Abstract
The common view of the Japanese human security (JHS) has been of a politically and conceptually progressive approach imbued with liberal internationalist commitment and exemplary relationship with the United Nations. In this article, I offer an alternative perspective to JHS which shows that the mainstream understanding does not take into consideration some important features of JHS, with a result of producing a romanticised imagery.
Specifically, I pay attention to tight links between Japanese discourses and practices of international development and humanitarian assistance, refugee policy, counter-terrorism and NGO regulation. Two arguments are developed.
First, I maintain and show that these issue areas have so far not been examined together as far as JHS is concerned, thereby obscuring some of its important peculiarities, most importantly strong affinities to national security and non-liberal bureaucratic control. Second, I argue that once the international and domestic sides of JHS are put under the microscope together, JHS cannot be understood to be resting either on liberal values, or a combination of liberal values and "Asian" values.
Instead, I suggest that it needs to be studied through a domopolitical diagram concerned with national security, that is, governance in the image of the home which links citizenship, state and territory in a novel way. After the initial discussion of the notion of domopolitics and its conceptual extension to Japan's context, the article investigates the domopolitical relationship between JHS as practiced in Afghanistan and Japan's domestic refugee policy.
It continues by examining the domestic emergence of juridico-bureaucratic administration of NGOs and its extension to the area of JHS. What follows are concluding remarks.