CIAO DATE: 06/07

Pacific Affairs:
An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

 

Fall 2006 (Vol. 79 No. 3)

Articles

• Introduction: Taking Japan-North Korea Relations Seriously: Rationale and Background
  Linus Hagström and Marie Söderberg

• The Dogma of Japanese Insignificance: The Academic Discourse on North Korea Policy Coordination
  Linus Hagström

  The message of Japanese insignificance in international affairs can be found in many different literatures, including that on the formation of policy towards North Korea in the 1990s and 2000s, in particular in regard to the recurring nuclear crisis. Books and articles on the topic either exclude Japanese foreign policy altogether or tend to emphasize the predominant role, or power, of the United States. Japanese foreign policy, it is implied, is under US control. The aim of this article is to question that dominant view, (1) by demonstrating that there is an undercurrent of statements in the same literature which could well be interpreted as implying Tokyo's exercising of political, economic and perhaps even military power over Washington; (2) by clarifying the conceptual bias upon which the predominant view rests; and (3) by suggesting how another understanding of power is more coherent with the first two points, but at the same time renders the whole question of power in North Korea policy coordination practically a quagmire. By doing so, this article deconstructs the more uniform understanding of power in that discourse and reveals a patchwork of inconsistencies, differences and questions.

• Tokyo's Quandary, Beijing's Moment in the Six-Party Talks: A Regional Multilateral Approach to Resolve the DPRK's Nuclear Problem
  Kuniko Ashizawa

  The record of Japan's diplomacy in the Six-Party Talks (SPT), the key multilateral mechanism to address North Korea's unflagging nuclear ambitions, is unpronounced. Tokyo's position in the SPT process has been often viewed as a secondary one, as if it was functioning as Washington's henchman, and at times as unproductive, thanks to its attempts to address the abductions issue in this multilateral setting. This represents an interesting contrast to China's SPT diplomacy, which has seen Beijing play an indispensable role, projecting itself as an honest broker. Further, the contrast between the two countries is intriguing when their general policies toward regional multilateral institutions over the past decade are taken into account. Both countries made a conspicuous shift in their attitudes toward regional multilateral institution-building, from negative and skeptical to positive and active. In the case of the SPT, a new multilateral institution in Asia, Tokyo's activism appeared to be muted, while Beijing positioned itself in a most visible manner. With this backdrop, the article examines Japanese policy making toward the SPT through a specific comparison with the country's general attitude toward regional institution-building and with China's SPT diplomacy. It argues that three aspects of the decision-making context—the nature of foreign policy questions, the composition of actors, and the type of available diplomatic tools—unique to Japan's dealings with the SPT essentially shaped its diplomacy and thus brought about a conspicuous contrast with its general attitude toward regional institution-building and with Beijing's growing regional activism.

• Can Japanese Foreign Aid to North Korea Create Peace and Stability?
  Marie Söderberg

  Peace building and peace preservation are new key concepts in Japanese foreign aid policy. According to the revised ODA Charter of 2003, "Japan aspires for world peace. Actively promoting the aforementioned effort with ODA," which Japan will carry out "even more strategically" in the future. Asia, and especially East Asia, is singled out as a priority region. North Korea, with which Japan has not yet normalized relations, would therefore seem like an important starting point. How come development aid is not extended to that country? The answer is that aid is a very complex issue, and not giving is often regarded as being as effective as giving when it comes to eliciting concessions and bringing about changes in the recipients' policy behaviour. For Japan, the question of North Korea policy is made much more complicated by the nuclear issue and the abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea. Various domestic opinions and interest groups have to be taken into consideration as well as security interests and foreign pressure. This article uses I. William Zartman's "ripe moment" theory and addresses the question of whether Japanese ODA can be an effective tool for the normalization of relations between Japan and North Korea as well as for helping to generate peace and stability in the Northeast Asia region.

