Since the early 1990s, Steven Reed and Gary Cox have changed our understanding of Japan's multimember SNTV electoral system, by highlighting its institutional effects similar to what is known as Duverger's law in the Anglo-American context. While we offer some additional evidence to consolidate their findings, we also address an issue left unexplored in these studies, namely the role of partisan information. Under Japan's system, party labels matter in elections. We show that, while Japanese voters are generally willing (...) to abandon the candidates without affiliation with established parties, the partisan effects produce constraints for strategic coordination. (shrink)

Five major claims are made in our paper on strategic voting within the context of Japan's multimember single non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system (Fournier and Kohno, 2000). Two claims deal with the reconciliation of Steven Reed's (1990) and Gary Cox's (1997) important work on extending Duverger's law to the Japanese case, and three claims deal with the informational effects of partisan labels on strategic voting.

This book examines the broad historical process of introducing engineering ethics in Japan from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century. The author discusses this process from a comprehensive perspective, including not only engineering education but also various issues in science, technology, and society studies.

This book raises questions about what really matters through its account of Japan’s March 11, 2011, triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, exploring the relationship between culture, community, and disaster.

Could international financial capital impose shareholder sovereignty on Japan, the ultimate bastion of stakeholder capitalism? As the Japanese economy descended from boom to bust in the early 1990s, government and industry leaders called for a decisive move toward US-style shareholder capitalism, and increasing foreign share ownership exerted strong pressure to adapt corporate governance practices to Anglo-American norms. In practice, however, the government gave firms more options for restructuring but did not make them more beholden to shareholders. Firms on their part (...) favored superficial adjustments to prop up share prices rather than fundamental changes, because they sought to preserve the strengths of their traditional business models. This article explains how marketplace developments, domestic political dynamics, and corporate strategies combined to produce the distinctive pattern of Japanese corporate governance reforms since the 1990s. It concludes with an assessment of the consequences of these reforms for managers, workers, shareholders, and the general public. (shrink)

Abstract This article delves into the intricate interplay between copyright laws, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, and the evolving role of authors in the contemporary digital landscape, especially after the irruption of Generative AI systems, as ChatGPT. The paper scrutinizes Japan’s approach to copyright in the realm of AI training, highlighting the delicate balance between safeguarding creators’ rights and fostering competitiveness in the global market. By examining the concept of “the death of the Author” as elucidated by Roland Barthes, the study (...) explores how AI-generated content challenges traditional notions of authorship and creativity. (shrink)

While people are still alive, we owe them respect. Yet what, if anything, do we owe the newly dead? This question is an urgent practical concern for aged societies, because older people die at higher rates than any other age group. One novel way in which Japan, the frontrunner of aged societies, meets its need to accommodate high numbers of newly dead is itai hoteru or corpse hotels. Itai hoteru offer families a way to wait for space in over‐crowded crematoriums (...) while affording an environment conducive to grieving. Drawing on conversations with itai hoteru employees, we delineate the values this contemporary death practice expresses and show how these values comprise part of the broader idea of a good death. A good death implies duties on both sides of death's divide: to both the dying and the newly dead. (shrink)

Interwar Japan saw the rise of a generation of intellectuals, bureaucrats, and educators who were uneasy about modern life. One expression of this malaise was the introduction of calligraphy in the 1941 and 1943 school curricula. Calligraphy injected aesthetics into writing education. Yet it also compromised the speed and efficiency of writing, which lay at the core of Japan's system of modern education. The solution was to teach writing twice, once as an art in the `art section' and once as (...) a functional skill in the `language section'. As an art, writing was a means to cultivate the spirit, discipline the body, escape from the calculated logic of linear time and produce an aesthetic epiphany. As a functional tool, it was a skill for keeping pace with the demands of the modern world by communicating meaning quickly and efficiently. Bureaucrats and educators from 1941 were thus simultaneously engaged in the task of overcoming modernity on the one hand and of instilling proficiency in modern life on the other. This duality of the word as a functional code for transmitting meaning and the word as an aesthetic form both echoed and shaped the double nature of Japan's modernity. (shrink)

