In the first two years after China first proposed the Belt and Road Initiative, Japan, for the most part, gave it a cold shoulder and barely responded. When the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Protocol was officially signed, Japan renounced its title as a founding member and announced that in the next five years it planned to invest $110 billion of domestic capital in Asian countries and accelerate the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations with the United States.

The main reasons for this lay in the fact that, internally, the Japanese had not formulated a sophisticated view of the Belt and Road Initiative, and, externally, it was due to the hard fact of Japan's limited political independence on the international stage.

Also, Japan initially misunderstood the Belt and Road Initiative as cooperation limited to production capacity, therefore it failed to arouse much interest in the country. Since the mid-1980s, the demographic structure of Japan began to shift, and it has had a rapidly aging population, therefore, the economic growth potential of Japan has declined.

Right now, its potential growth rate is stagnant at about 1 percent. Due to its weak growth potential, macroeconomic stimulus or production capacity cooperation will do very little to revive the Japanese economy.

It is Japanese entrepreneurs that have taken the lead over the Japanese government. They are far more visionary about the importance of China's market and the cooperation prospects for both sides, so when the Belt and Road Initiative began to be rolled out, they expressed a more earnest desire for cooperation. The Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in China established an entity called the Belt and Road Liaison Council in 2017, to coordinate affairs related to the Belt and Road Initiative.

In recent years, on multiple occasions it has organized Japanese enterprises to visit Wuhan and other major cities in China for site investigations to explore the possibility of cooperation between Chinese and Japanese enterprises under the Belt and Road framework, not only in China, but also in third-party countries.

On Oct 25 to 27, last year, amid Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's state visit to China, the two countries reached several consensuses on multiple points, including economic cooperation, security guarantees, scientific and technological innovation and cultural interaction. With the third-party cooperation as the entry point, both sides signed 52 cooperation agreements, including more than 10 intergovernmental pacts signed in the fields of technological innovation, finance, trade and the sports industry. It should be noted that maintaining and safeguarding a sustainable resurrection of Japan's economy is a vital precondition for cementing the Abe cabinet's ruling legitimacy. Therefore, Japan has augmented the cooperation with its largest trade partner, China, because this serves both domestic and international purposes.

The mainstream media and all strata of Japanese society have already given positive comments to the progress being made by China and Japan in pushing forward the Belt and Road Initiative. Yomiuri Shimbun has pointed out that Japan can cooperate with China in emerging industries in countries along the Belt and Road routes, thus upgrading its economic ties with China deeply. Nikon Keizai Shimbun has also indicated that Japan's business circle must make good use of the Belt and Road Initiative to seek new opportunities with China.

Another positive signal is that Japan has deepened its understanding of the important role played by the Belt the Road Initiative in terms of the global division of labor and the formation of a unified regional labor market. What deserves special attention is the new visa policy promulgated by Japan on April 1, 2019. With two new visa types going into effect, the long-term restrictions imposed on immigrants trying to enter Japan's labor market have been lifted to some extent. This measure is seen as an important testimony to Japan's increasing focus on regional labor market cooperation and its anticipation that it can solve its labor deficiency dilemma with foreign workers.

Although in a geographic sense Japan cannot be identified as a Belt and Road country, China and Japan are close neighbors and share a large trade volume and very close economic ties. Bilateral trade between China and Japan increased from $1.04 billion in 1972 to $297.28 billion in 2017, a surge of nearly 300-fold in their total bilateral trade volume in 45 years.

The most significant foundation for Sino-Japanese cooperation on the basis of the Belt and Road Initiative is the mutual benefits produced by their economic structures. The Japanese economy is dominated by the service industry which accounts for more 70 percent of its GDP, wherein agriculture only takes a share of 1.5 percent. In comparison, the ratios of these two industries in China's total GDP were 5.3 percent and 54.3 percent in the first half of 2018. From the perspective of bilateral trade, China's exports to Japan are mostly labor-intensive products for which China enjoys traditional comparative advantages with low-added-value. Meanwhile, China has imported knowledge-intensive products from Japan, which are located in the high-end part of the global value chain.

The trading interaction attributed to this bilateral trade and economic compensation between China and Japan is an important win-win mechanism. In fact, as an important neighbor of China and the third-largest economy in the world, Japan, with its valuable experience in infrastructure investment and financing accumulated through the work in international organizations such as the Asia Development Bank, could play a constructive role in the Belt and Road Initiative if it can accept China's sincere invitation. Doing so would result in the prospects for Sino-Japanese cooperation becoming increasingly bright and promising, which would not only benefit future Sino-Japanese cooperation, but also have a positive effect on Asian, indeed global, development.

The author is the postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Economic Strategy at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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