Northeast Asia: Region Building Based on Environmental Cooperation
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II. Asia by Country and Region
1.
Introduction
Northeast Asia retains the imprint of international confrontations even now after the Cold War, but for that very reason there is hope for the possibility of potential international cooperation. In this region the United States, the world's biggest military power, uses its military bases in Japan and South Korea to directly face off with Russia and China, which have respectively the largest land area and the biggest population, and with North Korea, which maintains its own distinctive socialist system. Through the Cold War era the Sea of Japan region was long a sphere of antagonism, which had a profound effect on Japan's economic development by making the Pacific side into the nation's nucleus and relegating the Sea of Japan side to incidental status. From this backdrop came a post-Cold War proposal for "Northeast Asia" as a regional concept upon which to base efforts for transforming antagonism into cooperation to regain social governance through regional collaboration that does not see lands across the sea in terms of "countries." Characteristics of this region from an environmental perspective include: (1) the Sea of Japan is semi-enclosed and therefore readily accumulates pollutants, (2) to the surrounding nations, those portions of their countries facing the Sea of Japan are regarded as peripheral and generally have comparatively wellendowed natural environments, but are subject to development strategies entailing huge environmental burdens to compensate for low degrees of development, or are saddled with nuisance facilities, and (3) heavy environmental impacts are anticipated if development progresses in the future. Two major conceptions of "Northeast Asia" are: (1) the part of Japan along the Sea of Japan, the Russian maritime region (Primorsky Krai), the eastern part of China's Jilin Province, and the part of the Korean Peninsula along the Sea of Japan, and (2) all of Japan, the Russian Far East (RFE), China's Northeast district (Heilongjiang, JiHn, and Liaoning provinces), and the Korean Peninsula.^ The first is the region whose water systems flow into the Sea of Japan. If the Amur River (which empties into the Tartar Strait) is included in the Sea of Japan water system. Northeast Asia includes southeast Siberia, eastern Mongolia, the northeastern part of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and most of that country's Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces. River pollution in this region readily pollutes the Sea of Japan. And except for the parts of Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces in the Amur River watershed, economic development is relatively behind in all the countries and regions included in Northeast Asia (Japan, Russia, Mongolia, China's Northeast, and the Korean Peninsula). Unfortunately, efforts to help Northeast Asia catch up often lack environmental considerations, are overly ambitious, or have distortions. In fact, two of Japan's four worst pollution diseases, itai-itai disease and Niigata Minamata disease, occurred on its Sea of Japan side,
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