This paper investigates Japan's two foreign policies toward South Korea and the People's Republic of China after the 2000s based on prospect theory. The Japanese government intended those decisions as loss-averse behavior to overcome incomplete sovereignty by resolving the comfort women issue and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands' territorial dispute. However, the distrust trap made South Korea and China recognize Japan's intention as risk-acceptant. This paper posits that a distrust trap plays a significant role as a heuristic that makes South Korea and China reluctant to cooperate with Japan. The distrust trap indicates the extension of a cognitive gap between states when the challenging behavior of one state provokes distrust of others and gives a signal of threat regardless of its intention or approach. The twenty-first century is a remarkable period because security issues toward Japan are making gradual progress of cooperation of East Asia superficial. It relates to the problem of trust-building. This paper uses transnational survey data to show the distrust trap between South Korea, China, and Japan.

This paper seeks to explore North Korea's use of sports diplomacy, in particularly pingpong diplomacy with the United States during the Cold War. North Korea and the United States have no diplomatic relations but since the 1970s, North Korea began to explore ways to ameliorate relations with the United States through public diplomacy including by means of sports. By exploring the 1979 World Table Tennis Championships in Pyongyang, this study hopes to expand the discourse on North Korea's sports diplomacy and examine the process and outcome it had on creating diplomatic avenues for communication, exchange, and engagement with the United States. This article analyzes the failures and successes as well as strategies of North Korea's ping-pong diplomacy and the impact it had on North Korea's policy towards the United States.

The purpose of this study is to compare Soviet aid to North Korea (DPRK) in the 1950s and 1960s with Soviet aid to North Vietnam (DRV) during the same period. With the data collected from various sources, this study compares the aid and identifies the meaning of it from the perspectives of patron-client state relationships. Relatively, more aid was given to North Korea in the mid-1950s and more to North Vietnam in the late- 1960s and both countries were given similar aid in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was due to the fluctuation in the strategic value of the two countries to the Soviet Union particularly by the confrontations with the US-supported respective southern states and the compliance behavior of the recipient countries.