Japan as “thought leader” : the Japanese grant scholarship for human resource development and its implications in Vietnam and transitional economies in Asia

Abstract

Former Japanese Foreign Minister Asō Tarō argued in 2005 that Japan needed to become a “Thought Leader” in Asia. Non-physical and non-infrastructural grant aid Japan might be seen as a useful tool toward this aim. The “Japanese Grant Aid for Human Development Scholarship” (JDS), has been chosen as a relevant case study. This programme, started in 2000, offers training for young state officials and future leaders from developing countries in Central, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, in Southeast Asia, in public and private universities in Japan. Countries like Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos supply between thirty and forty students every year to the programme. Through official negotiations, Japan and the recipient countries establish certain “areas of intervention”. These include law, economics and public administration. In view of this, the following research question will be answered: how has human resource development been discursively conceptualised in Japanese ODA? In order to answer this question effectively, it is necessary to look at the issue from a multi-level perspective. The main hypothesis of this research is that an interplay of supra-national interest (that of the US-led international system), Japan’s “national interest”, and the recipient needs have shaped Japanese knowledge-based aid’s objectives since 2000. Instead of looking at development as a single discursive apparatus, this research looks at how different discourses — or to say it with Mannheim (1986), “styles of thought” — interact between donor/recipient, donor/other donors and even among different donor’s agencies. Since the mid-1980s Japan has been one of the world’s biggest aid donors. In the 1990s, Japanese administrators started facing severe fiscal restraints but were able to maintain Japan at the top of the ranking in aid disbursement. After an ODA-related scandal erupted in 2001, Japanese global leadership in aid was jeopardised. Administrators had to reduce the amount of ODA and to spend great effort to justify new aid initiatives in the eyes of the taxpayers. For policymakers in Tokyo aid had to be linked to the general national interest (kokueki). Scholars and aid practitioners are instead more in line with international institutions as OECD, UNDP and World Bank thus supporting Japanese affiliation to the US-led international community (tsukiai). They argue that Japan does not necessarily need to be a “big donor”, rather, it has to become a “smart donor”. As one of the most industrialised countries in the world, Japan might export its know-how, technical assistance and technology in compliance to the needs of the recipient countries. The two ideas of national interest and international affiliation might seem conflicting. However their juxtaposition at the core of the official discourse enables the policymakers to reach a consensus among the diverse stakeholders of the development programmes, ranging from politicians, to businessmen, governmental bureaucracy, and recipient countries’ leaders enabling Japan to attain kokueki in the long run through the strengthening of strategic partnerships with the recipient countries.