Organizer and Chair: Saadia M. Pekkanen, University of Washington
There is little question that the Asian region is,
once again, commanding attention for its economic performance and military
rivalries. In contrast to the past, a great deal of institutional engineering
to influence the course of Asia is underway by Asian players in the region
although it tends to be uneven in its depth and breadth across issues. Japan’s efforts to influence the
institutional trajectory of Asia have already been the subject of much debate.
This panel focuses specifically on the concrete political, economic, social,
and legal efforts by Japan to shape the future architecture of Asia through
a set of interrelated questions. What is Japan’s role and what specific
steps has it taken to configure the institutional makeup of Asia? In which areas,
and to what degree, is its influence evident? What are the main causes and also
major consequences of its actions? Who are the main actors and what are their
incentives, motivations, and visions of Japan’s role in the regional order?
Saadia M. Pekkanen, University of Washington
Although Japan’s regional economic diplomacy has attracted a great deal
of attention, its ambitions regarding the investment regime in the Asian region
are not as well known. Since the early 2000s, Japan has made considerable strides
in structuring the rules of investment bilaterally with Asian countries. But
it is also now moving to lay down the fundamental rules that will govern the
investment architecture regionally in conjunction with both China and Korea.
Very few studies have underscored the causes and consequences of Japan’s
attempts to shape the regional investment architecture. This work focuses generally
on how formal law now governs Japan’s investment relations and traces
the specific ways in which the Japanese government has embarked on a rule-making
mission related to investments through its Bilateral Investment Treaties
(BITs), its EPAs (Economic Partnership Agreements), and also now a regional
investment treaty that is in the making. In legally shaping these sets of agreements,
the Japanese government has acted assertively in the interests of its trade-dominant
industries and with a view to forging the long-term institutional map of
East Asia.
David Leheny, Princeton University
Over one hundred years after Fukuzawa Yukichi's exhorting Japan to "escape
from Asia and enter Europe," Japan's political efforts to engage in "public
diplomacy" have begun to shed the idea of a common East Asian cultural
identity and to move instead toward a focus on democracy and human rights
as crucial values. This no doubt reflects anxieties about China as the logical
new leader of the East Asian community, as evidenced
by the emphasis on new partnerships with Australia and India, both with reasons
to be apprehensive about China's rise. But it also emanates from the rapid
breakdown of Japanese efforts to develop "soft power" (largely through the promotion
of popular culture and Japanese "digital content") in East Asia, which
were partly premised on the idea of common Asian values. These included an
expectation of nearly innate East Asian respect for Japan's ability to navigate
between modernization and maintenance of a traditional and distinctive identity.
This paper traces the discursive construction of the values debate in Japanese
diplomacy with particular attention to the potential implications for regionalism.
In doing so, it draws from the constructivist literature on international relations
but focuses on the strategies of Japanese officials who have to draw from
a limited and internally contradictory pool of available claims regarding Japan's
place in the world and the proper basis of its diplomatic relations.
"Democracy" and "Asian values" may be exploitable in their
meaning, but they may also constrain the Japanese government's ability to articulate
a coherent image of an Asian region in which Japan plays a leading role.
Saori N. Katada, University of Southern California
After ten years since the failure of Japan’s Asian Monetary Fund proposal
in the midst of the region’s unprecedented financial crisis (1997-98),
we find East Asia making substantial progress in establishing regional financial
institutions covering wide-range of issues from the emergency funding (Chiang
Mai Initiative) to bond initiatives and currency arrangement. The comprehensiveness
of regional financial architecture agenda is important for Japan, as it takes
the leading role in defining those arrangements in the context of the ASEAN+3.
By tracing the Japanese government’s interaction with three major actors,
domestic financial institutions, China, and the United States/IMF, during
the period of regional financial architecture construction, the paper analyzes
how and why Japan is pursuing this comprehensive agenda.
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