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The purpose of this paper is to explain Japan’s role in the peace process on the Korean Peninsula that began in early 2018.

This paper emphasizes the historical context of international politics in Northeast Asia, rather than power politics or geopolitics. The paper reaffirms the significance of the ongoing peace process on the Korean Peninsula by considering a synthesis of three joint declarations published in 1998, 2000 and 2002 between the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Japan, the ROK and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and between the DPRK and Japan.

The normalization of diplomatic relations between DPRK and Japan, along with reaffirmation of the joint declaration between the ROK and Japan, and the Panmunjeom Declaration, would be a base for denuclearizing Northeast Asia.

In Northeast Asia, historical reconciliation among the two Koreas and Japan and peace-building between the two parties on the Peninsula are closely linked. Moreover, the three bilateral relationships among these three parties are also the basis for creating a new multilateral security order in Northeast Asia.

The government of Korea considers the promotion of Free Trade Agreements (FTA) as necessary to develop its economy into an open trading nation. As for the countries with which the Korean government is actively investigating possible FTAs, there are Japan, Singapore, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN,) and Mexico. For the time-being, the FTA with Japan seems to be a critical one in practicing Korea s FTA policy. Recently, Korean industries show negative positions against a Korea-Japan FTA, with strong opposition from the labor union insisting that it is evident that Korea will sustain damages in the short-run and the dynamic (long-term) benefits are still ambiguous and uncertain. Regardless of whether their argument is correct or not, it will be difficult for Korea to conclude the FTA with Japan unless there is concrete confidence of balanced economic gains through the FTA between the two countries.

The economic success of East Asia was due to an export-led growth strategy, which was heavily dependent on the global trading system underpinned by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In recent years, however; East Asian countries have shifted their trade policy focus to regional agreements and made Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) among themselves arid with other regions. Government organization has been restructured to increase FTA activities. Generally, the current literature predicts that FTA activities of East Asia would help to increase the welfare of the region. In this paper; we offer a critical assessment of East Asia FTAs. We note that East Asia FTAs provide incomplete coverage of sectors and are likely to lead to an inefficient resource allocation. FTA movements are not matched with actual trade flows. The benefits of East Asia FTAs are fairly limited and potential benefits, if any, would not likely be materialized in the near future. Our overall assessment is that the recent policy shift in East Asian countries from multilateral trade orientation or unilateral action to regionalism or a parallel multilateral and regional trade approach will not produce much gain. The governments should increase their efforts at economic reform and reduce barriers to trade and investment, rather than to allocate more resource and manpower to FTA activities.

The purpose of this paper is to present the North Korea policy pursued by the Moon Jae-in administration and discuss the possibility of a weakened alliance between South Korea and the USA.

This paper compares the North Korean policies and the ROK–US alliance under the Moon administration, analyzing the recent inter-Korean and North Korea–US summits, with a focus on the issues of denuclearization and establishing a peace regime.

This paper reveals that the approach taken by the Moon administration regarding North Korea is similar to that of North Korea and China, and that the ROK–US alliance is likely to weaken should there be any change concerning the North Korean nuclear issue.

Denuclearization takes place in accordance with the agreement between North Korea and the USA, there is a high likelihood of the ROK–US alliance weakening.

As Japan has been slowly opening up to foreign workers to supplement its shrinking workforce, local employees have had to deal with increased diversity at work, owing to the presence of foreign coworkers. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between foreign coworkers’ nationality (specifically Chinese, Korean and those from Western countries) and the perception of the benefits and threats of cultural diversity in the workplace by Japanese employees.

A sample of Japanese employees working in Japan, half of which working with foreigners, was used, focusing on those Japanese employees who reported working with foreign coworkers of a single nationality.

The authors found that Japanese workers’ perceived benefits of cultural diversity at work, but not perceived threats, are significantly impacted by the unique nationality of their foreign coworkers. Specifically, the effect of coworker nationality is most apparent for the two benefits of “understanding of diverse groups in society” and “social environment,” whereby cultural distance is significantly and positively related to these perceived benefits. And more benefits from cultural diversity at work are perceived by Japanese employees in the presence of Western or Chinese, rather than South Korean coworkers.

In the Japanese context, hiring employees from certain distant and heterogeneous cultures and nationalities could increase the positive perception of multiculturalism at work, therefore facilitating diversity management and fostering inclusion in the culture of the firm.

Very little research in Japan has examined perception biases among native employees based on the nationality of their foreign coworkers, which is critical as globally minded Japanese firms are trying to increase their level of internal internationalization.