ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 outlined how Japan, during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, has gradually managed to overcome the international structural barriers of bipolarity, national division and the colonial past, in order to reassert quietly its political presence in East Asia and assist the reintegration of the region as a political unit. This chapter now turns to focus upon how Japan has managed similarly to overcome the international structural barrier to interaction with and between the various East Asian states of the diversity of their economic systems, and to promote a degree of economic convergence and integration between itself and the region. As a result, at the start of the twenty-first century, Japan has re-emerged as the principal, if not wholly unchallenged, economic organizer and leader of a readily identifiable East Asian economic region.
