Missiles, Abductions, and Sanctions: Societal Influences on

North Korea twice conducted ballistic missile tests close to Japan in 1998 and 2006. While Japan responded with non-coercive condemnations to demonstrate its disapproval in 1998, it imposed unilateral economic sanctions in 2006, marking the first instance in post-World War II of applying a substantial coercion to punish a neighbouring state. The research asks why Japanese policy toward the North shifted for a seemingly identical type of provocation. The dissertation seeks contextual explanations by using inductive process-tracing, a type of ‘middle approach ’ between historical narratives and parsimonious theories. It is applied to highlight the underlying mechanism through which public discursive changes concerning national security and North Korea during this eight-year period influenced the subsequent policy shift in 2006. ii The dissertation concludes that the unilateral sanctions were not necessarily a calculated strategic response to punish the missile launch (or North Korean nuclear programs) per se, but were a direct consequence of a deeper shift in societal discours