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will negatively affect the country’s major industries that possess international competitive advantages (in the forms of high technology capacity and high-quality final goods). Moreover, as argued by senior METI official, Norihiko Saeki in a Financial Times article, unremitting RE supply crisis will sooner or later, undermine Japan’s leadership status in the manufacturing of automobile, electronic and green intermediary and end products. [26] In other words, such scenario compromised Japan’s national economic power in the long-run. Thus, in order to prevent such an eventuality, measures to retain Japan’s competitive niches have to include tackling the RE supply end for its industries. It is within this context that METI’s strategy for Ensuring Stable Supplies of Rare Earths was ultimately conceived in July 2009 in which four pillars are identified in solving Japan’s RE concern, namely, securing resources abroad, recycling, development of alternative materials and stockpiling. [27] Of these, securing RE resources overseas remained to be the forefront measure in tackling the Japanese dilemma of succumbing to unstable Chinese RE supply to its major industrial players, at least from short-term to medium-term point of view.

 

Dependent Variable of Foreign Policy: Japan’s “Expansionist” RE Foreign Policy through Bilateral Cooperation Frameworks to Secure RE Resources

 

Recent actions by the Japanese government have shown the extent to which Tokyo is willing to invest in diplomatic scenes in the course of securing the precious minerals overseas outside China. Though such venture started as one of the four pillars within METI’s strategy as outlined beforehand, there is a clear intensification of this endeavor after the Senkaku Islands’ crisis in September 2010. The major challenge remained to be replacing huge volume of China’s RE supply (and production) with new or potential supplying countries that could provide substantial RE volume rivaling that of Beijing. This warranted an effective, “expansionist” Japanese RE diplomacy which could cope with the high amount of cooperative schemes in the two streams: exploration and production.

 

Having said that, the discovery of other mine-able deposits of rare earth around the world has opened the doors of economic opportunities for Japan in which the government itself is working on a “growth blueprint” to best support its industries in buying the right to develop RE minerals in countries other than China to hedge against Beijing’s monopoly of the minerals’ market. The core of Tokyo’s RE diplomacy remains to be two-pronged. First, the government is to provide policy support in which it proactively seeks to expand as much as possible cooperative agreements with the countries that possess huge volume of RE reserves. Second, as Leo Lewis put it, the Japanese government helped to injects funds into Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) for which it directs these capitals into local companies seeking exploration of new mines around the world. [28] For the past two years or so, efforts have been made in nations believed to be rich in RE resources, namely, Kazakhstan, Uzbek本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。