Journal of International Studies

Tokyo has earned plaudits for its aid approach, but it wants support for its maritime disputes

In Tokyo all last week, I heard quite a few comments on the recently held inaugural 2+2 meeting between the foreign and defense ministers of Russia and Japan. The initiative for holding such conferences had come from the Japanese side, who were able to sell it to Moscow. For  Japan , it is a big thing: Tokyo only maintains similar formats in relations with its principal ally, the United States, and also with another ally, Australia. Russia, by contrast, is not only a former Cold War adversary, but also a country with which Japan still does not have a peace treaty, which also means that there is a territorial issue between the two. What is then the purpose of the Russo-Japanese 2+2, and what are its prospects? When the Japanese reached out to the Russians with their proposal, one thing they wanted to emphasize was their strategic autonomy. Historically, Tokyo had long been stung by Moscow's view of it merely as a Washington's ward. Of course, the Japanese had told  their ...

Author:  Sheila A. Smith , Senior Fellow for Japan Studies September - October 2013 Vol.1, No.2

By   Zhang   Yunbi   and   Li   Xiaokun   in   Beijing   and   Cai   Hong   in   Tokyo  (  China   Daily  ) Experts from China and Japan are calling for "constructive" grass-roots dialogues to inspire thetwo governments to repair strained relations. They made the remarks before a cluster of public diplomatic activities following a yearlongpolitical stagnation that developed after the Japanese government announced in Septemberlast year it would "nationalize" China's  Diaoyu Islands . The diplomatic impasse, focusing on territorial disputes and historical issues concerningJapan's wartime brutality,...

BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Yonhap) -- China on Monday warned Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe against regarding Beijing as its rival to bolster its security role in the region, saying the move would be a "wrong choice and wrong calculation." China's foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang made the remark in response to reported comments by Abe, who cited China's rise and North Korea's nuclear threats as key reasons to create a U.S.-style national security council in Japan. "Japan provokes China over and over again. What on earth does Japan really want to do?" Qin told reporters in unusually frank words. "If Japan insists on taking China as a rival, it would make a wrong choice and make a wrong calculation," Qin said. China and Japan have been locked in a bitter dispute over a set of islands in the East China Sea, which are known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan. Tension sparked in September last year when the Tokyo government purcha...

Japan is where the nuclear age began on August 6, 1945.  And, for the last 68 years, the Japanese people have been at the forefront of efforts to bring this perilous era to an end.  The  Hiroshima Report  continues this tradition by usefully highlighting where progress toward a more secure and more just nuclear future has been made—and where it hasn’t. Rightly, the  Hiroshima Report  scores Japan highly on disarmament (where Japan ranks first among the ten non-nuclear weapon states surveyed) and non-proliferation (where Japan ranks equal second among the same group). That said, it must also be acknowledged that most of Japan’s points were earned for activities that did not come at the expense of conflicting policy goals. For example, Japan’s voting record in the United Nations General Assembly and its adoption of tougher IAEA safeguards, while laudable, did not carry any particular political cost (even if enhanced safeguards do come with a significan...

In recent weeks, the standoff over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands  has taken to the air . On Sept. 9, manned Chinese bombers flew near Okinawa, but did not cross into Japanese airspace. The next day, a UAV, believed to be a Chinese BZK-005, was spotted near the Senkaku/Diaoyus, prompting Tokyo to deploy fighters to shadow the aircraft. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe  granted approval  to the Japanese Ministry of Defense to shoot down any drones that ignore warnings to leave Japanese airspace. Then, on October 27, Chinese bombers and surveillance aircraft passed through the Miyako Strait en route to the Pacific, which  Japan’s Minister of Defense called  “an example of China’s aggressive expansion of its active range that includes the ocean.” And in the most recent development, a former PLA commander announced that Japan shooting down a drone would be considered an act of war.  Tensions have, of course, been running high between Beiji...

Every region in the world today is locked in a heated war of words and strewn diplomacy. Barry Buzan's Regional Security Complex theory (of a region with security convergence and divergences) is analogous to a pressure cooker of all sorts, with overlapping and undermining tensions.  East Asia is not excused from this predicament. Sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diayou islands is increasing source of tension between China and Japan in their official 40th year of friendship. It reminds of the the Confucian saying "one mountain cannot harbor two tigers". A policy struggle of accommodation versus aggression by the Japanese in the light of China's "peaceful rise" is troubling Japanese investors and policy makers.  The region currently faces a string of asymmetric challenges that needs to be dealt with diplomatically. The islands dispute has been the elephant in the room for most talks between China and Japan in several multilateral frameworks.  W...

On October 3, the United States and Japan held the Security Consultative Committee (SCC) meeting, often referred to as "two-plus-two" because it includes the US secretaries of state and defense and Japan's foreign and defense ministers, in Tokyo. The joint statement issued at the end of the meeting, "Toward a More Robust Alliance and Greater Shared Responsibilities", described the vision of the US-Japan alliance that is "more balanced and effective." It included an extensive list of action items in three categories: "bilateral security and defense cooperation" (previously called "roles, missions, and capabilities"), "regional engagement," and "US force realignment in Japan".  While this joint statement is encouraging in that it reaffirms the two countries' commitment to further enhance the resilience of the US-Japan alliance, its ambitious agenda raises a simple question: can Washington and Tokyo mu...

"History" again raised its ugly head when Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo failed to get even a brief session with South Korean President Park Geun-hye while they were both in Southeast Asia earlier in October.  By international standards, Japan's handling of its past is above average. Unlike Turkey with the Armenian genocide, Japan is not in hysterical denial. Nor does Japan, as the Chinese Communist Party does, put a mass murderer (Mao) on its banknotes. Tojo's soul is inscribed in obscurity at Yasukuni, but the founding father of totalitarianism's mummy is worshiped in Moscow. Western democracies have often dealt with crimes against humanity, such as the slaughter of native peoples and slavery, with indifference or negation. A highway next to Washington DC is named after Jefferson Davis who presided over the Confederacy during its struggle to uphold slavery.  In the end, though, Japan is always judged based on how West Germany (and later a reunit...

It is not uncommon to hear professional Japan-watchers warn of a “drift” in U.S.-Japan security relations. The danger of drift in U.S.-Japan security relations was the subject of a  recent article  for the Asia Pacific Bulletin by Akira Kato. This is not the first time that the subject of drift has come up. Yoichi Funabashi addressed it in his 1999 book, Alliance Adrift , where he examined the various sources of friction in the relationship throughout the early 1990s. This perceived drift was the impetus for a number of initiatives that recalibrated and strengthened the alliance. Even during the halcyon days of the Bush II-Koizumi relationship, where many were calling the U.S.-Japan security relationship the strongest it’s ever been, thoughtful analysts were looking at  trends portending a dimmer future . First, let’s examine the arguments for continued drift in U.S.-Japan security ties. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a singular threa...