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AbstractJapan’s dropping birthrate is a frequent topic in both media and political discourse and yet, an increasing number of non-Japanese women are giving birth in the country. While praised for several of its women-centered features, Japanese maternity care also faces criticism for its perceived inflexibility and lack of cultural sensitivity. This article presents a comprehensive overview of Japanese and English language studies on non-Japanese women’s access to maternity care in Japan. It highlights the challenges many women encounter, such as linguistic and cultural barriers, as well as institutional and physician inflexibility. The article also acknowledges noteworthy aspects, including excellent midwifery and support for new mothers. Ultimately, this paper argues that research utilizing in-depth narratives from foreign women is necessary to develop a more culturally sensitive approach to maternity care. It also underscores the need for medical professionals to collaborate with grassroots organizations to understand the dynamic needs of non-Japanese women and sufficiently support them through pregnancy, birth, and post-natal care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Japan, the so-called neoliberal-inspired transition generally refers to an ideological agenda. However, one should distinguish between neoliberal reforms carried out in accordance with a political agenda and the genuine local evolution of ideas based on the influence of foreign thinkers. By leveraging key notions such as 'individual responsibility' (jiko sekinin), 'self-help' (jijo), 'mutual aid' (kyōjo) and 'public aid' (kōjo), this paper accounts for older roots of Japanese-style neoliberalism. It highlights how, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, predating current liberal norms, certain notions preceded contemporary liberal ideas and served as a discursive framework, while others became intertwined with 'foreign' ideas as they permeated the political discourse. It illuminates how shorter-term politics characterized by conflicts of interest and political strategies fit within longer-term political notions and their ideological evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin and purpose of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution seem shrouded in secrecy. This paper places Article 9 in the context of the UN Charter and peace constitutions which were emerging globally that aimed to limit state sovereignty in favor of international organization and the renunciation of war in the aftermath of WWII (Schlichtmann 2009b). It is a provision the Japanese people have upheld for more than seventy years. With the gradual return of block confrontation during the 1990s and the revival of the 'balance of power' concept, however, Japan came under pressure to change its Constitution and participate in military defense alliances. This has led to a noticeable shift in policy. Although Shidehara Kijūrō (1872–1951) had been well-known and respected for his peace diplomacy as foreign minister during the interwar period, it soon became expedient to deny him any direct involvement in the drafting of Article 9 when he was Prime Minister after the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that commodities such as blinds, flooring materials, and food supplies are valuable historical sources for understanding the power of Heian and Kamakura royal women. Vases and bowls excavated from the Noto Peninsula, for example, show that Premier Royal Lady Kōkamon-in (1122–1181) played an important role during the twelfth century in starting Suzu stoneware production at her Wakayama Estate and stimulated interregional commerce. From this growing industry, she gained economic benefits and strengthened her political networks. Another contemporary female landlord, Senyōmon-in (1181–1252), implemented a due-collection plan for obtaining material objects that maintained the livelihood of her palace. Mundane items including household furnishing articles supported her economic well being while buttressing her political and cultural influence over the course of her life. By collecting various items from her estates, such as blinds, curtains, and mats, she supported her adopted children and widened her human networks. With the effective use of such material goods, she could seek political allies and align with leading courtiers who participated in decision-making meetings at court. As a whole, the above case studies show that series of innocuous data such as excavated ceramic pieces and recorded object types can be used to reveal a level of significant cultural, political, and religious influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political trust has long been presented as a key social determinant of pandemic resilience in public health by facilitating public cooperation with government instructions. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, countries where citizens had relatively low levels of trust in government tended to see higher numbers of infections and deaths. Yet Japan's public health response to COVID-19 complicates a straightforward relationship between political trust and successful pandemic response, presenting something of a paradox. Trust in government, very low by international comparison, was compounded by a lack of state authority to enforce its public health recommendations. Nevertheless, it appears that initially, most people followed government advice, particularly politicians' calls for jishuku ('self-restraint'). This paper explores the Japanese government's response to COVID-19 and places the concept of jishuku in historical context, arguing that it represents a complex dynamic that includes expectations about the solidaristic behavior of imagined fellow citizens, stigmatization and social coercion, and government appeals to ethnonationalist identity that together may have helped overcome low trust in government. 