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This paper addresses the question "what are the similarities and differences between U.S. trade frictions with China, Japan, and South Korea that account for different U.S. retaliation patterns?" This paper develops six independent variables and their relative measurements from U.S.-Japan and U.S.-South Korea cases and the literature, and examines their impact on U.S. retaliation to China. Our results indicate that four out of six independent variables have decreased the probability of U.S. retaliation since 2001. Furthermore, the U.S. has lost the necessary political, economic, and military leverage to retaliate to China, although it has had two of the three "motivations" to do so. This paper suggests that U.S. leverage over China has deteriorated for two major reasons: (1) U.S.' "illusion" of the latter party's ability/willingness for cooperation and of its own capabilities to retaliate; and (2) China's accumulation of relative gains at an unprecedented rate after 2001. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a comparison of Japanese koenkai and American political machines in order to build an analytical framework with which to better understand reciprocal relationships between those in power and their constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides risking escalation of armed conflict, territorial disputes can influence normalized bilateral relations among states both negatively and positively. This paper examines whether issue linkage exists between territorial disputes and other bilateral issues. The main argument is that the level of interdependence between states effects whether they will escalate a territorial dispute and the likelihood of de-escalation in a timely manner. I examine a territorial dispute between China and Japan and their interaction between 1978 and 2001. Findings show that high levels of trade and cooperation on other bilateral issues (non-territorial) are positively correlated with the likelihood of non-military action by both China and Japan, negatively correlated with the likelihood of the initiation of a MID by China, and positively correlated with the likelihood of de-escalation in a timely manner by both China and Japan. These findings indicate that interdependence does not prevent escalatory behavior short of military action and that it influences the decision by leaders to de-escalate rather than escalate the dispute further to armed conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan?s new electoral system for the Lower House eliminated the necessity of intraparty competition at the election stage, which many political reformers and scholars hope will make money less necessary to ?buy? votes. In addition, new campaign finance regulations were adopted to make the flow of money more transparent. However, elections may not have become any less expensive because candidates appear to be spending considerable sums to boost their vote shares in the single-member districts. For this reason, money and votes should be positively correlated in Japan?s new system. In this paper, I examine the empirical relationship between campaign spending and vote shares for politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). I uncover a strong and positive correlation between candidates? expenditures and vote shares, which underscores the continued importance of money for election campaigns in Japan?s Lower House. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of local politicians in affecting national-level election outcomes, by focusing on recent municipal mergers in Japan. Specifically, we argue that the political party relying most extensively on local politicians' efforts for electoral mobilization and monitoring will suffer an electoral slump as municipalities are merged and the number of municipal politicians is swiftly reduced. Empirically, we show that municipalities with a history of recent mergers exhibit significantly lower voter turnout and obtain a smaller vote share for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in national elections when compared to other municipalities without recent experience of mergers. This result indicates that municipal politicians are indeed indispensable human resources for LDP candidates running for the national parliament. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite the long-held prejudice or lack of role models. From the late 1990s, governments in Britain and Japan began collaborating with various bodies, including higher education institutes. The paper underscores the importance of the reputation of women's universities embedded in the institutional foundations, by explaining how female scientific communities take shape in different national contexts. Britain, as a primary example of the neoliberal welfare regime, promoted its policy under the auspices of the Department of Trade and Industry, while Japan, as a conservative welfare regime with strong emphasis on the male-breadwinner model, carefully treated this matter from the perspective of 'equal participation of both men and women', rather than that of 'equality'. In this trend, women's universities, with their tradition of encouraging to become a 'good wife, wise mother' were regarded as legitimate and effective players to reverse the low ratio of women in scientific research (12.6 percent as of 2007, in contrast to 39.2 percent in Britain). