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Although Japan is considered a homogeneous country, protest in Japan is not as rare as it appears. Following the Fukushima triple disaster in 2011, Japanese citizens demonstrated against nuclear energy. However, these protests related to issues or events that affected the entire population. Therefore, what about other groups who are demonstrating for their own rights? This paper is concerned with the attempt to classify a minority in the terms of protest and its impact. First, the important concepts for this article, such as discrimination, protest and its forms, and the terms LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) and homosexuality are outlined. The topic of homosexuality represents one of the minority groups that are subject to discrimination in Japan. The key questions in this paper are therefore: how do homosexuals (dōseiaisha) as a minority group face discrimination, what are their reactions, and how does protest change the situation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of its high life expectancy and simultaneously declining birth rate, Japan has been experiencing a fast demographic transition since the mid-twentieth century. The number of people in the so-called Third and Fourth Age is gradually increasing and already constituted 28% of the Japanese population in 2019. This situation led to the introduction of long-term care insurance in 2000, which indirectly promoted an increase of small local care services. Given their size, these care services are more flexible and quicker to implement new concepts. A noticeable trend in this regard is the spread of intergenerational care approaches. This paper describes selected local care institutions and analyzes whether some intergenerational day care centers provide an extension of the nuclear family and its support services. The analysis is based on a six-month field research project in cooperation with different institutions (N=14) in Japan. The data was mainly collected through participant observation. The findings, when compared with Jurczyk's »Doing Family« concept and Erikson's view of generativity, indicate that certain institutions indeed function as an extension of the modern nuclear family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the question of how to understand what has appeared as Japan's ›success‹ in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic through analyzing the contribution of specific social mechanisms in shaping societal responses to governmental policies. A comparison of multiple countries in East Asia and West Europe indicates that Japan has been relatively ›successful‹ in containing the spread of COVID-19, at least when contrasted with Western states rather than other Asian states. This outcome is notable in particular in that it was achieved without reliance either on strict legal restrictions (as in some Western countries) or extensive surveillance of the population using digital tools. In fact, despite many of the government's COVID-19-related measures lacking solid legal underpinnings, they appeared to be endorsed and obediently followed by a significant majority of the Japanese population. Meanwhile, a more differentiated analysis shows that there are certain variations even within this general pattern of »Japanese obedience«, both across time and social segments. While this can on the one hand be associated with differing levels of fear of contracting the virus, this only provides a partial explanation of the specific observable patterns of »non-obedience«. Empirical evidence together with theoretical sociological accounts of social control point toward a more nuanced picture in which social pressure plays a substantial role in encouraging compliance of governmental rules--albeit in a highly uneven way--exerting strong influence over certain parts of the population while leaving others relatively untouched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese populism leaves little trace in comparative political science which is surprising given pertinent case studies that look at politicians like Jun'ichirō Koizumi, Tōru Hashimoto or Yuriko Koike through this analytical lens and find them to be populists. This article examines this literature and juxtaposes it with ideational and politicalstrategic approaches to populism. By doing so, it not only shows substantial qualitative differences between Japanese populism and what is considered populism in other regions, but also suggests that the clientilistic, one-party dominant regime of the LDP, the strong central state, and (often inexplicit) reference to Japan's political culture are the main causes of those positive populism diagnoses that seem to fall short of the»mainstream populism« elsewhere. In order to reconcile these diverse findings, this study suggests a common frame of reference based on both dominant approaches and the use of methodological instruments that allow a more fine-grained measurement of potentially populist phenomena and actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]