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Japan's asian diplomacy: a legacy of two millennia
Ogura Kazuo, who is a graduate of both Tokyo and Cambridge universities, served as Japanese ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and France before becoming president of the Japan Foundation. He currently holds professorial appointments at universities in Japan. In this masterly survey Ambassador Ogura looks at Japan’s relations with China and Korea since the earliest recorded times. He notes that previous studies have concentrated on the aggressive ideology of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and ‘Pan-Asianism’ as an ideology of resistance to Western colonialism, an idea he problematises in this work. He suggests that ‘our perspective should address the question of how the nation of Japan perceives itself.’ In his opening chapter on ‘The Ethos of Japan’s Asian Diplomacy’ he draws attention to the concept of ‘Japan as the “divine land”’ and discusses Nichiren’s famous Rissho ankoku ron (A Treatise on Pacifying the State by Establishing Orthodoxy, 1260) as contributing to the creation of the divine land ideology. He argues that insufficient attention has hitherto been given to the importance of Japan’s internal politics and domestic power struggles in relation to the development of Japanese foreign policy in Asia. Part I is entitled the ‘Fundamentals of Japan’s Asian diplomacy’. In this Ogura stresses the role and influence of ‘shared values’ in the formulation of policy, both in the early Japanese relationship with China and in the modern era in response to modernization, colonialism and in the postwar period to democracy and human rights. He describes Japan’s response to the ‘Yellow Peril’ jibes, concluding that in the Anglo-Japanese alliance ‘by making itself an ally of a “white” nation Japan strove to leave Asia and the “yellow race” behind.’ The rejection of Japan’s proposal for racial equality to the League of Nations followed by the condemnation by the League of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria can, he thinks, be seen as contributing to ‘Japan’s strategy of
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