Leadership matters Prime Minister Koizumi's role in the normalization of Japan's post-9/11 security policy

For many years following the end of World War II, Japanese leaders followed the Yoshida Doctrine, which placed the nation's priority on economic recovery and growth at the expense of defense spending. Tokyo was able to do this through the U.S.-Japan alliance during the Cold War years. The end of the Cold War and the "checkbook diplomacy" of the first Gulf War forced Japan's leadership to rethink how it approaches foreign policy and marked the beginning of the end for the doctrine and a beginning to normalization of Japan"s security policy. It would take another ten years and another Gulf crisis before Japan would cross the threshold of deploying its armed forces overseas during wartime conditions for the first time since the end of the Pacific War. Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi was the leader who orchestrated this remarkable achievement to expand Japan's security policy to better align Japan's international contributions to its economic status as the second largest economy in the world. This thesis will analyze Koizumi's specific contributions to the normalization of Japan's post-9/11 security policy and discuss why it took his specific brand of leadership to allow Japan's security policy to expand.