Nissan Seminar: Saori Katada (UC Santa Barbara), ‘Japan’s Grand Strategy: Liminal Power in an Uncertain World’
Convener(s): Professor Kristi Govella and Dr. Alice Baldock
Speaker(s): Saori Katada (UC Santa Barbara)
Japan is a liminal power, straddling contrasting identities in terms of its power status—from small power to great power—shaped by shifts in material capabilities, international standing, and overlapping social and geographic affiliations (e.g. Western, modern, and Asian). Using a historical institutionalist approach, this book traces the evolution of Japan’s grand strategy from the Meiji period (1868) to the 2020s. Drawing on selected chapters, this talk focuses on the contemporary era, examining how Japan has constructed its Indo-Pacific grand strategy around the concept of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” It argues that major shifts in the strategic environment created windows of opportunity that enabled Japan’s core decisionmakers to construct—and reconstruct—its grand strategy.
Saori N. Katada is the Louis G. Lancaster Chair of International Relations at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Political Science. Previous to her current appointment at UCSB, she was Professor of International Relations and the Director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. Her 2026 book with Kei Koga, Japan’s Grand Strategy: Liminal Power in an Uncertain World, was published by Oxford University Press. Her single-authored books include Japan's New Regional Reality: Geoeconomic Strategy in the Asia-Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2020) and Banking on Stability: Japan and the Cross-Pacific Dynamics of International Financial Crisis Management (University of Michigan Press, 2001), which received the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Book Award. She served as the vice president of the International Studies Association and on the editorial team of the Review of International Political Economy. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her B.A. from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo).
