In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific
  • Edward J. Lincoln (bio)
Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific. Edited by Ellis S. Krauss and T. J. Pempel. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004. xxi, 421 pages. $65.00, cloth; $27.95, paper.

Edited volumes are often disappointing and difficult to review because either the included essays are not clearly focused on a single subject or the quality of the essays varies widely. Happily, this volume holds up well on both counts. The essays address what should strike most readers as a sensible if not earthshaking hypothesis: U.S.-Japan relations used to be dominated by the bilateral dimension but this is less true today for both the economic and security issues. Meanwhile, all of the essays are competent, with no obvious weak inclusions to raise a reviewer's ire. Nevertheless, I do have some questions and problems about this theme.

This volume evolved from a panel for the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting to a series of several conferences and finally publication. T. J. Pempel provides an introductory chapter that lays out the proposition concerning the shift from bilateralism to multilateralism and weaves the contributions of the various authors into a seemingly convincing whole cloth. The concluding chapter, by Pempel and Krauss together, provides a similarly careful summation that ties all the chapters back into the overarching theme. In between are eleven separate chapters by different authors covering a wide variety of security and economic aspects of the bilateral relationship. On the security side these begin with the bilateral relationship in the context of American strategy toward East Asia (John Ikenberry) and the specifics of the bilateral security relationship (Christopher Hughes and Akiko Fukushima). Detailed reviews then cover how both countries have dealt with China (Mike Mochizuki) and ASEAN (Andrew MacIntyre). On the economic side, much of the focus is on finance, ranging from the evolution [End Page 399] of overall capital flows in East Asia (Natasha Hamilton-Hart), to the Asian financial crisis (Saori Katada), the evolution of new regional financial arrangements (Jennifer Amyx), and direct investments by American and Japanese firms in the East Asian region (Walter Hatch). A final section of the book takes up bilateral relations in the context of various multilateral institutions, including the World Trade Organization (Saadia Pekkanen), the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) process and the ASEAN Regional Form (ARF, both covered in a chapter by Kuniko Ashizawa), and the failed Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalization negotiation in APEC (Ellis Krauss). Whew (more on this "whew" below).

All of these chapters are competent reviews of what happened over the course of the 1990s. If you are looking for a decent academic narrative and analysis of any of these specific areas of bilateral relations, you will find it here. One of the problems that frequently infects edited volumes on U.S.-Japan subjects is that the Japanese contributors come from a very different academic tradition and tend to write conference papers devoid of footnotes or somewhat indifferently organized that are intended to be general "think pieces" while the Americans provide detailed, carefully laid out, heavily footnoted analytical papers. That problem does not affect this volume (unless there were papers that were ultimately excluded from the final product). All of the authors have Western academic training and all approach their subjects in a fairly uniform political science style.

However, this volume is not without its problems. These are not necessarily fatal issues that should lead anyone to avoid reading this volume, but they are certainly issues to think about when approaching the overarching theme and the analysis presented.

First, the seemingly sensible overarching theme of this volume is not quite so obvious or even convincing after reading the whole volume. At first blush, the length of this volume (327 pages of text) seemed to be excessive to discuss a rather simple and obvious concept—hence the "whew" after enumerating the list of contributions. Were eleven separate chapters on individual subjects really necessary to support the working hypothesis of the project? However, it turns out that rather than providing redundant support for the hypothesis, a number of...

pdf