Search

Guest worker programs entail an intrinsic tension between control over workers' mobility and workers' agency. By drawing on the qualitative data from Chinese construction workers in Japan's Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), I illuminate the dialectical nature of the tension between control and agency. My findings suggest that labor recruiters and employers implement labor control, but their practices have the opposite effect of pressing workers to abscond or to do irregular jobs. Staying in the program is not an outcome of effective control, but a response to circumstances wherein revisions to Japan's immigration policy bring rewards while China's surveillance policies incur potential punishments. The control-agency dialectic suggests that the regulative focus should be shifted from workers to employers and recruiters. Incorporating approaches of spatiotemporality and relationality, I analyze how workers sustain relations with various actors through three interconnected temporal stages, and how the relational dynamics shape workers' varied mobility choices. Two features of the construction industry shape workers' circumstances and occasionally facilitate their mobility: the stratification of the labor force according to legal status and the subcontract system. The paper thus highlights the need to contextualise labor agency in changing state policies, relations with co-ethnics, and industry-specific features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'China threat' has been identified as an important driver of Japan's security agenda and discourse. The threat posed by China has been discussed either as a given factor determining the trajectory of Tokyo's security approach, as a product of identity construction, or as an expression of securitizing processes that facilitate institutional and policy change. This paper contributes to this debate by offering an alternative explanation of the process through which the Abe government constructed China as a threat. Building on securitization theory, the paper examines the modes and strategies employed by the Abe Administration to successfully securitize China. The paper argues that, while Beijing was labeled a 'concern' rather than an 'existential threat,' it was still securitized through a process of securitization that involves an association with those domains in which China engages assertively, namely the maritime commons. The paper suggests calling this type of securitizing pattern 'transversal securitization' and explores how this indirect strategy allowed the Abe government to pragmatically pursue its objectives both domestically and at the international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on Realism theory, this paper provides an explanation of the importance of power in International Relations, by analyzing the behavior of China and Japan in the East Asian region, and also the behavior of the United States of America towards them as the dominant superpower under the current international system. It answers the problem of the transfer of power from the West to the East, and in return supports the assumption that the Great Powers seek to possess relative power as much as possible. The paper also emphasizes that the State should not undermine or renounce its offensive power, as with Japan, because that will put it in front of a dilemma of the growing the power of neighboring States that seek to achieve regional hegemony, such as China. Therefore, all of these transformations show that international relations are a complex field and should not be reduced to a specific ideal field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of international finance for coal power plants have intensified since the 2015 Paris climate agreement was negotiated. Over the past few years, Japan and South Korea have signaled their intent not to fund new coal projects overseas, leaving China and its Belt and Road Initiative as the 'financier of last resort.' In September 2021, China too announced its intent to stop providing finance for overseas coal projects. What accounts for their decision to cease financing overseas coal projects despite prominent differences in political systems, degree of internationalization of their financial systems, and economic size? Drawing on datasets of coal projects and financing supplemented by case material and interviews, this paper explores the dynamics of coal export finance and how the combination of international reputational pressures and declining demand for coal finance diminished the domestic support for incumbent coal exporters in all three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China and Japan are both Asian countries that are geographically adjacent and share a common cultural heritage. Suicide is a significant public health concern in both countries. While Japan has established a relatively mature framework for suicide prevention, China lacks national suicide prevention mechanisms. This paper analyzes the disparity in adolescent suicide prevention between China and Japan so that China can learn from Japan’s experience in this area and develop effective, systematic mechanisms for the prevention and intervention of adolescent suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes a critical look at the sovereignty claims surrounding the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands. The dispute has long plagued Sino-Japanese relations and is considered one of the key regional security hotspots, with the People's Republic of China mounting an active challenge to Japanese administrative control. This article reviews the case for sovereignty under both the discovery and the prescription principles. However, the article concludes that one cannot find a compelling case for sovereignty under either principle in favour of either claimants. The paper argues that this is due to the traditional insignificance of the islands prior to UNCLOS establishing exclusive economic zones. Rather, the article suggests that to facilitate a resolution to the disputes, the islands should not be classified as islands