Search

Begin New Search Political Geography Japan Content Type Journal Article Journal International Relations of the Asia-Pacific

31. Japan's reconceptualization of national security: the impact of globalization

Author:
Bhubhindar Singh and Philip Shetler-Jones
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Japan has steadily extended its military reach from a domestic zone of defense against territorial invasion in the late 1950s, through regional security policy in the late 1970s to what has now become a globally scaled military role. This re-expansion is perceived by some as evidence of revived militaristic ambitions, and by others as subservience to the US global strategy. However, taking the cue from Japan's 2004 National Defence Programme Guideline (New Taikō), this paper assesses the role globalization has played in this territorial expansion. The impact of globalization is evident in the double expansion of Japan's national security conception in geographical terms and self-defense forces roles in global security. These 'expansions' are studied through two key elements of globalization – the deterritorialization of complex relations of interdependence between states (security globality) and the inter-penetrating nature of these relations blur the boundary between foreign and domestic spaces (intermestic space).
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
United States and Japan

32. Cooperation, Competition, and the Search for Community: Asia's New Multilateralism

Author:
Sheldon W. Simon
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
A successful edited volume not only requires that the editors recruit qualified specialists for each chapter but also that those editors integrate the separate analyses so that the book displays a coherence beyond the sum of its individual parts. Michael Green and Bates Gill have succeeded admirably on both dimensions: enlisting renowned Asian country specialists and experts on the various types of cooperation that characterize Asian multilateralism. Moreover, their Introduction illuminates how these types relate to one another. Over the past 45 years, Asia has experienced a plethora of multilateral political, economic, and security arrangements – some long-lived and well-institutionalized (ASEAN) and others formed to deal with a specific situation such as the Core Group that provided aid to those countries devastated by the December 2004 tsunami. There is considerable overlap in states ' memberships among these bodies, though they tend to group in a Southeast Asian-led formation centered in ASEAN and a Northeast Asian coterie dealing with North Korea in the Six-Party Talks. An additional transnational dimension may be found in nontraditional security such as infectious diseases, criminal and terrorist activities, piracy and human trafficking, all of which cross national boundaries and are generally seen by Asian states as susceptible to cooperative action. Traditional, hard security concerns – territorial disputes, historical animosities, and resource conflicts – on the other hand, though discussed in a number of multilateral settings, produce a great deal of rhetoric but very little resolution. Another concern, especially for great powers such as the United States and India, is whether East Asian multilateral groups will be inclusive or exclusive – trans-Pacific or Asia only.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, and National Security
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Asia

33. Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security: From Pacifism to Realism?

Author:
Wilhelm M. Vosse
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Until the Japanese government's decision to participate in the so-called war on terror by first sending maritime self-defense force (SDF) ships to refueling missions in the Indian Ocean in 2001, and then by dispatching ground self-defense force troops to Southern Iraq, the overall view of Japanese security policy had been that it was constrained by article 9 as well as strong public support for perhaps pacifist attitudes. However, these developments and, so it seemed, fundamental changes in Japanese security posture after 9/11 have been taken as evidence that either antimilitarism was vanning, or that the Japanese government, particularly under Prime Minister Koizumi, had been successful in convincing the Japanese public that it was the time for a fundamental shift in Japan's security policy (Green, 2001; Hughes, 2009; Samuels, 2007). This book challenges this assumption and tries to prove that public opinion is not only stable, but also rational, and that it does continue to constrain Japanese government security policy decisions.
Topic:
Security and Government
Political Geography:
Japan, Iraq, and India

34. The absence of non-western IR theory in Asia reconsidered

Author:
Ching-Chang Chen
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This paper critically examines an ongoing debate in International Relations (IR) as to why there is apparently no non-Western IR theory in Asia and what should be done to 'mitigate' that situation. Its central contention is that simply calling for greater incorporation of ideas from the non-West and contributions by non-Western scholars from local 'vantage points' does not make IR more global or democratic, for that would do little to transform the discipline's Eurocentric epistemological foundations. Re-envisioning IR in Asia is not about discovering or producing as many 'indigenous' national schools of IR as possible, but about reorienting IR itself towards a post-Western era that does not reinforce the hegemony of the West within (and without) the discipline. Otherwise, even if local scholars could succeed in crafting a 'Chinese (or Indian, Japanese, Korean, etc.) School', it would be no more than constructing a 'derivative discourse' of Western modernist social science.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Japan, India, Asia, and Korea

35. The origin of trilateralism? The US–Japan–Australia security relations in the 1990s

Author:
Tomohiko Satake
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This paper analyzes US–Japan–Australia security relations in the 1990s. Since the establishment of the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD) in 2005, there have been a growing number of studies which focus on the TSD or bilateral security relations between Japan and Australia (Terada, 2006; Williams and Newman, 2006; Tow et al., 2007; The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2008). The announcement of the Joint Security Declaration between Japan and Australia in 2006 also received wide attention from researchers interested in the security policies of each country or Asia-Pacific security in general ( Bisley, 2006; Sato, 2008; Cook and Shearer, 2009). These studies focus mainly on the current development of US–Japan–Australia or Japan–Australia security relations in various dimensions, such as peacekeeping, non-proliferation, disaster relief, and other forms of multilateral cooperation. In particular, many studies emphasize that Japanese and Australian contributions to the US-led 'global war on terror' significantly upgraded their respective alliance relations, leading to the creation of the TSD (Jain and Bruni, 2006; Wolton, 2006). In comparison, few studies exclusively focus on security relations between the three countries in the 1990s.
Topic:
Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
Japan and Australia

