intervention in Diet deliberations of the NPT ratification bill for approval through his former imperial official Maeo Shigesaburo, then Speaker of the House. The presentation concludes that the Kishi doctrine faced no serious domestic challenges until the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis of 2011. Premier Tanaka Kakuei practiced virtual nuclear diplomacy with China and Russia in the early 1970s. Successive leaders from his faction, a derivative of the Sato group, showed no hesitation in public to admit Japan’s capability of producing atomic bombs instantly.