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Background: Dementia involves a progressive decline in many functional areas. Policy and practice guidelines should cover the entire course of the disease from early detection to the end-of-life. The present study aimed to evaluate the contents of national dementia strategies with a focus on palliative care content., Methods: We employed qualitative content analyses. Sixteen national dementia strategies from 14 countries were reviewed. Using open coding, the contents were compared to the domains and recommendations of the palliative care in dementia white paper of the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC)., Results: Although palliative care was not explicitly referred to in eight of the 14 countries and only to a limited extent in three countries, a number of domains from the EAPC white paper were well represented, including "person-centered care, communication, and shared decision making"; "continuity of care"; and "family care and involvement." Three countries that referred to palliative care did so explicitly, with two domains being well represented: "education of the health care team"; and "societal and ethical issues." The strategies all lacked reference to the domain of "prognostication and timely recognition of dying" and to spiritual caregiving., Conclusions: National dementia strategies cover part of the recent definition of palliative care in dementia, although they do not frequently label these references as "palliative care." In view of the growing numbers of people dying with dementia, preparation for the last phase of life should be added to national strategies.

This paper examines financial literacy in Japan using a recent dataset from 2022 and finds that financial literacy levels are low. Only 36% of the respondents could correctly answer the Big Three financial literacy questions, three well-known questions assessing the understanding of interest, inflation, and risk diversification. Also, significant demographic variation exists in the Japanese population: the young, women, and the less educated are those who struggle the most with these fundamental financial concepts. Additionally, we find that Japanese who know the basics about environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)-related principles are also those who show better financial literacy levels than those who do not know about ESG. Lastly, our results confirm that financial literacy matters: it is strongly and positively correlated with active investment behavior, which may affect wealth accumulation and financial wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Japan's aging population impacts the politics of monetary policy. Previous research suggests that the elderly have a variety of distinct policy preferences. Given that elderly voters also have higher voting rates, the rapid greying of the population could have significant effects on distributive struggles over economic policy across much of the developed world. In Japan, aging is advancing rapidly, and the central bank has engaged in massive monetary stimulus to induce inflation, which existing work suggests the elderly should oppose. Analyzing results from three surveys, this paper has three central findings: (1) the elderly tend to have higher inflation aversion, (2) the elderly display some opposition to quantitative easing (QE), and (3) despite such policy preferences, the concentration of elderly in electoral districts has no significant effect on the preferences either of legislative incumbents or candidates. The third finding is attributable to the fact that elderly opposition to QE is moderated by their partisan identification. Elderly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) voters have systematically lower opposition to QE, likely reflecting that these voters have aligned their preferences with the LDP's policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue comprises selected papers which were presented at the workshop on dependently typed programming (DTP 10) in Edinburgh in July 2010 – affiliated with Federated Logic conferences (FLOC 10). Earlier workshops on dependently typed programming took place in Nottingham in 2008 (DTP 2008) and there also has been a Dagstuhl seminar (04381) on this subject in 2004. After DTP 2010, in 2011 a workshop on dependently typed programming (DTP 11) took place in Nijmegen affiliated with Interactive Theorem Proving 2011 (ITP 11). In September 2011 there also was a DTP workshop in Shonan, Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This section offers information on the activities of the History of Economics Society in Japan. The universities that conducted reading of papers were the Keio Gijuku University and the Chuo University at the Kanto branch, and the Osaka City University and the Ritsumeikan University at the Kansai Branch. Details about the influence of Henry George on the classroom teaching of economics in Great Britain and the U.S. are presented. Also noted is the Economists' Papers Project launched by the Duke University Manuscript Department.

