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Political science in Japan has been changing very steadily for the last half a century. This has been taking place despite some seemingly very severe institutional and mental constraints that have been inflicted for more than a century. They may be called ambivalence and insulation. By ambivalence I mean the mixed feelings about the state. By insulation I mean the orientation toward things coming from abroad and toward interacting with foreigners.

The Japanese ambivalence about the state has not been well recognized. The state has never been so powerful until a modernizing impulse was implanted in the Japanese mind in the mid-19th century. Japan was isolated most of the time in its 1,000 year history. Japan was able to selectively absorb higher civilizational ideas from China or from the West as Japanese were reasonably astute and adroit in learning from abroad. Geographical isolation and the relatively high level of land productivity of the Japanese archipelagoes helped shape the Japanese attitude of not allowing a centralized state to emerge until recently. The experiences of the wars in the 1930s and 1940s did not encourage this way of thinking. It revealed first that the state mishandled international relations on all major occasions, such as 1931, 1937, 1941 and 1945. Second it meant that the state was irresponsible in its management of government wartime bonds, which they purchased willynilly. The defeat of Japan made these wartime Japanese government bonds worthless after August 15, 1945. Let me provide two examples of the Japanese ambivalence about the state. First, the resistance to consumption tax hikes has been dogged and tenacious. Before it was finally introduced in 1989, three prime ministers were forced to resign from office because of opposition to it. Second, the resistance to sending troops abroad, even when restricted to United Nations peace keeping operations, has been equally tenacious. The legislation authorizing this was passed at long last but the law will terminate after a certain time passes. It is not a permanent law, which is normally the case with most laws in Japan. While the strong staatslehre tradition does exist, popular reactions have tended not to encourage the government to install political science departments.

By insulation I mean something that is both geographical and mental. Japan’s isolation and relatively high productivity inculcated in the Japanese a mentality of allowing only selective ideas, institutions and technologies coming from higher civilizations such as China or the West to penetrate Japan. It is sometimes called ‘permeable insulation’ (Schaede & Grimes 2004). This feature can be understood when you compare the political science communities of Japan’s neighbors. Take Korea. As we have seen, Korea has some 1,200-1,500 American Ph.D.s whereas Japan has about 150-200 despite the discrepancy in relative size of the two political science communities of 2,500 vs. 5,000 respectively. You can call Korean political science neo-colonial (Moon & Kim 2002) and Japanese political science bumi putra in the sense of a lower readiness to absorb foreign ideas and practices. The existence of the very large domestic market for book publication and the rather slowly rising proficiency of English among Japanese social scientists seem to reinforce the already strong tradition of ‘permeable insulation’.

Given these features, it may not be surprising to see that political science in Japan has not been more vigorous in exercising conceptual and methodological leadership or taking international organizational initiatives. My point here, however, is that given the relatively fast transitions from the first via the second to the third periods, various schemes of international interaction and engagement such as the Asian Consortium for Political Research could become much more frequent and dense in the years to come. For example I as associate editor of a leading journal recently joined the editorial board of the International Encyclopedia of Political Science, which was organized by the International Political Science Association, and contributed to the publication of eight volumes in 2011 by Sage Publications (Inoguchi 2011).