ABSTRACT
Introduction Japan was the first non-Western country to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and by the time it did so in 1964 it had constructed a well-thought-out programme of economic cooperation with developing countries over the previous decade. After joining the US-led Western economic alliance, however, undoing foundational Japanese economic cooperation institutions, norms and policy priorities, and replacing them with Western bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) norms developed by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) proved to be a difficult and lengthy process. For this reason, even though it has decisively narrowed the gap between its ODA style and those of other DAC members, Japan retains a distinctive profile among bilateral donors. It would take until the creation of the “New” Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in 2008 for Japan to make a radical break with past institutional practices in order to better meet DAC ODA norms. Ironically, at this watershed moment in Japanese ODA, the need to compete with Chinese aid diplomacy for influence in Africa and other parts of the developing world began to compel Japan to re-examine the development assistance concepts and techniques that it had developed in the 1950s. China was now touting aid policy and practices that promised recipients what early Japanese economic cooperation had delivered in the past: economic infrastructure that promised to increase the recipient’s industrial production, inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports.
