Japan-Africa Relations (review)

The discourse on Japan's relations with Africa has gathered momentum commensurate with Japan's expanding role in the region's socioeconomic development since the early 1990s. Tokyo has switched from an immobilist attitude to a more proactive response to issues of the African region. Japan's new approach is encapsulated in the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), initiated in 1993, through which it has established a dialogue with the African countries and their major partners in an attempt to address the region's developmental problems. Scholarly discourse between 2008 (when the fourth TICAD summit was held) and 2010—including Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo's Japan-Africa Relations¹—affirms the emergence of Japan as a leading participant in the debate about Africa's development.

Lumumba-Kasongo affirms that "Africa is searching for new paradigms of social progress because most of her old experiments have been useless and detrimental to African causes" (p. xiii). Although his monograph is not a work of historiography in the classical sense, it is led by a conviction that there might be useful points of reference in Japan's socioeconomic development in the nineteenth century for the development of Africa. The overall focus of the volume is explaining "the general patterns of Japan's economic assistance and its policy implications in the search for social progress in Africa as defined by the states [and civil society organizations]" (p. 33). The author's tools of analysis lie in the field of international political economy, and the first two chapters of the volume are designed to contextualize Japan Africa relations in the theories of international politics. The other chapters generally address relations between Japan and Africa in the broad context of international relations, culminating in chapter 10, which looks at the mechanics of Japan's recent initiatives toward the African countries through the TICAD process. Chapter 6 seeks to increase appreciation among Japanese authorities of the sources of Africa's problems so they might have greater empathy with the region and its people. This is apparently necessary "because of the absence of Japan's experiential and historical ground for empathy in general" (p. 121). The chapter explores relations between Africa and the old imperial powers and how centuries of slavery and colonialism have contributed to the region's development malaise.

The central question in this book is whether Japan's economic assistance could lead to better life chances for people in the African countries in the long term. The analysis suggests that in contrast to the Washington Consensus, which is the favorite of the Western donors with whom Japan is compared in the volume, the TICAD process projects a more "holistic perspective to deal with the African crises," not least because its "discourse tends to go beyond the liberal economic principle . . . or the orthodox free market approach" (p. 213). However, the author also posits that the corrective measures within the objectives of TICAD "are not very much isolated from the dogmas of neoliberal projects of the 1990s and those articulated by the international organizations and trans-nationals in Africa" (p. 218).

The author notes lingering traces of the structural adjustment policy (SAP) in the TICAD process. In its economic assistance program for Africa in the 1980s, Japan uncritically subscribed to the SAP (as dictated by the hegemonic donor regime, led by the United States), which famously undermined the potential for Africa's economic development during this period. Thus, "Japan's participation in the adjustment programs in Africa implies . . . Japan was also partially . . . responsible for the consequence that the implementation of those programs caused in Africa" (p. 112). What is not in doubt is the apparent contradiction between Japan's support for the SAP and its own general outlook on development. As Howard Stein affirms, "Japan's support for adjustment is quite puzzling given the . . . conflict between the Japanese history of economic development and the policies embedded in adjustment."²

Tokyo supported the SAP for Africa partly because it felt Africa was still the preserve of the...