'Compliance' itself is complicated in this picture, with compliance with individual measures dependent on the dynamic tension between a variety of different factors beyond political trust alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the writing on labor market flexibilization focuses on non-regular employment, this ethnography of precarious work explores one overlooked aspect, the experiences of increasingly precarious young regular workers. These jobs take the form of standard employment, but workers are often subjected to even more precarious and exploitative working conditions than non-regular workers. Drawing on the case of Japan, a seemingly unlikely place to observe such a development, this article has three aims. First, it clarifies the underlying mechanisms of labor exploitation in precarious regular employment. Second, it illustrates these mechanisms at work by examining the experiences of young workers. Third, it explores the potential of such young workers to disrupt these mechanisms through an individualistic form of collective action. The paper illuminates that, in the context of labor market flexibilization, inequality of security exists not only between standard and non-standard employment but also within standard employment arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to provide a fuller picture of the organized abortions on Japanese female repatriates that took place within the repatriate medical relief under occupation of the GHQ. It also analyzes how the government carried out illegal abortions prior to the de facto legalization of abortion by the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948. This article suggests that the government justified abortions for societal reasons, such as rape, or for eugenic reasons, which were illegal at the time, by broadening the interpretation of caring for the mother's health and treating societal and eugenic reasons as medical reasons. In so doing, the paper examines the issues of historical continuity and discontinuity in Japan's modern history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan is one of the richest democracies of Asia, a pillar of the international liberal order in the region, and a strongly pacifist nation with the only anti-war constitution in the world. It is also one of three major countries which have elected to incorporate human security principles as intrinsic components of foreign policy. However, its implementation of human security principles in some areas, especially refugee policy, belies its rhetorical commitments; it boasts the lowest number of refugees among all industrialised nations. What explains this discrepancy? Through a comparative study of the Indochinese and the Rohingya refugee crises, this study aims to offer a corrective and a supplement to Sarah Tanke's work (2021) by arguing that despite Japanese officials' championing of a human security narrative in the international arena, the gap between declaration and implementation, especially regarding the human security of displaced persons in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, points to their instrumental use of such a narrative to avoid international censure and free ride on the international asylum regime. It further investigates the domestic political, social and psychological factors modulating this behaviour, and argues for a broader role for international pressure in order to bring about policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Toei Studio-produced Truck Guys/Torakku yarō (1975–79) is a popular domestic genre film series. Consisting of ten films, it is an action-comedy, loosely structured around a buddy-road film genre framework. While rarely canonised within critical or academic discourses, the series' lasting popularity is still evidenced by its commercial 'long-tail'. The aim of this article is primarily to shed light on this critically overlooked series, locating it within specific national and cultural contexts, in particular toward the end of the Japanese studio system. Specifically, this article examines how Toei attempted to revitalise the popular cycles of their genre films facing a decline in both mainstream commercial film production and cinema audiences, highlighting a fiercely pragmatic mode of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s where serialisation played an important role. By exploring the films from both textual and contextual perspectives, the article will also attempt to highlight and confirm the significance of intra-serial intertextuality, with particular reference to the first and the final instalments of the series: No One Can Stop Me (1975) and Hometown Express Service (1979). Addressing a practice of popular genre filmmaking in Japan also begins to fill a critical gap in Japanese film studies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role women play in men's everyday grooming practices in contemporary Japan. The past few decades have seen increasing scrutiny of men's bodies with rising standards said to be in response to women's supposed desires. Yet research has thus far focused primarily on cultural representations such as pop idols or models, leaving our understandings of men's lived, everyday bodily experiences largely unexplored. Addressing this gap, I employ an ethnographic approach by drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with thirty-three heterosexual Japanese men of various marital statuses and ask how heteronormative imperatives of appealing to women inform men's understandings of their bodies. Working under a common-sense assumption that women are particularly sensitive to men's bodies, the single participants reported greater attention to bodily grooming in order to attract women in intimate, romantic situations. Meanwhile, married men rely on or are doted upon by their wives in relation to their grooming thus reinforcing orthodox gender roles. Although male grooming may appear to subvert orthodox gender norms according to which men should be disinterested in bodily care, these findings underscore how orthodox, heteronormative gender ideology is in fact reproduced through men's bodies, thanks in large part to women's role therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Cold War, one of the biggest security challenges in Europe was the war in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). This article analyses Japanese foreign policy towards the Republic of Croatia, considering it the focal point of the Yugoslav crisis from the end of the Cold War in 1989, through the disintegration of the SFRY in 1991, until the establishment of diplomatic relations with Japan in 1993. Although the general opinion was that Japan did not have strong interests in this region, this article shows that Japan used the trilateral US–Europe–Japan framework to approach the Yugoslav crisis. It is argued that Japan acted indirectly through international institutions. Japan acted bilaterally to condition international recognition and sanctions using diplomacy and aid as its tools and multilaterally through the EBRD, G7, G24, UN, and the CSCE/OSCE by providing Japanese nationals as election monitoring staff. Japan's diplomatic