Showing papers in "Social Science Japan Journal in 2008"

Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia

Abstract: For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, however. Korea's nuclear program, China's rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in Tokyo just as these matters have in Washington. What is the next step for Japan's security policy? Will confluence with U.S. interests-and the alliance-survive intact? Will the policy be transformed? Or will Japan become more autonomous? Richard J. Samuels demonstrates that over the last decade, a revisionist group of Japanese policymakers has consolidated power. The Koizumi government of the early 2000s took bold steps to position Japan's military to play a global security role. It left its successor, the Abe government, to further define and legitimate Japan's new grand strategy, a project well under way-and vigorously contested both at home and in the region. Securing Japan begins by tracing the history of Japan's grand strategy-from the Meiji rulers, who recognized the intimate connection between economic success and military advance, to the Konoye consensus that led to Japan's defeat in World War II and the postwar compact with the United States. Samuels shows how the ideological connections across these wars and agreements help explain today's debate. He then explores Japan's recent strategic choices, arguing that Japan will ultimately strike a balance between national strength and national autonomy, a position that will allow it to exist securely without being either too dependent on the United States or too vulnerable to threats from China. Samuels's insights into Japanese history, society, and politics have been honed over a distinguished career and enriched by interviews with policymakers and original archival research. Securing Japan is a definitive assessment of Japanese security policy and its implications for the future of East Asia.

From Class Struggle to General Middle-Class Society to Divided Society: Societal Models of Inequality in Postwar Japan

Abstract: After the fierce class struggles in the first postwar years, a societal model describing Japan as a general middle-class society with outstanding equality in opportunities and outcome became dominant. In recent years, a new societal model of Japan as a divided society has replaced this general middle-class model. Nonetheless, empirical research and comparative studies neither fully support a model of Japan as an exceptionally equal society from the 1960s onward nor do they show a fundamental transformation of contemporary Japan into a socially divided society. This paper argues that the sequence and timing of societal models of inequality in Japan since 1945 reflect the degree of resonance that societal models of inequality have in the lifeworlds of society.

Quality assessment and assurance in Japanese universities: The plight of the social sciences

Abstract: Japanese universities are currently experiencing rapid development in quality assessment and assurance activities. In 2004, the national government introduced corporate-style governance into national universities, accompanied by a new evaluation scheme to be carried out by both a governmental committee and a national agency called the National Institution for Academic Degrees and University Evaluation. Most local public universities operated by prefectures and cities have also adopted corporate-style governance and face pressure from local assemblies to engage in formal performance assessment. Furthermore, since 2004 the Japanese government has required seven-year, cyclical ‘certified evaluations’ (accreditation) for all national, local public and private universities and colleges. This certified evaluation is implemented at the institutional level and applies to new and evolving forms of professional post-graduate education programmes. Project-based funding schemes, such as ‘Centres of Excellence (COEs)’ in research and ‘Good Practices’ in various other education programmes are regarded as indirect forms of performance assessment. Despite the implementation of these initiatives, however, the means by which the quality of university education and research is best assessed remains the subject of hot debate, especially within the humanities and social sciences. This article considers the latest initiatives in quality assessment and assurance of education and research activities in Japan, focusing on policy and administrative reform and the particular challenges faced by the social sciences.

The Burden of Social Capital: Visa Overstaying Among Fujian Chinese Students in Japan

Abstract: This paper provides a sociological analysis of the student visa-overstaying phenomenon among Fujian Chinese immigrants in Japan. Since the mid-1980s, international education has been an important channel of migration from China to Japan. With the rapid increase of Chinese students in Japan, student visa overstaying has also become a major source of undocumented migration. Student visa overstaying is particularly visible among Chinese students from the Southeast coastal province, Fujian. This paper probes into this phenomenon by examining Fujian immigrants’ migration network characteristics. It argues that the social capital that facilitates migration and secures the livelihood for immigrants can become a liability prohibiting them from achieving upward mobility in the host society. Fujian immigrant social network closure cultivates and maintains a norm that positively sanctions undocumented immigration and provides resources that make it difficult for Fujian immigrants to maintain legal status.

