Japan's emergence on the international scene has hit the world with tsunami-like force.
Strides in high technology, an ongoing export machine, and construction of new factories abroad have characterized Japan's activities to date. Now, the economic superpower is poised for another leapfrog over the West. In 1988, Japan surpassed the United States as the world's leading supplier of foreign assistance to developing and underdeveloped countries. The northeast Asian nation spent $10 billion--a hefty one-third increase over the previous year--compared to America's $8.8 billion (an amount that did not increase U.S. funding levels for 1987).
This year, Japan's foreign aid will top $11 billion.
The latest evidence of Japan's serious efforts to become a true world power--not merely a passive observer--has come through extensions of her official development assistance (ODA) program. Yet, questions remain about Japan's ability to master the delicate craft of what is euphemistically termed "foreign aid."
In the past decade, Tokyo saw its allotments of ODA moneys rise fivefold. (Few other countries even came close. The United States, for example, increased its foreign aid spending by twofold.) And, according to Tetsuma Fujikawa, a director of international projects for the Ministry of Finance, future increases will be equally substantial. "We look upon ODA as a way to keep up flows of world trade," he explains, "and greater trade will help Japan."
The situation today is somewhat ironic. As recently as 22 years ago, a Japan still rising from the ashes of the Second World War was the world's second biggest recipient of similar foreign assistance.
Origins Of Aid
The rise of ODA has not been accidental. Since the 1960s, Japanese leaders have explored ways of banishing negative images stemming from World War II aggression. By the 1970s, many in business and government spoke of creating a "Pacific Era," propelled by a benign Tokyo. It was in the 1980s that a third factor arose: As Japan's prosperity catapulted her to the status of a superstar, pressures from needy developing countries (many of them suppliers of the very raw materials used to fuel Japan's economic engines) mounted. "She was asked to, in effect, 'recycle' money earned from an advantageous trading situation," says Bruce Koppel, a researcher at the East-West Center in Hawaii and the first American asked by Tokyo officials to conduct oversight evaluations of Japan's foreign assistance projects.
ODA is a means of satisfying the disparate visions created by those factors. In 1978, as ODA levels totaled nearly double the $1.1 billion in outlays for 1976, Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda assured the world that further doubling of ODA funds would occur before 1981.
Absolute yen amounts allotted for ODA, converted into dollars, reveal that Japan has indeed made good on earlier commitments. Measured as a percentage of total GNP, she today allocates 3 percent for foreign aid, a proportion slightly higher than the U.S. level. The amount of Japanese money going to the developing world
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