Narrating Security, Preserving Identity: Japan’s Discursive Securitization without Militarization

Abstract Japan’s security posture shows rising tension between political elites advocating proactive defense and the legal and material constraints. Existing scholarship is often divided into two perspectives. One expects inevitable remilitarization from a realist perspective, while the other emphasizes consistent norms from constructivism. However, mechanisms linking these views are rarely well-developed. This study introduces the concept of “securitization without militarization,” using semantic network analysis and topic modeling of 1,974 Diet transcripts to trace the discursive evolution of security debates. The findings suggest that political actors effectively construct existential threats to legitimize material policy shifts, while meticulously avoiding militaristic rhetoric to preserve the state’s ontological security. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting how states can perform discursive securitization within institutional and normative constraints, thereby expanding the empirical scope of securitization theory to legally, institutionally, and normatively constrained middle powers.