A Sociological Survey of Japanese International Relations Journals and University Education: Still a Discipline ‘In Between’? (original) (raw)

Social Science Japan Journal, 2020

Abstract

The Japanese discipline of international relations has been understood as a product of interaction with its Western other, formed and developed much like Japanese contested identity. But although much attention has been paid to how the discipline emerged and evolved, only very little has been written about how does the discipline look like now. In order to remedy that, we apply a sociology of knowledge perspective to find out whether the Japanese discipline of IR does still posses distinct qualities or if there has been a growing influence of its Euro-American counterpart, We proceed in two steps: 1) we analyse 175 articles from Japanese language IR journals Kokusai seiji, Kokusai mondai, Kokusai anzen hoshō, Heiwa kenkyū, Ajia kenkyū, Revaiasan and Nenpō seijigaku, and dissect them according to topics, focus, author background and theories/methods used. 2) We conduct four case studies of IR education at Japanese universities to demonstrate how the discipline is taught, with focus on the lecturer background, experience and syllabus composition. Our findings suggest that although there remains a preoccupation with diplomatic history, loose methodology and either realist or atheoretical studies, there is a clear trend of convergence to Euro-American standards, especially in university education.

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