Transcript
DICK SAMUELS: What I'm going to do today is going to be familiar to some of you because I know some of you have read Securing Japan. My presentation will have three unequal parts. I want to talk very briefly about the past, then I'm going to talk about the present, and then spend most of the time speculating with you about where things are headed.
At the end of World War II Japan found itself with four unequally endowed groups of strategic thinkers and activists. Each of these groups was connected to a prewar perspective that I explore in the book in detail. The first group, the pacifists, got an outsized dollop of credit for having shaped postwar Japanese security policy. They certainly deserve some, because only because the pragmatic conservatives, the fourth group down there, worked with them to elevate their concerns about the revision of the constitution, the protection, I should say, of the constitution.
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