Why has Japan emerged from the “lost decades” unscathed from the populist wave and a far more consequential actor in the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific? In answering this question, Japan’s Quiet Leadership provides a sweeping look at Japan’s domestic economic and political evolution, its economic statecraft, and the array of geopolitical challenges that have triggered a gradual but substantial shift in the country’s security profile. This deep dive into Japan’s trajectory over the last three decades underscores Japan’s hidden strengths in its democratic resilience, social stability, and proactive diplomacy; while reckoning with the profound challenges the nation faces: depopulation, rising inequality, voter disengagement, and threats to Asia’s long peace. The book traces the profound currents of change coursing through the Japanese polity and its external environment; and the myriad ways in which Japan’s experience has become more relevant to countries coping with slow growth, adverse demographics, adjustment to economic globalization, and the emergence of a powerful and assertive China. This is a story of Japan’s reinvention as a network power to overcome the harsh realities of diminishing relative capabilities. In reshaping the Indo-Pacific, Tokyo deployed a robust economic strategy of trade integration and infrastructure finance; and a proactive security diplomacy cultivating new partnerships with regional and extra-regional actors and deepening the alliance with the United States. Nevertheless, acute geopolitical rifts, Japan’s pandemic insularity, and the securitization of international economic relations are testing Japan’s statecraft of connectivity. The tasks at home are no less pressing: delivering on the green, digital, and human capital transformations, avoiding the return of the politics of indecision at the helm of the nation, and fostering democratic dynamism. This book illuminates where the Japanese polity, economy, and people are heading as we move past the Abe era, and well into the 2020s and beyond.

The balancing of competing interests and goals will have momentous consequences for Japan—and the United States—in their quest for economic growth, social harmony, and international clout. Japan and the United States face difficult choices in charting their paths ahead as trading nations. Tokyo has long aimed for greater decisiveness, which would allow it to move away from a fragmented policymaking system favoring the status quo in order to enable meaningful internal reforms and acquire a larger voice in trade negotiations. And Washington confronts an uphill battle in rebuilding a fraying domestic consensus in favor of internationalism essential to sustain its leadership role as a champion of free trade. In Dilemmas of a Trading Nation, Mireya Solís describes how accomplishing these tasks will require the skillful navigation of vexing tradeoffs that emerge from pursuing desirable, but to some extent contradictory goals: economic competitiveness, social legitimacy, and political viability. Trade policy has catapulted front and center to the national conversations taking place in each country about their desired future direction—economic renewal, a relaunched social compact, and projected international influence. Dilemmas of a Trading Nation underscores the global consequences of these defining trade dilemmas for Japan and the United States: decisiveness, reform, internationalism. At stake is the ability of these leading economies to upgrade international economic rules and create incentives for emerging economies to converge toward these higher standards. At play is the reaffirmation of a rules-based international order that has been a source of postwar stability, the deepening of a bilateral alliance at the core of America's diplomacy in Asia, and the ability to reassure friends and rivals of the staying power of the United States. In the execution of trade policy today, we are witnessing an international leadership test dominated by domestic governance dilemmas.

Japan is on the verge of a sea change. After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the 21st century, critical questions arise about its motivations. What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns that will help explain how Japan will respond to the emerging environment of world politics? American understanding of Japanese character and purpose has been tenuous at best. We have repeatedly underestimated Japan in the realm of foreign policy. Now as Japan shows signs of vitality and international engagement, it is more important than ever that we understand the forces that drive Japan. In Japan Rising, renowned expert Kenneth Pyle identities the common threads that bind the divergent strategies of modern Japan, providing essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Japan arrived at this moment -- and what to expect in the future.

A Region of Regimes traces the relationship between politics and economics—power and prosperity—in the Asia-Pacific in the decades since the Second World War. This book complicates familiar and incomplete narratives of the "Asian economic miracle" to show radically different paths leading to high growth for many but abject failure for some. T. J. Pempel analyzes policies and data from ten East Asian countries, categorizing them into three distinct regime types, each historically contingent and the product of specific configurations of domestic institutions, socio-economic resources, and external support. Pempel identifies Japan, Korea, and Taiwan as developmental regimes, showing how each then diverged due to domestic and international forces. North Korea, Myanmar, and the Philippines (under Marcos) comprise "rapacious regimes" in this analysis, while Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand form "ersatz developmental regimes." Uniquely, China emerges as an evolving hybrid of all three regime types. A Region of Regimes concludes by showing how the shifting interactions of these regimes have profoundly shaped the Asia-Pacific region and the globe across the postwar era.

Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?" Supported by the latest groundbreaking research, Quiet Leadership provides a brain-based approach that will help busy leaders, executives, and managers improve their own and their colleagues' performance. Rock offers a practical, six-step guide to making permanent workplace performance change by unleashing higher productivity, new levels of morale, and greater job satisfaction.

This book asks why, in the wake of the Cold War, Japan suddenly reversed years of steadfast opposition to security cooperation with its neighbors. Long isolated and opposed to multilateral agreements, Japan proposed East Asia's first multilateral security forum in the early 1990s, emerging as a regional leader. Overcoming Isolationism explores what led to this surprising about-face and offers a corrective to the misperception that Japan's security strategy is reactive to US pressure and unresponsive to its neighbors. Paul Midford draws on newly released official documents and extensive interviews to reveal a quarter century of Japanese leadership in promoting regional security cooperation. He demonstrates that Japan has a much more nuanced relationship with its neighbors and has played a more significant leadership role in shaping East Asian security than has previously been recognized.

A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.