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As Japan commemorated the anniversary of the end of the Great East Asia War Aug. 15 and renewed, in a mild manner, its claim on Takeshima (Dokdo to Koreans) we can expect more Asians — and some Americans — to warn against the dangers of rising Japanese nationalism. What is striking, however, is the absence of nationalism in Japan compared to its Chinese and Korean neighbors and its U.S. ally.

Nationalism is a term that can have different meanings.  Here, I define it as an ideology that mobilizes the entire citizenry to foster an ambitious and often aggressive foreign policy while justifying the use of military force as a first rather than last resort.  Japan in the early Showa era was a nationalistic polity, but today, regardless of the metric used, it scores very low on nationalism.