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Scholarly accounts of the European encounter with East Asia tend to emphasize the admiration that Europeans held for Chinese and Japanese culture and society, yet the period also exhibited powerful currents of Sinophobia and Japanophobia. In his account of a 1609 visit to Japan, the Mexican criollo Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco presents an overwhelmingly positive vision of the Japanese that would help support his effort to broker a diplomatic agreement between the Hapsburg Monarchy and the Tokugawa shogunate. A careful reading of the text, nevertheless, reveals the presence of conflicting attitudes toward the Japanese, including a powerful Japanophobic undercurrent probably nurtured by Vivero's prior experience as interim governor of the Philippines. This essay explores how Vivero processes these conflicting attitudes in order to produce, later in life, an image of Japan as an exemplary foil to the Catholic Monarchy in both politics and piety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of early modern Japanese history have noted the imperial court's political insignifi cance and the lack of confl ict most contemporaries supposedly saw between the emperor's institutionally supreme position and the fact that Japan's warlords had usurped power away from the emperor. This article draws on Korean visitors' observations of Japanese society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to challenge this view and reveal that the imperial court remained the only truly legitimate seat of power for many early modern Japanese elites, exposing the depths of fi ssures in the Japanese political order in ways most scholarship has overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the Japanese General Social Survey conducted in 2010 on a representative sample of adults, the present analysis intends to identify the factors more likely to predict variations in death penalty attitudes in Japan. Compared to death penalty proponents, those who oppose capital punishment are less likely to express punitive attitudes in general and to be dissatisfied with government expenditures on crime control. Relative to retentionists, abolitionists tend to have a higher level of social trust, show a higher level of support for public participation in the criminal justice process, are more likely to practice a religion, and are younger. Instrumental factors, such as victimization and fear of crime, symbolic factors, such as institutional trust, trust in the judiciary, and the police, as well as gender do not differentiate death penalty opponents from supporters. The results of the multinomial logistic regression show that residents who did not express agreement or disagreement with the death penalty have more in common with those who oppose capital punishment than with those who favor it. Although the majority of the population (65.2%) expressed support for death penalty, one in four respondents (26.1%) remained ambivalent regarding the use of capital punishment. Additionally, most of those who expressed an opinion (50.5%) said they would hesitate to recommend death, if chosen to serve in the newly instituted citizen judge system. Findings suggest that public support for death penalty is not as strong in the country as the Japanese government claims and that it requires further exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of 1990s, the Japanese government has made a clear neoliberal shift in its strategy for regional governance. Within the ongoing framework of regional revitalisation (chihôsôsei), various local attempts to foster revitalisation (kasseika) are underway. Two seemingly irreconcilable views prevail in connection with volunteer-based localism: local participation and the mobilisation of civic action. However, the ways in which these seemingly distinct phenomena can socially coexist are relatively unexplored. Against this background, this article aims to offer a critical re-examination of regional revitalisation projects in Japan and it focuses on the correlation between local participation patterns and local power structures. Taking one community as its empirical case study, the central question posed is: 'In reality, who are the motivated participants in the community-revitalisation project?' What becomes apparent is, on the one hand, the locality's power structure strongly limits the level of participation in the project; on the other hand, the locality's inhabitants experience the ongoing situation as fundamentally fair and reasonable. On this basis, this article argues that the state's governing discourse of neoliberalism is able to advance at the local level while simultaneously and unwittingly perpetuating the structure of social segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been proposals to pass a law making discrimination against Burakumin an offence since at least 1925, but the Japanese government was never sympathetic towards them. Post-war, although some targeted measures were taken to provide improvements to Buraku communities through the Dōwa policy projects, there was still resistance to any suggestion that discrimination against Burakumin, or indeed any other group, be legally discouraged. This was despite the fact that many other liberal democracies were devising such legislation and creating commissions to hold governments to account and, at the international level, the UN was codifying human rights standards. Amos and Bondy in the following articles demonstrate how the LDP was persuaded to introduce the LPEBD into the Diet in early 2016 where it was passed with the support of all parties except for the JCP. This article sketches out the background to these developments looking at the evolution of policy across the twentieth century and the international context of its passage between 2014–2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 Law for the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination (LPEBD) was a significant development in the history of postwar