Japan's Foreign Relations - 9780367016494

Taylor & Francis

After World War II, Japan reemerged in the arena of international relations as an almost exclusively economic power without military might or territorial ambitions. Within some thirty years it transformed itself from a semideveloped state to a technological superpower with an economy that today is the second largest in the free world, next only to the United States, accounting for over 10 percent of total global production. The management of a rapidly growing industrial state with little domestic supply of resources necessarily requires great skill in the difficult task of maintaining sufficient access to overseas markets to sustain internal economic activity. Not surprisingly, then, Japan\u2019s foreign relations from World War II to the present have been heavily conditioned by economic considerations. This collection of original articles investigates how the economic growth of Japan has affected the pattern of its foreign relations and where and to what extent economic principles ha