This article examines the power relationship between the prime minister and ruling party legislators. I theoretically explore the power relationship between the prime minister and ruling party legislators, and examine legislators' parliamentary voting, focusing on the political process of postal service privatization of 2005. This analysis presents three arguments. First, theoretically, when the prime minister attempts to achieve a project, risking his or her job, he or she can firmly control ruling party legislators. Second, empirically, the anti-Koizumi legislators' rebellion was based on their unfounded assumption about the prime minister's behavior or ultimate outcomes. Third, the anti-Koizumi legislators' electoral incentives to secure their reelection and ruling incentives to weaken or overthrow the Koizumi Cabinet drove them to rebel against the prime minister in the Lower House, while the ruling incentives alone caused the rebellion in the Upper House. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how an uneven electoral system in Japan shapes political parties' mobilization strategies by utilizing a majoritarian electoral system with heterogeneous district magnitudes, which in turn contributes to the gap in turnout across districts. Scholars have long debated the relationship between electoral systems and turnout; it is known that countries with proportional representation electoral systems – those with larger district magnitude – tend to have higher turnout rates than countries with majoritarian electoral systems, especially single-member district (SMD) systems. The current discussion on turnout and district magnitude of an electoral system assumes a monotonic relationship between these factors: the larger the district magnitude of the electoral system, the more (or less) participatory the electorate, due to competitiveness and mobilization efforts by political parties and other relevant groups. In contrast, this paper shows a mixed relationship between district magnitude of the electoral system and party mobilization and subsequent turnout, investigating a majoritarian electoral system with uneven district magnitude in the Japanese Upper House. During the survey period, the party system in Japan consisted of two major parties and a few smaller parties; consequently, the two major parties focused their efforts on SMDs in order to maximize their seat share, while smaller parties focused their resource on districts electing more than two members (where they have some chance to elect their party's candidates). In combination, these party strategies have resulted in the lowest mobilization and turnout rates in districts with two members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese media have undergone commercial liberalization during the reform era. Interviews with media practitioners reveal that media reform has brought about three different types of newspapers that differ with respect to their degree of commercial liberalization. Based on a natural experiment during the anti-Japanese protests in Beijing in 2005, this article shows that urban residents found more strongly commercialized newspapers more persuasive than less commercialized newspapers. Provided that the state can enforce press restrictions when needed, commercial liberalization promotes the ability of the state to influence public opinion through the means of the news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's so-called Lost Decade of the 1990s presents a unique case study of an economy with a recent severe and prolonged recession, with large changes in the labor market and fiscal policy as the main policy available to the government. Japanese unemployment rate surged from 2.1% in 1991 to 5.4% in 2002. Meanwhile, the Japanese economy experienced a rise in government expenditures, while taxes remained fairly stable. This paper quantitatively evaluates the impact of these changes in fiscal policies on labor market variables, in particular the unemployment rate, during the 1990s. We build, calibrate, and simulate a dynamic general equilibrium model with search frictions in the labor market, a productive government sector, heterogenous government spendings, and different categories of taxes. Our model is able to reproduce the paths of the main labor market variables, and the counterfactual experiments show that the changes that took place in the different spending components affected the unemployment rate heterogeneously, although overall they kept unemployment lower than it could have been. We also find that had the government also implemented countercyclical tax policies, unemployment would not have risen as much as it did by 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses archival material, including personal correspondence, to chart General Sir Ian Hamilton's changing attitudes towards Japanese nationals, Japanese military leaders and Japanese military personnel, during and after the Russo Japanese War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the concept of dignity as the cornerstone that justifies hate speech regulations in democratic societies. In political theory and constitutional law, the primacy of dignity as the moral and legislative justification for regulating hate speech has already been addressed by dignitarianism, especially in the course of debate with free speech advocates. We aim to augment this important claim in the normative literature with empirical data. Specifically, based on our survey conducted in Japan, where its first national anti-hate speech law had only recently been enacted and ordinary citizens were thus less predisposed of the debate, we show that citizens' concerns about the dignity of a targeted victim lead them to support regulations. Our analysis further clarifies the possible mechanisms of the dignitarian rationale, revealing not only the people's public-centered expectation regarding the societal consequences of hate speech, which dignitarians emphasized, but also the importance of more individual-based judgments regarding morality and justice, in shaping their regulatory attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temnocephalids are ectosymbionts of various freshwater animals. A species tentatively identified as Temnosewellia aff. vietnamensis (Platyhelminthes: Rhabdocoela: Temnocephalidae) is reported based on materials collected from the body surface of the freshwater crabs Eriocheir japonica (Brachyura: Varunidae) and Geothelphusa exigua (Potamidae) in Kagoshima, southern Japan. The temnocephalid is characterized as follows: the cirrus composed of a cone-shaped shaft and a cylindrical introvert 42–77 μm long; the introvert covered with approximately 30 vertical rows of fine sharp spines; the four seminal receptacles; and a long, curved oviduct with vaginal gland; a pair of gland cells (Haswell's cells) present anterior to the excretory ampullae. Bayesian inference trees using partial nuclear 28S rDNA (28S) and mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) genes supported that the specimens collected from both crab species are conspecific but these also showed the geographical variations among them on both 28S and COI. The previous records of the genus Temnosewellia in East to South Asian countries are assembled and shown on the map (fig.7, this paper). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an update on issues of interest to the History of Economics Society (HES) as of March 1986. The annual conference to be held in New York City in May is being organized by president-elect Abraham Hirsch. Two papers were read for the Kanto Branch of the Japan History of Economic Thought (HET) Society at Hitotsubashi University on January 12, 1985. The "SLS Newsletter" has been established by the Society for Literature and Science (SLS).

