Providing a thorough and novel account of US and Japanese foreign policymaking toward regional institution-building in post-Cold War Asia, this study serves as the first comparative analysis of these two major actors in this realm of regional cooperation and demonstrates not only how but also when state identity shapes a state's foreign policy.

Japan's regional geoeconomic strategy -- Foreign economic policy, domestic institutions and regional governance -- Geoeconomics of the Asia-Pacific -- Transformation in the Japanese political economy -- Trade and investment : a gradual path -- Money and finance : an uneven path -- Development and foreign aid : a hybrid path.

Since the mid-1990s, Japan’s regional economic strategy has transformed. Once characterized by bilateralism, informality, and neomercantilism, Japanese policy has shifted to a new liberal strategy emphasizing regional institution building and rule setting. As two major global powers, China and the United States, wrestle over economic advantages, Japan currently occupies a pivotal position capable of tipping the geoeconomic balance in the region. Japan’s New Regional Reality offers a comprehensive analysis of Japan’s geoeconomic strategy that reveals the country’s role in shaping regional economic order in the Asia-Pacific. Saori N. Katada explains Japanese foreign economic policy in light of both international and domestic dynamics. She points out the hurdles to implementing a state-led liberal strategy, detailing how domestic political and institutional changes have been much slower and stickier than the changing regional economics. Katada highlights state-market relations and shows how big businesses have responded to the country’s interventionist policies. The book covers a wide range of economic issues including trade, investment, finance, currency, and foreign aid. Japan’s New Regional Reality is a meticulously researched study of the dynamics that have contributed to economic and political realities in the Asia-Pacific today, with significant implications for future regional trends.

This original and detailed collection explores how regional actors deal with uncertainties that are inherent to the current geopolitical situation in East Asia. The contributors collectively demonstrate that strategic uncertainty has become a major factor in the shaping of the security order in East Asia.

This book provides a comparative assessment of the material and ideational contributions of five countries to the regional architecture of post-Cold War Asia. In contrast to the usual emphasis placed on the role and centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Asia’s multilateral architecture and its component institutions, this book argues that the four non-ASEAN countries of interest here 3⁄4 Australia, Japan, China and the United States 3⁄4 and Indonesia have played and continue to play an influential part in determining the shape and substance of Asian multilateralism from its pre-inception to the present. The work does not contend that existing scholarship overstates ASEAN’s significance to the successes and failures of Asia’s multilateral enterprise. Rather, it claims that the impact of non-ASEAN stakeholders in innovating multilateral architecture in Asia has been understated. Whether ASEAN has fared well or poorly as a custodian of Asia’s regional architecture, the fact remains that the countries considered here, notwithstanding their present discontent over the state of that architecture, are key to understanding the evolution of Asian multilateralism. This book will be of much interest to students of Asian politics, international organisations, security studies and IR more generally.

Beyond Bilateralism analyzes how, and to what extent, crucial global and regional security, finance, and trade transformations have altered the U.S.-Japan relationship and how that bilateral relationship has in turn influenced those global and regional trends.

This book studies India’s historical, socio-cultural, and trade linkages with Inner Asia. Inner Asia includes the landlocked regions within East Asia and North Asia that are part of today's Western China, Mongolia, the Russian Far East, and Siberia. The volume examines issues of geopolitics, geoeconomics, climate change, regional cooperation, and discusses the importance of the fabled Silk Road for the countries of Inner Asia. It also analyses the impact India has wielded upon the region through its cultural traits and how Buddhism has remained a binding force between the people of the two regions. Lucid and topical, this book will be of useful for scholars and researchers of Asian studies, central Asian studies, area studies, geopolitics, international trade, international relations, defence and strategic studies, diplomacy and foreign policy, and political studies. It will also be of interest to policymakers, bureaucrats, diplomats and think tanks.

This book brings together up-to-date research from prominent international scholars in a collaborative exploration of the Japan’s efforts to shape Asia’s rapidly shifting regional order. Pulled between an increasingly inward-looking America whose security support remains critical and a rising and more militarily assertive China with whom Japan retains deep economic interdependence, Japanese leaders are consistently maneuvering to ensure the country’s regional interests. Nuclear and missile threats from North Korea and historically problematic relations with South Korea further complicate Japanese endeavors. So too do the shifting winds of Japanese domestic politics, economics and identity. The authors weave these complex threads together to offer a nuanced portrait of both Japan and the region. Scholars, observers of politics, and policymakers will find this a timely and useful collection.

This volume offers a comparative analysis of Japanese and Russian politics in the 2010s, examining both domestic dimensions and foreign policy. A bi-national collaborative effort, the volume is structured to offer perspectives on each country from both Russian and Japanese scholars. An introduction by Takashi Inoguchi gives a historical overview of the two countries' paths to development as 'late comers' vis-à-vis the West in the late nineteenth century. The analysis that follows reveals that Japan and Russia have come to acquire genuinely striking contrasting features: frequent leadership change despite extraordinary societal stability and continuity in Japan and infrequent leadership change despite extraordinary ups and downs in Russia.