2
studies of this research could successfully identify the ideas as important explanatory
roles in foreign policy decision-making because the policy continuity happened while the
international and domestic political systems experienced radical changes. Third, although
Japan has been called a “reactive state”
2
since Japanese foreign policy was conducted in
response to pressure from the United States, this research displays the proactive side of
Japan’s foreign policy. Though this study does not deny that the United States played a
crucial role in Japanese policy in the postwar period, Japanese economic development
policy for Asia was guided by its own preference and interests shaped through
institutionalized ideas.
Research Questions
Japan’s colonial policies in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria were enhanced by
Japan’s imperial motivations. Yet these polices included unique economic development
policies comparing other Western imperialisms, and the policies share major similarities
although Japan had different purposes in each colonies depending on the stages and time
of Japan’s imperialism. After World War II, Japan started to provide its foreign aid to
Asian countries like other Western industrialized nations. Why did Japan conduct its own
independent economic development policies even though Japan’s other foreign policies
were greatly influenced by the Cold War, especially, the United States?
Moreover, why do Japan’s colonial and ODA policy share similar unique
economic development policies even though historical contexts and purpose changed?
The Japanese domestic political system was restructured while the international system
changed its configurations from a multipolar to a bipolar system. Yet Japanese economic
policies in Asian countries did not change, and became recognized as the Asian
Economic Development Style.
3
Structuralists cannot explain the continuity in Japan’s economic foreign policy
despite radical changes in the external security environment. The bureaucratic politics
approach can account for continuity in the postwar era since the same bureaucratic
political decision-making process was conducted for Japanese ODA policy. This
approach, however, does not provide reasons why diverging interests among different
ministries and agencies could be accommodated to continue same economic development
policy over the last hundred years. Also, ODA literature did not explain the origin of
Japan’s economic development policies completely because it does not examine Japan’s
foreign economic policies before World War II.
4
Japan's economic development policies are the dependent variables for this study.
Specifically, major similarities in the economic development policies of Japan's colonial
and ODA policy will be systematically explained. The major similarities between Japan's
colonial and ODA policy are 1) investing heavily in economic infrastructures, 2)
2
Kent Calder, “Japanese Foreign Economic Policy Formation: Explaining the “Reactive State,” World
Politics 40, (1988), 517-541.
3
The World Bank, The East Asian Miracle (Washington, DC: Oxford University Press, 1993).
4
Except Akira Nishigaki and Yasutanmi Shimomura, The Economics of Development Assistance (Tokyo:
LTCB International Library Foundation, 1999), 153-5 and Akitoshi Miyashita, “Gaiatsu and Japan’s
Foreign Aid: Rethinking the Reactive-Proactive Debate”, International Studies Quarterly (1999) 43, 696.
Nishigaki and Shimomura traced the ideas of Japan’s ODA to the Edo period. Miyashita states that Japan’s
postwar foreign aid was designed to reestablish wartime “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
Convention