No Japanese leader has dominated Japan’s recent political landscape more than the late Abe Shinzo. With the this as the basic premise, the main objective of this compiled volume is to examine and assess Japan’s foreign and domestic polices during the 2010s, a decade which largely overlaps with Abe’s tenure as prime minister. This book is much more than a mere study of Abe’s leadership, however, as it ventures far beyond the traditional scope of diplomatic and political history by incorporating a multidisciplinary approach. As such, the contributors comprise not only historians and political scientists, but also sociologists, economists, legal experts, journalists, and practitioners of diplomacy. This diversity in backgrounds makes it possible to examine a much wider range of topics and themes that clearly illuminate the multitude of challenges that Japan faced in the decade as well as how it responded to those challenges, leading to a more thorough understanding of the path that Japan took in the 2010s.

In the mid-1950s, as part of Tokyo's goal of reinstating Japan as a full member of the international community, Japan sought and gained admittance to the United Nations. Since then, it has been a proactive member and a generous financial contributor to the organization. This study focuses on postwar Japan's foreign policy making in the political and security areas, the core UN missions. It analyzes these two policy arenas from three perspectives—international political structure, domestic political organization, and the psychology of policymakers.

The intent is to illustrate how policy goals forged by national security concerns, domestic politics, and psychological needs gave shape to Japan's complicated and sometimes incongruous policy toward the UN since World War II. In contrast to the usual emphasis on the role of the foreign-policy bureaucracy, however, the author argues that we must view the bureaucracy as functioning within a larger framework of party politics and interactions among government agencies, political parties, and other actors associated with these parties. The last part of the book addresses the psychological aspect of Japan's UN policymaking in an effort to elucidate the role of national prestige in generating Japanese policy toward the UN.