Several decades have passed since the first call was made toward political scientists, among other social scientists, to devote attention to human rights and enrich, through empirical investigations, our understanding of how human rights implementation works. Today, the political science discipline is finally beginning to respond to this appeal, with an increasing number of scholars making it their goal to isolate variables that obstruct or facilitate human rights implementation. The current paper joins this burgeoning body of literature by offering a within-case analysis of Japanese prison policy-making. In particular, I compare the 2005 bill updating the Prison Law (Kangoku hō) that had been in force in Japan since the Meiji era with an earlier draft version of that bill which appeared in parliament on three occasions since the early 1980s. On the basis of the convergence of these bills in terms of seeking to align Japan with the evolved new global standards for convicted prisoners' treatment, I argue that a three-decade delay occurred in the implementation of prisoners' rights in Japan. To account then for this delay, I point to a provision pertaining to the criminal procedure (i.e., pre-conviction) which was incorporated in the law in question in 1908 merely for pragmatic reasons, and with regard to which the modern-time stakeholders of the bar and the police could not find agreement. Ultimately, the message that this case deals to the political science of human rights is that institutional–infrastructural factors, such as ties of legal nature, matter to human rights implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This edited volume contains the proceedings of a conference on the role of individual differences in instructed SLA held at Aoyama Gakuin University in 1999. It includes 11 studies as well as an introductory chapter written by the editors. The first two papers, by Yamashiro and McLaughlin and by Hiser, Croker, Kenudson, and Stribling, present multivariate statistical analyses to examine the interrelationship between motivation, second language (L2) proficiency, and other learner characteristics in Japanese student samples. Although both studies offer unique insights into the characteristics of their target population, the authors also call for methodological improvements that would go beyond the use of self-report questionnaires. Sharing a similar interest in improving motivation research methodology, another study by Hsiao explicitly sets out to test the construct validity of the most well known motivation test—Gardner's Attitude/Motivation Test Battery—in Taiwan, which is a very different learning environment from Canada, where the test was originally developed. Özek and Williams's paper is also of interest in this respect because in their study a questionnaire survey conducted in Turkey was complemented with qualitative interviews, thereby resulting in a particularly rich database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the challenges of hazards impacting coastal communities, demand is growing for more equitable coastal natural hazard adaptation and disaster mitigation approaches, supported by co-productive research partnerships. This review paper outlines contemporary advances in hazard adaptation and disaster mitigation with attention to how an equity and justice framework can address the uneven impacts of hazards on marginalized and underserved communities. Drawing upon the allied concepts of distributive, procedural, systemic, and recognitional equity and justice, we illustrate how these concepts form the basis for equitable coastal resilience. To demonstrate how equitable resilience can effectively advance contemporary adaptation and mitigation strategies, we present two vignettes where collaborative partnerships underscore how equitable coastal hazard planning and response practices complement these processes in coastal zones subject to large earthquakes and tsunamis. The first vignette focuses on disaster response and takes place in the Tohoku region of Japan, with diverse gender and sexual minority community members' experiences of, and responses to, the 2011 Tohoku disasters. The second vignette centers on hazard planning and takes place on the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast along the Cascadia Subduction Zone to demonstrate how principles of distributive, procedural, systemic, and recognitional equity can inform the co-production of alternative coastal futures that prioritize equitable resilience. From this discussion, we suggest applying an equity lens to research processes, including alternative futures modeling frameworks, to ensure that the benefits of hazard adaptation and disaster mitigation strategies are equitably applied and shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To describe and compare the references cited in popular books about diet and health between the USA and Japan. Design: Books were selected based on their best-seller rankings in the diet and health category of online bookstores. We identified references throughout all pages of the books and examined the number of references, reference format (identifiable or not) and presence of specific types of references, such as systematic reviews of human research. We compared the characteristics of references between the two countries and examined related factors to citation. Setting: Cross-sectional study. Participants: Books (n 100 in each country). Results: Among 100 books from each country, sixty-five US and sixty-six Japanese books had references. Forty-five US books cited more than 100 references, against only five Japanese books. The number of books that cited systematic reviews of human research differed between the USA (n 49) and Japan (n 9). Additionally, the number of books that provided identifiable information for all references was significantly higher in the USA (n 63) than in Japan (n 42). Books whose first authors have licences of medical doctors were more likely to cite references than those without in both countries. Conclusions: Two-thirds of books about diet and health cited references in both the USA and Japan, but Japanese books cited fewer references and were less likely to cite systematic reviews and provide identifiable references than US books. Further research into the scientific reliability of information in books about diet and health is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's labor market has been under severe strain over the past few decades, driven by its protracted economic recession, a series of labor market reforms, and changing labor management practices. Confronting these new challenges, an increasing number of young people have had extreme difficulties in searching for decent and stable jobs in the labor market, trapped in the vicious cycle of precarious