under UNCLOS as they do not meet the legal threshold for such a classification, either today or historically. If anything, the weakness of claims that contributes to the intractability of the dispute today shows that traditionally neither China nor Japan has considered these territories as islands in a manner that would be in the spirit of UNCLOS. While such a reclassification would not immediately resolve the dispute, it would be a significant step to remove incentives for the further pursuit of conflicting sovereignty over the islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Teaching Expertise in Three Countries project is used as an example to show the significance and contribution of international comparative research and to think about the possible implications for policy in early childhood education. The project studied the development of expertise in preschool teaching in Japan, China, and the United States by employing 'video-cued multivocal ethnography' to explore how teaching expertise is defined in each of these countries and what processes help teachers acquire advanced teaching skills. This project has shown similarities and culturally specific notions, in what the participants have to say about characteristics of less and more experienced teachers. These research findings raise issues and challenges in early childhood education that resonate with the situation not only in the three countries but also possibly in other countries, such as problematizing the role of remembering and reflection in professional practice and the value of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan is abandoning its once unidirectional foreign security policy towards the USA, two notable examples of which are its increasingly comprehensive and substantial security relations with the Philippines and Vietnam. Putting these burgeoning Japanese security partnerships front and center, this paper asks the following questions: What are the characteristics of Japan's maturing security partnerships with the Philippines and Vietnam? What factors have driven and enabled their recent emergence? What promotes and constrains their future development? What do these maturing Japanese non-US security partnerships reveal about Japan's direction as a security actor in and beyond East Asia? The paper finds that these two Japanese security bilaterals, which have six basic characteristics in common, are fundamentally driven by the contemporary shift in the balance of power and the strategic challenge that China's emerging maritime power and ambitions present Japan. It moreover argues that the substantiation of these security partnerships have been pursued under American auspices and further invited by Japanese nationalism and security legislative reforms. Notwithstanding these encouraging factors, however, domestic and geo-strategic constraints and counter incentives lead this paper to expect further substantiation, but limited military significance in the future of these security partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline of US liberal hegemony raises the following questions for Japan: What is Japan's vision of international order and strategy? How does the Japan-US alliance influence Japan's vision? Some have argued that Japan is reactive and lacks a strategy, whereas others have claimed that the country has pragmatically pursued its interests within the given circumstances. This paper argues that Japan has maintained its own vision and strategies since the Cold War. Also, in the 2010s, Japan's diplomatic tradition was updated to focus on actively shaping the Asia-Pacific region. Japan seeks to preserve existing liberal international (rather than domestic) rules; however, its method is classical as it includes a balance-of-power approach involving military expansion and alliances, and a diplomatic approach to making agreements with a variety of political regimes, whether democratic or authoritarian, including China. I call this emerging vision in Japan a 'rules-based order'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to highlight the increasing value of Joseph Nye's concept of soft power in East Asia by observing the actions of China and Japan in Thailand. The two major powers are trying to gather sociocultural and political resources towards improved economic relations and collaborations, while mostly detaching from ideological promotion. This article gathers opinions from "intellectual elites" to assess how the two countries understand soft power in action while outlining their main objectives, strategies, and impact. Although China's reputation is gradually improving, the country seems to be playing a risky game where admiration for its economic prowess and skepticism towards its opaque methods are equally present, resulting in a precarious position. Japan's image is still positive and stable, but its safe‐playing stance seems to reflect the geopolitical status‐quo and could be a missed opportunity to emerge as the third option beyond China and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a preliminary look at a commoditised form of caregiving that emerged in the first decade of the new millennium in the USA, China and Japan: adult male breastfeeding (AMBF). I argue that AMBF is emblematic of both the changing geography of industrial production since the 1973 oil crisis and how consumption has since come to be the most important economic task of those within privileged nations and enclaves. AMBF emphasises how marketing forces today have deployed what are increasingly maternalistic imaginaries to emphasise the degree to which a product or service dyadically recognises, affirms and cares for its consuming subjects. The marketised maternal is rooted in the racialised reproductive savings of those long given privileged access to the superior productivity of the Machine, which compelled smaller family size. It is these savings that have allowed for new dyadic intimacies to be fashioned between the maternalised "market‐and‐me." The flipside of this is that privileged consumers are increasingly infantilised, even as its