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries use U.S. insider trading doctrine as a model, in part as a result of historical and political factors and in part because the United States is seen as a market leader--an early adopter with a well developed, disaggregated, public securities market. Yet, despite these convergent beginnings and a general agreement on the nature of the regulated conduct (i.e., prohibiting securities trading by insiders possessing material nonpublic information), operative insider trading rules in the United States (as a rule originator) have evolved to protect different interests and regulate different specific market activities than insider trading rules in other countries. Using existing insider trading law and regulation in the United States, Germany, and Japan, this paper (a) identifies the common roots and divergent evolution of insider trading doctrine in these nations, (b) articulates ways in which differences in current insider trading doctrine may be meaningful, and (c) isolates possible reasons for the existence and persistence of the observed doctrinal divergence. Divergent political, economic, and societal histories, and differences in legal systems and traditions, are at issue in the analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I investigate the trends in political inheritance in Japan from 1947-1993, the postwar time period during which Japan employed the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system. While SNTV did not allow for the transfer of votes, a great deal of transfers of political resources occurred between generations of politicians. I first address the determinants of political transfer between one politician and another, and when such transfers are likely to occur between family members. Second, I investigate whether the resource advantages that led hereditary candidates to run for their predecessors' seats actually resulted in greater electoral success. I find that the predominance of hereditary politicians in Japan under SNTV was largely the result of supply and demand incentives in the recruitment process, and that hereditary candidates were especially likely to be nominated when they were succeeding politicians who served many terms, were hereditary candidates themselves, or died in office. My research greatly improves upon previous work done on hereditary politicians in Japan by including data on all candidates, all related and non-related transfers, and expanded control variables. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines different labour market deregulation policies in Italy and Japan based on the political factors such as the labour policymaking structure, the political power of labour unions, and the partisanship of the government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper distinguishes between politicians' policy expertise and policy specialization and explores changes in MP policy expertise and policy specialization in Japan related to changes in the electoral system. Traditional measures of policy expertise for Liberal Democratic Party House of Representatives MPs (membership in seisaku zoku - 'policy tribes') in Japan show a decline in the number of policy experts since electoral reform. However, this paper shows that the decline in policy experts is attributable to the nature of the measure of expertise and the decline in the overall seniority of the LDP party caucus, rather than changes in the electoral rules. However, political career path analysis of LDP House of Representative MPs in Japan shows that policy specialization, particularly by junior MPs, has declined since electoral reform. We attribute this decline in policy specialization to the need to represent a broader range of constituents as most MPs moved from multi-member districts to single-member districts following electoral reform. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine competing nationalisms in contemporary Japanese politics, focusing specifically on the controversy surrounding prime ministers’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine. I trace the contestation over Yasukuni Shrine in regard to identity formation and negotiation, showing that it is wrong to assume that the Japanese subscribe to one, monolithic nationalism. Next, I assess the shrine’s role in state-(re)making, especially as that concerns the will to sacrifice. The dialectic of remembering and forgetting that nationalism entails is particularly relevant in this regard. Finally, I show how Yasukuni Shrine has become a symbolic focal point for the fusion of state and society, a vehicle for the melding of the private, particular identity of the citizen and the public, universal identity of the state with the prime minister attempting to serve as an exemplar nationalist. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the OECD has played a significant financial role in providing foreign aid for AIDS. In accounting for the convergence in AIDS funding, constructivists would claim that the norms of global response to AIDS motivate foreign aid for AIDS by reshaping and redefining donors' identity and preferences. More interestingly, the countries vary in the timing of initial funding decision and the size of funding as well as the pattern that the norms are transferred into domestic arena. The variations, I argue, are based upon distinctive domestic structure and domestic norms. I will examine the case of Japan which posed a lagged pattern of global AIDS funding in terms of its initiation and increase of funding. When it comes to public awareness and perception on HIV/AIDS, basically Japanese people were not aware of what AIDS was and how they should respond. In addition, foreign perception was so strongly intensified that even risk groups such as homosexuals did not change their sexual behavioral pattern. In terms of civil society and domestic structure, Japanese government has a rigid structure that has strong bureaucracy at the top of the society with weak civil society. The bureaucracy was not responsive to the new demands of society under the situation that civil society did not play active roles in encouraging government to respond to the need by adopting new agenda in its priority. