Japans System of Official Development Assistance

Once the world's largest ODA provider, contemporary Japan seems much less visible in international development. However, this book demonstrates that Japan, with its own aid philosophy, experiences, and models of aid, has ample lessons to offer to the international community as the latter seeks new paradigms of development cooperation.

This book presents the only English language, up-to-date, and comprehensive reference to Japanese law. It covers a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals of the Japanese legal system, to the Civil Code which is the cornerstone of private law in Japan and business related laws in a comprehensive manner. The author presents the current state of Japanese law in operation by referring to numerous cases and the latest discussions. Since the last edition in 1999, Japanese Law, in almost every area, has undergone substantial reform, all of which is reflected in the new text. In particular, the new edition contains the first comprehensive analysis of the new Company Law and the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law. This makes this book an essential reference work for all who have an interest in Japanese law.

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

The world order as we know it is currently undergoing profound changes, and in its wake, so is foreign aid. Donors of foreign aid, development assistance or development cooperation around the world are already facing new challenges in the changing development architecture. This is an architecture that globally seems to become increasingly forgiving of foreign aid as a win-win concept that also meets the donors’ own national interests—something that has been an unofficial Japanese trademark for many years. This book examines Japan’s development assistance as it transitions away from Official Development Assistance and towards Development Cooperation. In this transition, the strong and reciprocal relationships between Japanese development policy and comprehensive security, diplomacy, foreign, domestic and economic policies are likely to become even more consolidated and integrated. The utilization of, and changes within, Japanese development policy therefore affects not only recipients of foreign aid but also the relationships Japan enjoys with its allies and strategic partners, as well as the relations to competing donors and rivals in the region and around the world. Japanese foreign aid as such provides an extremely interesting case from where regional and even global changes can be understood. Written by a multidisciplinary team of contributors from the fields of political science, international relations, development, economics, public opinion and Japan studies, the book sets out to be innovative in capturing the essence of the changing patterns of development cooperation, and more importantly, Japan’s role in within it, in an era of great change. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Foreign Policy and International Relations.