Japan and Russia: Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy

This volume attempts to present how Japanese and Russian academics portray and analyze the domestic politics and foreign policy of the two countries in the 2010s. In an era of globalization, Seymore Martin Lipset1 is most apt when he says that one never knows one country without knowing other countries. A foremost scholar specializing in and well-versed with one country cannot automatically be a scholar in the Lipset sense. When “socialism in one country” was a good slogan for Russia during much of the Soviet period (1917–1991) and when the Economic Planning Agency drew Japan’s “national economic outlook” in much of the preglobalization era (before 1985–), knowing one country was almost enough for country specialists—a starkly different feat in the 2010s.