Nikka Kankei

This paper discusses a number of topics on Japanese-Canadian relations including: why now is an opportune moment to improve relations; getting right the macroeconomic setting; restructuring and expanding the Japanese economy; prospects for trade, investment, and technology exchanges; and prospective policies. It includes an observation paper which is intended to heighten Canadians' awareness of the opportunities for expanding and deepening Canada's economic relations with Japan.

Until recently, many Japanese believed that they lived in the richest country in the world, and in the early 1990s, they welcomed the end of one-party dominance. However, by the middle of the 1990s, many Japanese are no longer confident in their economy, nor optimistic in their politics. This authoritative study analyses various aspects of Japanese society and economy in order to provide a balanced view between the optimism of the 1980s and the pessimism characteristic of more recent years. The Political Economy of Japanese Society is a revision and translation of a multidisciplinary research project carried out by the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, it examines the historical developments of Japan's contemporary political economy, paying particular attention to the changes that have occurred 'from below'. Social actors who have often been given peripheral treatment, such as opposition parties, the aged, female workers and foreign workers, are brought to the forefront of the analysis, alongside those considered more mainstream, such as the governing party, large corporations and labour unions. The Japanese political economy of the 1980s and 90s has had a strong impact on the global economy, and this book also analyses selective influences on the outside world, in particular on other Asian nations and the USA. Volume 1 analyses the structures of the Japanese political economy which encouraged continuous economic growth in the period from 1955 to 1990, focusing on such phenomena as Japanese political management, the Japanese employment system, and one-party dominance in politics. Volume 2 examines some of the problems inherited from this period of dramatic economic growth.

Based on extensive original research including interviews with key participants, this book examines how, following Richard Nixon’s famous visit to China in 1972, Japan established formal diplomatic relations with China, doing so before the United States and other Western countries. It considers the key personalities – Prime Minister Tanaka and Foreign Minister Ōhira on the Japanese side, and Zhou Enlai on the Chinese side, outlines how the discussions unfolded, and discusses the key issues which divided the two sides and how these issues were resolved: Japanese war reparations to China, how the two countries perceived their past, how Taiwan should be treated, and possession of the Senkaku Islands. The book also shows how Tanaka and Ōhira sought to reconcile China–Japan relations with the US–Japan Security Treaty and to continue non-governmental exchanges with Taiwan following the severing of relations. Overall, the book emphasises that the nature of the relationship established in 1972 continues to be very important for understanding present day China–Japan relations.

The new developments across the Taiwan Strait have illuminated the dilemma of the 'One China' policy, which could mislead to inconsistent or even contradictory policies, and result in devastating military confrontation between China and the U.S. and possibly Japan.

Japan and China have been rivals for more than a millennium. In more recent times, China was the more powerful until the late nineteenth century, while Japan took the upper hand in the twentieth. Now, China's resurgence has emboldened it even as Japan perceives itself falling behind, exacerbating long-standing historical frictions. June Teufel Dreyer's Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun provides a highly accessible overview of one of the world's great civilizational rivalries that ranges from the seventh century to the present. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the shrinking distances afforded by advances in technology and the intrusion of Western powers brought the two into closer proximity in ways that alternately united and divided them. In the aftermath of multiple wars between them, including a long and brutal conflict in World War II, Japan developed into an economic power but rejected militarism. China's journey toward modernization was hindered by ideological and leadership struggles that lasted until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The final part focuses on the issues that dominate China and Japan's current relationship: economic rivalry, memories of World War II, resurgent nationalism, military tensions, Taiwan, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and globalization. Dreyer argues that recent disputes should be seen as manifestations of embedded rivalries rather than as issues whose resolution would provide a lasting solution to deep-standing disputes. For the paperback edition, she has added a new afterword that takes readers up to the present day.

Focusing on two case studies from East Asia and Europe, Yinan He argues that the key to interstate reconciliation is the harmonization of national memories.

This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports – the key strategic places on China’s coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or parts of cities, outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities. Topics covered include land and how it was acquired, the flow of people, good and information, specific individuals and families who typify life in the treaty ports, and technical advances, exploration, and innovation in government.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the nineteenth century encounter between East Asia and the Western world has been narrated as a legal encounter. Commercial treaties--negotiated by diplomats and focused on trade--framed the relationships among Tokugawa-Meiji Japan, Qing China, Choson Korea, and Western countries including Britain, France, and the United States. These treaties created a new legal order, very different than the colonial relationships that the West forged with other parts of the globe, which developed in dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power, and local institutions. They established the rules by which foreign sojourners worked in East Asia, granting them near complete immunity from local laws and jurisdiction. The laws of extraterritoriality looked similar on paper but had very different trajectories in different East Asian countries. P?r Cassel's first book explores extraterritoriality and the ways in which Western power operated in Japan and China from the 1820s to the 1920s. In Japan, the treaties established in the 1850s were abolished after drastic regime change a decade later and replaced by European-style reciprocal agreements by the turn of the century. In China, extraterritoriality stood for a hundred years, with treaties governing nearly one hundred treaty ports, extensive Christian missionary activity, foreign controlled railroads and mines, and other foreign interests, and of such complexity that even international lawyers couldn't easily interpret them. Extraterritoriality provided the springboard for foreign domination and has left Asia with a legacy of suspicion towards international law and organizations. The issue of unequal treaties has had a lasting effect on relations between East Asia and the West. Drawing on primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, and several European languages, Cassel has written the first book to deal with exterritoriality in Sino-Japanese relations before 1895 and the triangular relationship between China, Japan, and the West. Grounds of Judgment is a groundbreaking history of Asian engagement with the outside world and within the region, with broader applications to understanding international history, law, and politics.