Overview

Abstract

Japan being part of Northeast Asia had been directly influenced through the first thousand years of its recorded history by just two countries, China and Korea. For the past 150 years one of its greatest foreign policy dilemmas has been how to balance the West, coming from afar and representing modernity, and Asian neighbors, long behind in the pursuit of modernization and power but temptingly close at hand. Since the mid-1980s this dilemma has acquired new poignancy as the power differential between these two poles has rapidly changed. At stake are Japan’s position in the global balance of power and also its identity in an age of globalization accompanied by rising regionalism and reemergent nationalism. The challenge of strategic thinking toward Asia is to assess how ties to the United States and others in the West can best serve policies in nearby areas of Asia and how Japan’s own internal needs and national interests are best pursued as these areas become transformed. Our study examines how strategically have Japan’s leaders over the past two decades viewed Asia, especially Northeast Asia. We identify criteria for strategic thinking, assess how well they were met across four periods (the 1980s, the first half of the 1990s, the second half of the 1990s, and the Koizumi era through 2005), and separately focus on China, Japan, the Korean peninsula, Russia, and Central Asia as well as providing a broad look at perceptions of regionalism.