36. Japan's alliance diversification: a comparative analysis of the Indian and Australian strategic partnerships

Author:
Thomas S. Wilkins
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
As part of its movement toward 'normal country' status, Japan has begun to engage in a policy of alliance/alignment restructuring and diversification. This is a twin-track policy – the reconfiguration of existing allied relationships and the creation of new cooperative bilateral links. In recent years, Tokyo has deepened its ties with the United States and Australia on the one hand, while cultivating new partners such as India, as well as several Southeast Asian states. This article examines the nature and dynamics of two of the most important new strategic partnerships: India and Australia. Through a comparative analysis, it seeks to account for their formation, structure, and prospects using a specifically designed model of 'strategic partnership' drawn from Organizational Theories literature. It concludes that these strategic partnerships represent a major platform of a more robust and comprehensive security policy on the part of Japan, forged in response to a shifting international environment in the Asia-Pacific region.
Topic:
Climate Change
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, India, Australia, Tokyo, Southeast Asia, and Asia-Pacific

37. Nishida Kitaro and Japan's interwar foreign policy: war involvement and culturalist political discourse

Author:
Kosuke Shimizu
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Takashi Inoguchi once stated that Japan's international relations theory is characterized by its exclusive disciplinary orientation toward constructivism. Nishida Kitaro is widely recognized as one of such constructivists. In this article, I argue that Nishida's theory of world history was based on the perception of subjectivity of contradiction, and was thus exclusively culture-oriented. By emphasizing cultural aspects, he tried to disturb the coherence and consistency of the colonialist discourse on which the dominant regime of Japan of the time was entirely reliant. However, because Nishida's theory of world history completely lacked the recognition of the material relations of the colonizer and the colonized, as a direct consequence of his understanding of the term 'culture', his attempts were unrealized.
Topic:
International Relations and Culture
Political Geography:
Japan

38. The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II

Author:
Yoko Iwama
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Yinan He adds yet another book on the subject of post-war reconciliation. The aim of her book is to examine the validity of two theories, that of standard realist theory of international relations, and that of 'national mythmaking theory', in explaining the process and outcome of reconciliation between countries. For this purpose, she examines two post-World War II cases, Sino-Japanese and (West) German-Polish relations. In the end, Yinan He wishes to establish why reconciliation is achieved in some cases and not in others.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Japan, China, Germany, and Tokyo

39. Regional cooperation in Northeast Asia: searching for the mode of governance

Author:
Hidetaka Yoshimatsu
Publication Date:
05-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Since the late 1990s, China, Japan, and South Korea – the core states in Northeast Asia – have gradually engaged in various initiatives and institutions for regional cooperation. Such initiatives extend from summitry to functional cooperation in finance, environmental protection, logistics, and other areas. Furthermore, the three countries have shown their willingness to vitalize cross-border economic activities by concluding commercial arrangements. Given these evolutions, this article seeks to address the following questions: what features are found in trilateral cooperative initiatives and how these features are evaluated in terms of 'regional governance'? The paper advances two propositions. First, regional cooperation in Northeast Asia can be characterized as weak neoliberal orientation and intensive business involvements in cooperative projects in state-directed policy networks. Second, regional governance in Northeast Asia has gradually intensified the nature of regulatory governance in which the governments of the three countries sought to harmonize standards and regulatory systems through trilateral cooperation.
Political Geography:
Japan, China, South Korea, and Northeast Asia

40. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the softest of them all? Evaluating Japanese and Chinese strategies in the 'soft' power competition era

Author:
Yee-Kuang Heng
Publication Date:
05-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
As states jostle to attract and entice others by deploying a range of innovative strategies, a 'soft' power competition era looms possibly in the Asia-Pacific. This paper argues that reflecting on this period of competitive policy innovation provides a valuable opportunity to re-assess the theory and practice of Joseph Nye's 'soft' power, given its conceptual and empirical frailties: how theoretically precise are the policies commonly described as projecting 'soft' power? To do so, it undertakes a comparative evaluation of Japan's and China's 'soft' power strategies. By paying close attention to the theory–practice linkage, it illuminates the disparities in their understanding of Nye's 'soft' power. Rather than a one-size-fits-all concept, 'soft' power strategies with distinctively Japanese and Chinese characteristics are emerging, bringing different advantages and weaknesses. The proverbial magic mirror would conclude that by more closely matching Nye's formulations and displaying a less competitive streak, Japan appears the 'softer' power.
Political Geography:
Japan, China, and Asia-Pacific