employment. This paper examines the deterioration of employment and labor market conditions for Japan's youth after the collapse of the asset bubble in the early 1990s and the government's policy efforts to address these concerns, especially since the early 2000s, a period during which it has initiated a wide array of youth employment and labor market policies. In particular, it analyzes variations in policy target group and goal across different measures and evaluates the effectiveness and limitations of these programs in dealing with youth problems in the labor market. This paper argues that while the government has promoted various policy tools to help young people become economically and socially independent individuals, it has gradually shifted its policy focus toward human capital development for growth and industrial competitiveness as a way of revitalizing Japan's troubling economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population aging, along with a secular decline in real interest rates, is an empirical regularity observed in developed countries over the last few decades. Under the premise that population aging will deepen in coming years, some studies predict that real interest rates will continue to be depressed further to a level below zero. In this paper, we address this issue and explore how changes in demographic structures have affected and will affect real interest rates, using an overlapping generations model calibrated to Japan's economy. We find that the demographic changes over the last 50 years reduced the real interest rate. About 270 out of the 640 basis points decline in real interest rates during this period was due to declining labor inputs and higher saving, which themselves stemmed from the lower fertility rate and increased life expectancy. As for the next 50 years, we find that demographic changes alone will not substantially increase or decrease the real interest rate from the current level. These changes reflect the fact that the size of demographic changes in years ahead will be minimal, but that downward pressure arising from the past demographic changes will continue to bite. As Japan is not unique in terms of this broad picture of changes in demographic landscapes in the last and next 50 years, our results suggest that, sooner or later, a demography-induced decline in real interest rates may be contained in other developed countries as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea's persistent enmity towards its erstwhile colonizer Japan has been a compelling topic of East Asian international relations scholarship for decades. This article argues that the historical evolution of South Korea's democracy offers a vital and overlooked piece of this puzzle. Given that it emerged from one of the most virulently anti-communist dictatorships of the Cold War period, in a society facing an ongoing threat from communist North Korea, any left-of-center opposition movement faced an uphill battle against severe anti-communism. In such circumstances, the only way for a leftist opposition party to survive was by pitting its stronger anti-Japan reputation against conservatives' anti-communism. After South Korea's democracy stabilized, liberals tried and failed to overturn the anti-leftist institutions left over from the Cold War and then sought equilibrium through parallel rhetoric targeting pro-Japanese elements. Today, neither left nor right can afford to allow a final amicable settlement with its respective target of antagonism. Through analyses of domestic political rhetoric targeting alleged pro-Japanese or pro-communist elements, this paper demonstrates how these competing antagonisms achieved an uneasy equilibrium that undergirds South Korean political dynamics to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Japan signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, the government enacted a new act to deal with international parental child abduction according to the Convention in the same year. The Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs were immediately in charge of making a draft Bill. Once the government and respective ministries had instantly set up the legal and administrative procedure for dealing with international family issue under the Convention, as some studies argue, simultaneous issues of the family in separation in Japan were underdeveloped. Employing a method of content analysis of the record of policy debates by authorities, observing both diplomatic and domestic frames referred in the debate in contrast, this paper highlights this law-making process delivered and elucidated continuous consecutive inquiries about radical questions of the current Japanese family law regarding the wellbeing of the changing families and their children in contemporary Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benhabib et al. [(2001) Journal of Economic Theory 96, 40–69] argue that there exists a deflation steady state when the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate is considered in a Taylor-type monetary policy rule. This paper estimates a medium-scale DSGE model with a deflation steady state for the Japanese economy during the period from 1999 to 2013, when the Bank of Japan conducted a zero interest rate policy and the inflation rate was almost always negative. Although the model exhibits equilibrium indeterminacy around the deflation steady state, a set of specific equilibria is selected by Bayesian methods. According to the estimated model, positive shocks to households' preferences and wage markup, and a negative shock to monetary policy do not necessarily have an inflationary effect, in contrast to a standard model with a targeted-inflation steady state. An economy in the deflation equilibrium could experience unexpected volatility because of sunspot fluctuations, but it turns out that sunspot shocks have a limited effect on Japan's output fluctuations and rather contribute to stabilizing the economy after the global financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a response to demographic ageing, various governments have been promoting social policies that promote older people's participation in productive activities, including those outside the formal labour market. Nevertheless, older people's behaviours do not simply reflect government policies and intentions. This paper explores how older people themselves interpret their social roles within a policy context that seeks to position them as providers of welfare through their participation in community activities. For this purpose, this paper draws on a qualitative case study of older people in Japan engaging in health promotion and mutual aid among local residents. By employing Hannah Arendt's distinction between the human activities of labour, work and action as a conceptual