Partnership against the rising dragon? Japan’s foreign policy towards India

Abstract

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has shown a keen interest in his country’s relationship with India with an intention to protect Japan’s stake in maritime affairs under the ‘Indo-Pacific’ concept. In evaluating Japan’s India strategy, a particularly important factor is China’s regional presence. This article, through an analysis of Japan’s India policy during 2013–18, seeks to address the following two questions. First, how has Japan’s India diplomacy under Prime Minister Abe in politics, security, and economics been influenced by its strategies towards China? Second, how can Japan’s diplomatic policies towards India be evaluated in terms of key concepts in relation to a state’s foreign policy responses? The exploration of the development of Japan’s India diplomacy, the geopolitical and geo-economic factors behind it, and the strategic nature of the diplomatic policies enables us to understand the prospect of increasingly important Japan–India relations and their strategic implications for rapidly evolving regional politics.

Keywords:

• Japan
• India
• China
• balancing
• hedging

Notes

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Vyas Utpal and the reviewers of The Pacific Review for their valuable comments on the earlier version of this article.

Notes on contributor

Hidetaka Yoshimatsu is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan. His recent publications include Comparing Institution-Building in East Asia: Power Politics, Governance, and Critical Junctures (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and The Political Economy of Regionalism in East Asia: Integrative Explanation for Dynamics and Challenges (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). His current research interests include regionalism and functional cooperation in East Asia. He has published articles that focus on trade policy and regionalism in Asia in numerous journals, including New Political Economy, Asian Survey, Pacific Review, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific.

Notes

1 REEs are a group of seventeen chemical elements that are part of the family of lanthanides on the periodic table with atomic numbers 57–71 such as neodymium, lanthanum, and cerium.

2 Foreign Minister Taro Kono showed this proposal during meetings with his US, Indian and Australian counterparts (Horimoto, 2018, p. 42).

3 Japan-India Joint Statement: Toward a Free, Open and Prosperous Indo-Pacific. Accessed 16 May 2018. Retrieved from https://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/files/000289999.pdf.

4 In this short article, Abe recommended ‘a strategy whereby Australia, India, Japan, and the US state of Hawaii form a diamond to safeguard the maritime commons stretching from the Indian Ocean region to the western Pacific’. Abe apparently regarded the diamond linkages as a counter to China’s growing influence as he warned that the South China Sea is on the verge of becoming a ‘Lake Beijing’.

5 India is the second largest shareholder of the AIIB, and Modi stated at the third annual meeting of the AIIB in Mumbai in June 2018 that India and the bank were both strongly committed to making economic growth more inclusive and sustainable.