dependencies are supported by a workforce largely procreated by racially diminished other‐mothers (ROMs). Infantilism, in turn, psychically shields consumers from the planetary devastations that have made privileged consumption possible. AMBF holds theoretical promise by making the unconscious nature of desire‐for the maternal (as a dyadic site of caregiving) explicit along with the latter's revolutionary potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's growing development assistance has become commonly perceived as a threat to the autonomy and development of Southeast Asian countries that had promoted by Japan in the past. This paper challenges that understanding by comparing China's development assistance with Japan's engagement in the region. The comparison supports an alternative perspective, which sees Chinese development assistance as favorable for Japan's interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is the East Asia region so important for the European Union? What are its interests and what challenges does it face? How it approaches its main strategic partners in the region, the People's Republic of China and Japan? The current paper is trying to answer these questions providing an analysis of the foreign policy of the EU in the region as it has formed throughout the last decade. It focuses mainly on a brief review of the literature and the research progress which has been accomplished so far with the purpose of identifying new challenges, weaknesses and factors that need to be included in future research. In the first part, there will be an effort to describe the interests, priorities and challenges of the Union. In the second part, there will be an analysis and description of the EU foreign policy towards its two major partners in East Asia, highlighting the main elements of their bilateral relationships. Lastly, there will be an effort to provide the future trends and possible actions to be taken by the EU, in order to further consolidate its presence in the area via a multifaceted strategy as presented at the EU Global Strategy of 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global drive for world-class universities is twinned with a radical movement to create research assessment indicators, and universities have never been pressured as much as today by global rankings. This paper aims to focus on how research assessment exercises have reconfigured the institutional missions of the university in terms of knowledge production, teaching, and service address, by comparing three top research-intensive universities in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Japan. It critically investigates how far and in what ways academics in the three systems have been pressured to respond to these exercises. The empirical findings show that all the three cases have been affected severely and that Hong Kong universities are the most internationalized and Mainland universities are the most productive in research outputs, as also evidenced in recent QS rankings. The paper argues that the global ranking regime has created a Double Bind for East Asian universities, and has brutally dominated their institutional reconfigurations. To turn the tide, the manipulated emphasis, flawed methodology, and unethical desirability of global university rankings and research assessment exercises should be avoided to help universities healthily and meaningfully focus on real missions to which they should commit themselves. Meanwhile, critical reflections and policy actions are particularly urgent on the indigenousness of knowledge exploration and production by higher education systems in East Asia and other post-colonial contexts. Furthermore, the paper anticipates that the importance of teaching and service will be revitalized in the new stage of East Asian universities, e.g., the Chinese University 3.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aging of a population structure is an inevitable path of demographic transition, as an inescapable result of decline in fertility rate and extension in life expectancy. Although demographic transition occurred earlier in Japan than in China, the two countries had similar patterns, both of which took a much shorter period of time than Western countries to complete demographic transition, as well as have been aging at a rapid speed that has rarely been seen in the world. Japan has the highest level of population aging in the world, and China has been experiencing a very fast pace of the population aging process and has the largest older population. Drawing upon data from World Population Prospects (2019), this paper compares changes in population aging in both China and Japan. Findings show that Japan's aging process is 30 years ahead of China, but China has been changing in a similar way as Japan. To be specific, both countries experienced four phases of the population aging process: accelerated development period, rapid development period, slow down period and high-level maintained period. In addition, both countries had a quick growing rate of population aging. It will take China 23 years and 10 years respectively for the aging rate increasing from 7% to 14% and then to 20%, while Japan took 24 and 11 years respectively, which is much shorter than developed countries in the West. Furthermore, China has a faster pace than Japan in population aging in the next 25 years. We found that from 2019-2044, China's aging rate, elderly dependency ratio, oldest-old coefficient and median age of population will increase 13.24 percent points, 24.21 percent points, 8.33 percent points, and 8.47 years, while the four indicators of Japan will increase 8.38 percent points, 22.52 percent points, 8.29 percent points, and 6.20 years, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five Trogloneta species from Southwest China and Japan are reviewed that two new combinations and a new synonymy are proposed in the current paper: T. nojimai (Ono, 2010), comb. n. is transferred from Mysmena, T. yunnanense (Song & Zhu, 1994), comb. n. (= T. denticocleari Lin & Li, 2008, syn. n.) is transferred from Pholcomma