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Japan?s quest for regional order-building has a mixed historical record. During the first half of the 20th century, the country pursued its vision of a Japan-centered regional order, termed as the Grater East Asia Co-prosper Sphere, excluding the United States, only to bring total catastrophe to the region. Four decades later in the early 1990s, it conceptualized the ?multi-tiered? structure of regional security, with the US-Japan alliance as the linchpin, and rather quietly promoted it with some success. Despite such stark contrasts, the two instances show one commonality?Japan was an ascending power. With this backdrop, the paper examines Japan?s current attitude toward the question of the emerging regional order. Is Japan, now far from being an ascending power thanks to decade-long economic stagnation, and in the face of a new, rapidly ascending power, China, still committed to regional order-building? If so, does Japan still maintain a ?multi-tiered? regional order, in which the position of China is unspecified. Or has the country conceived of a new kind of regional order to reflect the current power balance in Asia? Through addressing these questions, the paper seeks to articulate the factors that shape Japan?s perspective of a regional security order and assess the possible implications for the country?s relations with other regional countries, especially China, overall intra-regional relations, and the ongoing discussion on the recently proposed East Asian Community. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the major power relationship in Northeast Asia has undergone some significant transition and reconfiguration. Among other things, Sino-South Korean relations began to show some new momentum that has the potential to reshape the geopolitical environment in the region. On a series of important political and security issues, Beijing and Seoul share more common interests than their respective relations with the other two major powers in the region: Japan and the United States. On the war history issue, China and South Korea formed a united front against Japan. On the North Korean nuclear issue, the six-party talks have clearly demonstrated that China and South Korea have more in common in terms of approaches and tactics than they do with both the United States and Japan. On the core issue of China’s national interestâ€"Taiwan, Seoul’s position is much closer to Beijing than both the U.S. and Japan. On the issue of Korea’s reunification, China and South Korea are also more likely to find common ground. In additional, both China and South Korea have territorial disputes with Japan. Both China and South Korea have strong anti-Japanese and to less extent anti-American sentiment in the public. By examining the new dynamics and developments in Sino-South Korean relations, this paper tries to argue that with Japan moving closer to the status of a normal power and China’s sustainable rise, a strategic realignment in the region is inevitable in which a potential China-ROK “strategic partnership” is emerging and will be pivotal to a possible regional security framework in Northeast Asia. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disputes over history abound in northeast Asian politics today. Whether it is Chinese and Koreans protesting “revisionist” Japanese histories of World War II, Japanese counter protests about Chinese and Korean history textbooks, or Koreans disgruntled with Chinese accounts of their shared past, history appears to be an endless source of friction in northeast Asia. Yet there has been little research seeking to systematically explore just how such historical disputes matter for international relations in the present. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impact of nation (China/Japan/Korea), source (ingroup/outgroup textbooks), and valence (positive/negative narratives) on measures of beliefs about the past, emotional response, hostile attribution, and threat perception in present day Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Korea-Japan relations. The study will be conducted with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean university students. A 2 X 2 X 2 design will expose randomized groups of students from each country to excerpts and pictures from false high school history textbook accounts of colonial Korea from the 1910s and 1920s, colonial Manchuria of the 1930s and 1940s, and tributary Chosun’s relations with the Ming and Qing Dynasty from 1392-1910. Implications and future research are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exchange rate policy cannot be modeled as a simple product of domestic politics, as Jeff Frieden does in his recent work on this topic. Countries deciding whether or not to go on or off the gold standard may have been able to make these decisions separately based on domestic politics, without coordination or bargaining, and small countries may still be able to do so with regard to the dollar or euro in today's monetary regime. But big countries, including the United States, cannot make exchange rate policy on their own. It takes two to float, by which I mean that it is more accurate to model exchange rate policy as a two-level game in which two partners each seek an exchange rate regime and level that reflects domestic political interests and institutions, with the outcome determined by bargaining. The United States cannot make a decision to float vis-a-vis the renminbi without China going along. Japan has learned that it cannot devalue the yen without the United States blessing this policy. The paper lays out the two-level logic of exchange rate bargaining and illustrates it by examining several cases of United States - Asia exchange rate bargaining, including US-Japan since 1980 and US-China since 2000. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]