Description
From the designation of John Kerry as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate to the appointment of Brunei Darussalam’s Foreign Minister Dato Erywan as ASEAN’s Special Envoy to Myanmar, national governments and international organizations alike seem to turn to envoy diplomacy in response to some of today’s most intractable challenges in international politics. Yet the allure of ‘one-man diplomacy’ has a long history that transcends borders. This paper examines the role of special envoys in the largely understudied context of postwar Japanese foreign policy, focusing on the dispatch of three prime ministerial envoys to Southeast Asia, the US, and South Korea from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s. Drawing on Japanese, British and US archival sources, I interpret Japanese envoy diplomacy as a symptom of the persistent rivalry in Japanese foreign-policy decision making between the prime minister and the foreign ministry, highlighting some of the risks that come with this diplomatic practice: adhockerism, elitism, lack of accountability, and, above all, overconfidence in the power of personal relations and charisma in solving complex matters.
