Story of Japan’s Silk Road in Central Asia and Relation with Belt and Road Initiative

Japan's Silk Road diplomacy, introduced in 1997, was the first official and overt use of the Silk Road phrase by a government in the post-Soviet era for interaction with the Central Asian societies. Although the power of narrative discourse of Japan's Silk Road diplomacy could help the rapid progress of Tokyo’s diplomacy in Central Asia, it faced stagnation –but not a decline- after reaching the pinnacle in 2006. The purpose of this article is to discover the evolutionary process of narration of Japan’s Silk Road policy in Central Asia and its relationship with the Silk Road Economic Belt (the continental section of China’s Belt and Road Initiative). The question is “what is the rule in Japan and China’s Silk Road game in Central Asia? and why?” The initial answer is that “since Japan’s security and infrastructural priorities are focused on South and Southeast Asia and due to the geopolitical predicaments in connecting with Central Asia, Tokyo’s stance on the Silk Road Economic Belt has gradually changed from non-participation to conditional and multilateral interaction in a game with double results of algebraic addition.” Findings of the article, based on inductive reasoning method, suggest after modification of the above-mentioned hypothesis that the interaction between the Silk Road narratives of Japan and China in Central Asia have never been hostile, and have swung from minimum participation to conditional/multilateral interaction. Instead, the conflicting discourses of the two countries on the basis of zero-sum algebraic addition over the Indo-Pacific has moved towards China’s Maritime Silk Road narrative and the free and open Indo-Pacific narrative of Japan.