Buraku liberation politics. Why then was there such strong opposition to it by the Japan Communist Party and JCP-affiliated groups? This article explains this opposition to the new law by placing it within a larger postwar historical context. Once the content and meaning of the strong opposition to the law's passing is placed in historical perspective, and the reasons for and motivations behind the law's pronouncement are contextually clarified, the importance of the critiques provided by these groups becomes more readily apparent. The concerns raised about the possible negative impact the law might have upon individuals and communities identified as belonging to the contemporary Buraku liberation movement are cogent and worthy of close consideration, particularly in light of the murky circumstances and distinct lack of political debate that actually surrounded the passing of the bill. The article, however, also concludes by discussing some of the problems with the JCP interpretative framework, and suggests the need for new interpretative paradigms to envisage the twenty-first century Buraku liberation movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the thought and career of Nabeyama Sadachika (1901–79) from communist militant in 1920s Japan to his conversion to the emperor system in the 1930s and, finally, to his role in shaping the postwar anti-communist movement. Using Nabeyama's recently released private papers, the article shows how he brokered his anti-communist expertise to a range of postwar actors and institutions—the police, the Self-Defense Forces, business circles, politicians—as well as to foreign states, especially the Republic of China (Taiwan). These networks indicate that important sections of Japan's postwar establishment rallied behind anti-communism in the face of reforms that threatened their power at home and their vision for Japan in the world order after 1945. As a transwar history, this article adds to our understanding of Japan's transition from the age of empire to that of liberal democracy by qualifying narratives about the "progressive" nature of postwar Japanese politics. It argues that the vitality of anti-communism is symptomatic of the durability of particular political traditions, and reveals that, despite the significant reforms that Japan underwent after 1945, the Right was able to claim a space in the country's political culture that has been neglected by historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald Dore's 1979 essay about Japan's "internationalization" tackled one of the defining themes of Japanese politics, society, and culture over the past decades. In his characteristically witty voice, Dore assessed the myriad ways in which a Japan that was well attuned to global cultures was also capable of reaffirming supposed chasms between Japanese society and the world outside, particularly in political and economic matters. In this article, I place Dore's compelling essay in the contexts both of his own changing views on Japan over the course of his distinguished and prolific career, as well as in the currents of a Japan that has been transformed dramatically over the past three decades by transnational flows that fall outside the prevailing use of the word kokusaika (internationalization). Dore's contributions to the field displayed not only his keen engagement with Japanese intellectual and social debates, but also moral judgments regarding the values encoded, reproduced, and sometimes betrayed by institutional environments. By extending the logics of Dore's work, this article suggests that we might think of internationalization as something not only challenging these environments, but also transformed and embedded within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the efforts by evangelical Christians in Japan to oppose the planned amendments to the country's constitution. Also cited are the plan by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to establish Japan's self-defence force, the ecclesiology of Abraham Kuyper as a guide for Christians to oppose issues related to nationalism in Japan, and the support of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo of the proposed constitutional revision.

In this article, Sir David Warren, who was British Ambassador to Japan from 2008 to 2012, lays out the historical background to modern Japan, its political and economic structures (and international relationships); explores why we tend not to think of Japan as affected by the populism that we see in other Western democracies; and asks why Japan still presents itself as such a 'different' country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2008 the Japanese government has become more responsive to the exercise of Chinese economic, diplomatic and military power in Southeast Asia, suggesting an intensifying rivalry. The Japanese government has thrown off any reticence about self-promotion by more forcefully positioning Japan as a sensitive and sustainable strategic partner for Southeast Asian nations in a strategic contrast with the People's Republic of China (PRC). Rather than trying to contain China, Tokyo is seeking to mediate how China turns its material resources into influence. Despite an increasing asymmetry in material resources between China and Japan, this article argues that Japan maintains a surprising ability to influence the preferences of Southeast Asian nations and responses to exercises of PRC power, which in turn has allowed Japan to influence China's regional strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Japanese government with academics who research, write, and talk about sordid or awkward aspects of Japan's twentieth-century history. It mentions Japanese studies what had been sporadic and episodic has become more systematic and intrusive on Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and funding involves conveying government positions on wartime history. It also mentions subject to legal harassment in the form of a freedom of information (FOI) request in 2019.

