Middle power is an opaque term that involves multiple concepts. Through different conceptualizations of the term, Turkey and Japan are both middle powers. Indeed, widely read textbooks about Turkish foreign policy published around 2000 regard Turkey as a middle power. In the Japanese context, several scholars, including Yonosuke Nagai, Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Nobuya Banba, and Mitsuru Yamamoto, have evaluated the foreign policy of their own country as middle power diplomacy since the late 1970s. Recently, Yoshihide Soeya comprehensively summed up Japanese middle power diplomacy after the 1970s.