Race as a status marker in contemporary international society: The case of the ‘Japan Threat’ thesis

Abstract This article advances the debate on race and hierarchy in international politics. It explores the continued salience of racial hierarchies in maintaining or elevating a state’s status within the international system and examines how ‘racial social fields’ operate in the contemporary international community to do so. Specifically, the article examines the so-called ‘Japan Threat’ discourse in the United States (US), which enjoyed a period of attention in the late-1980s and early-1990s. The ‘Japan Threat’ thesis was not necessarily about an imminent material threat to US survival emanating from Japan; rather, it was a discourse in which Japan was recast as a ‘non-Western’ state with a fundamentally ‘alien’ civilisation – and, on this basis, seen not only as threatening the US’s hegemonic position but also as unqualified for, and incapable of, replacing American global leadership. The article demonstrates that the ‘Japan Threat’ discourse serves as an important example of how race can be invoked to protect or improve a state’s status within a supposedly ‘decolonised’ international community, a topic that has remained under-explored in the study of International Relations. It also adds to the debate on international hierarchy by shifting the analytical focus towards actors who occupy a superior rank in the social pecking order as they attempt to shore up their position.