What age a state designates as appropriate for voting rights raises a range of democratic and empirical issues. The lowering of the voting age in Japan in 2015 was the biggest expansion of the country's democratic franchise since 1945, yet it happened in an abrupt manner. Lowering the voting age was not a significant issue among the Japanese public until the mid-2000s and the government began supporting the move officially only in 2014. Why then? What happened to precipitate this decision? This study argues that the circumstances governing the period before the policy decision was made are crucial to understanding what followed. In the prevailing theories of policy change, analysis has focused much more on the phase of decision making over policy; public opinion, policy beliefs, and policy transfer have been prominently cited as the major reasons for lowering the voting age in other countries. In contrast, this article claims that the policy opportunity spillover, from constitutional revision to voting age, was a necessary condition for lowering the age. The discussion of constitutional revision incidentally opened a policy window to another issue area, in this case voting age. The findings help us answer the question of what time period we need to examine in order to discern actual policy dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approval in public opinion polling is an important resource for prime ministers in contemporary Japanese politics. Though it is widely agreed that cabinet approval ratings increased in political significance after the electoral reform and the restructuring of government agencies, little attention has been paid to the fact that public opinion polling in the mass media also experienced a transformation during the same period. This article surveys the history of public opinion polling since 1945. It argues that changes in survey methodology enabled newspapers to conduct and report opinion polling quickly and frequently, which has strengthened the link between approval ratings and ongoing political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serialized in a period of booming popular interest for the United Red Army (URA), Red (2006-2018) by manga artist Yamamoto Naoki (1960-) is to this day the most thoroughly detailed and researched work of fiction drawing on the famous Japanese terrorist group. In the present article, we would like to address how Yamamoto is fully engaged in a memory struggle regarding the "truth" of the historical event -- he has been active in the "Association to transmit the overall picture of the United Red Army incident," a group involved in the gathering and publishing of testimonies surrounding the incident, bringing to the fore until then unknown and neglected details of the URA. And yet, serialized in the seinen manga magazine Evening, Red constitutes at the same time a genuine piece of popular culture, fostering narrative and visual devices aimed at a large audience (for instance, all the characters appear with false and dramatized names - Nagata Hiroko becoming Akagi or "Red Castle" Hiroko - and the ideological motivations are all downplayed in favor of more sanitized and universal ones). By so doing, Yamamoto succeeds in reshaping the popular memory of the URA, but we argue that this reworking is made at the expense of the political and social background of the organization, with the result of hindering our social and historical understanding of this foundational event of contemporary Japan politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by a previous finding that single-party cues have no effect in Japan and by the increasing 'presidentialization' of Japanese politics, the present study examined whether the use of prime minister cues in place of single-party cues helps Japanese voters form policy preferences. In addition, to probe the effect of party cues that are unique to multiparty systems, the effect of multiple-party cues, which indicate that a policy is supported by multiple rather than single ideologically distinct parties, was investigated. The results of a survey experiment showed that while prime minister cues are not utilized by the supporters of incumbent parties, the supporters of opposition parties demonstrated significantly reduced approval of a policy when there was an indication that the prime minister supported it. The effect of prime minister cues on opposition supporters was stronger than that of Liberal Democratic Party cues, suggesting that leader cues are effective in Japan. Furthermore, a cue indicating that ideologically distinct parties support a policy enhances approval for that policy among the public, which suggests that multiple-party rather than single-party cues are informative in multiparty systems. Theoretical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Cool Japan' is an instance of Japanese government's nation branding exercise as part of its soft power projection in which the unique selling point is identified as Japanese national identity. In this paper, I examine the relationship between Cool Japan and Japanese national identity and highlight a tension in the construction. Cool Japan is about emphasizing Japan's attractiveness for public diplomacy, while the top-down nature of the branding undermines the imagery that the branding is designed to convey. I show that policy elites resolve this tension by invoking the traditional Japanese identity narratives that construct Japan into both a non-Western and an un-Asian entity, reproducing