［Book Publication］Professor Paul Midford｜”The Senkaku Islands Confrontation and the Transformation of Japan’s Defense ” Palgrave Macmillan

In late March 2025, Professor Paul Midford, from the Department of Global and Transcultural Studies, has published a monograph: The Senkaku Islands Confrontation and the Transformation of Japan’s Defense (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

Highlights:

• Explains the dramatic and well reported shifts in Japanese defense policy at the end of 2022
• Offers a distinct interpretation of the trajectory of Japan’s defense strategy over the past decade
• Argues that it is driven by a renewed focus on territorial defense and de facto deglobalization

Overview
This book argues that the transformation of Japan’s defense since 2012 has been triggered by the emergence of the first threat to Japan’s territorial integrity since 1945, namely China’s continual challenging of Japan’s control of the Senkaku Islands. It shows how this threat led to Japan building its own version of an A2/AD strategy and contributed to the demise of the prohibition on not procuring long-range missiles. It argues that the new security documents of 2022 that mandate increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP, is the culmination of this Senkaku-driven post-2012 defense transformation. Nonetheless, Japan’s defense transformation faces significant challenges, including geographic and demographic, base-community relations, and limited SDF capacity. This book analyzes the implications of Japan’s defense transformation for its involvement in a military conflict over Taiwan between China and the USA. It argues that the attitudinal defensive realism of the Japanese public and many elites explain why the confrontation over the small and remote Senkaku islands led to a transformation of Japanese defense, and why this transformation has been limited to territorial defense and is not leading Japan to play a military role beyond its borders.

Endorsements
“This book presents the most recent and compelling assessment of Japan’s drastic security policy shift since December 2022. Informed by defensive realism, it convincingly argues that the shift was meant for homeland territorial defense against Chinese threats, rather than for global operations. Highly recommended.”
–Tsuyoshi Kawasaki, Professor of International Politics, Simon Frazer University, Canada.

“Midford builds a strong case that Japan’s increasing defense spending and capabilities are not primarily to return as a regional military power but rather are narrowly focused on Japan’s own territorial defense, which has important implications for the future regional balance of power.”
–Andrew L. Oros, Professor of International Studies, Washington College, USA.  

“Empirically rich and convincingly argued.”
–Tom Phuong Le, Chair of Politics, Pomona College, USA.

Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-77727-1