of the Theridiidae, T. speciosum Lin & Li, 2008, T. uncata Lin & Li, 2013, and T. yuensis Lin & Li, 2013. The female of T. yuensis is described for the first time. An identification key and diagnoses are provided for these species, as well as new photographs or illustrations of the genital organs and habitus of T. yuensis and T. yunnanense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methamphetamine (MA) abuse continues in East Asia and shows an increasing trend among youths in South Korea, Japan, and China. Although the negative effects of MA abuse on youth are considered as significant problems, few studies have been conducted on the topic in these countries. This paper focuses on the effects of MA on the human body and current MA abuse among youths in South Korea, Japan, and China. To investigate the negative effects of MA on the human body, we searched the keywords "MA," "human," and "effect" for studies published from 2013 to 2017. MA activates the neurotransmitter system and the central nervous system, and when used at high dosage or for long term, MA can cause severe neurotoxicity and cardiovascular problems. Online networks contribute to MA abuse by sharing methods for preparing synthetic MA. Despite efforts to reduce MA abuse, social crimes associated with its abuse continue and numbers of illegal MA users are increasing steadily in Korea, Japan, and China. In young users, diverse factors associated with drug addiction, such as curiosity and peer effect, lead to MA abuse and its attendant personal and social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the location choice of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in China, shedding special light on the role of agglomeration of same-nationality firms. We examine how this role differs according to firms' productivity. Furthermore, we compare the location choice of Japanese and Taiwanese MNEs in China, taking into consideration that Taiwanese MNEs experience less uncertainty in investing in China due to Taiwan's linguistic and cultural advantages. When considering firms' productivity, we find that less productive Japanese firms prefer to locate close to larger same-nationality agglomerations while there are no differences in location choices in the case of Taiwanese firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's economy, one of the most important national indicators of economic growth performance is the country's ability to produce new technology--and use it responsibly and efficiently--for environmental protection or energy conservation, production and consumption in agreement with international standards. The purpose of this study is to identify the Research and Development (R&D) capability in the area of environmentally friendly technologies in China, Japan and Korea over the last twenty years. As the field is very wide, Water-Gas Shift (WGS) reaction technologies were taken as a case study for the purpose of this article. During 1990-2011 a total of 788 papers in the field of WGS technologies were published by scientists in China, Japan and Korea. China was the top producing country with 394 papers (50%) followed by Japan with 250 papers (32%), and Korea with 144 papers (18%). The growth of the literature in the field was found to be exponential in nature for China. The R&D capabilities were found to correlate directly with the Gross Domestic Expenditures on R&D (GERD), Researchers in Full-time equivalents (FTE), and other economic parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2004 was the year when the Japanese public's affinity with China dropped dramatically, to 37.6 %, due to anti-Japan riots in China. Now more than 70 % of the Japanese public does not feel an affinity with China. How could such a strong anti-Chinese sentiment influence Japan's policy toward China? This paper considers this question by examining Japan's decision-making process on terminating the much-criticized yen loans to China. Yen loans are a type of Official Development Assistance (ODA) provided by the Japanese government to countries lacking sufficient funds for economic development. China is one of the top yen loan borrowers, and the loans have contributed to China's economic growth and increasing openness. However, in March 2005, Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura told Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing that Japan intended to phase out the yen loans before the 2008 Beijing Olympics and reached an agreement on the matter. Two-and-a-half years later, Japan terminated its yen loans to China, as the foreign ministers had agreed. Through mainly firsthand documents and interviews with government officials, this paper will clarify the following two points: (1) While it is true that the Japanese government significantly reduced its yen loan package to China from 2001 onward due to domestic criticism of China, as pointed out by previous studies, it was not planning to terminate the yen loans as of summer 2004. Instead, the Japanese government was contemplating how to keep providing yen loans to China; (2) Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, who was appointed in September 2004, had pushed for the termination of yen loans to China only after anti-Chinese sentiment rose dramatically in summer 2004, because he felt that continuing the much-criticized yen loans would not benefit stable Japan-China relations. This paper sheds light on the background of the termination of yen loans to China, a major milestone in postwar Japan-China relations that had been unclear until now. Having said this, the more important point of this paper may be that it also shows the influence of strong anti-Chinese sentiment on Japan's policies toward China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of recent transformations in East Asian welfare regimes, applying a 'real-typical' perspective, based on the 'productivist welfare capitalism' thesis of Ian Holliday (2000). Unlike Western welfare-state regimes in which the politics of austerity has dominated, the politics of welfare expansion has been noticeable in East Asian