ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 has demonstrated how Japan was excluded from the East Asia region politically following defeat in World War II. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate and chronicle how Japanese policy-making agents have mustered power resources in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods in order to reorganize and reintegrate Japan into a new East Asian regional political order, despite the constraints imposed by the structure of the international system. The chapter will deal in turn with Japan’s relations with China, the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia. Each section begins by reiterating the factors of structure and agency, and is then followed by subsections which demonstrate how these factors interacted with each other to affect at certain critical junctures the development of Japan’s political relations with the East Asia region.