• The Political Economy of Japanese Sanctions towards North Korea: Domestic Coalitions and International Systemic Pressures
  Christopher W. Hughes

  Japan has often been dismissed by mainstream international relations and policy discourse as a bit-part actor in Korean Peninsula security affairs. If ascribed any role at all, it is seen as a secondary and submissive actor, generally bending to US strategy and international systemic pressures. This paper argues, however, that Japanese policy towards North Korea is now challenging these international systemic pressures, and threatening divergence with US policy. This is due to the fact that Japan's policy is increasingly driven by domestic political considerations that are rivalling or even superseding international influences in importance. In order to highlight these domestic dynamics, the paper utilizes domestic sanctions theory and a detailed empirical analysis of the Japanese policy-making process with regard to the imposition of sanctions on North Korea. It demonstrates that a "threshold coalition" has now emerged in Japan which is tipping government policy towards sanctions, irrespective of, or even in opposition to, international systemic pressures to desist from such actions. The paper highlights the changing disposition of a pluralistic range of domestic actors away from default engagement to default containment. The consequence of these aggregate domestic pressures is that the Japanese government is finding it progressively harder to converge with US and international strategy towards North Korea. Japan is thus set to augment its influence in Korean Peninsula security affairs by becoming a more obstructive partner in attempts to find an international resolution to the nuclear crisis.

• Vicarious Traumas: Television and Public Opinion in Japan's North Korea Policy
  Hyung Gu Lynn

  Critiques of American mainstream and conservative media for their often dubious cheerleading of the US war against Iraq have become familiar elements of recent public discourse. However, such analyses have not generated equivalent intellectual engagement with media representations of North Korea. Considering how difficult it has been to obtain accurate information on North Korea, this relative paucity is surprising. I address this lacuna by analyzing the role of the Japanese media, particularly television, in generating public perceptions of North Korea. Why did Japanese television coverage of North Korea reach saturation points following the 9/17 summit? Why were audiences so receptive? How did television shape public opinion? And how did domestic public opinion influence or constrict Japan's North Korea policy? In answering these questions, rather than simply observe that the abductions themselves have been the most important issue in Japan, or note that there have been temporary increases or decreases in Japanese media coverage of North Korea, I argue that television (and other forms of mass media) herded the public into a relatively constricted range of views through narrow, biased saturation coverage of the issue du jour. An intersection of structural concentration, content isomorphism, malleable audiences and domestic policy conflicts allowed the media not only to set agendas, but to prime the audience and frame the presentation of information. Public opinion, maintained by conservative political lobbies, viewer ratings responses and broadcasting strategies, ultimately constricted the government policy agenda, range and choice in dealing with North Korea, generating very predictable behaviours.

Books Reviewed In This Issue

Asia General

• State Making in Asia. Edited by Richard Boyd and Tak-Wing Ngo.
  Reviewed by Robert E. Bedeski

• Multiculturalism in Asia. Edited by Will Kymlicka and Baogang He
  Reviewed by John R. Clammer

• A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. By Peter J. Katzenstein
  Reviewed by R. Bin Wong

• Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland. By Yang Lian; edited and introduced by Jacob Edmond and Hilary Chung.
  Reviewed by Yiyan Wang

China and Inner Asia

• Normalization of U.S.-China Relations: An International History. Edited by William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross and Gong Li
  Reviewed by David L. Shambaugh

• Chinese Foreign Policy Think Tanks and China's Policy Towards Japan. By Xuanli Liao
  Reviewed by Michael B. Yahuda

• Under New Ownership: Privatizing China's State-Owned Enterprises. By Shahid Yusuf, Kaoru Nabeshima and Dwight H. Perkins.
  Reviewed by Jongchul Lee

• State and Laid-off Workers in Reform China: The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched. By Yongshun Cai.
  Reviewed by Jaeyoun Won

• Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice. Edited by Neil J. Diamant, Stanley B. Lubman and Kevin J. O'Brien.
  Reviewed by Pitman Potter

• Poverty and Inequality among Chinese Minorities. By A.S. Bhalla and Shufang Qiu.
  Reviewed by Morris Rossabi

• Education and Social Change in China: Inequality in a Market Economy. Edited by Gerard A. Postiglione.
  Reviewed by Kathryn Mohrman

• Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China. By Adam Yuet Chau.
  Reviewed by David Ownby

• The Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus Fiction, A Historian's Quest for the Truth. By Higashinakano Shudo.
  Reviewed by Bob Wakabayashi

• Useless to the State: "Social Problems" and Social Engineering in Nationalist Nanjing, 1927-1937. By Zwia Lipkin.
  Reviewed by Richard Belsky

• Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing. By Richard Belsky.
  Reviewed by Bryna Goodman

• Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier. By C.Patterson Giersch.
  Reviewed by Yingcong Dai

• The Social Life of Opium in China. By Zheng Yangwen.
  Reviewed by Norman Smith

• Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture. By Scott Simon.
  Reviewed by Lane J. Harris

• Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Identity-Based Movements of Plain Indigenous in Taiwan. By Jolan Hsieh.
  Reviewed by Scott Simon

Northeast Asia

• Japan in a Dynamic Asia: Coping with the New Security Challenges. Edited by Yoichiro Sato and Satu Limaye.
  Reviewed by Hyung Gu Lynn

• Japanese Management: The Search for a New Balance between Continuity and Change. Edited by René Haak and Markus Pudelko.
  Reviewed by Masao Nakamura

• Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan's System of Social Protection. By Leonard J. Schoppa.
  Reviewed by Thomas Roehl

• Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories. Edited by Paul H. Kratoska.
  Reviewed by Ethan Mark

• America's Japan: The First Year, 1945-1946. By Grant K. Goodman.
  Reviewed by Masako Shibata

• Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s. By William O. Gardner.
  Reviewed by Monika Dix

• Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance, and Social Change in North Korea. By Hazel Smith.
  Reviewed by C. Kenneth Quinones

South Asia

• Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. By Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and René Véron.
  Reviewed by Subrata K. Mitra

• The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. By Aseema Sinha.
  Reviewed by Arthur G. Rubinoff

• A Region in Turmoil: South Asian Conflicts Since 1947. By Rob Johnson.
  Reviewed by Sumit Ganguly

Southeast Asia

• ASEAN-Russia Relations. Edited by Gennady Chufrin, Mark Hong and Teo Kah Beng.
  Reviewed by Leszek Buszynski

• Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History and Identity. By Vatthana Pholsena.
  Reviewed by Penny Van Esterik

• A Plastic Nation: The Curse of Thainess in Thai-Burmese Relations. By Pavin Chachavalpongpun.
  Reviewed by Thongchai Winichakul

• The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy. By Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet.
  Reviewed by Alexander Woodside

• Searching for Vietnam: Selected Writings on Vietnamese Culture and Society. By A. Terry Rambo.
  Reviewed by John Kleinen

• The Road to Freedom: A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By Virginia Morris with Clive Hills.
  Reviewed by Edwin E. Moise

• The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. By Andrew Preston.
  Reviewed by William J. Duiker

• Satanic Mills Or Silicon Islands: The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines. By Steven C. McKay.
  Reviewed by Aprodicio Laquian

• The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. By Vicente L. Rafael.
  Reviewed by Rudolf Mrazek

• Naming the Witch. By James Siegel.
  Reviewed by John Roosa

Australasia and the Pacific Region

• Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West. By Simon Harrison.
  Reviewed by Claudia Gross

• Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America's Largest Charitable Trust. By Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth.
  Reviewed by Alexander Dale Mawyer

• Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. By Paige West.
  Reviewed by Gordon Brent Ingram

• Pathways to Heaven: Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea. By Holger Jebens.
  Reviewed by Doug Dalton

• Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth. By John Pule and Nicholas Thomas.
  Reviewed by Anne Allen

• 'First Contacts' in Polynesia, The Samoan Case (1722-1848): Western Misunderstandings about Sexuality and Divinity. By Serge Tcherkézoff.
  Reviewed by Dan Taulapapa McMullin

• One & a Half Pacific Islands: Stories the Banaban People Tell of Themselves. Edited by Jennifer Shennan and Makin Corrie Tekenimatang.
  Reviewed by Nancy J. Pollock