Will Japan’s new security laws enable it to play a more active and constructive role in the Indo-Pacific region? In this seminar, Professor Naoyuki Agawa will explain the context for the laws, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s stated policy of “proactively contributing” to peace. Considerations include a changing security environment and the prospects for strengthening Japan’s alliance with the US as well as security cooperation with Australia and other countries in the region. Professor Agawa will consider the debates around the new laws, including traditions of pacifism in Japanese society and a reluctance to dispatch the Self Defense Force overseas. Much will depend on how Japan’s new security policy interacts with public sentiment, politics and regional developments.

Professor Naoyuki Agawa teaches American constitutional law and history, as well as the history of Japan-US relations, as Professor of the Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University in Japan. He served as Dean of the faculty between 2007 and 2009 and as Vice President (International) of the university between 2009 and 2013. Professor Agawa was the Minister for Public Affairs at the Embassy of Japan in Washington between 2002 and 2005. Prior to this, he was a senior counsel in major international legal firms in Japan and the United States.

Professor Agawa’s books include: The Birth of an American Lawyer; American History through the United States Constitution (for which he received the Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo Award in 2005);The Friendship on the Sea: the United States Navy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force; and Manifest Destiny on the Seas? The Birth and Rise of Pax Americana (edited and co-authored). He graduated, magna cum laude, from the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, in 1977 and from the university’s Law Center in 1984. He has taught at several universities on both sides of the Pacific and served on various occasions as an advisor to the Japanese government.