A chronological overview from the end of World War II to 1990. This work gives a broad analysis of the major changes, strategies, and situations that helped shape diplomatic and economic relations between the two nations.

A chronological overview from the end of World War II to 1990. This work gives a broad analysis of the major changes, strategies, and situations that helped shape diplomatic and economic relations between the two nations.

This book, first published in 1999, compares the strategies of France and Japan in trying to win economic and political influence in the newly emerging Vietnam, which opened to the international community only after the Vietnamese Communist Party had started economic reforms in 1986. These reforms are aimed at transforming the country’s centrally-planned economy into a government-controlled market economy and at opening Vietnam to foreign capital, technology and know-how. This setting provides a unique opportunity for comparing the strategies of two nations from different continents in conducting their economic relations with a unified Vietnam.

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the consequent outbreak of the Cambodian conflict brought Southeast Asia into instability and deteriorated relations between Vietnam and the subsequently established Vietnam-backed government in Cambodia on the one hand and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries on the other. As a result of the conflict, the Soviet Union established a foothold in Southeast Asia while China, through its support of the anti-Vietnam Cambodian resistance, improved relations with Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand. Japan's Fukuda Doctrine - it’s declared priorities of promoting cooperative and friendly relations between Communist Indochinese nations and non-Communist ASEAN countries – became increas¬ingly at odds with Japan’s role as a member of the Free World in the broader Cold War confrontation. Tokyo had to steer a path between Washington’s hard-line policy of isolating Vietnam and its own desire to prevent regional destabilization. Against this background, this book addresses the following questions: what was Japan’s response to the challenges to its objectives and interests in Southeast Asia and to the Fukuda Doctrine? What role did Japan play for the settlement of the conflict in Cambodia? How did Japan’s diplomacy on the Cambodian problem affect the Japanese role in the region? It argues that Japan’s contribution was more active than has widely been recognized.

This text examines the position of Japan in terms of its political, economic and security role in the three core regions of the global political economy, the United States, East Asia and Europe, as well as in the key global institutions.

Japan, the reigning economic giant of East Asia, and Vietnam, an industrializing socialist country in Southeast Asia with strong links to China, occupy worlds that seem not to intersect. Yet historical connections between the two countries date back at least to the fourteenth century, when a Japanese merchant community flourished in the city of Hoi An.

A reexamination of the historical relationship between Laos and Thailand, by two preeminent Lao historians who bring to light a wealth of new source material in their evaluation of the Laotian leader, Chao Anou, and his failed revolt against Siam. This book challenges conventional Thai interpretations of that event and of the political conflicts leading up to it.