More than six decades after the end of World War II, the Japanese government has yet to return an estimated ¥278 million worth of unpaid financial assets owed to Asian victims of forced mobilization for the war effort. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, American authorities directed Japanese officials to deposit these assets in the Bank of Japan for eventual restitution, setting up a custody account in 1946 and a foreign creditor’s account in 1949. However, the outbreak of the Korean War destroyed any chance of restitution, as the U.S. preoccupation over the cold war conflict effectively froze the unpaid assets that still remain in the Bank of Japan. Clarifying the historical record of American involvement in managing these accounts can contribute towards a U.S.-mediated effort to reach regional reconciliation between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia.

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 article examines the foreign policy views of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), from the party’s founding through its first year in power.

Main Argument

In 2009 the DPJ came to power in Japan, ending a half-century of conservative rule, with the hope of reshaping the post–Cold War order by rebalancing Japanese policy with a greater emphasis on Asia, inspired by a “new Asianism.” Instead, the party’s first year in office was marked by foreign policy tensions— first with the U.S. over bases in Okinawa, followed by clashes with China in the Senkaku Islands. The DPJ has moved painfully along the learning curve from opposition politics to the realities of governance. On both sides of the Pacific, policymakers now believe the rocky transition has led to a restoration of the postwar consensus, particularly regarding the U.S.-Japan security relationship. But it would be wrong to conclude that DPJ policies, shaped during the party’s formative years by key leaders who remain largely in place, have been simply thrown aside. The new Asianism, which should not be understood as a “pro- China” shift but rather as an effort to manage the rise of China, remains a core identity of the DPJ.

Policy Implications

• There is a real danger that relations between Japan and the U.S. could slide again into a morass. Avoiding that outcome requires a more serious effort to understand the underlying foreign policy identity of the DPJ and dispel illusions about the nature of change in Japan.
• Rather than seeing the new Asianism as only a threat, policymakers should view it as an opportunity to jointly, and in concert with South Korea, reshape the security order in Northeast Asia.
• The DPJ’s interest in an East Asian community potentially challenges China for leadership of future regional structures. The party’s focus on Asia, including ties with countries such as India, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia, could create a security structure in Asia that can cope with the rise of China’s power.
• The mechanism and basis for dialogue is weaker than ever in the U.S.- Japan alliance. The relationships built up over decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party need to be revitalized to adapt to a new era in Japanese politics.

The economic benefits attributed by the literature to ethnic networks include helping their members cope with social exclusion, mainstreaming, facilitating entrepreneurship, and providing access to transnational opportunities. In this article, the authors explore the benefits provided by participation in ethnic professional associations formed by Indian and Chinese engineers in Silicon Valley. We find that the ethnic professional associations offer several of these economic benefits. These benefits are complementary to the benefits from other ethnic ties and from nonethnic ties.