Japanese Politics and the Global Political Economy Project
In April 2021, President Biden and his Japanese counterpart made global headlines when they jointly “underscored the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”—the first such reference in a joint summit-level statement since the U.S. and Japanese governments switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in the 1970s. In the nearly three years since, such language has been repeated dozens of times. Meanwhile, discussions within Tokyo about a so-called “Taiwan Strait contingency” have been mainstreamed to an unprecedented degree. Amidst a rapidly changing regional...
In the late 1960s, a new style of “non-political” social movement emerged in Japan. Despite aiming at social reforms, these movements—including environmental, consumer protection, and local improvement movements—embraced a rhetoric of “anti-politics,” disclaiming “ideology” in exchange for a focus on “issues.” These paradoxically “non-political” organizations achieved great success in the political arena, and by declaring that “anyone can join,” these movements succeeded in achieving a number of policy goals. I trace the history of Japan’s “non-political” political activism from the mid-1960s...
The yearslong stalemate between Japan-South Korea has been thawing in the past year, with the leaders of both countries working toward rapprochement and greater trilateral cooperation with the United States. Chinese ambitions, North Korean threats and the Russian war have rallied the three allies toward greater cooperation, leading to a historic leader-level summit at Camp David in August 2023. The U.S., Japanese and South Korean officials are now working to create enduring structures that they hope would endure shifting political dynamics in the three countries. But challenges remain,...
In the past decade, smoking has gone from being widely accepted in Korean and Japanese society to being increasingly frowned upon and regulated. Instead of depending on nonsmokers’ tolerance and smokers’ etiquette, recent reforms impose more detailed and expansive nonsmoking rules and penalties for noncompliance. As the Japanese government’s promotional materials note, the reforms move “from manners to rules” (manā kara rūru e). What explains this shift toward more legalistic governance, with formal rules and enforcement mechanisms? Smoking regulations offer an ideal case for analyzing the...
Since the late 1970s, the three most salient minority groups in Japan - the politically dormant Ainu, the active but unsuccessful Koreans, and the former outcaste group of Burakumin - have all expanded their activism despite the unfavorable domestic political environment. In Rights Make Might, Kiyoteru Tsutsui examines why, and finds an answer in the galvanizing effects of global human rights on local social movements. Tsutsui chronicles the transformative impact of global human rights ideas and institutions on minority activists, which changed their understandings about their standing in...
How does racism structure the patterns of cooperation and contestation in international relations? In the century since Japan’s failed proposal for a League of Nations racial equality clause, overt expressions of racism have become increasingly taboo in international diplomacy. However, I argue that institutional racism has emerged as a fundamental feature of the contemporary international order. Much like domestic politics, overt racism has given way to systemic racism, in which seemingly race-neutral rules and institutions perpetuate racial disparities and hierarchies. Despite their many...
Single-party dominance in democracies is an unresolved puzzle in comparative politics, and no case is more extreme than Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has dominated elections for more than six decades. Can the LDP’s success be attributed to voters’ support for its policies? To examine this question, we introduce a novel approach to measuring voters’ utilities from parties’ policies through a conjoint survey design and apply this measure to test the theoretical implications of spatial voting models. We find that voters’ policy preferences are positively associated with their...
2022 is expected to be a watershed year in Japanese strategy. North Korean missile launches and China’s expanding military power have intensified Japanese concerns about their security. But it is tension across the Taiwan Strait that may be the most compelling reason for Japanese decision makers to double their defense spending and invest in offensive capability. In this talk I hope to discuss my findings from a recent trip to Tokyo. Sheila A. Smith is John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on Japanese politics and foreign...
Although the need for the U.S. to work with Japan during a future crisis is ever increasing, we do not yet have a sufficient understanding of what Japanese citizens think about security policies and possible military actions. We leveraged on an extremely rare opportunity in which the Japanese government decided to dispatch its de facto military, the Self-Defense Forces (SDFs), overseas for a high-risk operation, the evacuation from Afghanistan in August 2021. Specifically, we conducted “real-time” survey experiments in this context to test some hypotheses relevant to the theoretical...
Registration: Please register for the talk at this link Shinzo Abe, the slain politician who served as prime minister longer than any other Japanese leader, often talked about creating a society in which “women can shine.” One of his signature economic pillars, dubbed “womenomics,” was built on a promise of promoting women in the workforce to address dire demographic problems like a declining and aging population. But many of his pledges, including an original target of placing women in 30 percent of corporate...
By comparative standards, the dominance of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is highly unusual. The party has formed the government for all but four of the past 67 years. In the majority of Lower House elections held since 1955, the LDP’s seat tally was more than double that of any other party. Its string of election victories is especially surprising in light of an electoral system shift in the 1990s that was predicted to make single-party dominance less likely. A policy-based explanation is similarly implausible: the LDP’s positions are at odds with large segments of Japan’s...
