Internationalization of the Japanese and Their Approaches
to the Other Peoples of Asia

1. Going into and out of Japan: Transnational Flows of People, Goods, Money, and Information

To begin, let me examine the modern history of international exchange activities by Japan and the Japanese. During most of the modern period, Japan was basically a recipient of cultural elements and messages from other nations, mostly the Western countries. From time to time Japan might have sent its cultural elements and messages to the outside world, yet even nowadays the Japanese tend to consider themselves to be permanent receivers. Perhaps because of an inferiority complex, many Japanese, even well-informed intellectuals and bureaucrats, have been advocating until quite recently that Japan should move from the position of the receiver to that of the sender of cultural elements and messages. I have been saying that this is not an appropriate response. Why? Because actually Japan has already become quite a big sender, we simply did not notice it.

As you can see from Figure 1, in 20 years --- from 1968 to 1988 --- the annual flow of money in and out of Japan rose from a base of 100 to nearly 9,000. Likewise, the annual flow of telecommunications messages jumped from 100 in 1968 to 4,500 in 1988. The annual flow of goods expressed by values of export and import increased by almost 20 times in 20 years, and the annual total number of people going abroad from Japan and coming to Japan from abroad increased by 14 times. This last index of the increase of people's transborder movements is by no means small. These days, 15 million Japanese go abroad annually. Likewise, Figure 4 tells us, the number of Japanese people visiting Singapore, in particular, increased from 241,000 in 1986 to 568,000 in 1991.

The economic development and the development of international transportation have been the major backdrop for all of this. Figure 3 tells us what was some of the immediate impetus for this increase. For the Japanese, international travel had been restricted until 1964. That year, the Tokyo Olympic Games were held, and international travel was liberalized. The number of outgoing Japanese gradually increased, surpassing that of incoming foreign visitors in 1970. In 1970, the jumbo jet was put into commercial service, and as you see, this was a great impetus.

It is now an established fact that far more Japanese visit other countries than foreigners visit Japan. Yet, I wonder if the Japanese overseas tourists come back home having learned sufficiently enough from other peoples. In other words, I wonder if the total amount of Japanese learning about other countries matches that of other peoples' learning about Japan. I think this is a real question, but some Japanese leaders are more concerned if the Japanese are still recipients of foreign cultural elements or not. Their concern is based on their historical understanding that Japan has long been an importer of foreign cultures, and they maintain that now it is time that Japan should be a sender of information and cultural elements. I would like to address this question for the moment.

Needless to say, cultural elements and messages are not carried overseas in the form of international telecommunications messages alone, goods are a potent means of sending and receiving cultural elements and messages internationally, and so are traveling people and money flow.

In sum, transnational flows of goods, people, money, and information can all involve international movements of cultural elements and messages. Without intending it, Japan has become a great mover of cultural elements and messages. However, people who think the Japanese are still recipients of foreign cultures would say that the most important question is not the total volume but the balance between the outgoing and the incoming cultural elements and messages. In Figure 2, the horizontal line in the center is the balance line, when the incoming volume and the outgoing volume are equal, the mark will drop on this line. Above the center line, the volume outgoing from Japan exceeds the volume incoming to Japan. As you can see from this graph, Japan has been constantly a net sender of money, goods, and people and a net receiver only of telecommunications information. Being conscious of the slight overall imbalance in this field, which is unfavourable to Japan, some Japanese demand more outgoing transmission of Japanese cultural elements and messages, when actually, as we have seen, Japan is a big sender.

2. Moving with Return Tickets: Global Migration in Asia

Now let me take a look at people's transnational movements more generally. According to an estimate by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), 80 million people resided outside their countries of birth and citizenship in the year of 1990. Some other figures estimate that there were 100 million migrants in 1992. The 1990 figure is about equal to the population of united Germany and suggests that about 1.7 percent of the world's population lives abroad. To this number of migrants, we may add, for instance, nearly 15 million Japanese international tourists annually these past few years. However, 1.7 percent of the world's population being migrants means that the vast majority of people are still residing in their countries of birth and citizenship. The figure of 80 million is huge, but, as Stephen Castles and Mark Miller suggest, quantitatively it may not be so significant. More significant are the qualitative characteristics of recent transborder movements of population. For instance, some 25 to 30 million of the estimated 80 million recent immigrants are thought to be foreign workers, and they are believed to remit over $67 billion annually to their homelands, thereby placing labor second only to oil in world trade.