framework, it finds that although the purported purpose of community activities was to substitute decreasing pensions and family care or to create a better community, participants in this study valued their activities as a process of creating new relations and new realities through action. The paper argues that while labour has occupied a predominant position in the post-war welfare paradigm, community activities by an expanding population of older people may offer opportunities for action, which were not always available through paid work or care-giving in the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the "Ainu problem" as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of East Asian welfare regimes focus on similarities between social security schemes. In contrast, this paper explores cross-national variations in public–private pension mixes in six welfare states: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Our research echoes the pension policy analysis of international organisations but takes a step forward with emphasis on the historical and institutional characteristics of the respective pension systems. The analysis identifies three institutional patterns. First, the statist pension system (Taiwan and China) primarily relies on public pensions to provide old-age security, with private pensions playing a rather minor role. Second, in the dualist pension system (Japan and Korea) both public and private pensions work in parallel to ensure retirement income, though a clear security gap exists between workers in the formal and informal economies. Finally, the individualist pension system (Hong Kong and Singapore) is characterised by genuine fully funded individual accounts, emphasising citizens' own responsibilities for ensuring old-age security. These three types of pension systems demonstrate distinct institutional characteristics and policy outcomes, illustrated by the juxtaposition of their institutional structures as well as by the comparison of key indicators collected from government reports and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection of East Asian pension policies and a diagnosis of the distinct challenges confronted by each of the various pension patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the domestic politics explanations to Japanese security policy expansion between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. In response to the various explanations offered in the literature, such as the implementation of administrative and institutional reforms since 1994 that resulted in the centralization of the decision-making process, changes to the balance of power of political parties within the Japanese political system, and shift in the type of politicians that dominate the LDP, opposition parties and security policymaking structure, this paper argues that it is important to incorporate collective identity into understanding Japanese security policy expansion. Two reasons highlight the importance of collective identity – first, without collective identity, it is difficult to understand the type of security policy produced as the discussion of vision is omitted; and, second, collective identity reveals the organizational make-up of the security policymaking structure that is responsible for the formulation of security policy. To explicate the collective identity–institution relationship, this paper focuses on Japanese security identity and the Japanese security policymaking regime in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Two security identities for Japan are examined – the peace-state and international-state; and three elements of the regime are studied – the agents involved or marginalized in the security policymaking process, the decision-making structure of the security policymaking, and the role of the US. This paper aids in our understanding of how collective identities are sustained and supported within an institution, and how Japanese security policy expanded in the post-Cold War period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the latest activities of the Japan History of Economic Thought (HET) Society as of June 1984. It cites several activities of four regional branches, namely, the Kanto branch, the Seinan branch, the Tohoku branch and the Kansai branch. The activities were mainly presentation of papers, including the reading by the Kanto branch of "The Discovery of Social Surplus and Marx," by Shigeo Abiko at the Rikkyo University on June 4, 1983.

During 1980–90, Japan's annual real GDP growth rate was 4.6%, but which declined to 1.2% in the 1990s. While the drop in itself is a problem, at the same time it exacerbated many other problems, namely inequality, budget deficits, and the increasing burden of an aging society.Society is not concerned about income distribution when the economy is growing, but begins to worry about inequality when an economic slump shows no signs of ending. Moreover, prolonged recession magnifies inequality. With the employment situation surrounding young people worsening, there arose an inequality between those finding jobs and those unemployed. And, the prolonged recession led to a huge budget deficit and the accumulation of government debt. Tax revenue shrank, and the government repeatedly increased public investment in the form of economic stimulus measures, but the Japanese economy did not recover in a sustained fashion.Japan's low growth has already continued for 20 years. Incomes of the younger and middle-aged segments of the population have not increased. Additionally, Japan is an aging society. The aged need pensions, and medical treatment and care, costs which must be borne by younger and middle-aged segments of the population, in fact those who have not experienced Japan's prosperous times.This paper discusses issues relating to the Great Recession, inequality, and the budget deficit and burden of an aging population.Japan's Great Recession is basically explained by monetary shocks. Just the bubble and its bursting are not solely responsible for the prolonged slump. There is no empirical evidence for the assertion that certain structural problems lessened the efficiency of the Japanese economy in the 1990s. TFP (total factor productivity) in the 1990s did not decline compared with the early 1980s. Fiscal policy and the diminution of the financial intermediary function can only explain the Great Recession in small part.The absence of any real monetary policy hampered economic growth through the channels of stock prices and improvement in bank balance sheets. Using vector autoregressive models, the exchange rate was not found to be an important channel of monetary policy, but there is some evidence that it significantly affected output.On inequality problems, that among younger generations is important since it