AGREEMENT WITHOUT IMPLEMENTATION Military Bases and Alliance Tensions in Japan By Kerri J. Ng Department of International Relations Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs ANU College of Asia and the Pacific A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Australian National University. Canberra © Copyright by Kerri Jinzhi Ng 2020 Unless otherwise indicated, this is my own original work. _________________ Kerri Jinzhi Ng October 2020 ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I must thank Dr. David Envall, my chief supervisor, for his time, patience and encouragement over the course of this undertaking. Over many long discussions, he has helped me articulate the ideas that I had and organize them in a logical way. I am also grateful for the opportunities he provided for me to share my research in class, which were also valuable exercises in summarizing and communicating my arguments. And if I one day find myself with more than one style guide in my office, I know exactly who to blame. Similarly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the other supervisors on my panel. Professor William Tow was instrumental in getting me to Waseda University as a visiting scholar in 2014, thus enabling me to conduct a large part of my fieldwork in Japan. But he was also a mentor whose door was always open when I needed advice and encouragement. I also thank Dr. Ian Hall for his suggestions in terms of background scholarship and how I should organize it, and to Dr. Amy Catalinac for her insights into the Japanese political system. The traces of their influence may not be as obvious in the finished work presented here, but it is most certainly there in my mind. In the course of my fieldwork, I must especially thank Professor Chikako Kawakatsu-Ueki and Shino Hateruma, the former for sponsoring me for Waseda’s Visiting Scholar Program, and the latter for helping me reach out to many of the people I wished to interview. Dr. Noriaki Fumiaki and Dr. Akiko Yamamoto were also incredibly generous in sharing their time and contacts, especially in Okinawa. I am immensely grateful to Professor Manabu Satō and Professor Kunitoshi Sakurai, and all the other former and current scholars and practitioners who agreed to speak with me, both on- and off-the-record. What I learned from all of you greatly enriched my research, and I hope that my findings and contributions to the field will be worth the time that you shared with me. Many other individuals have been instrumental in this path I have wandered down. I will always credit Professor Rikki Kersten for sparking my interest in the complexities and contradictions of post-WW2 Japan, way back in the first half of 2011. Lauren Richardson has been incredibly inspirational, and I thank you in particular for being so generous with your time, both as I was setting out and also as I approached the end of the journey. I am grateful also to Dr. Amy King and Dr. Shiro Armstrong, who provided me with opportunities to iii expand my horizons in the field of International Relations. And I must not forget Dr. Yoichi Funabashi, Yoichi Kato, and the rest of the staff at Asia Pacific Initiative, for allowing me to further explore the world of practitioners in international relations while I finished writing up this dissertation. I would not have made it this far without my friends and family, both near and far. I am forever indebted to my Okinawan family for welcoming me into their lives even as some of the events covered herein played themselves out, and to my friends in Australia, Japan and elsewhere, who were perhaps all too willing to distract me from time to time. Thank you to my housemates over the years—Rin, Hayley, Husnia, Priya and Cris in particular—for the many great dinners, movie and k-drama nights, and bouts of Settlers of Catan. And to my comrades-in-arms from the Bell School at ANU, whose companionship on this journey has been much valued. Thank you to Wenti Sung, Caitlin Mollica and Jennifer Canfield for being great officemates, and also to Gail Ma, Ruji Auethavornpipat, Carly Gordyn, Richard Salmons, Tereza Kobelkova, Alana Moore, Naomi Atkins, Sophie Saydan, and Zohra Akhter for sharing laughter, tears and good cheer these past few years. I’ll never forget all those special resolutions that we adopted! Finally, I am deeply grateful to my family for their unwavering love and support—in particular, Mum, Dad, Kevin, Paula, Jon, and Rupert and Joyce. Whether in Canberra, Singapore, Perth—and for three years, Ithaca, New York—you were always ready to offer a listening ear and encouragement, even when you couldn’t see where this project was going. Thank you for being patient with me as I wrestled with the biggest challenge in my life thus far. And I must not forget Jamie and Cameron, and Anka and Floyd—you were the best pals I could ever wish for when I needed to put everything aside, whether for an hour or a day. I owe this to all of you. iv Abstract Why are some international agreements implemented while others fail? Why do some pass easily whereas others progress only slowly or cause great turmoil? In 2006, Tokyo and Washington signed an agreement to consolidate and realign US military facilities across Japan, with a major goal being to reduce alliance tensions in base-hosting communities in Japan. More than a decade later, efforts to implement this and related agreements have led to contrasting and, in some cases, quite unsatisfactory results. In Okinawa Prefecture, for example, tensions remain high and the agreement only partially implemented despite some successful land returns and unit transfers. By contrast, tensions rose briefly before falling again in Iwakuni City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, which has seen an increase in the number of fighter aircraft at the facility it hosts. To explain such differing outcomes, this dissertation shifts attention away from the agreements in question—the focus of much of the scholarly literature—and instead examines how alliance managers undertook the task of carrying them out. It focuses especially on how sub-national actors and their preferences have shaped the dynamics of implementation and so might account for this variation in outcomes. Using as a framework the concept of “preference incorporation,” the core argument is that the manner in which alliance managers engage with sub-national actors and incorporate or otherwise address their preferences is crucial to understanding why and how tensions rise and fall. Furthermore, it identifies positive and negative feedback loops as the key mechanism through which this occurs. By making this case, the dissertation not only contributes to a better understanding of the turbulent history of basing politics in Japan but also broadens our knowledge of how sub-national actors shape not only agreements the states make but also how such agreements are then actually implemented. v Table of Contents Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................... xiii Tables and Figures ............................................................................................................................ ix Author’s Note ...................................................................................................................................... x Chapter 1: Introduction .....................................................................................1 1.1 Okinawa: agreement without implementation .............................................................................. 2 1.2 Okinawa’s importance for Asia-Pacific security .......................................................................... 5 1.3 Okinawa’s importance for alliance theory .................................................................................... 8 1.4 Approach and argument: expanding the focus to implementation ............................................. 14 Chapter 2: Alliance Theory and Basing Politics ............................................19 2.1 Systemic level theories and implementation failure ................................................................... 22 2.2 Neorealism and the US military realignment in Japan ............................................................... 24 2.3 Institutions and norms in alliance theory .................................................................................... 29 2.4 The politics of basing 1: institutionalization at the domestic level of an alliance ...................... 33 2.5 The politics of basing 2: socialization at the domestic level of an alliance ................................ 40 2.6 Alliances from an implementation perspective .......................................................................... 45 2.7 Political will, capacity, and the US-Japan military realignment................................................. 48 2.8 Preference incorporation, internal alliance tensions, and implementation ................................. 51 2.9 Methods ...................................................................................................................................... 60 Chapter 3: The History of Basing Politics in Japan and Okinawa ..............66 3.1 The US-Japan Security Treaty and Okinawa’s separation from Japan ....................................... 67 3.2 Managing basing relations: compensation politics in Japan ....................................................... 74 3.3 Okinawa under US administration .............................................................................................