Thomas Feldhoff

For much of the 20th century, economic growth was fueled by cheap oil-based energy supply. Due to increasing resource constraints, however, the political and strategic importance of oil has become a significant part of energy and foreign policy making in East and Southeast Asian countries. In Japan, the rise of China’s economic and military power is a source of considerable concern. To enhance energy security, the Japanese government has recently amended its energy regulatory framework, which reveals high political awareness of risks resulting from the looming key resources shortage and competition over access. An essential understanding that national energy security is a politically and economically sensitive area with a clear international dimension affecting everyday life is critical in shaping a nation’s energy future

depriving this concept of whatever analytical precision it may have in order to make it fi t the Japanese context? That said, this book has many merits. It is a clear, meticulously researched study that makes an important contribution to the literature on state-society relations in Japan. The study’s combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, moreover, will make it relevant to a broad swath of social scientists. In short, I learned a great deal from this study and recommend it to anyone interested in state-society relations in Japan.

Washoku, the traditional dietary culture of the Japanese, was designated as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in December 2013. For the Japanese government, this designation implies a long-term commitment to preserve culinary traditions and the diversity of ingredients “strongly rooted in the terroir” (Nippon.com 2014). Drastic changes in Japanese food consumption in the post-war years, however, are directly linked to the continuous decline in the demand for domestic produce. Furthermore, a new wave of transregional mega-trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), have created new challenges for food and agricultural businesses in Japan and across the globe (Harada 2013; Yamashita 2015a, 2015b). The declining agricultural sector, habitually supported by government intervention, has been faced with the threat of new policy directions to more liberalisation since Japan joined negotiations for the TPPA. Issues related to agriculture have broken out of the narrow policy community, which has intentionally limited policy debate and the scope for policy change for many decades. “The zombification of Japanese farming” (Gōdo 2014) has been the most noticeable policy outcome of this. In fact, discourses linking Japan’s national identity to traditional food, particularly rice, have been elaborated over time by an influential policy community to make a strong argument for the continued protection of agriculture. With an increasing population and limited natural opportunities to broaden the basis for domestic production, this was linked to the supporting idea of food security, which has been a major topic on the political agenda well before and ever after World War Two (Balaam 1984; Harris 1982; Ogura 1976; Tanaka and Hosoe 2008; MAFF 2013). As economic stagnation, ageing and declining populations are severe problems in Japan’s rural and remote areas today, the agricultural sector is at risk of diminishing almost completely. This challenge requires a dramatic policy change, which is difficult to achieve as the combination of history and food culture, food security objectives and patronage for farmers caused powerful vested interests. George Mulgan (2000) stressed that agrarian power has helped to produce a distinctly pro-rural bias of post-war Japanese governments. However, as new transregional free trade agreements are now promising business opportunities for other sectors of the Japanese economy, losing in the rather narrow venue of agriculture seems to have become politically feasible. This fleeting impression must be contrasted with careful scrutiny though. Based on a literature review, including governmental and nongovernmental documents, policy reports and briefings, secondary data analysis and an in-depth look at the recent media coverage, this chapter provides relevant background knowledge regarding Japan’s food security related discourse and how this relates to the politics of building and preserving the national food identity. It asks questions about the changes of farmer’s political power in the context of punctuated equilibrium theory in policy studies. In particular, the chapter argues that the prospect of a comprehensive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) could have served as a focusing event triggering substantive agricultural policy change and, thus, as a facilitator of long overdue domestic structural reforms. The chapter closes with an assessment of recent agricultural policy amendments in the context of the TTPA negotiations and the broader political and social contexts.

