Over the past year, Indo-Japanese relations have gained new momentum. As rival civilization-states to China, Japan and India have the most to lose from China’s potential hegemony in Asia-and the most to gain from working together and with the United States to ensure that the future Asian order remains pluralistic rather than sinocentric. For India’s modernizing leaders, few countries afford a better prospect for a development partnership than the nation that has been at the forefront of the industrial and technological revolutions that have transformed the face of Asia. In many respects, economic, technological, and security partnership with India offer Japan the prospect of renewal as a twenty-first century great power, less dependent on the United States alone and better diversified to compete against China and other emerging economies even as it confronts internal bottlenecks to growth such as its shrinking population. Unlike countries that suffered the effects of militarism, Indians comfortably acknowledge they do not have the kind of “history issues” with Japan that color its relations with countries across East and Southeast Asia. Japan has the world’s most advanced infrastructure, while India’s own requirements for modern transportation and urban networks exceed in scale those of any other country. Japan is a capital-rich, technology superpower while India has teeming supplies of human capital and the world’s largest labor pool. The complementarities between the two powers at opposite ends of the Asian landmass are equally striking. Japan remains shackled by its postwar pacifist constitution and normative constraints on the use of military force India is a nuclear-weapons state engaged in one of the world’s largest arms buildups. India, traditionally, has pursued a foreign policy of non-alignment and opposition to Western hegemony in world affairs, while Japan has been a model ally of the United States for over sixty years. India is the world’s youngest big country, while Japan is aging more rapidly than any other developed society. The order and discipline of Japanese society contrast vividly with the hustle-and-bustle of any Indian city. In many respects, India and Japan could not be more different: one has more poor people than any other nation on Earth the other was the first non-Western society to fully modernize. For all the focus on China’s ascendancy, the developing strategic and economic entente between Japan and India may eventually prove to be as important in shaping Asia’s future.
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