{"title":"Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan","authors":"Andrew L. Oros","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88027085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline","authors":"Linda C. Hasunuma","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87376972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and Contest for Hegemony, 1912–1933","authors":"N. Kanahara","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78483321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar","authors":"A. E. Murray","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82243239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Japan’s Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace","authors":"Jon Morris","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74919499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan","authors":"S. Klien","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAB007","url":null,"abstract":"‘Japan’s ageing society’ today is a commonly and globally recognised ‘issue’: pretty much everyone seems to have something to say about it, offering a diagnosis and fancying a solution. This discursive incitement, however, often obscures the voices of older people themselves, the very people to whom aged subjectivity and sociality are of real, practical and existential import. Iza Kavedžija’s Making Meaningful Lives is an invitation to listen to such voices. Exploring the lived experience of older women and men in two neighbourhoods in Osaka, she focuses on various acts of care and storytelling through which they make sense of their life. Much of this storytelling is anchored to the ‘salon’, a café-esque communal space established in the neighbourhood. A concrete space of discursive and material exchange, the salon serves as a place where its participants cultivate an emergent sense of sociality through ‘links of care’ (p. 7). As one participant puts it, ‘this salon is the source of our well-being’ (p. 5). Kavedžija connects her interlocutors’ singular life stories to general existential questions that concern us all: autonomy and mutuality, privacy and intimacy, self and alterity. In particular, she explores ‘the good life’ –what makes a life ‘worth’ living (ikigai) – as the central question of ‘existential anthropology’, ‘an investigation of the ways in which people try to make their lives their own in the face of adversity and constraint’ (p. 6). Notwithstanding the gravity of such questions, Kavedžija’s calm and unassuming prose invites us to withhold our usual expectation for narrative rupture and closure. Everything in this ethnography happens quietly: ‘Here, existential dramas did not play out in the form of ruptures or discrete events, but quietly, in everyday life’ (p. 6). Irreducible to narrative dénouement, the salon participants’ ‘dramas’ consist of acts of delicate ‘balancing’ – a recurring theme featured throughout the book. Kavedžija demonstrates that they co-construct the meaning of the good life and their ‘disposition to care’ (p. 172) through negotiating differences in a dialectic tension within the seeming orderliness of the everyday. Chapter 6 explores this balancing in terms of a dialectic between intimacy and independence, between the burden of connection and the risk of freedom, and Chapter 3 reveals how ‘distance, or a certain degree of separation’ (p. 53) is an enabling condition, not a hindrance, in the enjoyment of social connection for","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84863828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Losing Steam: Why Does Japan Produce So Little Geothermal Power?","authors":"J. Hymans","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAA040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAA040","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Japan has long faced energy insecurity due to its extreme dependence on energy imports. Why, then, has Japan failed to exploit its huge domestic geothermal energy resources, which could provide up to 10% of the country’s electricity needs? This article argues that local interests empowered by national policy have been the main obstacle to expansion of geothermal power production in Japan since the 1970s. The article substantiates its claim with a historical analysis of national geothermal policy and a fieldwork-based case study of geothermal power development in Yuzawa City, Akita Prefecture.","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82185037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nuclear Restart Politics: How the ‘Nuclear Village’ Lost Policy Implementation Power","authors":"Florentine Koppenborg","doi":"10.1093/ssjj/jyaa046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyaa046","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The March 2011 nuclear accident (3.11) shook Japan’s nuclear energy policy to its core. In 2012, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) returned to government with a pro-nuclear policy and the intention to swiftly restart nuclear power plants. In 2020, however, only six nuclear reactors were in operation. Why has the progress of nuclear restarts been so slow despite apparent political support? This article investigates the process of restarting nuclear power plants. The key finding is that the ‘nuclear village’, centered on the LDP, Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry, and the nuclear industry, which previously controlled both nuclear policy goal-setting and implementation, remained in charge of policy decision making, i.e. goal-setting, but lost policy implementation power to an extended conflict over nuclear reactor restarts. The main factors that changed the politics of nuclear reactor restarts are Japan’s new nuclear safety agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), and a substantial increase in the number of citizens’ class-action lawsuits against nuclear reactors. These findings highlight the importance of assessing both decision making and implementation in assessments of policy change.","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78323854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Winner of the 2020 ISS-OUP Prize","authors":"Leonard J. Schoppa","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAA049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAA049","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72625583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Green Japan: Environmental Technologies, Innovation Policy, and the Pursuit of Green Growth","authors":"G. Noble","doi":"10.1093/SSJJ/JYAA047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/SSJJ/JYAA047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44320,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Japan Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78154038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}