ABSTRACT
Japan's economic power was one of the key sources of its influence in the Asian region. As the first Asian nation to successfully industrialize and modernize, Japan developed an enormous head start over other Asian nations, a gap that only began to narrow in the 1980s. Japan has long sought to promote the development of Asian regional institutions, beginning in the 1960s when it proposed the creation of a Pacific Asian Free Trade Area and took the lead in the establishing the Asian Development Bank. However, the type of international institutional arrangements that are emerging in the Asian region are likely to remain relatively weak and underdeveloped, and they will enhance Japanese soft power only to a limited extent. The impact of International trends on Japan's image in Northeast Asia, and thus on its ability to exercise soft power in the region, has been devastating.
