Search

This paper argues that, although Japan's and Germany's energy transition paths differ in detail, a trend towards decentralisation is clearly evident in both countries. Based on comprehensive screening, own stocktaking and the results of a stakeholder dialogue, this paper highlights the motivation for different local actors to enter the energy market in both countries. Although there are challenges to success in a market dominated by large energy companies, this paper argues that the benefits to local communities outweigh the efforts. Overall, it is shown that democratisation and the decentralisation of the energy system are suitable to facilitate a successful transformation process in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Allied forces in occupied Japan had two main tasks: to punish and eliminate from public life those found responsible for war crimes, and to democratise the country. One of the tools used to achieve these objectives was a large-scale political purge targeted against the pre-war military and political elite, members of nationalist organisations, employees of the state administration and media, educators and business leaders. The paper examines the rationale behind the purge organized between 1945 and 1952, the assumptions upon which it was based, procedures used and the effects that it had. The main focus is on the fate of political activists. It also presents the efforts to prepare the ground in parliament for a vote on a new, pacifist constitution and the way in which Cold War tensions changed the priorities of the US occupation and lead to the so-called red purge. Selected individual cases are analysed, including that of Hatoyama Ichirō whose removal from politics and subsequent conflict with Yoshida Shigeru had far reaching implications for the post-war political scene in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's early postwar leadership and American occupiers alike asserted that democratization was a new lesson that the Japanese public would have to learn. In fact, the ideas of democratic reformers had been broadcast to a large audience as feasible programmes decades before 1945. Miyatake Gaikotsu, the editor of Democracy in 1919, outlined the benefits that democratic reforms might provide in a post-World War I world. Decades later, Japanese people faced a new postwar struggle, not as victors but as the vanquished. Gaikotsu, writing in 1945, reflected on democracy in these new circumstances in his study, Amerika-sama. Although the situation was vastly different, victory and defeat in world wars had opened paths to new possibilities. This paper examines Gaikotsu's prewar writings as prescient prescriptions that he revisits in his essay Amerika-sama, or ‘Honourable America,’ at the point they begin to be played out, in some instances only partially and at times for ill as well as good, in occupied Japan. These reflections strikingly demonstrate the continuity of ideas during the prewar past and postwar present. Amerika-sama is a representative expression of many programmes Gaikotsu and likeminded humanistic activists attempted to put into practice from the late nineteenth century until they were suppressed during the wartime years. Mainstream political parties, prewar and postwar, often found it difficult to embrace Gaikotsu's ideas and political programmes. Nevertheless, the general public embraced them and they now find legal support in the Constitution of Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The link between development and migration has been termed the 'new development mantra'. Studies on the subject have so far mostly focused on economic remittances, and the potential consequences of return migration on democratisation have been rarely touched upon. This article attests the potential of the migration experience to affect migrants' attitudes towards democracy, thus playing an important role in the diffuse support needed for democracies in the stage of consolidation. Based on a survey among 1,000 Philippine return migrants from six destinations, the paper suggests that the migration experience may not only lead to a more critical stance towards the political system of the home country; there are also indicators of lesser support for the principles of democracy when compared to migrants about to leave the country for the first time. The political system of the destination as such seems to be a less decisive factor than the specific freedoms and restrictions experienced by migrants and a potential bias when selecting the destination. The article focuses on return migrants from Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong and Japan, which showed the most distinctive numbers in support of democracy or changes therein when compared to first-time migrants heading for that destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ideal of the democratic peace and the recent misuse of this ideal in the war on terrorism. It argues against the idea that aggressive military force can be employed to bring about the ideal of the democratic peace. By looking at John Stuart Mill's utilitarian justification of benevolent despotism for “barbarians,” it examines how idealism can lead to a defense of aggressive intervention. And it considers how idealistic zeal can lead to violations of just war principles, as in the case of Hiroshima. It concludes by arguing that Kant's deontological