Supposing the moral state: Japan and historical justice under liberal internationalism

Abstract

Diplomatic spats over history between two of the United States' allies, Japan and the Republic of Korea, continue to simmer under the post-1945 liberal international order. The antagonism between the former colonizer and its colony has become a detriment not only for US security interests in the region, but also a challenge to the US claims to stand for human rights, as the issue of military sexual slavery has become tethered to the global human rights discourse by Korean American diaspora activists. Yet, when the US attempts to mediate between the two, it is rebuffed by its two allies because the US often acts as a neutral third party, rather than the major actor responsible for the making of post-1945 order in east Asia and the current impasse over history. This article asks how the entangled relation between order and justice in the making of the hub-and-spokes system in east Asia, mainly engineered by the United States, casts a long shadow over how to deal with history in Japan. This matters because questions of moral possibility in world politics always suppose a sovereign agentic state, and for Japan this creates a gap between the ideal moral state and the reality of being a semi-sovereign state. Thus, the persistence of Japan's ‘history problem’ must be understood not solely in terms of whether the empirical facts are accepted or not, but also in the sense of how being a sovereign matters when it comes to moral possibility in global politics.