will increase inequality in the future. Japan's economy will stagnate for a long time if the young are not employed and cannot garner skills.Another important point is that the way of maintaining social stability and alleviating inequality in Japan is extremely inefficient. To construct useless dams, roads, ports, and airports is extremely costly just to give jobs to the unemployed. It would be much better to give direct assistance to those in need.There is some reason to think that a budget deficit is not so serious a problem as generally believed, and that the important thing is to cut wasteful government expenditure and not raise government revenue. While I admit this argument carries some weight, there is nevertheless good reason to think that it is necessary to reduce the budget deficit.Before the global financial crisis, Japan's budget deficit was controlled, and declining, but subsequently became uncontrollable. Additionally, and more importantly, an aging population demands more social security expenditure, which causes serious budget problems, but Japan does not seem ready to cope with such problems.The selection of these topics is subjective, but I believe that these are reflected in the Japanese concerns now. Japanese academic circles do not necessarily respond to the interests of the society, but I have tried to select papers on these topics to the extent possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a question that has not been raised in the literature on Japan's regionalism: Why does it have a strong tendency toward making the boundary of the proposed East Asian community fluid? By looking back beyond the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s, a method hitherto untried, the paper shows that this Japanese propensity was also present in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, both then and now, Japan did not and does not have a firm adherence to an ideology. These are two similarities between the pre-World War II period and the present (from the 1960s). On the other hand, Japan's present international situation is very different from its pre-World War II position. The paper uses the logic of the ‘most different cases’ comparative method, which states that in two cases that are different in most aspects but the same in some, one or some of the similarities may explain the other similarity or similarities. It concludes that in both periods, the lack of a firm commitment to an ideology explains Japan's prejudice toward boundary fluidity. This explanation has the potential to contribute to a more comprehensive, if not yet a general theory of Japan's approach to regionalism because it applies not only to the present, but to the past as well. And it has to be stressed, the past refers not only to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s but also to the decades before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the presence of lonely, isolated and impoverished older citizens in Japan's prison population, many of whom have turned to petty crime only recently and arguably lack a genuine need for corrective services. The paper offers empirical evidence drawn from a mixed-methods study that appears to confirm their compliant, 'law-abiding' attributes. It argues that their influx into prisons can be seen, at least in part, as citizens who are already socially excluded and stigmatised leveraging law to assert an additional risk-laden and stigmatised identity, which provides protection. The outcome is the subversion of prisons as de facto aged-care communities. This analysis resonates with an emerging body of literature that Chua and Engel (2018; 2019) have described as the 'Identity' school of legal-consciousness scholarship. This literature centres on empirical studies of marginalised cohorts who leverage legal structures to embrace an identity that complicates their stigma while providing desired protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A once-dominant family of interpretations of the beginnings of Japanese and Russian development claimed that policies adopted by the two states were inadequate to modernize agrarian property relations, and so both states were required to mediate between premodern agriculture and “hot-house” modern industry. More recent accounts have insisted that despite the limited reforms to agrarian property relations, agriculture in both countries in fact dynamically participated in economic development. This paper contends that these revised accounts’ one-sided focus on market opportunities leaves unresolved key puzzles. Why did productivity growth jump higher after the Meiji reforms in Japan? Why did only some regions participate in agricultural development in Russia? To answer these questions, this paper argues it is necessary to return attention to the ways agrarian property relations did and did not change following reforms adopted by the two states in the 1860s and 1870s. The key theoretical upshot of this analysis is that the initiation of capitalist development required a political process in which institutions that had previously guaranteed non-market access of rural households to subsistence were dismantled in favor of the domination of market relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of musical engagement in later-life spiritual development and ageing. The nexus of music, spirituality and ageing has been relatively unexplored. Change of styles, means of expression and ways of engagement are among the transformation that older musicians often encounter. Based on an ethnographic study of Japanese music practitioners, the paper introduces a community music practice in which spiritual cultivation is a collective goal of musical pursuit. A case introduced in this paper suggests that music helps to develop a sense of purpose and enhance the meaning of life by instilling the feeling that people are still able to develop musically and spiritually. Some of the transformation identified in the study included changes of repertoire, the purpose of practice and the meaning of progress, all of which was characterised in the dictum of less-is-more. The paper highlights the process in which spiritual development and musical growth are linked and support positive ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on patterns in Japanese common stock returns. Many stock markets around the world display an unexplained strong weekly seasonal. This paper examines the daily stock market returns for Japan and finds evidence of weekly seasonal, though in a different form than the American one. The authors attempt to determine the cause for the unique Japanese seasonal and whether the results are associated with those in the U.S. They also find that seasonal in daily foreign exchange returns does not offset the seasonal in daily stock market returns.

