Japan and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Since 1945 Japan has been engaged in an economic’ southward Drive Diplomacy’ (nanshin gaiko) into Southeast Asia that has been just as single-minded as its military invasion of 1941–5, and certainly much more successful. By the mid-1970s Japan replaced the United States as the region’s most important source of trade, investment and aid, and Tokyo’s economic hegemony over Southeast Asia has steadily deepened since. Most analysts agree that

Japan’s war-time vision of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere is now a peace-time reality, thanks to reparations, John Foster Dulles and the Cold War, the World Bank, IMF, ADB, and other modern instruments for economically dominating formerly independent countries, namely: foreign trade, foreign investments, and foreign aid.¹