Bushidō Baseball? Three ‘Fathers’ and the Invention of a Tradition

Abstract: Japanese baseball is often presented as an example of an unchanging Japanese ‘national character’, and Japanese baseball players are depicted as contemporary versions of the samurai, living and playing baseball according to a code of ‘yakyūdō’ (‘the way of baseball’, thought to be a present-day incarnation of bushidō, ‘the way of the warrior’) by both Japanese and non-Japanese commentators alike. In this paper, however, I argue that rather than Japanese baseball's ideology and practices being reflective of a unique and unchanging ‘essence’ of Japan, they are the result of specific individuals and institutions interacting under particular historical and social forces. Moreover, although the dominant ideology in Japanese baseball has been couched in the rhetoric of bushidō for over 100 years, it is in fact closer to 19th-century Western notions of amateurism, sportsmanship and chivalrous masculinity than the ethos of samurai of earlier centuries. This is largely due to the efforts of Christian socialist Abe Isō, considered to be both the ‘father of Japanese socialism’ and the ‘father of Japanese baseball’, as well as his students Tobita Suishu and Saeki Tatsuo, known as the ‘father of student baseball’ and the ‘father of high school baseball’, respectively.

The LDP's Defeat in Crucial Single-seat Constituencies of the 2007 Upper House Election

Abstract: This paper attempts to clarify and analyze the major factors behind the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) huge loss and the Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) overwhelming win in the single-seat constituencies (there are a total of 29 throughout the country), the results that decided the final outcome of the 21st House of Councilors Election held on 29 July 2007. Analysis of the election results reveals that, first, there was a shift in support from the LDP to the DPJ among primary-industry and construction workers, who were hard hit by the structural reform drive under the Koizumi and Abe administrations, and second, that since ‘unified local elections’ had taken place a few months earlier, many LDP supporters, tired out by their efforts in local-level elections, lost interest in the Upper House election and did not go to the polls (a situation known as the ‘Year of the Boar phenomenon’).

Physical Anthropology and the Reconstruction of Japanese Identity in Postcolonial Japan

Abstract: This article will attempt to show how Japanese identity was conceptualised within the theories and models of Japanese physical anthropology after the fall of the colonial empire in 1945 as part of the broader debate about the ‘origins of the Japanese’. Whereas at the time of the colonial empire, researchers considered that the ‘Japanese people’ had arrived on the archipelago during the proto-history of the archipelago, after the late 1940s, major researchers such as Hasebe Kotondo, president of the Tokyo Anthropological Society, stated that the Japanese had never known any interbreeding and form an uninterrupted line of descent since the Palaeolithic period. This theory was transformed into a model during the 1950s and 1960s by Suzuki Hisashi of the University of Tokyo, using the concept of microevolution and the craniometrical analysis of thousands of skeletons discovered after the war. It then became the dominant paradigm from the 1950s to the 1970s. However, at the same time, researchers from old colonial universities in Taipei and Seoul formulated an opposing model, based on the work of Kanaseki Takeo, who thought the Japanese people were the product of interbreeding, as the excavations he led in western Japan tended to show. This idea was further developed by Hanihara Kazurō in his Dual Structure Model and then by several geneticists from the 1980s-1990s onwards. This, therefore, permitted an alternative to the ‘homogeneous people’ paradigm, but at the same time showed a persistence towards the concept of ‘race’ within the research on ethnogenesis, as well as what must be called an obsession with identity that goes beyond variations between models in physical anthropology.

Gender in the Meiji Renovation: Confucian ‘Lessons for Women’ and the Making of Modern Japan

Abstract: From the early Tokugawa period onward, the expression, ‘The hen does not announce the morning. The crowing of a hen in the morning indicates the subversion of the family’ from the Shujing (Book of Documents) was frequently called upon as a warning. At the height of the Tokugawa period, Ogyū Sorai deployed the authority of the Confucian Classics to subject the daimyo houses' ‘inner quarters’ (oku) to a scorching critique. But in conjunction with the Sannō Gaiki (Secret History of the Three Rulers), attributed to his student Dazai Shundai, Sorai's Seidan (Discourse on Government) could also be perceived as targeting the house of the shogun. While the anonymous author of the Sannō Gaiki meant to expose the sorry state of the shogun's rule, Sorai's Seidan offered a vision of what government ought to be like. Calls to remove ‘the hens’ from the inner sphere of power now rapidly grew in volume. Against this background, the ‘Meiji Renovation’ (Meiji ishin) must also be understood as an attempt to eliminate, in the diction of the times, ‘the power of the women’ (joken) from the deep recesses of the government's power structure, and to reaffirm the power (of men) which alone was considered legitimate. Thus, after their seizure of power, the imperial restorationists hurried to crush what they called ‘the power of women already lasting for centuries’ and moved an empress who ‘does not poke her beak into matters of government’ to the front instead. Ultimately, a program to educate ‘good mothers and good wives’, drawing on examples from Japan, China and the West alike, was embarked upon with the empress at its head.

