요시다 시게루(吉田茂)의 전후 구상에 대한 재검토: ‘군대 없는 메이지국가’ 구상과 미일동맹의 현실

Abstract

This paper attempts to reevaluate Shigeru Yoshida’s post-war design. In order to understand Yoshida’s post-war design, it is crucial to shed light on his career as a diplomat during the inter-war period, as well as to understand his framework for imperial diplomacy. In the pre-war period, Yoshida presented himself as a rational pragmatist that placed importance on free trade, yet he was a classic imperialist who had no hesitation in his aggressive pursuit of national interests abroad. In that sense, it can be argued that Yoshida simultaneously advocated imperialistic international order as well as the free trade theory. While this ‘liberal imperialism’ was a widely-held idea in Europe at the time, it was hardly viable as a political line in Japan’s domestic circumstances. Yoshida’s post-war stance based on the US-Japan alliance and anti-militaristic development was also a paradoxical one, just as his pre-war position as a diplomat was. As a result, Yoshida adopted a peculiar ‘non-militaristic security alliance’ that took root in post-war Japan. Japan as ‘base state’ enabled him to adopt this basic line. On the other hand, ‘anti-Yoshida’ camps that were formed during his tenure ranged in wide spectrum, from those who attempted to relativize US-Japan alliance to those who propagated constitutional revision and rearmament. Here, it is possible to find one of the reasons why there has been a recent political attempt to minimize Yoshida’s influence and to break free from his legacy.