welfare regimes. This paper will analyse whether these changes have fundamentally dismantled the productivist feature where social policy is subordinate to economic objectives. While the trajectories are different depending on different political institutional contexts, this study shows that there are two strong signs that these states are moving out of their productivist nature and also that they are in the process of establishing their own welfare states. Japan seems to still be a productivist welfare-state regime struggling to accommodate rapid socio-economic changes, whereas Korea is a welfare state regime with strong liberal characteristics via modern welfare politics. Since the needs for social policy expansion in China correspond to economic and political needs, the productivist feature has been significantly weakened. However, this study argues that these transitory welfare regimes are in critical stages of formulating their new welfare regimes and that welfare politics based on contingent events could affect the future trajectories of these regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author aims to examine the differences in perception concerning the anxiety toward the risk among three countries — Japan, the United States of America and China. The anxiety, in this case, is triggered by uncertainty. This paper also intends to clarify the effect of information to improve people's risk management targeted on the respondents of the Chinese population focusing on earthquake disasters. The social survey using questionnaire has been carried out in order to obtain the needed quantitative data for my research project. It is interesting to conclude that both respondents in China and in the United States tend to accept the impact of uncertainty better. They have shown somewhat lower level of anxiety toward nineteen items of the risks as compared with that of the Japanese respondents. The significant effects on information designed as a part of the risk management action plan as well as the living sufficiency safeguard are clearly observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines the conventional wisdom that characterizes Sino-Japanese energy relations as predominantly competitive, but views Sino-Japanese environmental relations as essentially cooperative. Using sociological theories of risk, it is argued that Sino-Japanese cooperation is more likely in both the energy and environmental areas when common risks are perceived and relative gains are minimized. Despite their many conflicting strategic, political, and economic interests, as energy importers who are vulnerable to supply interruptions in the Middle East and competitors for global energy supplies, China and Japan share common risks to their energy security. Consequently, there actually may be increasing opportunities for China and Japan to address their common concerns through bilateral and multilateral cooperative practices, such as common positions on pricing or energy conservation initiatives. Although one would expect China and Japan to highlight their mutual interests in tackling environmental problems such as air pollution, in fact relative gains often impede cooperation. Japan increasingly views China as an economic competitor and is reducing environmental aid, while China continues to set a priority on economic growth, which sets limits on the use of costlier Japanese green technologies. By examining a selection of scholarly articles, reports and newspaper articles by Chinese and Japanese analysts, as well as material from interviews in Beijing and Tokyo in May-June 2007, the paper shows how environmental and energy issues in Sino-Japanese relations may be framed as threats, requiring counter-measures, or common risks, which can be addressed through cooperative practices. Lastly, the paper discusses the possibility of the development of an energy security 'risk community' as cooperative practices develop between China and Japan. Nonetheless, conflicting political interests, strategies, and self-images, accentuating relative gains, may provide obstacles to their cooperation in both energy security and environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an analysis of the economic relationship between the two most important economies in Asia. Over the last decades, the Chinese and Japanese economies have become more economically interdependent, a development which will, in the long run, impact the countries' political relationship. The paper seeks to answer the question: How can China and Japan gain from the current economic situation, further enhance their relationship and increase their synergies for regional economic development? Data on trade and Foreign Direct Investment are used in combination with primary data from interviews with Japanese and Chinese companies on how they perceive the current business situation and future potential. The result of the data analysis shows that the countries have much to gain from their economic interdependence. The firms see great potential in their respective markets but are concerned about political turbulence. Three possible scenarios for the future economic relationship are presented, including fierce competition on all markets and a leveraging of resources for mutual development between Chinese and Japanese companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to compare several machine learning techniques on the task of Asian language text classification, such as Chinese and Japanese where no word boundary information is available in written text. The paper advocates a simple language modeling based approach for this task. Design/methodology/approach - Naïve Bayes, maximum entropy model, support vector machines, and language modeling approaches were implemented and were applied to Chinese and Japanese text classification. To investigate the influence of word segmentation, different word segmentation approaches were investigated and applied to Chinese text. A segmentation-based approach was compared with the non-segmentation-based approach. Findings - There were two findings: the experiments show that