Local Power in the Japanese State


Book Description

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.




Japan’s Reluctant Realism


Book Description

In Japan's Reluctant Realism , Michael J. Green examines the adjustments of Japanese foreign policy in the decade since the end of the Cold War. Green presents case studies of China, the Korean peninsula, Russia and Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the international financial institutions, and multilateral forums (the United Nations, APEC, and the ARF). In each of these studies, Green considers Japanese objectives; the effectiveness of Japanese diplomacy in achieving those objectives; the domestic and exogenous pressures on policy-making; the degree of convergence or divergence with the United States in both strategy and implementation; and lessons for more effective US - Japan diplomatic cooperation in the future. As Green notes, its bilateral relationship with the United States is at the heart of Japan's foreign policy initiatives, and Japan therefore conducts foreign policy with one eye carefully on Washington. However, Green argues, it is time to recognize Japan as an independent actor in Northeast Asia, and to assess Japanese foreign policy in its own terms.




Japan Under the DPJ


Book Description

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) came to power in 2009 with a commanding majority, ending fifty years of almost uninterrupted Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rule. What explains the DPJ's rapid rise to power? Why has policy change under the DPJ been limited, despite high expectations and promises of bold reform? Why has the party been paralyzed by internecine conflict? This volume examines the DPJ's ascendance and its policies once in power. Chapters in the volume cover: DPJ candidate recruitment, the influence of media coverage, nationalization of elections, electoral system constraints on policy change, the role of third parties, municipal mergers, the role of women, transportation policy, fiscal decentralization, information technology, response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, security strategy, and foreign policy. Japan under the DPJ makes important contributions to the study of Japanese politics, while drawing upon and advancing scholarship on a wider range of issues of interest to political scientists. Contributors include Kenneth McElwain (University of Michigan), Ethan Scheiner (University of California-Davis), Steven Reed (Chuo University, Japan ), Kay Shimizu (Columbia University), Daniel Smith (Stanford University), Robert Pekkanen (University of Washington), Ellis Krauss (University of California-San Diego), Yukio Maeda (University of Tokyo), Linda Hasunuma (Franklin and Marshall College), Alisa Gaunder (Southwestern University), Christopher Hughes (University of Warwick, UK), and Daniel Sneider (Stanford University).




Allied Occupation of Japan


Book Description

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the end of the American-led Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-52), The Allied Occupation of Japan is a sweeping history of the revolutionary reforms that transformed Japan and the remarkable men and women, American and Japanese, who implemented them.




Power and Pork


Book Description

Aims to tell the 'inside story' of a Japanese politician - Matsuoka Toshikatsu - one of the more controversial members of Japan's national Diet, and who's behaviour has been the subject of much speculation and commentary in the media.




The Rise and Fall of Japan's LDP


Book Description

Explains how the persistence of party institutions (factions, PARC, koenkai) and the transformed role of party leadership in Japan contributed both to the LDP's success at remaining in power for 15 years and its downfall.







Thinking Beyond the State


Book Description

Human mobility has been a widely examined phenomenon in the social sciences, and in this increasingly globalized world migration continues to be of significant concern. The chapters comprising this volume on Thinking Beyond the State address the need to think beyond prevailing state discourses in problematizing human movements between Japan and the Philippines, by focusing on the presence of other actors involved in these processes. This collection investigates a range of issues that are part and parcel of the migration experience: citizenship and nationality, migrant incorporation and integration, human security, migrant welfare, philanthropy, identity, and multiculturalism. The editor and contributors aim to inform the larger public of the realities that are embedded in this particular phenomenon, as well as engage academics involved in migration studies. The book will be a valuable resource to those with professional interests in the East Asian region, most particularly in Japan and the Philippines.




Transformative Sustainable Development


Book Description

Recent debates about sustainable development have shifted their focus from fixing environmental problems in a technocratic and economic way to more fundamental changes in social-political processes and relations. In this context, participation is a genuinely transformative approach to sustainable development, yet the process by which participation leads to transformation is not sufficiently understood. This book considers how the act of participating in sustainable development projects can bring about social transformation that is considered to be fair and just by the participants and non-participants in a broader societal context. Drawing on ideas from social theory and applied anthropology, the book proposes a reflexivity-based framework to analyse participation as a type of social action underpinned by primary experience. Development projects have a transformative effect when participants are given the opportunity to reflect on their experience, share the reflection with others, and open new space for collective deliberation and change. The book applies this framework to assess community-based participatory projects in the Amazon, African slums and rural settlements, and disaster stricken areas in Japan. It also outlines potential institutions of governance to institutionalize the change by referring to current food governance, drawing out lessons with international relevance. This book will be of interest to students of sustainable development, environmental policy and development studies, as well as practitioners and policy-makers in these fields.