Castles and Miller call today "the age of migration," and they describe the following general tendencies of migration movements today: (1) the globalization of migration, (2) the acceleration of migration, (3) the differentiation of migration, and (4) the feminization of migration. By the globalization of migration, they mean the tendency for more and more countries to be affected by migratory movements at the same time; the diversity of the areas of origin is also increasing. Acceleration refers to the tendency for migrations to grow in volume in all major regions. Differentiation points to the fact that most countries have a whole range of types of immigration at once. And since the 1960s women have been playing an increasing role in all regions and all types of migration. Thus their fourth characteristic of the feminization of migration.

Why do we see the phenomenon of global migration with these characteristics today? The usual economic explanation seeks the cause in economic gaps, which bring about all sorts of push factors on the side of the sending countries and pull factors on the side of the receiving countries. This push-pull mode of explanation has difficulty in explaining why the same countries are sending and receiving migrants at the same time; why many, if not all, foreign workers move back and forth so frequently; and why an increasing number of them do not permanently reside in the labour-receiving countries. In order to answer these questions, I would propose that we take into consideration a third factor, namely, the state of world transportation and communications today. After all, such transportation and communication factors, existing between the push factors and the pull factors, determine the actual patterns of people's transborder movements.

Figuratively speaking, today's global migrant moves across national borders with return tickets in hand. This is of course made possible by advances in means of transportation. Earlier, people could not move back and forth across the ocean and across continents so easily. They ventured abroad with a one-way ticket only, and most of them could not go home for a lifetime. Migrants became immigrants almost inevitably. Today migrants travel on jumbo jets for far cheaper fares. Even if they go abroad with one-way tickets only, they can easily earn the money to buy their return tickets.

Because it was so difficult for earlier immigrants to go back home once they emigrated, it was inevitable that they did their best to become assimilated in the receiving countries. If that was not possible for the first-generation immigrants, the second generation would achieve the necessary assimilation. Those days assimilation was the concern of immigrants themselves and the receiving societies as well. Today we see far less pressure for assimilation. Foreign workers are required to gain only the limited language ability necessary on work sites, and they can escape into their ethnic enclave whenever they wish. Thanks to advanced international telecommunications technology, they can make international calls at relatively small cost. While living abroad for longer or shorter periods, they retain their ethnic ties.

In short, it is now possible for us to keep our ethnic ties while we move globally, without losing our national identities as we must carry our own national passports. Rather, just because it is easier for us to move across national borders, it is also easy to keep our ethnicity. People move globally, carrying their ethnicities along with them. We can even say that transnational movements increase our ethnic consciousness. Having come to think this way, we realize that the overseas Chinese might have been just this type of global migrant long ago. Although officially immigrants, they have kept their strongholds in their ethnic enclaves, the ubiquitous Chinatowns, and they maintained strong ties with their home villages to which they yearned to return, although they might never be able to do so alive. If they wished, on the other hand, they could assimilate themselves into their new countries, and they often succeeded in doing so. In the opinion of Professor Wang Gungwu of Hong Kong University, who is a second-generation overseas Chinese himself, "sojourners" is an appropriate word to characterise overseas Chinese. Now we are perhaps all sojourners. In the modern age, which was an age of sedentariness, of our national enclosure, we used to divide ourselves according to our nationalities alone; now, in the age of migration, we can divide ourselves along our ethnicities too, but not along those ethnicities alone.

3. Culture and Identity in Increasing International Contacts

It is my basic premise that international exchanges of any sort, be they transnational flows of people, or goods, or money, or information, and regardless of whether exchanges are carried out intentionally or unintentionally, will result in cultural contacts. For those elements carry elements of the culture of their origin. Even money, although it is theoretically international, void of cultural difference, realistically is a culture carrier, in that very often particular money buys particular goods and information.

Cultural contacts often bring changes to the culture, especially that of the receiving side. Asian cultures, for instance, since their contacts with Western civilization or cultures, have all gone through tremendous cultural changes. The cultural change is often resisted by people who would not like their accustomed way of living to be forcefully changed. The resistance to forced cultural change is natural, and the resistance sometimes becomes quite heightened, whether the cultural contacts that lead to the cultural change are made intentionally or unintentionally. We Japanese have the experience of inviting cultural changes by intentionally seeking for cultural contacts, most conspicuously during the Meiji period. To the extent that we were intentional for invited cultural changes at the receiving end, we are apt to forget that unintentional contacts could also bring cultural changes that are bleeding to receiving peoples. I think we must be cautioned of this.

