Japan and the G8 Evian Summit: Bilateralism, East Asianism and Multilateralization

This article has four aims: (1) to supplement an extant literature on Japan’s role in the G7/8 summit process by cataloguing events during the 2003 Group of Eight (G8) Summit1 held in Evian, France, from the Japanese government’s point of view; (2) to highlight the main actors involved in this process, their objectives, and the degree of success in their ability to achieve these objectives at Evian; (3) to demonstrate how the Japanese government has instrumentalized a multilateral forum, namely the G8, in order to pursue the resolution of what is essentially a bilateral issue – the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents (racchi jiken) – a strategy that it adopted in the 1990s unsuccessfully to seek resolution of the Northern Territories’ dispute, but is becoming increasingly evident in other areas of its foreign policy; and (4) to review Japan’s traditional role in the summit as representative of Asia and discuss whether this will come under threat with the limited, but nevertheless precedent-setting, participation of China in the Evian Summit.