by Sophie Welsh
After the U.S. government’s decision to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, the Japanese government Self-Defense Forces (SDF) failed to evacuate about 500 Afghan staff members working in the Japanese embassy. Yusaku Horiuchi (Dartmouth College), in a collaborative project with Takako Hikotani (Gakushuin University) and Atsushi Tago (Waseda Univesity), fielded multiple surveys during this crisis in August last year. In the Special Series on Policy Innovations in Crises seminar on February 14, 2021, he presented initial findings of their “realtime” experiments. The questions examined in their studies are the following: Did the U.S. lose credibility in the eyes of the Japanese public? Does the Japanese public understand the principle of civilian control over the SDF? And finally, what is Japanese citizens’ sensitivity to casualties? In the Special Series on Policy Innovations in Crises seminar on February 14, 2021, Yusaku Horiuchi presented findings from this project.
With regards to U.S. credibility among allies, there had been mixed views in the media and experts, with some expressing concerns, while others claimed the opposite. In Horiuchi’s experiment, the respondents first read a short description (with a photo) about the U.S. decision and the current situation in Afghanistan. Then a randomly assigned one-half of respondents were encouraged to consider the U.S. decisions. The other half, in the control condition, were not given this information treatment. All of the survey respondents were then asked three outcome questions: Is U.S. a trustworthy and cooperative ally for Japan? What should the Japanese government do about the alliance with the U.S. based on the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty? And if China invades Taiwan, will the U.S. take effective measures to defend Taiwan? Horiuchi and his collaborators found that most respondents thought the U.S. a trustworthy and cooperative ally for Japan. Most thought Japan should keep its alliance with the U.S. at its current level; and that they could not say for certain about the U.S. capability to adopt measures to defend Taiwan in a hypothetical Chinese invasion. The key finding here was that there was no significant difference between the responses of the two groups. Based on these results, Horiuchi and his coauthors concluded that the Japanese public did not become as skeptical about the U.S.-Japan alliance and U.S. military as had been portrayed by some media reports.
Next, the experiment asked about civilian-military relations during the crisis, which had been one of the key debates before the passage of the Peace and Security Law of 2015. Here, the researchers asked different hypothetical questions to different groups to compare their responses. Their question centered on a hypothetical decision taken either by then-Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga or the Commander of the Joint Mission Task Force, to send troops to Kabul (which would constitute a violation of Self-Defense Forces Law), resulting in either a success with no casualties or a situation with some casualties. Between the groups considering the scenarios involving Prime Minister Suga and the Commander of the Joint Mission Task Force, there was not much difference in the opinions ranging from “I support this operation” to “I do not support the operation.”
In fact, the support for the operation headed by the Commander was slightly higher than one headed by the Prime Minister. Horiuchi and his collaborators concluded from these results that the Japanese public is surprisingly deferential to its military, contrary to the conventional wisdom that they hold anti-militarist values. The researchers also point out a troubling implication that the Japanese public’s support for civilian control of the military may be gradually eroding.
When the question posed to participants differed in the number of hypothetical casualties, there was a big difference in opinion between groups. There was significantly more support for a case of few or no casualties than for a case of several casualties (though there was support for the military operation in either case). However, when the researchers asked a similar question breaking down the number of hypothetical casualties further, the respondents in each group indicated that a majority supported the action regardless of the number of casualties. This led the researchers to conclude that the Japanese public is perhaps not as sensitive to the number of casualties in conflict situations than they are thought to be.
Horiuchi’s presentation was followed by a lively discussion on his empirical findings, methodology, and policy implications. We look forward very much to reading more of his work related to alliance credibility, U.S.-Japan relations, and civil-military relations.