Food Security and International Fisheries Policy in Japan's Postwar Planning

Abstract: Japanese fisheries and food-security policy objectives of the postwar era were first conceived during the Allied Occupation and negotiations for the San Francisco Treaty. Official Japanese planning was largely concerned with food security, involving a high degree of self-sufficiency in fisheries in order to reduce the economic burden imposed by importing necessary food resources. The San Francisco Treaty provided the architecture for international fisheries relations in the North Pacific, whereby the US-Japan-Canada Trilateral Fisheries Agreement had set an important precedent through its support for freedom of the seas, resulting in Japan's largely unrestricted access to fishing grounds around the world.

Personnel Management Reforms in Japanese Supermarkets: The Positional Warfare and Limited Assimilation of Conversational Communities

Abstract: The Japanese general merchandising stores (GMS) industry has, in the 2000s, introduced new personnel management policies based on the principle of determining employee status and treatment according to ‘working conditions rather than employment arrangements’. This paper analyzes the substance and features of the new policies, as well as the factors underlying such policy reforms. By focusing on micropolitics at the workplace level, this paper highlights the possibility that the unofficial power of part-timers may underlie these reforms. The Japanese supermarket industry has increasingly been relying on the transformation of part-time employees into their main workforce both in volume and in substance in order to reduce labor costs. In the supermarket industry, these new personnel management policies serve both to contain the unofficial power of part-time employees through a limited assimilation of core part-timers and to stabilize the profit structure. In addition, the new policies, which offer preferential treatment to employees who are able to accept transfers involving changes of residence, reinforce the gender differentiation that previously adhered to the underside of employment arrangements while weakening notions of differential status based on employment arrangements.

Reflections on the Trajectories of Social Science Research in Contemporary Japan

Abstract: This survey on the science of the social sciences in Japan reflects upon a largely invisible discourse that has been hardly systematically explored so far. Since the current transformation of the field is first of all a reaction to a new global political economy of science, we introduce the concept of ‘academic neo-colonialism’ for a critical assessment of the vested and ramified dynamics impacting the social sciences. The survey features a short review of major contributions to the science of the social sciences, and evidence of the dynamics and consequences of the current process of change within the fields of social science demand, the academic division of labour and Japan's position within the international academic world. We argue that the apparent passivity of Japan's social sciences as well as the asymmetrical global flows of people, texts and ideas are a reflection of Japan's semi-peripheral position in the world system of the social sciences.‘Science is in danger, and for that reason it is becoming dangerous’ (Bourdieu 2004: vii).

Deciphering Maruyama Masao: The Challenge of Originality

Abstract: Authors who contribute to the crowded field of books on Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) must be endowed with at least one of two qualities: courage and originality. Moreover, the more time that passes since Maruyama’s death in 1996, the more demanding and difficult the task of writing on Maruyama becomes. Authors do not only need to deal with the substantial body of their subject’s thoughts and deeds but also have to bring something new to the table. What can they say that has not already been said? The books under review, both in the approachable shinsho (paperback pocket edition) format, possess the requisite courage for this endeavour; in the opinion of this reviewer, only one matches courage with originality. Karube Tadashi has crafted a splendid book that should be appreciated by academics as well as by the wider reading public. The beauty of his book is its structure and its scope. Karube masterfully pulls together an impressive array of material, including the huge amount of secondary literature published on Maruyama since 1996, through employing the present (gendai) as a streaming device. Contextualising Maruyama in this fashion requires Karube to weave together text, context and biography in an original manner. Karube first paints the scene, then locates Maruyama as a person and as a scholar, adding Maruyama’sownvoice to consolidate the contemporary analytical focus. It is anextremely effective technique. Karube’s core premise is that Maruyama can be best understood as an intellectual of the presentday; thus, the primary task for him as an author is to amplify and illustrate how Maruyama reflected, molded and interpreted an array of successive ‘presents’. The result is both convincing and illuminating. Karube has made splendid use of the various collected essays, series and volumes of letters and lectures that constitute the bulk of primary sources penned by Maruyama, and he has surveyed the field of secondary writings without being distracted from his main objective. What emerges is a clever book that informs the interested post-postwar generation of the ideas and impact of Maruyama in his own lifetime, and at the same time, stimulates postwar connoisseurs of Maruyama’s opus to take a fresh look at the thinker whom we all think we know.