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This paper examines a new trend in Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) policy that emerged at the end of the Cold War. In 1992, the Japanese government adopted the "Official Development Assistance Charter," which obliged Japan to use its foreign aid to promote human rights, democracy, and freedom. Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been cases when Japan imposed "human rights conditionalities" by increasing the amount of foreign aid to the recipient countries with good human rights records and reducing economic assistance to the countries with poor human rights practices. However, there remain doubts whether Japan is truly committed to use its aid power as leverage to ensure that democracy and human rights are respected by the governments of its aid recipients. This paper uses panel data analysis to examine whether the condition of human rights in aid-recipient countries has become one of the factors that influence Japan's ODA allocation. The findings reveal the lack of evidence to prove that the human rights condition in aid-recipient countries has influenced the allocation of Japanese aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on human rights issues of the Ainu of Japan. It examines some of the rules of customary international law and treaties to which Japan has acceded and those that are relevant to the Ainu situation. This will include an analysis of the manner by which international law comes into force in Japan. Those human rights protected domestically under the Japanese Constitution will also be examined. The dominant focus of this paper, however, will be Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), and, in particular, the expropriation of Ainu land as considered in the so- called Nibutani Dam Case and the legislation following the decision. The Ainu originally lived throughout Hokkaido, the Kuriles and southern Sakhalin. By 1604 part of Hokkaido had been "granted" to the Matsumae clan by the Tokugawa shogunate. The remainder was still seen as foreign Ainu-land. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 however, Ainu land was appropriated as terra nullius, under the Land Regulation Ordinance, 1872. Mass immigration and colonial administration followed. Authorities relocated Hokkaido Ainu to reservations, using their former, fertile land for Japanese agriculture.