This collection of studies on Japan's foreign policy is edited by Takashi Inoguchi, professor of political science at the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, and Purnendra Jain, professor of political science at the University of Adelaide. Included are 16 papers by Japanese and foreign scholars in the field, of which Jain is the author of two.
The book was conceived as a companion volume to a 1997 book edited by Inoguchi and Jain, "Japanese Politics Today: Beyond Karaoke Democracy?", which surveyed recent developments in Japanese domestic politics, as the editors recognized the absence of a work in English that provided comprehensive coverage of the most important concerns of the country's foreign policy.
The goal of the most recent volume is therefore to give a as full a picture as possible of Japan's foreign policy. The editors' intention was to set out key policy issues and explain relationships and disparities between them. The set of papers collected here includes analyses of specific regional and bilateral relationships deemed essential by the editors to a "comprehensive picture of the policy landscape," and also provides an assessment of where Japan's international relations are headed in the next decade.