Romancing India, Reinventing Japan, Explaining Continuity in the India-Japan Partnership

Abstract

Why did the Hatoyama Yukio administration in Japan continue to build its partnership with India, despite changes in policy toward the U.S. and China? This paper argues that continuity prevailed because partnership with India fit into Hatoyama's vision for Japan's future role in East Asia, not for solely economic reasons or merely as a strategic counterweight to a rising China. The project has two distinct methodological components. The first is a review of the existing secondary literature that seeks to find analytical flaws in explanations for the partnership centered on power and economics. The second part of the project is a review of primary sources, including Japanese and Indian Prime Ministers' official statements, joint statements and agreement texts to distinguish changes in the ideological justification for the partnership given by leaders of differing political leanings. The dominant explanation for the India-Japan partnership put forth by Michael Green and Harsh Pant, among others, has been the powers' mutual concern about China. Others have explained the partnership in purely economic terms as motivated by the complementarity of labor-abundant India and capital-abundant Japan. This paper provides a more constructivist response that fits the Indian partnership into the nationalist visions that Japan's leaders have had for their nation on both the right and left, exploring the differing reasons that each had for pursuing the partnership and explains policy continuity across administrations