ABSTRACT
The ending of the global Cold War, even if not as complete in East Asia as in Europe, with a divided China and Korean peninsula containing the seeds for renewed conflict, has opened up new opportunities for substate actors to play an increasingly important role in forging crossborder political, economic and cultural links between Japan and China. Whether the spatial scale of analysis is the regional, as in the case of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC),1 the subregional, as illustrated by the East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Plus Three (China, Japan and South Korea),2 or the microregional, as addressed in this chapter,3 Japanese substate actors are actively carving out new international roles in response to the dynamic intersecting of the globalization and regionalization processes unleashed by the crumbling of Cold War structures. At the microregional level, bridges are now being built across the once “frozen seas” off Japan’s shores, with the Cold War thaw providing the impetus to view the sea as a “liquid continent”, where Japanese prefectural and city political authorities, local businesses, and other substate actors, are promoting crossborder bridges of cooperation, as in the links being built across the Yellow Sea to Dalian and other Chinese cities in the region.