In retrospect, a bigger change than the end of the Cold War in 1989 took place around 1970. You will recall that in the late 1960s and the early 1970s man landed on the moon for the first time, while we also realised that oil and other natural resources were not so bountiful on the enclosed earth. Students were rebelling against authorities all over the world, and the war in Vietnam was entering its final phase, leading towards the final victory of colonised Asian people over the colonisers. To these events you may add the first flight of a commercial jumbo jet, the signing of the Helsinki Declaration, which included a human rights "basket," and Thomas Kuhn's publication of his theory of paradigm shift.

These events shook from the bottom not only the Cold-War system but the nation- state system itself on which the Cold-War system had fed for some time. I am inclined to think that later historians will take the 1970s as the turning point of world history when the age of nation-states entered its last stage. In any case, I would divide the recent era into three periods: first, the period of nation-states; second, the post-nation-state period, which started in the 1970s; and third, the post-Cold-War period from 1989 onwards, which, in my thinking, is nothing but a subperiod of the second, post-nation-state period.

Now, during the nation-state period, a typical nation-state would naturally undertake international cultural exchanges in order to strengthen itself. Thus, a less developed nation would try to import selected cultural elements from a more developed nation, while a more developed nation would export its cultural values to other nations in order to increase it prestige or its sphere of influence. Thus, the dominant form of international cultural exchanges in this period was one-way flows, with nations either sending or receiving cultural elements. In this situation, the less developed nation was obliged to guard itself against international cultural exchanges, lest over-importation of foreign cultural elements should destroy its own culture or tradition.

In Asia, since the latter half of the nineteenth century we have witnessed a long series of cultural conflicts of this sort, both domestically and internationally. Out of this situation, experts in the humanities developed the concept of cultural relativism, which, they said, would require international cultural exchanges to be carried out both ways. Nevertheless, in so far as the nation-state monopolised the function of international cultural exchanges, two-way streams of exchanges were not fully realised. Only when the world entered the initial stage of the post-nation period did various actors other than the nation-state start engaging in two-way international exchanges. Previously all exchange activities were executed from the national center. Now various private groups, including grass-roots groups, are very active in carrying out international exchanges, and they do so from their local bases. Furthermore, as we have entered the post-Cold-War subperiod and we are engaged in more and more transnational relations, people's international exchanges are also taking a new form. That is, people are working together across national boundaries towards common and mutual benefits, such as cooperation for local development and environmental protection.

In opposition to Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory, I would argue that the unit of international relations, in the past, at present, and perhaps in the future too, is not a civilization but a cultural entity and that our issue should not be the clash of civilizations but contacts and conflicts between cultures. I would rather agree with Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics, who sees "culture as an important constituent of the modernity that all societies are forced to move towards" and says that "any approach based on the ??homogeneity' concept invites an alternative history of both international relations and the development of individual societies. For the latter, the shift is evident: what may previously have been seen as discrete, isolated, national histories, now appear much more clearly as the result of international processes, of imitation, competition, defensive modernization and influence."

I cannot agree with Professor Samuel Huntington on all points in his article "The Clash of Civilizations?" I do, however, accept two arguments of his. At one point he said, "Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities." Here I will agree with him, because he is talking about the multilayered structure of cultures. At another point several lines below, he talks about multiple identities, saying, "People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself ... as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner." Again, I fully agree with this statement. However, right between these two groups of sentences I quote, he wrote, "Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations." I find the utmost difficulty in agreeing with this key sentence.

In addition to the increase in people's transnational mobility I talked about moments ago, we now have a multitude of global problems, such as the global environmental crisis, which both require us and help us to further develop our multiple identities. In order to illustrate this real possibility, I would like to quote from Huntington again. Quoting from Donald Horowitz, he wrote, "An Ibo may be ... an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African." Can we suppose that in New York, this African has stopped being an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo, an Ibo, and a Nigerian, only to be an African belonging to the African civilisation? Certainly not. To a passerby, he may simply be an African, but within himself he is simultaneously all of them. He must have multiple identities for sure. His multiple identities are achieved exactly because he has moved vertically from one level to another by having moved intranationally and transnationally. And people's transnational mobility makes it possible for this African in New York to have serious interactions with Asians, Arabs, Latin Americans and others, who all have their respective multiple identities. With the global problems hanging over them, their meetings will make it possible for them to together identify themselves as all living together on this single planet.