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government is responsible for the peace and safety of citizens in its territory, and is thus interested in deaths by cause. Similar to other countries, Japanese government has collected death data from autopsy documents, which have been analyzed by epidemiologists. .x000d.However, most analyses have focused on heredity, lifestyle, and exposure to viruses and germs. They tend to downplay how governmental policy affects death rates. For example, in a prefecture where there are free or subsidized health checkups, there may be fewer deaths from diabetes or breast cancer. There may be other prefectures that have developed superior social security systems and thus have more deaths from old age, which is preferable to premature death..x000d.In addition to the results of epidemiology, I am interested in how political economic factors influence the rates of each cause of death. .x000d.To achieve this purpose, I combined the number of deaths, population, and potential factors that may affect death rates in Japan. Although in a seminal stage, I have found tuberculosis and viral hepatitis C are higher in Tokyo and Osaka. This could be a result of patient migration, climactic conditions, and unfavorable local policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how immigrant political rights have evolved in Japan, discussing the case of immigrant voting right in local elections. The recent increase of international immigrants has been accompanied by immigrant rights claims in Japan. International human rights and the local level of immigration politics have contributed to ameliorate human, civil, and cultural rights for immigrants in Japan. With the new debate on the immigrant right to vote in local elections, however, immigrant political identities and the national level of immigration politics (in the Diet), which have been overlooked thus far, have come on the central stage of immigration politics. The debate on immigrant voting rights issues began with a 1990 lawsuit filed by eleven Korean immigrants from Osaka, Japan. This lawsuit could be seen as an extension of a series of lawsuits that had previously been filed by members of the 'resident' Korean identity groups against various instances of discrimination. This legal struggle by the new Korean resident identity, which is different from North Korean diasporic identityâ??rejecting the voting rightâ??and South Korean transnational identityâ??appropriating the voting right as 'Korean' right, produced an opportunity structure in which various organizations, opposition parties, and local governments come together in their common struggle for immigrant voting rights. The 1995 ruling of the Japanese Supreme Court, an interpretation of law based on legal positivism, shifted its location of the decision from the Court to the Diet by stating that the voting right can be granted if it is passed through appropriate legislative processes. Finally, the Diet, dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party, turned down bills for the immigrant right to vote for local elections in 2000, showing that the final instance to decide the political rights for (old and new) immigrants is still in the hand of nationalist politicians in the LDP. In conclusion, this study suggests three potential developments of the post-war immigration politics in Japan, according to political positions on the issue of the voting rights and immigrant identities. The 'no voting right for foreigners' position will preserve the notion of the post-war Japanese nation attached to the ideas of citizenship and state, while maintaining political exclusion of all immigrants. The 'voting rights only for South Koreans (Taiwanese)' position would bring the pre-war empire back into the picture by selectively including immigrants, while excluding various new immigrant groups as well as North Koreans. Finally, this study argues that the 'voting rights for all foreigners' position, based on human/civil rights and Jumin consciousness, will facilitate the building of a broad incorporationist coalition among old and new immigrants, human right activists, immigrant advocacy groups, local governments, and political parties, This final option would provide the pivotal basis for the beginnings of post-national politics in Japan ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some 40,000 Chinese, along with 700,000 Koreans, performed forced labor for private corporations in Japan during the Asia Pacific War. The presenter, having closely observed Chinese and (to a lesser extent) Korean forced labor redress activities in the Fukuoka area since 2002, locates these distinct but overlapping political movements within leading models of the reparations process. A mismatch exists between the especially strong Chinese reparations claim and the Northeast Asian political context in which it is being contested. Pessimistic short-term prospects for compensation from Japan cast some doubt on the universality of redress norms and the progressive view that a new morality is driving the global trend toward repairing historical injustices. Yet due to an evolving calculus of more pragmatic concerns like economics, security and international reputation, Japan may eventually come to terms with the past in a manner partially satisfying to Chinese forced labor survivors and their government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan and Taiwan have been rapidly approaching each other since the 1990s. This process, which has elevated their relations to an "unofficial-in-name-only" status, is the result of three mutually reinforcing factors: the re-imagination of colonial ties, the sharing of a democratic identity, and the permeating of popular culture. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]