Regionalism and Rivalry: Japan and the United States in Pacific Asia.

This collection of ten research papers - a dozen if we include the editors' introduction and an appraisal by Martin Feldstein in his presidential capacity - is the product of a 1992 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conference unusual for its multi-disciplinary character. It combines the talents of economists and political scientists. (One of the editors, Frankel, is an economist, the other, Kahler, a political scientist.) The resulting meld of viewpoints, which seems to have been predominantly cordial, may be called "political economy" - a novel meaning for this ambiguous term.

This NBER conference was designed originally to consider the question: "Are U.S.-Japan relations in the Pacific Asian region a potential national security risk for the U.S.?" Economists were to focus on three sorts of questions: Is the Pacific Asian area becoming (contrary to American preferences) an economic bloc with unusual concentration of trade, finance, and investment within the area? Does Japan dominate the economic relations of the region, including trade, financial, and investment flows? Are the Pacific Asian nations becoming dependent on Japan for trade, financing, private investment, and/or foreign aid? Political science paper writers were given a more complex trio of key questions: If an East Asian economic bloc centered on Japan is developing or will soon develop, what effect will this bloc have on the political alliances of these countries with the U.S. and with Japan? What effect will such a bloc have on potential security relations in the area? Can these developments pose a significant military or "more general" (i.e., economic) security risk for the U.S.?

The broadest generalization this reviewer can offer - it gives inadequate credit for the high-level statistical work involved in individual papers - is that the collection as a whole gives neither aid nor comfort to America's bevy of alarmists, Japan-bashers, and "revisionists." Among the paper-writers and their 13 commentators, none represents these lines of thought and few take them at all seriously. (Japan's kembei or "America-haters" get a slightly better press from the Japanese contributors.)

It seldom happens at academic conferences that paper-writers answer precisely the questions the organizers set for them - "only this, and nothing more." The present conference is no exception, and Professor Feldstein accordingly does readers a special service by classifying many - though by no means all - of their answers under five heads, to indicate what he himself, an unusually well-informed economist but hardly an Asian specialist, believes he has learned from the proceedings:

1. Is Japan acting in ways that could lead to a hegemonic position in the Pacific Asian region? No more so than the region's geography would lead us to anticipate. Neither is Japan playing an unusually central role in the region's commodity trade, although the same is not true for aid or for direct investment. (More comparisons with the American role in Latin America or the Caribbean, or with the German role in the European Union, might have been helpful here, and also the imminent rise of China to rivalry with Japan.)

2. Is Japan acting in ways that could lead to a hegemonic position in the Pacific Asian region? There has never died out in Japan, and indeed there may never die out, a certain nostalgia for the good old days of the exploitative Dai-To-A-Kyo-Ei-Ken (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, of unhappy memory). So much is true, but present Japanese policies, even when more favorable to Japanese interests than to American or European ones, are also beneficial to Japan's partners in the region. (No zero-sum gaming here!)

3. Does Japan want to establish a hegemonic position in the region? Possibly so if the experiment were a free good, but not at the cost of increased friction both with the U.S. and with resentful elements in Pacific Asian countries alienated by Japanese Army occupation in World War II. Hegemony also carries with it responsibility (as in Korea or Cambodia) as an offset to enhancement of national pride and to the propagation of "Japanese" models of economic organization and activity.

4. Will the collapse of the Soviet Union change U.S.-Japan relations in ways that effect U.S. national security? It will make Japan less dependent on the American military and nuclear "umbrellas." It will also make the U.S. less dependent on Japanese bases and military production for activities on the Asian continent. Each country is thus more apt than before to adopt policies which injure the other, but it seems fanciful to anticipate actual menace to the U.S. (Nor should we forget the ongoing dispute between Japan and Russia over the Hoppo Ryodo - the Southern Kuriles - as a damper for anti-American turns in Japanese policy).

5. Is the U.S. vulnerable to shifts in U.S.-Japan relations? There seem to be two problems here, neither of them important for the near future. One conceivable danger is the cutting off or boycott by Japan of its exports to the U.S. of particular high-technology goods or components in which Japan has acquired or will acquire world-wide monopoly power. The other is the intentional destabilization of the American economy by the dumping on the international market of Japanese holdings of American assets, especially of real estate and government securities (the national debt). In each case it seems to this reviewer, as to the members of this conference, that the U.S. retaliation - featuring the boycotting of Japanese exports - would injure Japan both more and faster than these Japanese bogeys would injure the U.S. But it would be foolish to deny that kembei sentiment is growing in Japan, or that important American "fat figures in the public eye" are involuntarily nurturing potential Japanese Hitlers or Zhirinovskys with their Japan-bashing, much as their fathers nurtured the Tojos, "young officers," and kamikazes of a half-century ago.

Martin Bronfenbrenner Duke University, Emeritus