Book Talk - Japan’s Grand Strategy: Liminal Power in an Uncertain World

The event examined Japan as a liminal power, highlighting how it straddled contrasting identities in terms of its power status, ranging from a small power to a great power. These dynamics were shaped by fluctuating material capabilities, international status, and multiple, overlapping social and geographic affiliations, including Western, modern, and Asian identities.

Drawing on a historical institutionalist approach, the presentation traced the evolution of Japan’s grand strategy as a liminal power from the Meiji period, beginning in 1868, through to the 2020s. Based on several chapters of the book, the talk focused in particular on the contemporary period, during which Japan constructed its Indo–Pacific grand strategy centered on a “Free and Open Indo–Pacific.”

Across these periods, shifts in the strategic environment opened windows of opportunity that enabled Japan’s core decision-makers to construct and reconstruct the country’s grand strategy.

 

By Saori N. Katada (University of Southern California) and Kei Koga (Nanyang Technological University)

Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in Grand Strategy series

March 2026

 

 

Saori N. Katada is Professor of International Relations and the Director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. She served as the vice president of the International Studies Association and on the editorial team of Review of International Political Economy. Her single-authored book, Japan's New Regional Reality: Geoeconomic Strategy in the Asia-Pacific, was published by Columbia University Press in 2020, and her co-authored book, Japan’s Grand Strategy: Liminal Power in an Uncertain World, with Kei Koga, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in March 2026.  Her other single-authored book Banking on Stability: Japan and the Cross-Pacific Dynamics of International Financial Crisis Management (University of Michigan Press, 2001) received the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Book Award.  Her research covers geoeconomics, international political economy of trade and finance, monetary policy, and Japanese foreign policy.  Her Ph.D. is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her B.A. is from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo).  

 

This event is part of The Japan Seminar Series, presented by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto.