The paper argues that East Asia is setting the pace for the recent trend in regional and inter-regional integration, which is associated with multilateral infrastructure connectivity initiatives, like the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) of the People's Republic of China and Japan's "Partnership...

The paper deals with the issue of how Japan is positioning itself in the emerging and contested field of international connectivity initiatives. It starts with surveying the emergence of the connectivity topic in recent years, paying attention to recent infrastructure initiatives in the...