For several decades, Japan kept in place significant self-imposed constraints on its security policy even as its economy grew tremendously. While it has been argued that Japan refrained from enacting security policy change because of strong domestic pacifist or anti-militarist sentiments, recently, radical policy changes have nonetheless taken place. How can these changes be understood? The existing explanations typically see them as a response to objectively existing or constructed external threats. Such threat constructions might have contributed to the policy changes, but do not fully account for how the conditions that previously limited similar changes have altered. This article combines temporal othering and de-securitisation theory to account more fully for the policy changes. It shows that during the post-war period, Japan’s temporal other, that is its wartime self, was securitised within Japan, limiting changes in security policy. More recently, however, a de-securitisation of the Japanese temporal other has taken place, which has enabled more far-reaching policy change. Apologies have played a key role in this de-securitisation process by repeating and strengthening an identity narrative about how fundamentally different Japan has become from its past wartime self.

中文翻译：

---

暂时他者、去证券化和道歉：理解日本安全政策的变化

几十年来，即使经济大幅增长，日本仍对其安全政策实行重大的自我限制。尽管有人认为日本因国内强烈的和平主义或反军国主义情绪而没有实施安全政策变革，但最近还是发生了激进的政策变革。如何理解这些变化？现有的解释通常将它们视为对客观存在或构建的外部威胁的回应。此类威胁构建可能促成了政策变化，但并未完全说明之前限制类似变化的条件发生了怎样的变化。本文结合时间他者和去证券化理论来更充分地解释政策变化。这表明，在战后时期，日本的其他时间，那是它的战时自我，在日本国内被证券化，限制了安全政策的变化。然而，最近发生了日本临时他者的去证券化，这使得更深远的政策变化成为可能。道歉在这个去证券化过程中发挥了关键作用，它重复并加强了关于日本与过去的战时自我有多么根本不同的身份叙述。