efforts and humanitarian and reconstruction aid in the former SFRY were considerable. The larger implications of this article concern Japan–EU relations. By aiding the former SFRY republics to achieve democracy and market economy, Japan facilitated future NATO and EU expansion to protect its economic interests in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed history of film classification, or age ratings, in Japan. It describes historical precedents for Eirin, the agency responsible for film classification in Japan, and key moments in Eirin's organisational formation and reform. Drawing on multi-sited archival research and interviews with Eirin staff, the article recognises the importance of the US Production Code Authority as a model for Eirin's formation during the United States' occupation of Japan, but also argues against understanding age ratings in Japan as just another American import. By tracing earlier domestic precedents and by highlighting similar controversies overseas, the article considers the crucial role of both state and non-state actors, as well as international models and markets, in reforming film governance for youth spectators in Japan. Two exemplary scandals involving the Zigomar films in the early 1910s and the taiyōzoku (sun tribe) films in the mid-1950s demonstrate lasting concerns over youth that Eirin seeks to address. The article describes the redevelopment of the classification system in the late 1950s that underpinned an enduring form of now internationally-recognised regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate over whether traditional Japanese business practices are converging towards those of Anglo-American societies. One aspect of business practice is the attitude toward the skills demanded of newly graduated recruits. Traditionally, Japanese managers were said to value communitarian attributes, such as cooperativeness and flexibility, to encourage socialisation into the firm's culture; however, in the last two decades business groups have been emphasising a new set of qualities, including creativity and problem solving, expressing these in a discourse of personal independence and autonomy. This study reports interviews conducted with Japanese managers concerning the attributes and skills they seek in new employees. It finds that, within the firms canvassed, managers still stressed the importance of communitarian values, often articulating attributes and skills in terms of their contribution to the overall harmony of the firm. The findings have potential implications for how we understand cultural change and continuity within Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both English and Japanese-language scholarship, Domon Ken's 'realism photography' grounds the history of photography in postwar Japan. Domon proclaimed that photographs should deal directly with social phenomena, and that photography should never mix with other media. This essay introduces an alternative to Domon's realism, through a series of abstract, studio-based photographs that were published in the pages of the popular magazine Asahi Graph between 1953 and 1954. The photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoji (1923–2001) produced this series (collectively known as the APN photographs) in collaboration with other artists, while simultaneously criticizing Domon's dogma in print. This essay argues that Domon's 'realism photography' should be reconceived as a form of straight photography, a tradition of modernist purism couched in a moral language that also reflects heterosexual anxiety over the stability of identity. The APN photographs themselves play with the conventions of realistic representation, and the critical nature of Ōtsuji's writing remains unexplored in scholarship to date. Shifting attention towards Ōtsuji loosens the hold of realism on postwar photography in Japan, and also brings the conditions of prewar photography into view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first decade after the end of World War Two, nūdo satsueikai (nude shooting sessions in which naked female models were photographed by groups of primarily male photographers in public parks, beaches, and studios) offered a particularly popular way to engage in photography in Japan. Photographer Tokiwa Toyoko was one of the many women entering male dominated workplaces in this period and through her portrayal of the male participants at the nude shooting session she critiqued assumptions that women were more suited to being in front of, rather than behind, the lens of the camera. The following article pursues a detailed analysis of mass media depictions of the so-called 'birth of the female photographer in postwar Japan' and intervenes in debates surrounding nude shooting sessions to provide a new interpretation of Tokiwa's photographs of women who labored with their bodies. In so doing, it calls into question the foundational discourses of Japanese postwar photographic realism and reveals a new perspective on the gendered dynamics therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), members of the Heiminsha, the nascent socialist group based in Tokyo, created and promoted a program 'evangelizing' socialism in the Japanese countryside. Based on a careful reading of the group's primary publication the Heimin shinbun, as well as other complementary contemporary publications, this article explores the intellectual influences and social networks that these socialists relied upon to send their message into the countryside, the idealized images that drove them, and the realities that constrained their work. This article also examines the brief but significant overlap of leading socialists and Christians during this period, and the ways their respective adherence to international/supernational belief and intellectual systems drove their opposition to the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan has traditionally emphasized international student recruitment and exchange as priorities in its internationalization strategy. However, little attention has been given to the increasing importance of international program and provider mobility (IPPM), which includes international branch campuses, franchise programs, international joint universities and joint/double degree programs. This article analyzes the policies, status and role of IPPM to meet future needs of Japanese higher education. The study reveals that the full potential of IPPM is not realized given the government's restrictive regulations for the establishment of Japanese programs and international branch