This paper argues for a reappraisal of extant scholarship on delegation in the domain of financial regulation. Through an examination of Japan's experience with financial regulation between 1992 and 2003, it is demonstrated that crisis-induced institutional development entails a shift toward a more flexible, trustee-type bureaucratic structure. While the logic presented in this paper is far from a universally applicable theory of institutional change, it calls into question the relevance of more conventional approaches to the origins of delegation of authority, notably the approach that uses unified and divided government as a key variable. A renewed emphasis on the role of extra-political sources of transfers of authority inside the executive, and also between the legislature and the executive, therefore, is in order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Internationally, Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) activities are conducted under the International Criminal Police Organization system for handling a large number of bodies during disasters. However, the police have taken the initiative and commissioned clinicians and dentists to estimate the cause of death and identify the deceased, under a unique system in Japan. In this presentation, we examine the problems in the current DVI activities in Japan through DVI training. Method: We held DVI training sessions three times in preparation for the occurrence of a large-scale disaster in Chiba Prefecture with Chiba Prefectural Police, Chiba Medical Association, Chiba Dental Association, local government staff in Chiba, and forensic staff in other institutions. We conducted desktop trainings using paper dolls, under a simulation of an aircraft disaster, and a natural disaster such as flooding and landslides caused by typhoon damage in the third session. After the training, participants reflected on their activities through a questionnaire. Results: In accordance with the conventional method, the police officers numbered the bodies, photographed and checked their personal belongings, followed by the estimation of the cause of death with a doctor, the preparation of documents. Subsequently, dentists collected postmortem findings and matched with antemortem data. On the other hand, police officers and local government staff interviewed the bereaved family members under simulations. In the post-survey, participants were generally satisfied with the training, but some said that it was difficult to understand the activities of other professions. Conclusion: In Japan, where there are no DVI teams, this training was a good opportunity for all the job categories involved in DVI activities to meet each other. While the activities conducted by each profession helped to improve skills, the collaboration among professions was poor. We would like to improve the quality of DVI activities by introducing a team system for collaboration among multiple professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most rapidly ageing industrialised countries, ageing problems have become an important social issue. In Japan, owing to the rapidly ageing population, the government has been intervening in both the demand side and supply side of labour to increase employment of older adults. This study examines labour supply responses to the increasing pension eligibility age and labour demand responses to company expansion and the abolition of the employee selection mechanism. This study is based on Japanese longitudinal survey data (Keio Household Panel Survey) from 2008 to 2018. Since employment law revisions and social security revisions are inextricably linked, one way to examine the effect of revisions to both simultaneously is to investigate them by cohort. The difference-in-difference model was used to compare revision-affected cohorts born between April 1953 and January 1956 and unaffected cohorts born between April 1949 and March 1953. It was found that the revisions had almost no impact on the employment of older adults and their receipt of pensions. However, they did have significant positive effects on job transfers and resignations. Hence, although the system was modified, it also gave companies the option of placing older adults in associated companies and of retaining some routes for older adults to retire, much as before the revisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In organ transplantation, there is a lack of ethical discussion about the recipient's right not to receive a transplant. Using the current situation of living organ transplantation and deceased organ transplantation in Japan as an example, we prospectively discussed to what extent the recipient's right not to receive a transplant is ethically acceptable. In directed transplantation from a living donor, a recipient may refuse organ donation from a particular donor. It is preferable that a recipient's request for organ donation from a donor occurs as part of a transparent process. In nondirected transplantation from a deceased donor, refusal of transplantation from a particular type of donor appears potentially justifiable. There are both moral and pragmatic considerations. Certain refusals based solely on belief are morally unacceptable, and refusal to transplant a recipient based on the donor's age jeopardizes the entire transplant system. When religious beliefs affect mental and physical health, individualized measures are required for transplant rejection. We also deductively developed a prospective argument based on the current status of donor–recipient communication in living organ transplantation in Japan and the 2010 amendment of the law allowing relatives to be given priority in organ transplantation from deceased donors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals the technological properties of lactic acid bacteria isolated from raw milk (colostrum and mature milk) of Wagyu cattle raised in Okayama Prefecture, Japan. Isolates were identified based on their physiological and biochemical characteristics as well as 16S rDNA sequence analysis. Streptococcus lutetiensis and Lactobacillus plantarum showed high acid and diacetyl-acetoin production in milk after 24 h of incubation at 40 and 30°C, respectively. These strains are thought to have potential for use as starter cultures and adjunct cultures for fermented dairy products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries, constitutional amendments require the direct approval of voters, but the consequences of fundamental changes to the powers and operations of the state are difficult to anticipate. The