4. Universalism and/or Multiculturalism?

To come back to the general question of culture, a culture is a complex system composed of an innumerable number of cultural elements. Within a culture, human rights, for instance, as a part of the system, contain an amount of related cultural elements interlocking with each other. Of those cultural elements comprising the human rights portion of the culture, some are unique to the culture and others are common with other cultures. And through international processes of culture contacts, some elements may become common, while others may become more distinct. In short, I would like to argue it is not that human rights in total are either particular or universal but that they are partly unique and partly common. But what cultural elements are regarded as universal and common?

We must admit that what are regarded as universal values today are mostly bequeathed by the modern West. But here we cannot help but ask the often asked question: "But whose values are they?" Intellectuals of the East, including Japan, argue for human rights, but many of them often feel compelled to oppose, or doubt at least, certain demands for human rights from the West, because they consider those to be particular of Western culture(s) and because they feel the Westerners are blind of this fact. Today this dilemma is expressed on the stage of human rights diplomacy, but it has a deeper root. Is it possible for the Eastern intellectual to argue for universal values, yet to be based on Eastern culture(s)?

Japanese intellectuals as a whole need a lot more thinking and debating before they get rid of their ambiguity over whether human rights are culturally defined or universal. As I see it, the Japanese government is indecisive and fluctuating too, while the governments of the other Asian countries, and many opinion leaders too in some cases, are more or less firmly against the imposing by the West of its notions of human rights as universal. A survey of their statements at the United Nations Vienna Conference on Human Rights, for example, will reveal that the most tenacious of them are Singapore, China, and North Korea.

To give you one example of intellectual debates within Japan, Professor Nobuyuki Yasuda, a specialist of Asian legal sociology at Nagoya University and a member of a study group of comparative human rights concepts, maintains that there are human rights of an Asian type. The gist of his argument is that Asian human rights are rights of the collectivity more than Euro-American human rights, which are rights of the individual, and that the Asian type of human rights are rooted in the primordial (and ideal and universal) community of Asia. Professor Kazuko Mori, a specialist of contemporary Chinese politics at Yokohama Metropolitan University and another member of the same study group, does not agree with Professor Yasuda's argument. She argues that although the Chinese government is for the moment successful in fighting back the human rights diplomacy of the United States and there are many internal and international causes, historical and current, for that fight, Chinese people will eventually accept some of the Western human rights, because they are universal after all. Between them, my argument is eclectic, on which I shall shortly elaborate a little.

One way to escape from clashes between particular universalisms is to believe in multiculturalism. But many have difficulty in accepting multiculturalism, too. When we feel difficulty with multiculturalism, we are considering it by placing it on a single plane, so to speak. In other words, we tend to look at multiculturalism horizontally, by placing, in the case of American society for example, the Chinese Americans side-by-side with white Anglo-Saxon Americans. If we place two or more ethnic groups horizontally, then we are almost destined to have a multitude of ethnic conflicts and only a little hope for interethnic understanding. But if we look at multiculturalism vertically, we shall get a different picture. With the multilayered structure of cultures and multiple identities offered by none other than Professor Huntington, it is possible to have a picture of vertical multiculturalism. A Chinese-American youth, for example, can be a Chinese on one level and an American on another level. People's transnational mobility, best represented by their transnational movements, greatly helps to develop such multiple identities, and thereby what I call vertical multiculturalism.

I have said that there is another angle of looking at multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, looked at horizontally on a single plane, may not contribute to building a new world order, to say nothing of an orderly, peaceful new world order. But multiculturalism, dealt with vertically on multiple planes, will give rise to a new, hopeful perspective. For it seems to me that so far all arguments on a new world order have only been concerned with changes of constillations on a single plane, that is international politics.

It is needless for me to point out that international society is no longer a society of states alone. Actors existing on all different levels --- namely, local, national, regional, and global --- come together to mingle and produce international and transnational relations. If we shift our perspective ninety degrees, we see that today's international society has a multilayered structure with a number of concentric circles forming something like complex nested boxes. Mark Hoffman, in his phrase "overlapping or interlocking communities which embrace varying degrees of commitment as the basis for developing a just world order," and Fred Halliday, in his phrase "multiple dimensions of international society," are each trying to express a similar thinking to mine.

