Introduction: This week

Welcome to the fourth week of “Korea in a Global Context”. In Week three, our focus was on China, thinking about China’s economic and military power, and the implications of the rise of China for regional politics.

More specifically, we paid our attention to the following important questions: - First, what does China want on the global stage? - Will China rise peacefully? - Can China become a hegemonic power in Asia? - How likely is a conflict between China and the U.S. or between China and Japan to occur? - What implications does a rising China have for Korea and for Asia? - How have South Korea-China relations evolved since World War II? - What do you make of the current relationship between the two countries? Whether or not China will be the largest economy or the strongest power in the world within the next 20 years is certainly questionable or even debatable.

However, we can safely say at this moment that currently China is one of the most important actors of global power politics, and China can make a substantial impact upon the global economic and security order making as well as on our daily lives. Here, it is very important to remind ourselves that the rise of China does have manifold implications for global politics and for individual states (particularly for those states in Asia); and the rise of China can be interpreted from both negative and positive perspectives. For example, a rising China can be both opportunities and challenges for many states, including South Korea, not only from economic perspectives, but also from security perspectives as well.

If so, what we need to do first is to think about how to realise those opportunities while coping with the challenges before taking sides with a particular interpretation or prediction in the debates over China’s present and future. today we will talk about Japan, the third biggest economy in the world.