Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically examines contemporary Japan's politico-economic relationship building vis-à-vis the Asia region using an entrepreneurial Indo-Japanese creative business project as a case study.

Paper long abstract:

Japan's political economy vis-à-vis the Asia region is one of the emerging arenas in which one can examine Japan's contemporary position in the world. In response to the rise of China, India and other Asian economies, as well as to the decades-long stagnation of its domestic economy, Japan has started to try to reboot its growth by enhancing its politico-economic relationships with such rising Asian markets. Analytical perspectives on these dynamics seem to still be in development.

In response to this relative scarcity, and in order to explore preliminary perspectives through which to examine Japan's politico-economic position in the Asian context, this paper ethnographically examines a business venture started by a Japanese entrepreneur seeking to establish a business platform for the Japanese creative industries to sell products in the Indian market. Introducing creative Japanese companies into rising Asian markets is one of the tenets of the Asia-shift. The paper first briefly reviews the history of the Indo-Japanese relationship and identifies the discrepancies in the business customs between Japan and India as one of the significant ethnographic areas of focus that embody Japan's struggle to make connections with India (and Asia). It then ethnographically examines the entrepreneur's business negotiations with his Indian and Japanese stakeholders (held in Tokyo, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore) to explore how he tried to resolve such discrepancies in business customs to carry his business forward. The paper finds that the entrepreneur's brokerage behavior, which put him in a liminal and ambiguous position (i.e. trying to bridge the 'Japanese' and 'Indian' ways of doing business by standing in-between the two sets of customs), helped create a new transnational business flow. The paper suggests this ambiguity as one of the points of entry through which we can examine how Japan can (re)build its relationships within Asia. The gap between the significance of the relevant players taking liminal and ambiguous positions to carry forward trans-Asian business (and thus to incorporate the rising Asian markets), which this paper explores on the grass-roots level, and Japan's firmly self-centered overall growth strategy (e.g. Abenomics) is also examined.