Regarding the following Paul Midford’s comment, which was cited in Richard Katz’s post:

“if Japan really saw China as a threat, like it does North Korea or did with the Soviet Union in the past, it would not trade with them for fear of building up a military threat, not to mention the dangers of becoming dependent.”

Again, I was appalled by this kind of simplistic and naïve neo-realist thinking that does not understand domestic and international political economy at all.
Far from Japan having not traded with the Soviet Union as a threat, Japan was actually the most important non-Communist trade partner of the Soviet Union only after West Germany and their overall trade had reached
$4.4 billion annually by 1979.

As for China and Japan, even before the normalisation of their diplomatic relationship in 1972, they were engaged in trade through private arrangements such as so-called ‘L-T trade’ and ‘friendly trade’. Even before the end of the Cold War, the Chinese market was too big and important to ignore and there were great demands of having trade relationships with China by Japanese business, and LDP politicians responded to such demands. In this 'contemporary' age of economic interdependence between China and Japan, it would be almost impossible for the Japanese governments to ban trade with China, at least for a long term, given private business sector’s strong demand and Japan’s dependence on Chinese products for the Japanese economy and social life. In addition, there are a large number of Japanese companies and enterprises with Japanese capital in China. One of the biggest problems of neo-realist thinkers is that they (or at least some of
them) do not pay enough attention to domestic political economy and relevant actors, as if domestic political economy was a black box and the government could do whatever they want despite opposition by the business sector and citizens.

Hiro Watanabe

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Dr. Hiroaki Richard Watanabe, D.Phil. Oxford, MA Yale Lecturer, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield

http://www.shef.ac.uk/seas/staff/japanese/watanabe.html
http://www.wreac.org/people/WREAC-People/Core-Researche
rs/Watanabe%2C-Hiroaki-Richard/details