What role does identity play in foreign policy? How might identity impact on Japan's relations with South Korea? This book takes identity theorizing in International Relations theory a step further by attempting to account for a resilient collective identity that informs policy makers throughout time and space.

This edited collection explores how East Asia’s painful history continues to haunt the relationships between its countries and peoples. Through a largely social-psychological and constructivist lens, the authors examine the ways in which historical memory and unmet identity needs generates mutual suspicion, xenophobic nationalism and tensions in the bilateral and trilateral relationships within the region. This text not only addresses some of the domestic drivers of Japanese, Chinese and South Korean foreign policy - and the implications of increasingly autocratic rule in all three countries – but also analyses the way in which new security mechanisms and processes advancing trust, confidence and reconciliation can replace those generating mistrust, antagonism and insecurity.

Heo conceptualizes reconciliation in International Relations theory and fills a gap by building a theoretical framework for interstate reconciliation. Combining historical and political scientific approaches, she analyses case studies from Europe, the Middle East, and Northeast Asia.

Planned, instituted and run by the Japanese Imperial Military during the Asia-Pacific War, the ‘comfort women’ system remains hugely controversial. Although political leaders often contest the role of coercion, many argue that the ‘comfort women’ were mobilized forcibly, through processes of abduction and deception. Utilising archival research, court testimonies and eyewitness accounts of both survivors and military and civilian personnel, this book argues its case in three ways. Part I analyses the modalities of coercion employed by the authorities and investigates the historical differences and continuities between licensed peacetime prostitution and wartime sexual slavery. Part II then examines the failures f the Asian Women’s Fund to resolve the ‘comfort women’ issue, whilst Part III explores the removal of ‘comfort women’ content from school history texts after the late 1990s and details Japan’s diplomatic efforts to prevent war victims froms uing the post-war state. Presenting a strong argument in opposition to the revisionist school of thought, this book ultimately concludes that a realistic settlement would see a victim-oriented solution that the survivors can accept. Written by leading Japanese and zainichi Korean scholars, Denying the Comfort Women will be of huge interest to students and scholars of modern Japanese studies, gender studies, women’s studies and Asian history.

Identity has become an explicit focus of International Relations theory in the past two to three decades, with one case attracting and puzzling many early identity scholars: Japan. These constructivist scholars typically ascribed Japan a ‘pacifist’ or ‘antimilitarist’ identity – an identity which they believed was constructed through the adherence to ‘peaceful norms’ and ‘antimilitarist culture’. Due to the alleged resilience of such adherences, little change in Japan’s identity and its international relations was predicted. However, in recent years, Japan’s foreign and security policies have begun to change, in spite of these seemingly stable norms and culture. This book seeks to address these changes through a pioneering engagement with recent developments in identity theory. In particular, most chapters theorize identity as a product of processes of differentiation. Through detailed case analysis, they argue that Japan’s identity is produced and reproduced, but also transformed, through the drawing of boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’. In particular, they stress the role of emotions and identity entrepreneurs as catalysts for identity change. With the current balance between resilience and change, contributors emphasize that more drastic foreign and security policy transformations might loom just beyond the horizon. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Pacific Review.

Territorial disputes are one of the main sources of tension in Northeast Asia. Escalation in such conflicts often stems from a widely shared public perception that the territory in question is of the utmost importance to the nation. While that's frequently not true in economic, military, or political terms, citizens' groups and other domestic actors throughout the region have mounted sustained campaigns to protect or recover disputed islands. Quite often, these campaigns have wide-ranging domestic and international consequences. Why and how do territorial disputes that at one point mattered little, become salient? Focusing on non-state actors rather than political elites, Alexander Bukh explains how and why apparently inconsequential territories become central to national discourse in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These Islands Are Ours challenges the conventional wisdom that disputes-related campaigns originate in the desire to protect national territory and traces their roots to times of crisis in the respective societies. This book gives us a new way to understand the nature of territorial disputes and how they inform national identities by exploring the processes of their social construction, and amplification.

Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship. This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats.

Koreans in Japan are a barely known minority, not only in the West but also within Japan itself. This pioneering study analyzes these relations in the context of the particular conditions and constraints that Koreans face in Japanese society. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, including: * the legal and social status of Koreans in Japan * the history of Korean colonial displacement and postcolonial division during the Cold War * ethnic education * women's self-expression. These studies serve to reveal the highly resilient and diverse reality of this minority group, whilst simultaneously highlighting the fact that - despite recent improvement - legal, social and economic constraints continue to exist in their lives.