statistical language modeling can significantly outperform standard techniques, given the same set of features; and it was found that classification with word level features normally yields improved classification performance, but that classification performance is not monotonically related to segmentation accuracy. In particular, classification performance may initially improve with increased segmentation accuracy, but eventually classification performance stops improving, and can in fact even decrease, after a certain level of segmentation accuracy. Practical implications - Apply the findings to real web text classification is ongoing work. Originality/value - The paper is very relevant to Chinese and Japanese information processing, e.g. webpage classification, web search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the qualitative differences in dissociative experiences among normal college-age subjects in China and Japan. The paper first describes the process used to prepare the Mandarin version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES). Baseline statistics comparing the two populations of interest are then presented. These results show fundamental differences across these two Asian cultures in terms of the mean DES scores obtained as well as the shape of the overall distribution of these scores. The results of a factor analysis of the DES responses corroborate both gender and cultural differences across the Japanese and Chinese data. Interestingly, the structure of the factors derived shows little relationship to factors from analyses of normal college-age subjects in North America. These contrasting results suggest that the DES can be a useful addition to other instruments and methods for exploring cross-cultural psychological differences, and that prior to clinical use baseline DES norms for each culture need to be established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competitive pressures created by the global market, and the demonstration of market potential in one country influences the incentives to adopt successful technologies and business models in similar countries. In this paper, we explore how mobile payment operation models might evolve in China, using the more mature Japanese and South Korean markets for comparison. Comparing existing business models in the three countries, we argue that regulation has affected both the industry structure and the vertical linkages of the different participants in the mobile payments ecosystem. We predict that rather than converging onto the mobile payment models of Japan or South Korea, the Chinese mobile payment industry is likely to see the coexistence of competing business models in the intermediate term. We attribute this to the contradictory incentives created by Chinese financial sector regulation for the participants in the mobile payments industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping, the International Maritime Organization has adopted technical and operational measures, and discussed the possibility of adopting market-based measures. China, Japan and South Korea are major shipbuilding nations in the world, and have differing responses towards the IMO's regulatory initiatives. This paper conducts a comparative assessment of these three countries' positions on regulatory principles of the greenhouse gas issue, and concludes that their differentiated perspectives on this matter reflect their different regulatory interests. It is significant to take their differentiated interests into account in the developing regulatory regime to avoid disproportionate burdens being placed on certain countries, in particular developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the territorial dispute over the Diaoyu, or Senkaku, Islands in the East China Sea has flamed up between China and Japan. This conflict deserves further attention because of its potential of being the spark to unleash a Sino-Japanese firefight. However, this was not the first time the two Northeast Asian great power rivals have at least verbally fought over who is the rightful owner to the resource-rich archipelago and surrounding waters. The controversy can be traced from post-World War II, over the 1970s and 1990s, to today. The entire process of this largely verbal fistfight can be best understood through the Copenhagen School's securitization and de-securitization concepts. Japan, being in the role of the administrator, naturally more often desecuritized the issue in the past than did China, while China mostly strategically securitized the dispute. For the current round of escalation over the dispute, interestingly, Japan acted as initial securitizing actor. This paper aims to contextualize the instances in which the territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands has been either securitized or desecuritized by either party. The analysis adds nuances to securitization theory, especially concerning the role of societal uprisings in securitizing a dispute such as the one at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the frequent coastal activities of human beings, tens of thousands of tons of floating marine plastics pose a serious threat to marine ecosystems and human survival. This paper studies the feasibility of regional marine plastic garbage management, taking the Northwest Pacific as the research object. According to the Cobb-Douglas utility function of the costs and benefits of plastic processing in China, Japan and South Korea, the Shapley value method was used to analyze it. The study found that the data were substituted into the Shapley value model of cooperative game for calculation, and the results showed that any country joining the triple alliance U would create greater benefits, and obtain higher benefits than the sub alliance. It is a triple win situation for China, Japan and the South Korea to jointly manage marine plastic in the Northwest Pacific. The results of the model confirm that the three countries are willing to maintain long-term cooperation on marine plastic governance, this method can be used to solve the trans-national