eeds.Under these circumstances, Japan, thus, needed better relations with her neighbors in the post-Cold War era. However any formal military alliance with a specific neighbor country can easily provoke oppositions from other neighbor countries. At the same time, the US and Japan were not willing to give up their alliance that they have formed at the end of WWII. Thus, Japans interest in regional security had to be achieved in a way that satisfied both Asian and the US demands.Conveniently, there had been talks about formulating an Asian regional security entity among the intellectuals of the ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies (ASEAN-ISIS), and in ASEAN Post Ministerial Conference (PMC), which is a back-to-back ASEAN conference inviting foreign ministers of Japan, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and EU. In the 1990 PMC, then Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans proposed a forum to build confidence and patterns of cooperation, not only between old friends but between old adversaries (Dosch, 6). In the same conference, Canada suggested Asia-Pacific region to have an institution where security and cooperation matters can be discussed modeling after CSCE, Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe.Moreover, Japan agreed to Soviet Union proposal to commence a bilateral dialogue on security in 1990 (Midford, 377). According to Midford, this did not encourage Japan to start diplomatic relations with China and South Korea but may have encouraged the Japanese Foreign Ministry to separate the concept of a security dialogue from more encompassing, and implicitly threatening concepts, such as arms control or collective security. Thus Japans first concrete experience with a security dialogue may have encouraged policy-makers to experiment with a new concept of security multilateralism: multilateral dialogue (Midford, 377). Japan was encouraged to change her course on security by many outside pressures....