This work examines Japanese government policies that impact on the environment in order to determine whether they incorporate a sufficient ethical substance. In the enquiry into the ethics of the policies, Kagawa-Fox explores how Western philosophers combined their theories to develop a 'Western environmental ethics code'; she also reveals the existence of a unique 'Japanese environmental ethics code' built on Japan's cultural traditions, religious practices, and empirical experiences. The discovery of the distinctive Japanese code is not only important for what (...) it discloses as a new philosophy, but most importantly how it can be used to analyse the ethical framework of the Japanese policies. In spite of the positive contributions that Japan has shown towards the global environment, the government has failed to show a corresponding moral obligation to the world ecology in its global environmental policy. The policies examined in the three case studies comprising whaling, nuclear energy, and forestry, have also been found wanting in ecological ethical considerations, both from a Western and Japanese perspective. The main reason for this is that the integrity of the policies has been compromised by Japanese vested interest groups; business and political interests ensure that the policies are primarily focused on maintaining sustainable economic growth. Whilst Japan's global environmental policy initiatives are the key to its economic survival into the 21st century, and these initiatives may achieve their aim, they do however fail the Japanese code of environmental ethics."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

This reference introduces the significance of the natural environment in Japan's ancient culture, in its modern society, and in its future political agendas. It covers nature as a formative phenomenon in Japanese history, religion, philosophy and art; the modern history of Japan's enviromental problems and its successes and failures with dealing with them; the state of Japan's natural enviroment today, how it has been transformed and how this transformation reflects the cultural nexus; the country's grassroots enviromental movements and their sociopolitical (...) significance; and Japan's political culture and the forces which are currently poised to revolutionise the country's official position on the enviroment. It includes personal interviews with specialists from goverment, industry, NGO's and academia. (shrink)

This article sheds light on a relatively unexplored aspect of the Northern Territories dispute by examining the views of residents in Nemuro -- the symbolic frontline in Japan’s Northern Territories Reversion Movement (NTRM). The NTRM began in this northern periphery as a movement of divergent attitudes but was soon coopted by the Japanese government for political reasons. Local opposition to the government’s four island en bloc policy existed in some quarters but was largely kept in check by state largesse. However, (...) as a result of demographic and socioeconomic changes, dissent is slowly emerging in Nemuro. There are signs of an emerging disjuncture between national policy and local aspirations. This disjuncture has both theoretical and policy implications. Theoretically, this paper is congruent with politico-institutional arguments emphasizing the impact of the regulatory regime in shaping civil society organizations. From a policy perspective, public opinion in Nemuro indicates a potential avenue for compromise in Tokyo’s negotiating strategy, although pressure for change is unlikely to emerge from the bureaucratized NTRM. (shrink)

This article examines the effect of Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) over 10 years that proposed to facilitate environmental conservation in developing countries. Special emphasis is given to ODA disbursements in the energy sector to evaluate whether Japan’s foreign aid has shifted its policy toward more environmentally sound goals. The article finds that despite its articulated premise, Japan’s ODA for the energy sector has favored environmentally problematic projects, that is, those based on fossil fuels and larger scale (10 megawatt or (...) larger) hydropower. Similar to patterns in the early 1990s, environmentally friendly projects have received little attention. It is not surprising that the expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions from Japan’s ODA-supported energy projects appears substantial. (shrink)

Korea is one of the most complex, critical, and yet understudied of Japan's foreign policy relationships. While much attention in US policy and academic circles has focused on Japan's future relations with China as the key variable for regional stability in the twenty first century, an integral part of the security dynamic in East Asia has been driven by the JapanRepublic of Korea (ROK) axis facilitated the American presence as an Asia-Pacific power and security guarantor. And in the post-cold war (...) era, outcomes in the Japangrand strategy’ regarding the peninsula? (shrink)

Jecker and Au’s paper raises important issues concerning health equity in pandemic responses, and the importance of considering the long-term effects of pandemic strategy on population health and well-being.1 We welcome their focus on the experience of Asian countries, including Japan. However, we have some concerns with both the distinction which they draw between elimination and mitigation, and their account of the nature and origins of the Japanese response to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we believe that the distinction between elimination (...) and mitigation is not fine grained enough to capture the various strategies which countries have taken towards the pandemic. Many of Jecker and Au’s criticisms of the elimination strategy relate to specific policies such as lockdowns, travel restrictions and restrictions on businesses, which have been employed by numerous countries irrespective of their end goal. By contrast to the simple elimination/mitigation dichotomy with which Jecker and Au work, Baker et al have identified five separate COVID-19 strategies, namely: exclusion, elimination, suppression, mitigation and no substantive strategy.2 Baker et al define an elimination strategy as ‘maximum action to exclude disease and eliminate community transmission’ with the goal of reaching ‘zero [disease] transmission in the community’. On this account, Japan’s strategy does …. (shrink)

