ABSTRACT
This chapter will discuss what roles the Japanese government has played building regional environmental cooperation in East Asia since the early 1970s. The Japanese government has exerted dominant leadership for some regional cooperative mechanisms, but other times it has been a simple participant or a laggard for different cooperative mechanisms. This chapter will provide a comparative analysis of Japan’s foreign policy on regional transboundary air pollution issues, such as acid deposition, persistent organic pollutants, and joint research on long-range transboundary air pollutants in Northeast Asia.
