Japan and Indo-Pacific Strategy: How can Singapore and ASEAN be fit in?

Abstract
Japan, as the largest “developed economy” in the region, has consistently considered initiatives in economic cooperation in Southeast Asia to be one of the main strategic fields in its regional diplomacy over recent decades, serving as a primary source of capital, technology and foreign aid in Southeast Asian development. Yet Japan’s predominant position in the regional infrastructure and development has been challenged by China, which has actively pursued economic diplomacy and taken major initiatives such as the formulation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Since mid-2016, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has advocated the creation of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” as a new regional framework for economic cooperation. This seminar aims to elucidate Japan’s intention behind the launch of this new regional concept against the backdrop of its origins and development, while making comparisons with Chinese initiatives. It also examines how Japan positions ASEAN and Singapore in its Indo-Pacific strategy which, as some argue, deals with Southeast Asian states peripherally.

About the Speaker
Takashi Terada is Professor of International Relations at Dōshisha University, Kyoto. He received his Ph.D from the Australian National University in 1999. Before taking up his current position in April 2012, he was an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore (1999-2006) and associate and full professor at Waseda University (2006-2011). He has also served as a visiting fellow at University of Warwick, U.K. (2011 and 2012), a public policy scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C. (2012), and an operating adviser for the US-Japan Institute (USJI) (2011~). His areas of specialty include international political economy in Asia and the Pacific, theoretical and empirical studies of Asian regionalism and regional integration, and Japanese politics and foreign policy. His book in Japanese entitled East Asian and Asia-Pacific Regional Integration: Institutional and Normative Competitions among Great-powers was published by University of Tokyo Press (2013). He is the recipient of the 2005 J.G. Crawford Award.