In the new millennium, perceptions of the African continent changed dramatically as new powerful Asian actors, such as China and India, emerged to alter Africa’s international position. In May 2000, the front page of The Economist ran its famous “hopeless continent” headline, while more than a decade later, in December 2011, it maintains Africa is the “rising continent”. Findings indicated that African nations have achieved remarkable economic growth. This has been attributed to administrative reforms and institutional development, an improved revenue allocation structure, particularly in favour of infrastructure investments, and economic reforms improving productivity and the business climate. In addition, the reforms have paved way for a revival of foreign direct investment in Africa’s natural resources industries, with China leading the way. This is now part of a broader economic trend of accelerating investment and trade between African nations and emerging countries, including India, Brazil and the Middle East, profoundly re-ordering global trade and investment patterns (CII-WTO 2013; UNECA 2011: 1-3). Despite the fact that foreign direct investment and trade with mineral commodities have enhanced economic growth in many mineral-rich African countries, it remains unclear what the true potential of natural resources is and how this sector could effectively contribute to broader social and economic development goals (ADF-VIII 2012). Progress and opportunities for development are regularly assessed by international organisations, including the United Nations (AfdB et al. 2011, 2013, 2015). The UN Millennium Development Goals have now expired, and the Post-2015 Development Agenda “Transforming our world” has been adopted by the General Assembly only recently. It reaffirms the international community’s commitment “to create conditions for sustainable, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all, taking into account different levels of national development and capacities“ (UN 2015). Determined action is indeed required as tens of millions of people across Africa are still suffering from poverty – and Africa will account for the bulk of world population growth to be expected this century, further constraining efforts to address poverty issues. Performance below potential is despite the stronger integration of African countries into the global economy, and one obvious reason is that this integration is largely based on the natural comparative advantage. As Broadman (2007: 140) notes with regard to Chinese and Indian investment in Africa, this “reflects complementarities (…) based on factor endowment of natural resources in Africa versus skilled labour in China and India.” The “Africa Mining Vision”, adopted by the African Heads of State and Government in 2009, addressed this issue, and called for action to integrate the mining sector into the wider development agenda (African Union 2009). This chapter argues that Asian countries, which have emerged as important stakeholders in Africa’s natural resources industries, will have to play a major role in supporting this endeavour. Rashly denouncing their engagement as “neo-colonisation” is a widespread misconception, one that is kept alive deliberately by competing powers. Asian involvement in Africa rather reflects globalising processes, which continuously alter the nature and the degree of interconnection between different parts of the world (Dicken 2015: 8), and a global trend of increasing South-South cooperation among emerging markets. Taking into account the imaginaries used by Western stakeholders to blame China for “neo-colonialism” is a challenge for critical geopolitics, which offers an additional perspective to the analysis here. Negative Western imaginaries of Chinese businesses have a long history (Barclay and Smith 2013: 133-134), and the extractive industries have become a widely recognised symbol of China’s alleged exploitation of Africa. Critical geopolitics interrogates “the implicit and explicit meanings” that are given to certain places in order to influence and to determine international political and military policy (Flint and Taylor 2007: 69). The approach sees power as mediated by ways of talking about and seeing the world, and understands international conflict in terms of competing narratives each side tells about itself and the “other” (Agnew et al. 2008: 4). As Africa’s long-term structural socio-economic transformation is the challenge, however, African dealing with these power struggles in ways that enable African ownership of the development process is a key factor to success. The aim of this chapter is to study how especially China and India have been shaping Africa’s international position in recent years. In the first section, the chapter reviews Africa-Asia relations with a focus on natural resources. Then, it identifies the patterns of foreign direct investment and trade, followed by the…

In the aftermath of the 11 March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan is facing the endeavour to shape a new energy policy path. Top-down central state policies for low carbon communities of the “nuclear age” are now challenged by bottom-up local community and citizen initiatives looking for a non-nuclear future, new governance arrangements and a recalibration of traditional state-society-relations. A national mechanism for coordination and conflict management that brings together the top-down and bottom-up approaches, based on a consistent long-term energy policy framework and support for local approaches to a more decentralized energy supply structure, is a key policy desideratum. Moreover, a fundamental reform of central-local government relationships in the fiscal and financial policy fields would be a prerequisite to successfully strengthening local democracy. While the credibility and legitimacy of institutional standard practices to cope with the energy transition challenge is rapidly eroding, however, the resistance of vested interests in Japan’s political economy still is a major barrier to substantial policy change. Most importantly, current government policies suggest the assumption that, despite the disaster experience, nuclear power will remain part of Japan’s energy mix for the time being in order to realize a low carbon society.

ABSTRACT While promoting the expansion of alternative energy resources from the bottom-up, community ownership of assets is an important means to strengthen community resilience through local stakeholder engagement. This article argues that asset-based community development in the energy sector (ABCD-E) is a useful concept to frame our understanding of current Japanese community power initiatives which aim to reduce local dependencies on core executive decision-making and resource distribution, hence to reconfigure state–society and intergovernmental relations. Based on a case study of renewable energy projects in the City of Iida, located in Nagano Prefecture, empirical evidence for this multi-sectoral, place-based policy approach from Japan is provided. However, the tradition of central state authoritarianism, the interdependence and overlapping jurisdictional boundaries in the energy and regional policy areas, and vested interests of powerful interest groups pose strong barriers to energy-related ABCD functionality in the context of multi-level governance constraints.

Japan’s March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown shattered the country’s nuclear-dependent energy policy. Questions about the long-term consequences of Fukushima still linger, but a political and economic re-evaluation of the costs and benefits of this high-risk technology is long overdue. Concerns about the future role of nuclear power are part of the larger international debate about energy security and climate change. Germany is frequently seen as leading the way toward a clean-energy future with its nuclear exit and renewables expansion, but both Japan and Germany have managed to maintain a secure energy supply with dramatically reduced—or even zero—nuclear power since 2011. A comparison of similarities and differences between Japan and Germany helps to explain each country’s responses to Fukushima and to draw out key lessons for future energy systems. Energy policies that scrutinize vested interests of the industry and allow for more decentralized energy systems, relying on more renewable energy sources and more programs for emissions reductions, are key in shaping the inevitable big shift.

Airports in East and Southeast Asia - Japan’s airport infrastructure policies and perspectives in view of transnational competition. The paper deals with air passenger traffic and airports in East and Southeast Asia. Following some introductory remarks on the conceptual framework of studies on airport competition and globalization processes, the paper concentrates on intercity competition and infrastructure policies for major metropolitan airports in the Asia-Pacific region. The paper especially provides insights into the current strategies, basic problems and perspectives of Japanese airport infrastructure policies.