Japan's Aid Policy since the Cold War: Rhetoric and Reality

Abstract

Ever since Japan's arrival as a major donor of foreign aid, the motivations underlying the Japanese program have been the subject of debate among policy makers and scholars. This debate has been particularly contentious since 1989, the year Japan achieved the status as the world's leading donor of official development assistance (ODA). Japanese leaders subsequently pledged to become better aid citizens by supporting not only economic development but also social and political reforms in developing countries. In June 1992, the Japanese government adopted its first formal policy on development aid, the ODA Charter, which identified such factors as democratization, human rights, and restraint in military spending as preconditions for developing countries to receive Japanese aid. Japan's espoused new approach to foreign was well received within the regime.1 Members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) welcomed the alignment of Japanese with the normative principles and qualitative standards established in the 1970s by that body. A consensus emerged in the scholarly literature that the long-held geoeconomic orientation of Japanese ODA was becoming less valid. The Japanese government, many analysts argued, had exchanged its self-interested strategy for a degree of leadership within the regime comparable to its economic contributions. Aid administrators, it was further argued, had switched their emphasis from the earning strategies of linking with