the myth of Japanese uniqueness. I argue that the elite narratives surrounding Cool Japan readily replicate the language reminiscent of prewar identity construction. Despite the contemporary popularity of manga and anime, the purported 'coolness' of these products are framed within older constructions of Japanese Self that can trace their pedigree back to the nineteenth century. Using the minutes of committee meetings, policy documents, as well as media interviews given by policy- and business elites, I show that Cool Japan is effectively a twenty first century rendition of the familiar Japanese identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese Constitution has never experienced any amendment since its enactment in 1947. This article claims that the reason is not the Japanese people's support of it from the heart. The hypothesis presented in this article is that many other political, structural and cultural reasons have gradually deprived the Constitution's normative force among people, and have made constitutional amendment unnecessary in Japanese politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing interest over the last 20 years in the position and power of the Japanese prime minister, what he does after resigning from this position has been overlooked in the extant literatures in both English and Japanese. This is unfortunate because, to paraphrase former US President Bill Clinton, as an ex-leader "you lose your power but not your influence." This article represents the first attempt to explore what post-war Japanese prime ministers have done after stepping down and what influence they have continued to exert. It does so by providing an empirical overview of the afterlives of Japan's 33 post-war ex-prime ministers before then discussing the benefits and shortcomings of applying the comparative, conceptual literature on the role of former leaders in Western democracies to the specific case of Japan. After providing the necessary justification, it then focuses on three detailed and illuminating case studies of Nakasone Yasuhiro, Murayama Tomiichi and Fukuda Yasuo. It argues that Japanese prime ministers continue to exert influence in several informal ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the elevated status of the prime minister in the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government through the lens of Poguntke and Webb's presidentialization thesis. There are two distinctive characteristics in the Japanese case. First, its presidentialization does not occur as the evolution of the Westminster model and instead follows a unique path. Second, the reinforced position of the Japanese premiership is in essence the product of institutional reforms that the Japanese political class has enacted in the last two decades for the renewal of national strategies, which in turn means that the Japanese presidentialization is taking place by design at its core. Furthermore, the latter fact implies its potential risks—most importantly, the progress of presidentialization under the LDP's continued dominance can undermine check-and-balance functions in Japanese democracy to a hazardous degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Japan can now do more or less everything that other, more ‘normal’ countries do in the security field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policies (UMP). It considers whether these policies have been successful and where their effects remain uncertain. We survey both the domestic financial market and macro‐economic effects of UMP in the economies where these policies were introduced and their international spillover effects. The paper considers the impact of a wide range of UMP rather than the effects of specific policy instruments. We also provide a retrospective on the important case of Japan beginning in the late1990s and ask whether the Eurozone's experience with UMP is substantively different given its structure of policymaking. Finally, we ask: if the 'old normal' is not in our future, should the 'new normal' in monetary policy routinely include what we now refer to as UMP? We conclude that UMP can prevent economic collapse but are not designed to promote stronger long‐term economic growth. Apart from new communication strategies, the use of UMP under normal circumstances does not appear to be a sound monetary policy strategy. Failure to learn this lesson might also enable future policy makers to ask or expect too much from their central banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal mergers have been widely used as a tool for administrative reform. The goal of most municipal mergers is to increase the efficiency of service provision, but their impact on local democracy has been neglected. In particular, little is known as to how mergers affect performance of local legislatures. In filling these gaps, this study uses a dataset of 754 Japanese city-level governments from 2008 to 2014 to examine how mergers influence legislative performance. After controlling for potential confounding factors, the analysis shows that municipal merger is negatively correlated to legislative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the life history of Yoshihei Carlos Nakatani (1910-1992), using two intimate memoirs provided by his family and heretofore unknown to the historiography. Nakatani, who immigrated to Mexico in 1932, is known as the inventor of the cacahuate japonés (Japanese peanut), a toasted peanut covered in soy-sauce-flavored flour that is now a mainstream