Building an “East Asian Community” in Vain

Japan’s Power Shift and Economic Regionalism in the New Millennium

Presenter: Hoshiro Hiroyuki (Tokyo University)

Discussant: LEE Yong Wook (Korea University)

Date: 2011. 08.24 (Wed.) 16:00-18:00

Venue: Main Conference Room (R.301), ARI, Korea University

Language: English (Japanese & Korean)

abstract

One of the most noteworthy foreign policies launched by the new Japanese government is aimed at building an “East Asian Community;” however, little progress has been observed on economic regionalism since the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) came into power in 2009. Why has this policy not been more actively pursued by the DPJ cabinets, despite being one of the Prime Minister’s favored policies and in the absence of significant objections from opposition parties? This paper addresses this question by elucidating factors that promote or impede the building of an “East Asian Community” from the perspective of Japanese domestic politics. In particular, this paper sheds light on the preferences of the existing societal organizations of land, capital, and labor, on the one hand, and their relationships with the ruling government, on the other. This paper shows that the DPJ government, having been an advocate of economic regionalism in East Asia, has, in fact, experienced strong dissent among its supporters. Groups that have strong ties with the DPJ react negatively against economic regionalism as opposed to those closely linked to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Thus, conditions surrounding the DPJ government for promoting East Asian regionalism are relatively weaker than those that existed for the preceding LDP governments. Since the size of “win sets” has shrunken after the change of the Japanese government, the extent to which Tokyo can advance offers at EPA negotiations has also shrunken, making concluding EPA much more difficult. Even though the Prime Minister strongly advocates East Asian regionalism, as long as his party’s supporters oppose it, efforts made by the ruling power remain constrained. This is the reality that the DPJ government has been facing.