campuses abroad as well as foreign higher education providers in Japan. While regulations are necessary to ensure quality and achieve the multiple benefits of IPPM provision, there is a need to re-examine and relax some of the government regulations that serve as barriers. The success of the three Japanese international joint universities provides evidence that Japanese universities are motivated and experienced in working collaboratively with international partners and looking for new IPPM opportunities. Scholars, policy analysts, and academics interested in Japan's engagement with the rest of the world through collaborating with foreign higher education partners will benefit from this analysis of current and past IPPM activities and policies and the call for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms internationalisation and multicultural coexistence are used by a variety of actors. Depending on their respective position in society, they endow these terms with different meanings. The article aims to show how these meanings are contested and negotiated. The examination combines discourse analysis with insights into practice gained through participant observation and in-depth interviews. By focusing on the micro level and the issue of ethnic classrooms in Osaka it will become clear that multicultural coexistence, though often criticised as an anodyne catchphrase, has the potential to promote the right to ethnic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Career formation in professional occupations is heavily influenced by national institutional contexts. In common with many professions, however, in academia international exposure is attractive to employers and valued by employees. This national-international dualism presents early career academics (ECAs) with potentially contradictory challenges in navigating their career development. Drawing on multidisciplinary approaches we researched international mobility in academic career formation. We designed a rigorous five-stage mixed methods quantitative and qualitative methodology to question whether a lengthy early career sojourn in Japan assists British-trained scholars in pursuing an academic career in Japanese studies in the UK. Further, we ask whether and why a lengthy sojourn might hinder academic career formation. Although we researched experiences in Japanese studies, our research is relevant to any discipline where significant periods are spent overseas. We found that early career international mobility caused scholars to experience significant challenges of distanciation and socialisation in navigating their imagined career paths, including the potential to become marooned in Japan. Fortunately, our informants are adaptive in the best use of their circumstances and decisions. We conclude with a brief discussion of theoretical implications and provide advice for ECAs in managing international career transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fukushima nuclear disaster posed food safety risks on an unprecedented scale in Japan. In its immediate aftermath, information on the scale and the extent of the contamination of the food chain was scarce. Facing an anxious public, the government was tasked with defining and ensuring food safety amidst uncertainty. Via three case studies spanning from 2011 to 2020, this article draws on risk communication theory to analyze the Japanese government's response to food safety risks after Fukushima and its development over time. It finds that initial responses did not take the food-related risks facing consumers seriously. Instead, the response was aimed at mitigating the economic risks faced by producers. This increased both public confusion and uncertainty, and consumer avoidance. Over time, the government's response has improved, and elements of the policy have shifted towards more inclusive and interactive practices. Still, the article finds that ten years after Fukushima, the governmental risk communication is primarily aimed at correcting and dismissing consumer concerns while expressing certain fatigue with ongoing consumer avoidance. The article shows how the goal of risk communication changes from reassuring to correcting, and finally to closure. While the risk communication's main message remains consistent and simple – local produce is safe, eat local produce -, its target audience also differs. The article demonstrates that on top of ongoing shortcomings in terms of participation, the actual content of the government's risk communication also fails to assist in informed decision-making. Instead, the government makes the decision for the citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legally, administratively and socially, citizenship adapts to the challenges of not only shifting geopolitics but to new infectious diseases that do not readily submit to the rule of nation-states. This essay looks at citizenship in Japan among other countries against the backdrop of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic and the newer COVID-19, from the abject figure of the stigmatized homosexual in the former to quarantined foreigners aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess in the latter. I conclude with the role of passports in Japanese writers, such as Tawada Yōko (1960-), who do not so much remap citizenship as question its utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the narratives of a group of Japanese women who, to escape gender discrimination in regular employment, deploy their linguistic expertise in temporary employment as interpreters. Building on research that highlights women's investment dynamics into languages as an organising construct for their professional growth, this article argues that a category of Japanese women are increasingly turning to the 'foreign option' to mark their presence in the labour market for linguistic services as temporary workers, in a feminised industry where they feel gender equity is secured. Drawing upon in-depth interviews, this article uses the profession of interpreting as a key case for a micro-level ethnographic understanding of a temporary form of skilled linguistic work and women's aspirations. Adopting a critical approach to linguistic instrumentalism, it contributes to research by examining a small but ambitious segment of the Japanese female labour force, who – by mobilising rare communication skills – constructs an emancipatory turn from gender-stratified corporate structures. The study finds that interpreting, and the ethos of linguistic instrumentalism it carries, promises to informants