snack in Mexico. Nakatani’s life story is distinct in that his invention of cacahuate japonés demonstrates how he actively adapted to Mexican society. This article takes Nakatani’s life as one example of a Japanese immigrant’s lived experiences in Mexico and highlights aspects of his process of integration into Mexican society. Unique sources reveal the importance of emotion and personal histories for Japanese immigrants’ negotiation of their immigrant self-identities during the historical events of World War II. It argues that Nakatani’s experiences illustrate that Japanese immigrants in Mexico had starkly divergent experiences from their countrymen in the US, despite analogous experiences with economic struggles, racism, and displacement. Nakatani’s cacahuate japonés thus offers a locus through which to re-conceptualize Japanese immigrants’ experiences and trajectories in which integration into the host country could paradoxically include reliance upon Japanese heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on two main issues: the ability of informal cross-border entrepreneurs to avoid restrictions imposed by a government, and governmental capacity to make these restrictions work efficiently in the long term. Two kinds of informal trade activities between Russia and Japan-import of used cars and trafficking of marine bioresources-are taken as case studies. I argue that in both cases informal cross-border traders have tried to exploit cross-border differences to their benefit, balancing between legal, low-punishable, and heavily punishable practices. Both kinds of informal trade proved to be highly resistant to suppressive government policies and highly capable of exploiting legal and law enforcement loopholes. Still, suppressive government policies proved to be at least partially successful in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Catholic critiques of statism in Japan during pre-World War II. Topics discussed include the nature of the state and the law, the traditional concepts of national essence and its allegiance to the state, and the arguments associated with the state primacy and the natural law.

Scholars have recently argued that prime ministers reshuffle their cabinets strategically. Although some scholars assume that cabinet reshuffles help prime ministers increase their government's popularity, this assumption has not been tested formally because of the endogeneity problem. In Japan, polling firms sometimes provide respondents with cues about a reshuffle when asking about cabinet approval following reshuffles, while others do not. I utilized this convention in the Japanese media to test the assumption that reshuffles increase cabinet approval ratings. Applying a dynamic linear model to pooled poll data from 2001 to 2015, I achieved high internal, external, and ecological validity. The analyses show that cues about reshuffles increase cabinet approval ratings by 2.4 percentage points on average, and the credible interval of the effect does not include zero. This result reinforces the findings of previous research on the theory of cabinet management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to sovereign power when petty sovereigns refuse to exploit discretionary power to suspend the rule of law, the very power that is delegated to them and makes them who they are? How might such a refusal contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between resistance and sovereign power? This article revisits Judith Butler’s notion of petty sovereigns to explore the possibility that petty sovereigns establish a distinctive relationship with law. This article draws on a case involving one nameless petty sovereign and his published writings. He writes novels to expose how law is used by some officials to realize a particular policy goal with regards to nuclear energy. His novels blur the line between fiction and non-fiction: it contains classified information only available to bureaucrats, discusses actual energy policies and related laws, and introduces fictional characters who resemble non-fictional characters. I argue that this example suggests that petty sovereigns are not necessarily tied to the node between governmentality and sovereignty. Shifting between the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, petty sovereigns slip away from sovereign power, which controls the subject-making process, and quietly resist sovereign politics through the contingency of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Semi‐parliamentary government is a distinct executive‐legislative system that mirrors semi‐presidentialism. It exists when the legislature is divided into two equally legitimate parts, only one of which can dismiss the prime minister in a no‐confidence vote. This system has distinct advantages over pure parliamentary and presidential systems: it establishes a branch‐based separation of powers and can balance the ‘majoritarian’ and ‘proportional’ visions of democracy without concentrating executive power in a single individual. This article analyses bicameral versions of semi‐parliamentary government in Australia and Japan, and compares empirical patterns of democracy in the Australian Commonwealth as well as New South Wales to 20 advanced parliamentary and semi‐presidential systems. It discusses new semi‐parliamentary designs, some of which do not require formal bicameralism, and pays special attention to semi‐parliamentary options for democratising the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]