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Based on documents and extensive interviews with Japanese policy makers, this book provides a comprehensive and detailed empirical analysis of Japan's involvement in Asia-Pacific security multilateralism after the end of the Cold War.

While historically providing ASEAN with both normative and strategic justifications for initiating "inclusive" multilateralism in the wider Asian region, great power rivalry has also functioned as a major impediment to the progress of ASEAN-led institutions beyond "dialogue" forums. In the age of fierce great power rivalry, these institutional properties have inevitably made ASEAN-led institutions become major fora for the "soft balancing" games of the great powers.

Why has Japan attempted to promote Asian security multilateralism for over two decades despite its open acknowledgment of the vital centrality of the US–Japan alliance in its overall foreign and security policy? Why has Japan's pursuit of regional security multilateralism sometimes swayed between an inclusive 'Asia-Pacific' (with the US) and an exclusive 'East Asian' format (without the US)? This article examines the nature of Japan's approach to Asian security multilateralism through a new analytical model based on the decentering/recentering framework and major theoretical assumptions deriving from neoclassical realism. It unpacks the process by which Japanese policy-makers have come to recognize Asian security multilateralism as a means of advancing perceived political and security interests, arising from international pressures and opportunities. The analysis is divided into three phases; (1) Japan's leading role in the formation of the ASEAN Regional Forum (1991–1994), (2) Japan's initiatives for the establishment of the ASEAN Plus Three and the East Asian Summit (1997–2005), and (3) Japan's renewed focus on the EAS with US membership (2010-onwards). The article reveals the changing dynamics of the ideas and motivations behind Japan's initiatives for Asian security multilateralism. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

This article examines the processes behind the evolution of preventive diplomacy in the ASEAN Regional Forum. The Forum's potential to establish meaningful preventive diplomacy mechanisms is likely to remain highly limited unless it departs from the rules of the "ASEAN Way" of institution building. This departure would only be a prerequisite, not a solution.

This article explores changes in Japan's conception of and policy toward security multilateralism1 in the Asia-Pacific region after the end of the Cold War with special reference to the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). It makes the observation that notwithstanding Japan's active role behind the establishment of the ARF in the early 1990s and continuing public expression of strong support for Asia-Pacific security multilateralism since that time, in actuality, Japan's enthusiasm for it has dwindled from the late 1990s onwards. This article argues that this has been due primarily to Japan's disappointing experiences in the ARF, evinced by its abortive efforts to promote meaningful cooperative security measures and the failings of multilateral security diplomacy in addressing its security concerns. Consequently, Japan's conception of regional security multilateralism has shifted from an optimistic liberal to a more pessimistic realist perspective from which the ARF can, at best, be seen as a venue contributing only to a minimal level of confidence building among regional countries or, to put it more cynically, "a talking shop". This has made Japan's ARF policy more tentative and less energetic. Japan's enthusiasm has also been diluted by a number of internal and external constraints on ARF policy, including US misgivings about Japan's tilt toward regional security multilateralism, its domestic organizational limitations, growing dissent within the Japanese government over the value of security multilateralism, the lack of political support for bureaucratic initiatives and the unexpected frictions between bilateral and multilateral security approaches in Japan's overall security policy. (Pac Rev/DÜI)

Supported by a number of high-profile case studies, this volume offers a comprehensive exploration of Japanese-German economic relations through the whole of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. It also offers clarification on the structure and processes of the world economy in the same period. Drawing on both unpublished discussion papers as well as previously published essays, the reader will find much of interest in the wide-ranging scholarship contained in this work, structured as follows: Part I, Japanese-German Business Relations; Part II, Trajectory of Japanese-German Business Relations; Part III, The Japanese and European Business and Economies. A Foreword by YUZAWA Takeshi, Professor Emeritus, Gakushuin University, Tokyo, evaluates the relevance and significance of Professor Kudo's lifetime research and scholarship in the context of German-Japanese relations