The significance of this study stems from the argument that the security dialogue between the EU and Japan is healthy and ongoing, and, moreover, is expanding into new areas of dialogue. This book thus provides an advanced discussion on the issue of security. Inasmuch as most studies dealing with European-Japanese relations focus to a great extent on economic and trade issues rather than on political and security issues, this study is innovative. Employing both historical and problematic approaches, it provides a basis for further discussion on Japanese-European Union cooperation on the issue of security.

This book examines the security dialogue between Japan and the EU from the establishment of relations between the European Community and Japan in 1959 until 2006. ‘Security dialogue,’ in this context, refers to the discourse and joint activity between the EU and Japan, and the concept of security is treated in a broad context. This study argues that it is reasonable to enlarge the notion of security to include and consider as security issues those which have been enunciated in various EUJapan bilateral documents and those that flow from their individual security conceptualisations.

The second argument is that security means different things for different actors, and I, therefore, trace what security has meant for both actors over different historical time spans, and on this basis, I approach the EU-Japan joint agenda of those given periods.

The third assumption is that due to historical changes in the world and the development of the EU-Japan security dialogue itself, the latter tends to expand. To support this thesis, I examine the EU-Japan security discourse and their joint activity in certain areas of security dialogue that are cited in joint documents, and in which the parties have a common interest in further development.

The aim of this study is fivefold:

• 1. to analyse the EU and Japan's individual and joint security agendas;

• 2. to trace the expansion of security cooperation between the EU and Japan;

• 3. to expose and analyse the problems hampering the dialogue;

• 4. to demonstrate that EU-Japan joint activities have been in line with their security conceptualisations; and

• 5. to propose some suggestions for forwarding their dialogue.