Understanding Governance In Contemporary Japan

This book explores the transformation of the Japanese state in response to the challenges of governance by focusing on two case studies: ICT regulation and antimonopoly regulation after the 1980s, which experienced a disjuncture and significant transformation within the period with approaches embracing competition. In so doing, it reveals the transformation of the state and governance in a Japanese context and presents itself as an example of the new governance school addressing the state, its transformation, and the governance of the political arena in Japanese politics and beyond, setting out a challenge to the established body of pluralist and rational choice literature in Japanese politics. With its comprehensive review and analysis of the theory and development of Japan’s contemporary politics, this book is suitable as a textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate courses as well as a guidebook for practitioners engaging in policies and businesses relating to Japan.

This book deals with the public policy-making process in contemporary Japan testifying a new dictum: 'The various phases of the policy process cause politics'. The analytical focus is threefold: encompassing the policy-making process on the national level; elections and the policy-making process; and the regional policy and decision-making. These analyses offer a number of original and comparative data on Japanese politics. This book also tries to interpret the basic pattern of Japanese politics, which contributes to a clear understanding of the dynamic aspects of the political process and political economy after the Second World War.

Society and social sciences;Politics and government;Sociology.

This book sheds light on the changing nature of contemporary Japan by decoding a range of political, economic and social boundaries. With a focus on the period following the inauguration of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō, the book grows out of a recognition that, with the Koizumi administration playing a more proactive role internationally and moving ahead with deregulation and the ‘structural reform’ of the economy domestically, a range of boundaries have been challenged and reinscribed. Here ‘boundaries’ refers to the ways in which contemporary Japan is shaped as a separate entity by the inscription and reinscription of political, economic and social space creating insiders and outsiders, both internationally and domestically. The central argument of the book is that, in order to achieve the twin goals of greater international proactivity and domestic reform, the government and other actors supporting Koizumi’s new direction for Japan needed to take action in order to destabilize and reformulate a range of extant boundaries. While boundaries often remain invisible, the aim of this book is to promote an understanding of their significance by uncovering their pivotal role. Decoding Boundaries in Contemporary Japan brings together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from the UK, Japan and the United States. It will appeal to scholars and students of Japan as well as social scientists with an interest in borders and boundaries, political scientists interested in Asia.

Japan is one of the world's most important societies, yet remains one of the least understood. This book is designed to fill the gap for a concise but thought-provoking introduction to all aspects of the country's political, economic and social life set in a clear historical context. The author's starting-point is that the study of Japan is 'contested territory' where even such apparently simple questions such as 'Who is in charge?' spark considerable disagreement and controversy among experts. To understand contemporary Japan, Duncan McCargo argues, it is necessary to get to grips with a range of different perspectives on Japanese political and social structures. Integrating contrasting perspectives throughout, the core chapters of the book focus on the changing economy, government and politics, society and culture, and Japan's place in the wider world. The new third edition of this popular text has been fully revised and updated throughout to cover key developments such as the historic end of LDP rule in 2009. This accessible and lively book will be essential reading both for students and general readers who want to know more about this important country.

This book is an integrated examination of Japanese politics in the first two decades of the 21st century, as viewed from the perspective of "anxiety over governance." By empirically highlighting the social-environmental, political environmental, and sociocultural changes that have underlined the long-term political participation and voting behavior of Japanese citizens, the book provides deep insight into how modern democracies function and are perceived in post-industrial societies and reveals the specific processes by which Japanese politics have changed. Additionally, the book provides an analysis of the decline in social capital, the shrinking variety of political parties, and the intermingling of Asian values with liberal democratic values. By examining anxiety over governance, the chapters explore the links between anxiety and Japanese political behavior, revealing that, despite the high regard for democratic politics, Japanese citizens generally experienced a high level of anxiety and negative evaluation of the government, including countermeasures against COVID-19. Featuring surveys of Japanese political behavior over a period of more than 40 years, this book will be valuable reading for students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Political Behavior, and Psychology. The introduction, chapter 4 and chapter 5 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Presenting a study of politics at grassroots level among young Japanese, this book examines the alliance between the religious movement Soka Gakkai (the 'Value-creation Society') and Komeito (the 'Clean Government Party'), which shared power with the Liberal Democratic Party from 1999 to 2009. Drawing on primary research carried out among Komeito supporters, the book focuses on the lives of supporters and voters in order to better understand the processes of democracy. It goes on to discuss what the political behaviour of young Komeito supporters tell us about the role of religious organizations, such as Soka Gakkai, in Japanese politics. Unlike most other books on politics in Japan which tend to concentrate on political elites, this book provides extremely valuable insights into political culture at the grassroots level.