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The investigation of how different countries follow divergent pathways into the modern world has been one of the most prominent issues for historical sociologists. In this article, I extend eventful analysis onto a macro historical level to examine the political transformations of Japan and Korea in the post-World War II period. I accomplish this by focusing on the role of a pivotal historical event--the Korean War--in the specific geopolitical conjuncture of the Cold War. Typically, eventful analysis is used to assess micro level phenomena. By exploring the crucial role of the Korean War in rearranging international relationships in East Asia, I demonstrate that the outbreak of the war and subsequent geopolitical relations significantly enhanced state power in both Japan and Korea. Each state in turn responded to social demands with different strategies, thereby following different political pathways: a conservative democracy in Japan and a military dictatorship in Korea. Based on this analysis, I argue that by broadening the use of eventful analysis on the macro-historical level, it is possible to achieve a more historically contextualized explanation of historical changes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminologists have conventionally conceptualized criminality as the propensity to unlawful behaviors. The social reality of crime and criminality, however, does not correspond to actual law-breaking behaviors. While crime is an individual act, the discourse of criminality typically refers to a social category as a location of criminality. This paper examines the discursive construction of collective offenderhood in the foreign criminality discourse in contemporary Japan. After a decade-long decline of unauthorized migration, the Japanese government implemented punitive immigration control policies. What triggered this shift was the rising fear of foreigner-perpetrated crimes. The Japanese police discourse conflates foreignness and crime through four modes of linkage: statistical linkage, structural linkage, ecological linkage and cultural linkage. This paper argues that the demographic transformation, a belief in ethnic homogeneity as cultural orientation and the rise of the alleged security crisis contributed to the making of the foreign-crime nexus in Japanese consciousness. A criminality discourse magnifies the power of the marginalized and presents a distorted view of social stratification. A vision of collective offenderhood naturalizes social inequalities and rhetorically legitimizes further marginalization of the marginalized. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the policy-making process for criminal punishment in contemporary Japan. It focuses especially on how the process has functioned during the period of Japan's recent "justice system reform movement" (shiho kaikaku undo), and it examines some of the most important punishment policy outputs in recent years. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]