approach is better. Kant provides us with a reason to hope that as democracy spreads, peace will spread as well. But Kant also prohibits us from using force to actualize this ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 24, 2010, a nineteen-year-old American soldier stationed in Okinawa became the first American military serviceman to be tried by a group of lay assessors in Japan. In fact, he became the first American armed force personnel to be tried by the people's adjudicative panel in East Asia. After many years of the public demand for the establishment of equitable lay judge systems, the Japanese government finally introduced two systems of lay adjudication -- Saiban-in Seido (a lay assessor system) and a new Kensatsu Shinsakai (Prosecutorial Review Commissions (PRC) or a revised grand jury system) in 2009. This paper argues that those twin systems of lay adjudication in Japan will have a significant democratizing effect in Okinawa. Given the fact that the Japanese public was rarely given an opportunity to present their sentiments or common sense judgments in a Japanese courtroom, the lay assessor system can revitalize Japan's democratic process in criminal justice proceedings. The new grand jury system (PRC) will equally be empowered to influence the prosecutor's use of discretion in making indictment decisions. Even the prosecutors will not be given unbridled authority, because, under the new PRC grand jury law, the Japanese prosecutors' non-indictment decisions in criminal cases involving military personnel can be challenged and possibly reversed by the citizen panel. The Japanese prosecutors will then be bound by the commission's decision to prosecute and must initiate the investigative process to again begin the prosecution of accused American servicemen. These two lay justice systems may then help to restore a strong sense of social independence, political sovereignty, and the right to self-determination for the people in the island of Okinawa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent criticism has overlooked the importance of Japan to Herman Melville's vision of race and empire in the Pacific, when in fact Melville is deeply committed to exposing the rhetorical strategies by which the United States justified its aggressive intervention in the region in the 1850s. Historical studies of Commodore Matthew C. Perry's forced "opening" of Japan to trade with the West tend to ignore the ways in which Perry's campaign itself served as a supplement to violence rather than a circumvention of it. Perry's gunboat diplomacy was informed by two strands of American exceptionalist discourse elsewhere popularized by William H. Seward: the democratization of the globe through commerce and the providential duty to bring Christianity to the barbarians. Seward insisted that the Americanization of the Pacific would unify East and West in contradistinction to the defaced Atlantic world. In Moby-Dick (1851) Ahab inverts these arguments; he rhetorically conflates the white whale and Japan as the twinned nemeses of American commercial interests in the Pacific. By convincing the crew to forgo the Pequod's contracted whaling mission in favor of a romanticized geopolitical revenge plot, Ahab confronts the spectral trace of Western capitalism's origin—the white whale as commodity's cipher. The manufacture and marketability of terror in the Pacific, Melville concludes, incites the Pequod's demise off the coast of Japan, and further evidences the failure of American ambition to prescribe its own limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the provocative question of the use of American power in post-World War II Japan to achieve the enfranchisement and liberation of women showing the emergence of the association between the U.S. democratization of Japan and U.S. exceptionalism. We see many of the ways in which the American public came to be informed about Japanese women's enfranchisement and improvements in their legal and other social statuses. We also read on just how much the American media had portrayed Japanese women.

The article discusses about school education and democratization of social consciousness in postwar Japan. In postwar Japanese society, democratization of social consciousness was the objective of educational reforms. In the postwar period the democratization of social consciousness signified the postwar generation's movement away from the old attitudes and beliefs represented by an ideology rooted in the Tenno system, and toward the acquisition of modem ethos i.e. process of reversing and amending this tendency toward traditionalism and authoritarianism. An authoritarian conservatism scale is used as an index of the democratization of social consciousness. The relationship seen between authoritarian conservative tendencies and age in the sample as a whole is primarily attributed to the new and old educational systems, but a direct relationship between age and authoritarian conservative tendencies is not observed in the generation educated only in the new school system. The function of democratization of school education gradually increased. The magnitude of democratizing function of the new educational system is about 1.8 times as large as the one of the old system. The function of the democratization of social consciousness through postwar school education has been sustained for twenty-five years.