Japan's Role in Asia: Mutual Development or Ruthless Competition.

• Author: Tow, William T.
• Position: Book Review

Japan's Role in Asia: Mutual Development or Ruthless Competition. By Lim Hua Sing. 4th Edition. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2003. Softcover: 333pp.

As evidenced by the impending "Asian summit", China's "peaceful rise", Japan's ongoing identity crisis relative to becoming a "normal" state and major uncertainties about the Korean peninsula, Asia is clearly entering a landmark period of geopolitical and economic change. Fresh assessments of those forces most affecting this process are now critical to understanding Asia at this historic juncture, particularly assessments that are able to bridge analysis of the region's economic development with scrutiny of the longer-term political trends emanating from it.

Initially, Lim Hua Sing's book on Japanese economic interaction in the region would appear to meet this requirement. The scope of issues covered is appropriately broad: investment, trade frictions, overseas development assistance (ODA), technology transfers and free trade areas. Lim even delves very briefly into a politico-military related discussion of Japan's post-Cold War security behaviour. The book is richly endowed with quantitative data in the form of comprehensive tables, charts and assorted statistical compilations. Its documentation is also impressive with extensive source citations found at the end of each chapter. Indeed, the reader is nearly overwhelmed with the range of coverage pertaining to such arcane issues as Japan's non-tariff barriers on Singapore's canned pineapple and Japanese yen fluctuations during the 1990s. Perhaps the volume's greatest strength is the assiduous research that underlies much of its content.

That strength is overshadowed by several weaknesses. Japan's Role in Asia suffers to some degree from conceptual ambiguity and disparate narrative. Fully two-thirds of the book contains material written well before the Asian financial crisis (covering events only up to the mid-1980s) and thus offers observations that are outdated or contradict observations made in other chapters. China, for example, is no longer an oil exporter (p. 123). The conclusion to Chapter 6 waxes optimistic about Japan-ASEAN trade relations while Chapter 5 concludes by strongly implying that trade tensions between these two entities could lead to serious long-term problems. The book's last six chapters are less dated than the first nine, and oscillate between such topics as Japan's domestic economic problems, China's overseas...