marine governance innovatively and promote regional ocean cooperation governance. At the same time, by comparing the Northwest Pacific Plan with other action plans, China, Japan and South Korea should abandon political controversy, seeking common ground while putting aside differences, to cooperate fully to curb the growing trend of plastic waste problem in the Northwest Pacific, and contribute to the sustainable development of regional marine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "images" which have commonly distinguished Brussels' relations with Beijing (starting from the 1990s) and Tokyo (since the Cold War years) appear to actually be the result of the concurrence of events and of structuring factors that denoted trade problems on the surface, or dysfunctions generated by the systemic variable. Nonetheless, in this paper I try to explain that these problems are fundamentally based on a much more complex and inherent divergence of two universes of values and different political cultures. Zhao Tingyang's theory on "relation rationality" and the Japanese ethical notion of "relational coexistence" (linked to Watsuji Tetsuro) may help to inscribe and construct modern historical relations between China and Japan towards Europe into a narrative by bringing - in Carol Gluck's words - "the outside in". Finally, I analyze the relationship between the three actors in the light of the systemic changes occurred after the end of the bipolar system and especially following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, trying to highlight the potential of their political dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a localized case study of teaching Sino-Japanese energy issues in the area studies setting of Japanese studies through a historical perspective. It is based on the author's four semesters of teaching at Chinese University of Hong Kong, the complexities of which are increased by the 11 March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting discussions of energy issues in Northeast Asia. Five sub-topics related to energy are discussed here: energy transitions; history of energy fuel use in Northeast Asia; the scarcity of fossil fuels in the region; competition and cooperation for energy resources; and the potential and possibility of non-fossil fuel replacement resources. These five sub-topics are collectively discussed and contextualized in the post-311 or post-Great East Japan Earthquake scenario. The methodology used in analyzing the content approach to covering these topics and making them accessible to students fall into three main areas: the use of historiography to cover the major arguments, concepts and scholarly arguments/schools of thought in teaching these sub-topics; techniques in constructing historical overviews to make these topics accessible to area studies students and constructing literature reviews to stimulate student discussions on post-311 energy scenarios in Northeast Asia within the contextualized of the globalized energy industry and relations. Limitations of these approaches will be discussed through observation techniques. Textual analysis of textbooks covering these topics will also be analyzed based on the author's bibliographic use in constructing the course materials for the above subject areas. Finally, some concluding trends, remarks and observations as well as implications of the above teaching experience are covered in the concluding section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply the optimum currency area (OCA) criteria to assess the suitability of whether the US, Japan or China would best serve as the monetary anchor country for East Asian countries. The OCA criteria used are trade openness, business cycle synchronisation, real exchange rate volatility, inflation convergence and real interest rate cycle synchronisation. The ‘performance’ of these potential anchor countries is compared before and after the Asian financial crisis. The findings suggest an increase in the potential for China as a monetary anchor in the future but the US dollar likely still is the most obvious choice of anchor currency. From an endogenous OCA perspective, the findings also broadly support the existing currency boards in Hong Kong and Macau and the monetary union between Singapore and Brunei. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provide a comparative study of growing strategies of non-profit organisations between Japan and China. The concept of the non-profit organisation (in China, 'non-governmental organisation') was imported into the two societies around the same period; however, many differences emerged between their respective processes of development. I will describe those differences to feel for an answer to the following question: How are non-profit organisations developing uniquely in East Asian societies? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reinterpretation of Japan's responses toward China's pressure over the Yasukuni issue. It is generally taken for granted that Japan's official responses to China's pressure over the issue are determined by the personality of individual leaders, the emergence of Japanese conservative nationalism and the calculations of Japan's national interests with regard to China's strategic role. With the examination of two cases during the Koizumi and Abe administrations between 2001 and 2007, this paper offers an alternative interpretation by highlighting the rationality of individual political actors and the primacy of domestic political survival. The article suggests domestic political legitimacy of individual leaders is a vital factor that affects Japan's official responses to China's pressure over the Yasukuni issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The projects discussed in this paper, Galileo and ITER, are two contrasting experiences of Euro-Asian cooperation within Very Large (Public) Scientific Enterprises. They offer key insights into the deepening relations which have given shape to the rapidly expanding field of Euro-Asian collaborative interregional projects. Cooperative agendas within