Japan’s Foreign Assistance at 60: Reflecting on the Past and Looking to the Future

Abstract

In Japan, Kanreki—the 60th birth anniversary—marks a time for reflection, a period of looking back on past accomplishments and of looking forward to new challenges. In this chapter, we draw on the 20 chapters in this book to reflect on lessons from history and to look to the future of Japan’s foreign assistance. Over the past 60 years, Japan has moved from an aid recipient to a major bilateral international donor. It has also emerged as an important shareholder of the international financial institutions (IFIs) and the multilateral development banks (MDBs). As Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) expanded rapidly in the 1980s, it drew both interest and critical attention from the international community, which often found Japan’s approach to foreign assistance different, and frequently enigmatic. Often, Japan found itself out of step with the mainstream thinking on aid policy and practice. Today, the aid community appears to be coming around to a number of values and objectives—country ownership, the need to end aid dependence, and the importance of broadly shared economic growth—that have shaped Japanese foreign assistance over six decades.