The global balance of power is undergoing a gradual but dramatic shift. While the United States will likely remain a preeminent economic and geopolitical power, the long era of American hegemony is coming to an end. In particular, managing the rise of Asia will likely prove to be the central challenge of international politics in the 21st century. In the face of such striking change, rigidity threatens to make international organizations relics of a bygone era. A substantial update of the international organizational architecture is needed. As two of the world’s leading democracies and economic powers, there is much that the United States and Japan can contribute toward such an effort. This paper will examine how U.S.-Japan cooperation can reinvigorate and update international organizations to meet contemporary challenges.

The first section discusses distributional imbalance as a serious shortcoming of several major international organizations, most prominently the United Nations Security Council and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Uneven representation can lead to needless tension and undermine the ability of international organizations to facilitate interstate cooperation. The major international organizations must be updated to reflect 21st century realities. The next section examines the economic and geopolitical rise of Asia and potential implications for institutionalized cooperation. Asia is a region with comparatively weak international organizations and inferior representation in universalistic institutions. Without deeper regional institutionalization and commensurate representation in global institutions, Asia’s rise may prove destabilizing for international cooperation. Accordingly, the paper then presents several policy prescriptions for how the United States and Japan can cooperate to update and reform the international organizational architecture.

This paper adopts a unified approach to an understanding of the development processes of the East Asian economies, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean, in terms of common five phases starting with Malthusian equilibria and extended to forthcoming post-demographic transitions characterized by the shrinkage of the working-age group share in the population. Notwithstanding of the basic commonality, however, there are also marked differences among the East Asian economies in the timing of turning points, durations, and substantive forms of the phases. The paper claims that those differences need to be co-explained by accompanying variations in institutional trajectories. It identifies the Malthusian origins of contrasting political-economic and social-norm characteristics in Chinese and Japanese institutional arrangements and discusses their transformations over successive phases. By delineating institutional characteristics of China and Japan from a game-theoretic perspective, it implicitly challenges prevailing views that contrast the East and the West in such general terms as kinship vs. the third party enforcement of contracts, Confucianism vs. Protestantism, collectivism vs. individualism, authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy, and the like. These dichotomies are too simplistic for explaining the uniqueness, commonality and variations of institutional arrangements in East Asia and their impacts on development processes of respective economies.

This paper begins with contested issues among various approaches to institutions and seeks an analytical/conceptual framework for integrating them. Based on fundamental studies of knowledge theory and epistemic game theory, it discusses the role of institutions in substantive forms as societal artifacts that cognitively mediate agents’ strategic interactions and their individual beliefs in societal games. This approach is termed as the institutions-as-cognitive-media-view and its implications to the role of culture, institutional complementarities, and policy in the institutional process are discussed. It concludes with a proposal for a three-level approach to institutions: generic-ontological, comparative-substantive, and policy-design levels.

Cloud computing is rapidly emerging as the new information technology platform. It is, however, much more than simply a new set of technologies and business models. Cloud computing is transforming how consumers, companies, and governments store information, how they process that information, and how they utilize computing power. It can be an engine of innovation, a platform for entrepreneurship, and driver of corporate efficiency. While an increasingly commonly term, confusion remains over what exactly constitutes cloud computing, how the markets are unfolding, and what forces will drive their evolution and diffusion. This paper provides an overview and conceptual tools for business leaders, policymakers, and non-specialist scholars to identify, distill, and easily understand the core aspects of how cloud computing service markets are developing, and how an array of policy issues will influence how this new computing platform unfolds across the world.

While globally successful Japanese industries were able to use their domestic market as a springboard into international markets, Japan’s telecommunications sector became decoupled from global markets, trapping Japanese ICT firms in the domestic market. This persistent pattern of leading without followers was not simply the result of misguided technological choices, ill-informed corporate strategies, or insular government standard-setting processes. Rather, the dynamics of competition, shaped and reshaped by political dynamics and regulatory structures, decoupled it from global markets. These dynamics created a “Galapagos effect,” in which winning in an isolated domestic market led to losing in global markets. Major regulatory shifts transformed the dynamics of competition since the late 1990s, decreasing the isolation of Japan’s telecommunications sector, but some factors pulling it along a proprietary trajectory persist. This paper highlights the dilemma of how to develop beyond a follower status, but avoid becoming a leader without followers.