This paper examines how automated multiphasic health testing and services (AMHTS), which were originally developed in the United States but never widely adopted there, gained traction in Japan despite being excluded from the country’s public health insurance system. Drawing on Fitzgerald et al.’s theory of interlocking interactions, we show how Japanese physicians and other stakeholders reframed AMHTS as a streamlined and affordable alternative to Ningen Dokku, Japan’s high-cost, elite medical checkup service. This creative reinterpretation helped spur efforts by actors such as the National Federation of Health Insurance Societies (Kenporen) to provide health screening subsidies outside the formal insurance framework, which supported the widespread adoption of the AMHTS by middle-class consumers. We introduce the concept of the “democratization of premium health services” to explain how care originally designed for elite users was redefined as both accessible and trustworthy. By highlighting how symbolic framing can promote innovation diffusion even beyond formal institutional boundaries, this study contributes to the business history of health care.

Do improved family policies meet women diplomats’ concerns about balancing work and family? Using a feminist institutionalist approach, the article analyzes the interaction of formal and informal institutional rules, the role of informality, and interactions between actors and rules to address whether and how family policies improve women diplomats’ experiences balancing work and family. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with Japanese women diplomats — most at the top ranks of diplomacy — surfaces the informal institutional rules at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). The article finds that informal institutional rules along with the lack of transparency in promotion limit the effectiveness of family policies.

Sanseitō is a fringe Japanese political party founded during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that has won several seats in the National Diet since 2022. Initially coming to prominence as a promoter of anti-vaccine narratives, the party has since promoted a conspiracist worldview that connects to more conventional right-wing nationalism and addresses a much broader range of issues and beliefs. In this article we outline the core tenets of this worldview and examine how attention to its construction as a participative political ideology sheds light on the party’s political actions and motivations.

Across the developed world, citizens typically file many more administrative appeals than administrative lawsuits. Yet, in contrast to the rich literature on court decisions, little is known about the determinants of administrative appeals decisions. We seek to fill this scholarly gap. An important feature of administrative review panels is that typically only some of their members have professional legal training. Drawing on original data on Japanese prefectural-level Administrative Complaint Review Boards (ACRBs), we show that ACRBs with more private attorneys rule more often against agencies. Consistent with a socialization perspective, we find preliminary evidence that ACRBs with more experienced private attorneys rule more often against agencies. We also find that, consistent with insights from both political insurance theory and the literature on technocratic appointments, more recently elected prefectural governors are more likely to appoint more private attorneys to ACRBs and that governors’ ideological orientations have little effect on their choices.

The sentiment expressed in a legislator’s speech is informative. However, extracting legislators’ sentiment requires human-annotated data. Instead, we propose exploiting closing debates on a bill in Japan, where legislators in effect label their speech as either pro or con. We utilize debate speeches as the training dataset, fine-tune a pretrained model, and calculate the sentiment scores of other speeches. We show that the more senior the opposition members are, the more negative their sentiment. Additionally, we show that opposition members become more negative as the next election approaches. We also demonstrate that legislators’ sentiments can be used to predict their behaviors by using the case in which government members rebelled in the historic vote of no confidence in 1993.

Studies in political science have revealed that voters evaluate candidates’ policy platforms based on gendered views, where women are expected to handle issues such as education well, while men are perceived to be better at issues such as national security. However, the extent to which voters’ views are gendered on immigration policy is less known, as existing theories offer varying interpretations of whether this issue is more aligned with the feminine or masculine stereotype. This paper empirically examines gendered evaluations of immigration policy platforms by conducting a survey experiment in Japan. Our experimental vignette presents a hypothetical candidate who is affiliated with a traditionally anti-immigration party but supports expanding immigration. We manipulate the gender of the candidate and the gendered framing of the position, and examine their interaction effects on attitudes to the candidate. Our experimental results show that the respondents do not evaluate the candidate based on gender and its interaction with the framing of the policy, suggesting that gender bias in voter evaluations may not be as severe as the literature expects in the immigration policy area.

This article focuses on a case study of one Japanese prefectural association and its monthly magazine to reassess the importance of prefectural associations (kenjinkai) beyond the diaspora communities in North America on which Anglophone scholarly focus has remained until now. It also returns an overlooked imperial dimension to Japanese language histories of domestic prefectural associations and discourse over the ‘hometown’. Arguing that the expansive ideas of the hometown, created through the networks of prefectural associations and the pages of their publications, gave rise to ideas of borderless empire and frictionless mobility, this article demonstrates how histories of prefectural associations and magazines like Fukuoka kenjin present a new, regional perspective on both empire and the idea of the hometown in pre-war Japan. Associationalism in and beyond Japan’s empire was not unique, and this article puts the history of kenjinkai in conversation with other such regional settler networks around the globe that were happening at the same time. The article then looks at the transwar continuities and ruptures felt by overseas associations in both North America and among former Japanese colonists, before contextualizing the rise of a ‘third wave’ of domestic migration and hometown discourse in the 1960s.

Exchange rate manipulation—the active devaluation of a currency through intervention in the foreign exchange market—is a frequent trigger of international disputes. Yet it is not an obvious policy choice: as a blunt tool to boost export competitiveness, it is disliked by citizens and importers because of the loss of purchasing power it entails, and because it benefits those with investment abroad at the expense of those with savings at home. It is thus notable that a group of East Asian countries, from Japan and Korea to Thailand, undertake frequent and often large interventions to devalue their currencies. What explains their policy choice? We provide evidence that exchange rate depreciations are undertaken at the behest of export industries. Because lobbying activities in East Asian countries are not directly observable, we focus on Japan and Korea and construct a proxy measure of lobbying by exporters, drawing on news reports. We use machine learning to scale daily reports of industry demands in the two leading financial newspapers, the Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun and, in a robustness check, the Korean Hankyung, over twenty-five years. We find evidence that mounting public pressure by organized economic interest groups precedes intervention and induces currency depreciation.

After World War II, Japan was severely degraded, and its people were generally devastated. For the country’s very survival, the beleaguered Japanese people sought to rebuild economically and reputationally. During this postwar period, Japanese business, union, and government leaders grappled with lagging progress and the necessary abandonment of prior transwar social and business arrangements. They sought new strategies to stimulate advancement in the wake of a governmental vacuum, labor unrest, and the threat of communism. In this context, Moral Re-Armament (MRA) took root in some areas of Japan during the period when Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $102 billion in 1945 to $420 billion by 1961. MRA introduced Western-oriented societal values, intended to help nurture individual and societal change, including collaborative relations between unions and management. Of the first eight Japanese prime ministers after World War II, six either worked openly with or endorsed the MRA movement.

Since the mid-2010s, conflicts at UNESCO over the interpretation of Japanese colonial rule and wartime actions in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan, South Korea, and China have been fierce. Contested nominations include the Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites for the World Heritage List (Japan), the Documents of Nanjing Massacre for the Memory of the World (MoW) Register (China), and two still pending applications on the Documents on the Comfort Women (South Korean and Japanese NGOs). This paper examines the recent “heritage war” negotiations at UNESCO as they unfolded in a changing political, economic, and security environment. Linking World Heritage and MoW nominations together for a holistic analysis, this paper clarifies the interests of State actors and of various non-State actors, such as NGOs, experts, and the UNESCO secretariat. We discuss the prospects for these contested nominations and recommend further involvement of non-State actors to ensure more constructive and inclusive heritage interpretation to enable a more comprehensive understanding of history.