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  • Japan and East Asian Monetary Regionalism: Towards a Proactive Leadership Role?
  • Saori N. Katada (bio)
Japan and East Asian Monetary Regionalism: Towards a Proactive Leadership Role? By Shigeko Hayashi. Routledge, London, 2006. xiv, 175 pages. $140.00.

At the height of the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) in the summer of 1997, the Japanese government proposed creation of an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF). With an Asian membership excluding the United States, this regional fund would counter future crises. Although the proposal lived only a few months before it was put to rest partly because of U.S. opposition, Japan watchers around the world viewed this action by Japan's Ministry of Finance (MOF) as "the most ambitious foreign economic policy proposal to come out of Tokyo in the postwar period" (p. 124, quoting Eric Altbach).1 Almost a decade later, in May 2007, the ASEAN+3 finance ministers committed to establishing such a fund by expanding and pooling the bilateral swap scheme established through the 2000 Chiang Mai Initiative. In this context, Shigeko Hayashi's book on Japan and East Asian Monetary Regionalism examines the proactive initiatives taken by Japan in regional cooperation and finance.

The author considers the proactive financial initiatives taken by the Japanese government as representative of the shift in Japan's foreign policy "from political minimalism to more initiative-taking politically. . . independent of the United States" (p. 3) and analyzes how this shift emerged. [End Page 157] Hence, the focus of her investigation is the "nature of Japanese foreign policy in the context of gradual but highly significant shifts through the post-[cold] war period" (p. 10). Her analysis aims to provide answers to the "puzzling question of disagreement on Japanese foreign policy" (p. 19) between the "reactive state" thesis and strategic and purposeful foreign policy. After laying out the "camps" of conflicting theories about the na-ture of Japanese foreign policy both from the reactive versus proactive axis (pp. 5–8) and from the U.S.-dependent versus U.S.-independent axis (pp. 8–10), Hayashi proceeds to argue that "it is crucial to analyse carefully these changes in Japanese policy in order to characterize effectively the nature of Japanese foreign policy, and in turn to understand what Japan has been doing regionally" (p. 11).

Under this framework, chapter 2 of the book—the longest chapter—reviews the history of Japan's regional policy since 1945 and provides a chronological overview of Japanese foreign policy toward East Asia, where "Japan has increasingly become more willing to take the initiatives in the region. . . .under the domestic, regional and international constraints imposed on it" (p. 21). The author's claim is appropriately illustrated as she depicts the changing nature of Japan's relationship with the region from the Yoshida Doctrine of the 1950s to the Fukuda Doctrine of the late 1970s. She turns finally to more involved policies in the form of "leadership from behind" as Japanese business began investing heavily in the region with explicit and implicit support from the Japanese government (pp. 43–48).

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe Japan's proactive position in relation to regional development and financial arrangements, and these are the main attraction of Hayashi's book. The chapters cover three related issues regarding East Asia on which Japan clashed with the United States: Japan's ideological challenge to the Washington Consensus (chapter 3), Japan's response to the AFC and its AMF proposal (chapter 4), and East Asia's emerging regionalism (chapter 5). All three chapters describe, with abundant use of Japanese-language materials and interviews with Japanese officials in Tokyo, how the Japanese government has gradually shifted its regional policy quietly and challenged U.S. dominance in East Asia. These chapters capture an implicit and explicit flow of events showing how the Japanese government began gradually but persistently to take a proactive role in the region with initiatives independent of the United States. This proactive regional policy has its roots in Japan's own views regarding the important role of the government and industrial policy in economic development. A much-diluted version of those views culminated in publication by the World Bank of The...

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