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Concerns about supplies of food have been a feature of Japanese politics since Japan started modernising in the second half of the 1800s. It has remained a prominent political issue even after Japan cemented its status as a wealthy country in the 1980s, with the Japanese Government continuing to protect domestic food production from international competition. Protectionism is a curious policy for a country so dependent on world trade, including for food. Protectionist practices have led to entrenched interests in some sections of government and industry. Protectionist ideas are used in nationalist arguments against food imports. The protection of domestic food production, however, resonates positively well beyond the groups that benefit economically from protection and those that indulge in chauvinist notions about the dangers of “foreign” food. The issue, therefore, is broader than interest-group capture or xenophobia. We find it is deeply embedded in Japanese policies relating to food domestically and internationally, and goes beyond government policy as such, involving ways of thinking about protection of national culture, and social and environmental responsibility. Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality helps to explain this approach to food security, accounting for the balancing act between free trade and protection as well as the pervasiveness of this rationality beyond government as such. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we consider how states wield shaming strategies to ‘be green’ and to try to influence other states to ‘become green’ – environmentally responsible states. We compare Australia–Japan relations in the international politics of whales and tuna, respectively, and show that only at the level of norms and identities, rather than material interests, can two seemingly contradictory behaviors be reconciled, where a country shames another in one case (whales) and deliberately spares it from shaming in another (tuna). We argue that each issue reveals two different ways in which Australia seeks to construct itself as an environmentally responsible state, following a ‘preservationist’ and a ‘conservationist’ paradigm, respectively. We thus contribute to the constructivist understanding of the role of norms of global environmental politics and of the links between norms, identities, and the choice of shaming as an instrument of foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]