a work–life balance and career growth. However, findings also show that informants' engagement with interpreting is not immune from gender stereotypes and occupational segregation, and thus remains a 'professional chimera'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's gender gap in housework—the second largest in the OECD countries—has come sharp focus with its female employment on the rise. Why are women and men in Japan still struggling to share housework? This article examines this question, analysing relatively newly emerged representations of 'kaji-hara'. The Japanese neologism 'kaji-hara'—a shortened form of the phrase 'housework harassment'—has garnered much public attention, since Japan's leading home builder Asahi Kasei Homes Corporation (AKHC) launched its 'Wives' Housework Harassment' campaign in 2014. The campaign conveyed a contentious message—that is, it is not husbands, but actually wives, who act as a bottleneck to gender equality in housework. This received a negative backlash, ultimately leading to the phenomenon of what I label here as the 'kaji-hara debates'. Based upon analysis of AKHC's campaign ads, its online survey results, literature and media coverage that inform the kaji-hara debates, this article shows the operation of the 'gendering of housework', by which housework is gendered and produces gender itself, thereby perpetuating the housework gender gap in the society. It argues that AKHC's campaign constitutes the gendering of housework, as it represents, assumes and commercialises housework as 'women's primary responsibility' while simultaneously promoting men's domesticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a birth control survey conducted by the Japanese government between 1945–1960, and analyses how this research, both as scientific practice and knowledge, resonated with government efforts to manage the population during post-war reconstruction. Focusing on Shinozaki Nobuo, a Ministry of Health and Welfare 'technical bureaucrat' (gijutsu kanryō or gikan) specializing in population issues, this article depicts how human agency participated in the at times precarious relationship between policy and practice. It also explores how the epistemological framework inscribed in the resulting scientific knowledge harmonized with the economic and political rationale supporting post-war reconstruction. This article contributes to the study of modern Japan by highlighting the critical, yet thus far underexamined role that population science and technical bureaucrats played in Japanese statecraft. At the same time, it demonstrates that the interaction between state governance of population and the creation of scientific knowledge about the populace was fundamentally complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short essay introduces the special issue, 'Critical approaches to reproduction and population in post-war Japan'. It first explains that the issue came out of the two-year project entitled 'Historicizing the Discourses of Declining Fertility and Ageing Population in East Asia, in which we reappraised Japan's post-war history by identifying the demographic, discursive, social, scientific, and political factors that shaped the post-war population policies and reproductive practices. The essay then elaborates on the two interwoven threads of analysis we incorporated to reach the overall goal of the special issue, namely, to complicate understanding of Japanese post-war reproductive politics. The first thread is the politics of reproduction in modern Japanese history was inherently a politics of population. The second is that the medical and scientific knowledge on reproductive bodies and population statistics constituted a discursive register that allowed issues surrounding reproduction and population to be reformulated as concerns of the state. By locating the stories of everyday reproductive practices within a broader history of population politics embedded in the post-war Japan's sovereignty and statecraft, the special issue clarifies hitherto understudied, yet critical, elements that shaped domestic reproductive experiences and the interpretation of the reproductive bodies in Japan's post-war history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how the idea of an 'appropriate' age for a woman to reproduce has been propagated through maternal and child health policies in Japan since the early post-war era. The notion of an 'appropriate' age emerged during the 1960s when a qualitative shift occurred in family planning, as local government classes for newlyweds began to emphasize the health risks associated with 'elderly primipara': childbirth in later life. Since the 1990s, the Japanese government has attempted to tackle the country's declining fertility rate through pronatalism, outlining the reproductive difficulties that aging can engender and, from the 2010s, instructing young people to draw up their own 'life plan'. However, as government recognition of child abuse has increased, a competing argument has emerged that pregnancy in young women should not be viewed as 'appropriate'. This concept of an 'appropriate' age for reproduction is fluid, malleable and dependent on both social context and interpretation. I argue that governmental attempts to define an 'appropriate' age for pregnancy should be challenged: reproduction and child nurturing are unpredictable phenomena, in which social and biological factors shape individual experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to introduce details about the forced sterilizations performed under Japan's Eugenic Protection Law (1948–96) and provide answers to questions about why such a piece of legislation could exist in postwar democratic Japan, how its constitutionality was discussed at the time, and how involuntary sterilizations were performed, perceived, and rationalized. It suggests that the law was conceived amid complex discussions on overpopulation and the quality of the 'nation' and that even though its constitutionality was put under question, these doubts were overlooked in favor of 'public welfare'. This article also suggests that forced sterilizations were not only an attempt to improve the genetic stock of the Japanese nation but were a complicated mixture of the state's willingness to promote sterilizations, care institutions' and families' inability or unwillingness to cope with the hygienic needs or sexuality of certain disabled people, and misguided concerns for the happiness or parenting abilities of these people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]