such "Big Science" endeavors heighten the question of the political considerations supporting the decision to engage specific forms of international cooperation. As the main driving force behind both projects, the EU's choices have resulted in the establishment of novel and distinct forms of Euro-Asian scientific cooperation. A better understanding of how such Euro-Asian initiatives emerge can logically be garnered by confronting the Euro-Chinese cooperation within Galileo, and the Euro-Japanese partnership within ITER. This comparison will show that the agendas and institutions of these two interregional policies vary greatly. Within the same policy field - in casu Large Scientific Projects - and in relationship to the same region - i.e. East Asia - this study shows that fundamentally different policies are practiced side-by-side. If in both cases Euro-Asian scientific cooperation has provided its participants with renewed leverage and unprecedented opportunities, the exact scope and function of these interregional collaborations range from the merely tactical in the Euro-Chinese Galileo experience, to the substantial in the Euro-Japanese ITER experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: China''s demand for energy has grown to fuel its rapidly expanding industrial, commercial and consumer sectors. At the same time, China has become the second largest consumer of petroleum products having surpassed Japan for the first time in 2003. The environmental consequences of a continuation of these trends will have global implications. Government policies and consumers have become more environmentally aware, but the ability of governments to formulate policies has been hindered by the lack of data on inter-factor and inter-fuel substitution possibilities. In this paper Allen partial elasticities of factor and energy substitution, and price elasticities of energy demand are calculated for China''s industrial economy using a two-stage translog cost function approach for the period 1995–2004. The results suggest that energy is substitutable with both capital and labor. Coal is significantly substitutable with electricity and slightly complementary with oil, while oil and electricity are slightly substitutable. China''s energy intensity is increasing during the study period and the major driver appears to be due to the increased use of energy-intensive technology. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Records of individuals who achieved rebirth in the pure land of Amitãbha Buddha began as a genre of hagiography in eighth-century China and began appearing in Japan in the late tenth century. Thereafter these ōjōden were produced repeatedly throughout Japanese history in greater numbers than in China, and came to function as a form of prooftext for the establishment of the Pure Land school. Focusing on an apocryphal Indian ōjōden created in the late Heian period, this paper evaluates the form and content of ōjōden as a unique genre of Japanese religious literature exhibiting influences from monastic bibliography, miracle texts, and the category of adbhutadharma in Indian Buddhist literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines US, Japanese, and European political economy approaches to China, and their effect on US-Japan and US-EU relationships. Great powers with a greater security concern in dealing with another major country care more about power while those with less of a concern are preoccupied with calculations for wealth. China's rise and its actions have posed a far greater security challenge to the United States and Japan and are driving the two countries closer together. The political economy game involving China reveals a dominant welfare motive among the advanced market economies. The ambition to transform China politically has diminished. China's integration into the global market makes a relative gains approach difficult to implement. Globalization simply limits the ability of a state to follow a politics-in-command approach in the absence of actual military conflict, which explains why the political economy approaches of the United States, Europe, and Japan are not that different in the scheme of things. China's own grand strategy to reach out to the world to outflank the US-Japan alliance has also contributed to a divergent European policy toward China although there are severe limitations to Beijing's ability to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scale of development and deployment of open source software (OSS) in the three Northeast Asian countries-China, Japan, and South Korea-is large enough to be noticed at the global level. OSS has redefined the dynamics of software markets in the three countries and has brought significant structural changes in their software industries. Governments have played a pivotal role in the development of OSS industry in the region. Governments in the three countries have also created impetus for continental collaborations in OSS projects. This paper examines the roles and contributions of governments to the OSS initiative in the three countries in terms of a number of technology visions and goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An armed conflict between Taiwan and China is not unthinkable in the future. For historical, geographical, economic, and diplomatic reasons, Japan would not be able to stand on the sidelines. Relying on three major concepts—national interests, path dependence and balance of power, this paper explores Japan's three possible roles in the event of a cross-Strait conflict. First, Japan could pass the buck, staying out of the conflict as much as possible and providing at most logistical and intelligence support for an American military operation. Second, it could balance power, throwing its weight behind Washington against Beijing. Finally, it could play peacemaker. At the end of the article, the author discusses several key factors that would shape Tokyo's decision-making in the event of a cross-Strait conflict and assesses the relative probability of each option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]