Cultures of Antimilitarism - National Security in Germany and Japan (Hardcover)

Both Japan and Germany have long traditions of militarism, culminating in their aggressive actions in World War II. Yet neither country now seeks to regain its former military power; on the contrary, antimilitarism has become so deeply rooted in the Japanese and German national psyches that even such questions as participation in international peacekeeping forces are met with widespread domestic opposition. This study asks how such a radical change in thought and behaviour could have come about. It analyzes the complex domestic and international political forces which have brought this unforeseen transformation, and shows how the post-war governments of Konrad Adenauer and Yoshida Shigeru - both moderate, right-of-centre politicians - succeeded in reaching beyond their own constituencies to help their countrymen devise new national identities. West Germans came to see themselves as part of a larger community of nations bound together by the common history of Western civilization; the Japanese as citizens of a peaceful merchant nation too busy with economic development to indulge in such morally suspect endeavours as power politics.