Japan

Cultural Propriety


Japan would become the economic powerhouse of East Asia and Pacific Asia by strategically opening those markets through their use of voluntary war reparations.   The Japanese began an aggressive policy to rebuild its relations with East Asia after WWII beginning with Southeast Asia then Taiwan followed by mainland China. Their use of these voluntarily war reparations helped to explore each countries market potential through private and public goodwill missions strategically developing transport infrastructures allowing for Japanese transportation of domestic goods into Asian consumer markets.
By the 1980s, Japan began investing 60 percent of her wealth into Asia surpassing U.S. investment by 25 percent. Japanese industrial investments in Southeast Asia before the 1980s were primarily domestic related markets. During the Reagan Era of the 80s, the United States “froze” Japan out of trading in favor of free trade agreements between Europe and the U.S. This forced the Japanese to find other investment opportunities in East and Southeast Asia and as a result of Regan’s lack of vision—the Japanese investments of Asia and Southeast Asia transformed a domestic market of goods into an oriented industry of exports that rapidly exploded into Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
However, Japanese investments created problems for local merchants and businesses of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries. As Japanese investment expanded they began to use local business agents and merchants to market their goods. The more experienced the Japanese became at handling their own business transactions, the less they relied on local agents and merchants and eventually eliminated their use in marketing Japanese goods. This eventually led to anti-Japanese demonstrations against what many East Asia and Pacific-Asian countries classified as a neocolonial relationship. Local agents and merchants felt little if any positive contributions were...