This book puts forward a revisionist view of Japanese wartime thinking. It seeks to explore why Japanese intellectuals, historians and philosophers of the time insisted that Japan had to turn its back on the West and attack the United States and the British Empire. Based on a close reading of the texts written by members of the highly influential Kyoto School, and revisiting the dialogue between the Kyoto School and the German philosopher Heidegger, it argues that the work of Kyoto (...) thinkers cannot be dismissed as mere fascist propaganda, and that this work, in which race is a key theme, constitutes a reasoned case for a post-White world. The author also argues that this theme is increasingly relevant at present, as demographic changes are set to transform the political and social landscape of North America and Western Europe over the next fifty years. (shrink)

In July 2003, Prime Minister Koizumi successfully passed the legislation to dispatch ground SDF units to Iraq in the Diet. His top-down policy process was completely different from Japan's traditional bottom-up system, which Aurelia George Mulgan calls the in which the bureaucrats in the ministries play a central role with the LDP being the only political power to negotiate with them. Mulgan also argues that the system has not changed despite recent institutional changes. On the contrary, this paper illustrates how (...) Koizumi and his Cabinet took advantage of the strengthened authority of the Cabinet Secretariat to initiate policies, and successfully pushed the controversial national security legislation through LDP decision-making organs and the Diet by gaining support first from the coalition partners, presenting a new style of Westminster system. (shrink)

In 2005 Japan completed its first census after the Personal Information Protection Law went into force in April 2005. The debate about the new law raised privacy concerns for the first time among the public. The news-media also provided several examples of possible lack of safeguards in the data collection of sensitive personal information required for the census. The result was the highest non-response rate ever for the Japanese census. Consequently, its accuracy and role as a source for the reliable (...) national statistics for health/welfare policy-making is now critically threatened. In this paper we argue the necessity to adopt specific safeguards to protect personal data in any future census if the trend of increasing non-response rates is to be reversed. We provide some suggestions for such safeguards, and criticize the Japanese government’s response of focusing exclusively on the mechanism of data collection as a means of meeting the privacy challenge. (shrink)

In June 1931, on the eve of the invasion of Manchuria, the Japanese mass media announced the winner of the first Miss Nippon contest. Applicants were limited to rank amateurs whose photographs, and not bodies, were judged by a panel of mostly elderly men who regarded the contest as `culture work'. A second contest was held in 1934. One of the main objectives of the Miss Nippon contests was to locate and record photographically, young women whose allegedly `pure blood' and (...) ideal bodily proportions demonstrated the success of eugenics and social hygiene programs launched decades earlier. Japan's imperialist aggression in Asia and the Pacific forms the backdrop to this study on the centrality of popular cultural events and media in the state's attempt to improve the `Japanese race' through technologies of eugenics and social hygiene. The article explores the politics of blood, body and beauty, three interrelated subjects, framed by the Miss Nippon contests, that were common to the colonial project and the discourse of eugenics alike. (shrink)

Both the US and China are pressing Japan to tilt its foreign policy in their direction. Japan's response depends on views of China, which turned negative as assumptions proved incorrect. Early expectations were challenged in 1990–94, despite hopes of becoming a bridge between the US and China, and were dashed from 1995. The struggle among four schools of thought intensified. The full engagement group lost the most ground. The predominantly engagement, potential threat group was attacked as the mainstream, but it (...) survived as the best option for global political leverage. The predominantly containment, possible engagement group gained as China allowed rising nationalism to target Japan. The full containment group also gained, boosted by Japanese nationalism anxious to rationalize the war era. More than reacting to Chinese or US actions, Japanese views are driven by instability in national identity. The US should be wary of encouraging containment of China because of its impact on rising Japanese nationalism. (shrink)

This chapter traces the evolution of Japan's systems of household and land registration from c.1600 to the period of early Meiji reforms in the 1870s and 1880s, with due attention to the distinction between a system designed by the state and local forms of registration practice. In the section on the pre-Meiji period, one such local practice of having people ‘disowned’ and its consequence — registerlessness — is examined. The section on the Meiji reforms and the section that follows turn (...) to the issue of continuity and discontinuity, and the question of whether any progress was made by those reforms. In order to illustrate the actual changes that took place at the local level, the chapter begins with an eighteenth-century story about a peasant woman and ends with a case of a family dispute that another village woman brought before the court some 120 years later. (shrink)

