Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy

International relations scholars have largely overlooked Japan in their surveys of great power politics. At the same time, students of Japan frequently focus on a single policy area or on Japan’s bilateral relations with specific states and have generally failed to test Japan’s larger strategic calculus against international relations theory.’ Those who have examined Japanese grand strategy typically adopt a structural realist model, under which states are motivated primarily by the fundamental imperative of military security and frequently subordinate other goals to that end. Some scholars, observing divergence from behavior predicted by this theory, have concluded that Japan’s foreign policy is nonrealist or otherwise exceptional.2 In this article, we examine Japan’s postwar foreign policy both against structural realism and against what we call ”mercantile realism,” which recognizes technoeconomic security interests-including, but not limited to, those associated with military security-as central considerations of state policy. We conclude that although Japan clearly does not ignore military security,