Japan’s aging peace: pacifism and militarism in the twenty-first century by Tom Phuong Le: (Columbia University Press, 2021, 368 pp, £28:00)

Through this cleverly framed volume, Le makes the persuasive argument that for Japan, ‘cultural, demographic, and economic forces have limited its embrace of conventional militarism as a tool of statecraft’ (6). In doing so, Le situates his study in relation to the existing International Relations literature (e.g., Hughes, 2005; Samuels, 2007; Umeda, 2007) to set out how Japan’s much maligned and supposedly intensifying militarism is poorly accounted for by current scholarship, or at least requires contextualising within the bounds of multi-fold limitations and influences.