Vertical multiculturalism, of which I am hopeful, has, however, its own difficulties. Vertical multiculturalism means internalising multiculturalism within the individual self and the group. Internalised multiculturalism may cause the individual and the group to be schizophrenic. As people's transnational movements keep increasing along with the transnational movements of goods, services, and information, conflicting values and cultural elements keep coming in. The individual and the group will both experience internal conflicts of cultural elements. In order to skillfully manage these internal cultural conflicts so that vertical multiculturalism may contribute to bringing about an orderly, peaceful new world order, it is required of us to carry on productive cultural exchanges, consciously accumulating universal elements and preserving valuable distinct cultural elements simultaneously.

5. Japanese Approaches to the Other Peoples of Asia

Thus, I believe that universalism and multiculturalism are not mutually exclusive. In a culture, there must be some elements universal to all mankind, while many other elements are unique to it. And I do believe they both must be respected. In more concrete terms, in everyday international contacts, we must be sensitive to similarities and dissimilarities as much as we can.

We Japanese have many similarities in culture with the other peoples of Asia. First, we are similar, because we are all human. Second, we are similar, because we are all Asian. We have the common history of having been thrown into international contacts with the West and forced into cultural contacts leading to cultural changes, whether we liked it or not. For over a century we have tried to overcome our inferior positions and tried to preserve our own cultures. Finally we are now getting out of that stage of history, mainly thanks to the Asian economic success.

On the other hand, we Japanese are aware that there are many cultural dissimilarities from the other peoples of Asia. Dissimilarities in culture are products of differences, first in places and second in history. I do not think I have to point out that local differences produce cultural differences. We Japanese must take a special note of our dissimilarities from the other Asian peoples that were produced by historical differences. As Asians we have been under the same destiny, but in Asian peoples' trying to get over the destiny in their own ways, we Japanese gave the other peoples of Asia a great deal of trouble and hardship by our military advances during the war and our economic advances during most of the postwar period. Some chances of international exchanges and cultural contacts we are currently enjoying with the other peoples of Asia may still be the products of our previous economic advances. But fortunately our economic relations have recently changed to more equal-footed ties, and above all internationalisation is making the Japanese people more sensitive of cultural similarities and dissimilarities than ever.

It is often said that to sensitise ourselves to cultural similarities and dissimilarities, mutual understanding is necessary and essential. It is so often said that it is almost a cliche. I think we must be as careful of this cliche as of other cliches.

It was in 1977 that former Primer Minister of Japan, the late Mr. Takeo Fukuda, announced what came to be known as his "Manila Doctrine" that mutual understanding should be the basic principle of Japan's approach to Southeast Asia. Five years earlier the Japan Foundation had been established, with Mr. Fukuda being one of its influential advocates. The Japan Foundation was given the same principle of mutual understanding as its guideline. But the Foundation was charged not with the introduction of other peoples' cultures to the Japanese people, but only with the sending out of Japanese culture to other peoples in order to increase their "mutual understanding," which was actually their one-sided understanding of Japanese culture. I think Mr. Fukuda is to be praised for his serving the cause of international cultural exchange, but the mutual understanding that he proposed and the Japanese believed in those days was quite self-centered and apologetic of Japanese economic advances towards other Asian countries.

Today a new concept of mutual understanding is needed. It is not one-way mutual understanding but two-way mutual understanding. It is to more sensitise people towards the cultural similarities and dissimilarities among us. And it is both to increase the universal and to increase the unique. As I said before, international contacts inevitably involve cultural contacts, which often invite cultural changes that are sometimes hard to swallow. So we ought to be most attentive which cultural elements other people have may be changed and which must not be changed. And if we can wish for more, we should be attentive enough to learn from others their cultural elements that will enrich our life. This is only possible by truly mutual understanding of each other's culture.

Only recently did the Japanese people start thinking that international exchanges should be two- way, reciprocal exercises. It was after 1989, namely after we entered the post-Cold-War sub-period, that large numbers of international exchange groups in Japan began to involve themselves in reciprocal activities and sometimes in joint activities with groups from other nations. I once made a cursory survey of what types of international exchange activities Japanese non- governmental groups were engaged in, and found out that earlier they were only interested in sending out messages from Japan or inviting guests from abroad, but then they gradually put into practice a new kind of exchange activities in which Japanese and non-Japanese participants live and work together.