Nishida Kitaro, originator of the Kyoto School and 'father of Japanese Philosophy' is usually viewed as an essentially apolitical thinker who underwent a 'turn' in the mid-1930s, becoming an ideologue of Japanese imperialism. Political Philosophy in Japan challenges the view that a neat distinction can be drawn between Nishida's apolitical 'pre-turn' writings and the apparently ideological tracts he produced during the war years. In the context of Japanese intellectual traditions, this book suggests that Nishida was a political thinker form the (...) very beginning of his career, and consequently, his later political works cannot be dismissed as peripheral to his philosophical project. Counter-intuitively however, Christopher Goto-Jones argues that a consistently political reading of his philosophy reveals a dissenting standpoint even during the height of the Pacific War. This book argues that the prevailing postwar tendency to dismiss interwar and wartime Japanese culture as fascist or ultra nationalist en total neglects a lively political discourse, which contained some serous and profound political insight and even dissent. By suggesting that Nishida tetsugaku was a voice of dissent during Japan's Great East Asia War, Goto-Jones presents a case for the rehabilitation of Nishida as a political thinker, and as an example of a Japanese resistance, able to make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates about international political, globalization , and inter-cultural relations. Offering a unique and potentially controversial view of the subject of Nishida and the Kyoto School, The Political Philosophy of Japan will be of huge interest to anyone studying Japanese History, Political Philosophy and comparative philosophy alike. (shrink)

Japan is unusual among industrialized countries in its reluctance to use brain criteria to determine death and harvest transplant organs. This results from public distrust of the medical profession due to an earlier incident, and from concern that technological interventions will threaten religious and cultural traditions surrounding death and dying. Public acceptance is growing, however, as medical professional groups and universities develop brain criteria, and as pressure from patients who could benefit from a transplant, as well as from foreign countries, (...) increases. (shrink)

This article argues that some denialists of Japan’s military sexual slavery are responsible for past epistemic injustices. In the literature on epistemic responsibility, backward- and forward-looki...

Japan is one of several East Asian countries that share an ethical system of mutual support. A review of Japan’s health care system reveals a strong egalitarian ethos often considered unique by outside observers.

This book takes us on a fascinating journey through the world of thought of Miki Kiyoshi, one of Japan s pre-eminent philosophers before the Pacific War, and thus makes us discover the man behind the philosopher.

In the fall 2007 Diet session, the largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) showed strong opposition against the government's proposal to continue the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) refueling operations to support maritime inspections in the Indian Ocean. In order to evaluate this parliamentary confrontation, the article compares the handling of this issue with the six past major post-Cold War national security policies. The DPJ constantly presented its own legislative proposals in order to participate in Diet deliberation. DPJ's counter proposals, however, (...) were not always cooperative with the government. This different attitude by the DPJ could not be explained by the public and media opinions or the position of the supporting organization but by DPJ's political calculation. (shrink)

Since the collapse of the bubble economy at the beginning of the 1990s, Japan has been in secular stagnation. Despite the stagnant economic conditions, the rate of profit has been rising, not falling. The coexistence of the rise in profitability and prolonged economic stagnation is a manifestation of the fundamental contradiction of present-day Japanese capitalism. Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF) provides a consistent explanation regarding the paradoxical situation in Japan characterised not by (...) a falling but a rising rate of profit. Meanwhile, this paper discusses the Monopoly Capitalism school, which has studied capitalist behaviour concerning productive investment and changes in the form of capitalist competition at the monopoly stage of capitalism. While the school’s negation of the LTRPF is unacceptable, their notions may provide useful explanations as to why the rate of profit has risen under secular stagnation in Japan. (shrink)

The differences of civilizations are based on them. They differ in history, language, culture, traditions, dominant religion, views on the relationship between man and society, citizen and state, etc. "Reduction" of the world at the expense of the latest technologies and means of communication, on the one hand, promotes the formation of "infinity" of the world, eliminates certain features of the people, the nation, and on the other - increases the degree of awareness of the ethnos of himself. The global (...) process of economic modernization and its associated social change weakens peoples' ties to a particular place of residence, diminishes the role of the state as a place of origin. But in this globalized space, one cannot help but feel the need to identify himself as distinctly different from others. (shrink)