Abstract:
Despite its manifest material capabilities, Japan in Asia has been a non-leader or a
sectoral leader at best. Starting from a working premise that Japan was not
uninterested in enhancing its leadership position, the explanatory framework
adopted here is centred on a regional source of socialisation as a mechanism to
explain why the Japanese leadership has been limited in the first place, and why it
has taken mainly ‘economic development’ as its purpose. The methodology
proposed here takes role theory in foreign policy as the point of departure, but
departs from it so as to follow the research agenda of a “more social” theory in
international politics. It leads to a hypothesis that it is the structure of ideas at the
sub-systemic level that limits Japanese leadership in Asia.