Another more recent type of international exchange activity, infrequent so far but very significant, is joint projects tackling global environmental and other problems. Interested Japanese have summed up all these new trends in the idea of "kyosei" ("conviviality" or "living together"), which is now often used in referring to international exchanges. "Kyosei" means mutually respecting different cultures, and it also means peoples of different cultures living together peacefully and fruitfully. In my opinion, "kyosei" is not just mutual respect for cultural differences. It also demands that people of different cultures work together for common purposes.

The Japan Foundation's Asian Center, formerly the ASEAN Culture Center, is the first public organisation in Japan charged with introducing the cultures of other countries to the Japanese. Parenthetically, in international cultural exchanges, after all, more benefit is gained by receiving messages than by sending them. More specifically, there is one type of exchange program undertaken by the Center that is potentially very important indeed. The Center plans and sponsors joint productions of dramas, musical events, films, and so forth by teams of multinational and multicultural artists from many Asian countries, including Japan. Those involved are precisely peoples of different cultures working together for common goals. This is an experiment for a new age. Similar small-scale efforts are being made by nongovernmental, grass-roots groups as well in Japan.

Mr. Kishore Mahbubani, in his famous Foreign Affairs article, made a powerful recommendation for a two-way street of mutual learning. I fully agree with him. But the question is, who will walk on the two-way street? I should say it is rather difficult for the government to do so. It is far easier and more effective for nongovernmental organizations, including individual persons, to meet, work and live together in the two-way learning process.

Finally, I would like to say that the "ASEAN way" and the "Asian way" are indicative that Asian peoples are the closest to the ideal mutual understanding. The ideal mutual understanding is the basis for coexistence, living together and working together, and in turn it is strengthened by these endeavours. I hope we Japanese have this Asian similarity.

Thank you very much.

(The above article is offered for reference purposes and does not necessarily represent the policy or views of the Japanese Government)

Reference: Castles, Stephen and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration, International Population Movements in the Modern World, Macmillan, 1993.

Halliday, Fred, Rethinking International Relations, Macmillan, 1994.

Hirano Kenichiro, "International Cultural Conflicts: Causes and Remedies," Japan Review of International Affairs, Japan Institute of International Affairs, 2 (2) (Fall/Winter 1988), pp. 143- 164.

Hirano Kenichiro, "The Westernization of clothes and the state in Meiji Japan," Hirano Kenichiro ed., The State and Cultural Transformation: Perspectives from East Asia, United Nations University Press, 1993, pp. 121-131.

Hirano Kenichiro, "Bunmei no shoutotsu ka bunka no masatsu ka?: Hanchinton ronbun hihan" (The clash of civilization or conflicts of cultures?: A critique of Samuel Huntington's thesis), Hikaku Bunmei (Comparative Civilization), vol. 10 (November 1994), pp. 21-37.

Hirano Kenichiro, "Japan's Cultural Exchange Approaches in Asia Pacific", Peter King and Yoichi Kibata, eds., Peace Building in the Asia Pacific Region: Perspectives from Japan and Australia, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 88-97.

Hoffman, Mark, "Normative international theory: approaches and issues," A.J.R. Groom and Margot Light, eds., Contemporary International Relations: A Guide to Theory, Pinter, 1994, pp. 27-44.

Huntington, Samuel P., "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 22-49.

Mahbubani, Kishore, "The Pacific Way," Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995, pp. 100-111.

Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton University Press, 1994.

Kenichiro Hirano

Kenichiro Hirano obtained his M.A. in International Relations at the University of Tokyo (1963), and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University (1983). He was a Fulbright Senior Researcher in 1986-87 at Harvard University.

Works that have been published include "Japanese Internationalization and Approaches to Asia", "The Japanese in Manchuria in 1915", "People's Transnational Movements and a New World Order", "International Cultural Conflicts. Causes and Remedies". Kenichiro Hirano has co-authored International Relations and National Integration in Asia: Studies with Fool on History, Culture and International Relations, and edited The State and Cultural Transformation: Perspectives from East Asia and Flows of People Across National Boundaries in an Internationalizing World.

Kenichiro Hirano is currently Professor of International Relations at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He is also Executive Director of Japan Association for Asian Political and Economic Studies, Japan Association of International Relations (JAIR), and Japan Association of International Law.