Leadership Matters: Prime Minister Koizumi's Role in the Normalization of Japan's Post-9/11 Security Policy

For many years following the end of World War II, Japanese leaders followed the Yoshida Doctrine, which placed the nations priority on economic recovery and growth at the expense of defense spending. Tokyo was able to do this through the U.S.-Japan alliance during the Cold War years. The end of the Cold War and the checkbook diplomacy of the first Gulf War forced Japans leadership to rethink how it approaches foreign policy and marked the beginning of the end for the doctrine and a beginning to normalization of Japans security policy. It would take another ten years and another Gulf crisis before Japan would cross the threshold of deploying its armed forces overseas during wartime conditions for the first time since the end of the Pacific War. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was the leader who orchestrated this remarkable achievement to expand Japans security policy to better align Japans international contributions to its economic status as the second largest economy in the world. This thesis will analyze Koizumis specific contributions to the normalization of Japans post-911 security policy and discuss why it took his specific brand of leadership to allow Japans security policy to expand.