referendums literature suggests that citizens weigh their prior beliefs about the merits of proposals against the heuristic provided by the partisanship of the proposer, but the relative salience of these factors across constitutional issue areas remains underexplored. This paper examines the determinants of citizen preferences on 12 diverse constitutional issues, based on a novel survey experiment in Japan. We show that support for amendments is greater when its proposer is described as non-partisan. However, constitutional ideology moderates this effect. Those who prefer idealistic constitutions that elevate national traditions tend to value proposals that expand government powers, compared to those who prefer pragmatic constitutions that constrain government authority. These results highlight the significance of constitutional beliefs that are independent of partisanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2011, Japan suffered a massive earthquake. The resultant tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor and it was later revealed that the reactor was actually in a state of meltdown. While it is still unclear how many people will be affected, both mentally and physically, by the radio-active fallout, the extent to which our lives are subject to the unimaginable risks of scientific technology has become patently clear. This paper strives to clarify the risks of scientific technology in relation to instrumental reason, critical thinking, plurality, and subsequently, the significance of the public realm in contemporary world affairs, with a specific focus on the Fukushima incident. In so doing, I shall introduce arguments regarding scientific technology by such thinkers as Arendt, Heidegger, and Horkheimer as well as the Kyoto School philosophers. This paper also focuses on the issue of morality in order to address the notion of the lack of critical thinking and the disappearance of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal impact of the duration of retirement on the cognitive functioning of male elderly workers in Japan using data from the National Survey of Japanese Elderly. We explore how the complexity of a worker's longest served job affects cognitive functioning after retirement. In particular, we investigate eight dimensions of the longest served job using information listed in the United States Dictionary of Occupational Titles, namely physical demands, mathematical development, reasoning development, language development, the job's relationship to data, the job's relationship to people, the job's relationship to things and the specific vocational preparation required. Our estimator takes account of the potential endogeneity of the duration of retirement and the left-censoring of the duration of retirement. Our empirical evidence suggests that the duration of retirement has a negative and significant impact on cognitive functioning. Moreover, among the eight dimensions of job characteristics, high complexity in the job's relation to data is found to be an important job characteristic in delaying the deterioration of cognitive functioning after retirement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the world rushed to develop treatments for COVID-19, some turned hopefully to drug repurposing (drug repositioning). However, little study has addressed issues of drug repurposing in emergency situations from a broader perspective, taking into account the social and ethical ramifications. When drug repurposing is employed in emergency situations, the fairness of resource distribution becomes an issue that requires careful ethical consideration.This paper examines the drug repurposing in emergency situations focusing on the fairness using Japanese cases. Ethical issues under these circumstances addressed by the authors include: maintaining the evidence level, integrity of clinical research ethics, and voluntary consent by original indication patients. In order to address these issues, they argue that rapid accumulation of ethically and scientifically valid evidence is required, as is obtaining information on resource quantity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally accepted that oceanic plate subduction has occurred along the eastern margin of Asia since about 500 Ma ago. Therefore, the Japanese Islands have a >500 Ma history of oceanic plate subduction in their geological records. In this paper, the accretionary history of the Japanese Islands is divided into six main stages based on the mode and nature of tectonic events and the temporal gaps in the development of accretionary processes. In the first stage, oceanic plate subduction and accretion started along the margin of Gondwana. After detachment of the North and South China blocks in Devonian time, accretionary complexes developed along island arcs offshore of the South and North China blocks. After the formation of back arc basins such as the Japan Sea, accretionary processes occurred only along the limited convergent margin, e.g. Nankai Trough. Detrital zircons of sandstones revealed the accretionary history of Japan. An evaluation of a comprehensive dataset on detrital zircon populations shows that the observed temporal gaps in the development of the Japanese accretionary complexes were closely related to the intensity of igneous activity in their provenance regions. Age distributions of detrital zircons in the accretionary complexes of Japan change before and after the Middle Triassic period, when the collision of the South and North China blocks occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of citizen deliberation in democracy is widely recognized today and the current digitalized and more fragmented society may benefit from discussions among people with diverse opinions in a well-organized setting. At the same time, concerns have also been raised about inequality in deliberative participation. We narrowed our focus to gender equality and examined whether introducing an evidence-driven style of deliberation can mitigate gender inequality in policy deliberation. In our repeated measure (within-subjects) experiment, university students in Japan discussed divisive policy issues during two sessions. Half of the participants started the discussion by examining factual information about the topic (evidence-driven style) and the other half started the discussion by expressing opinions about the topic (verdict-driven style). In the second session, the two groups switched styles. We found a statistically significant gender gap in participatory contribution for the verdict-driven style, but no such gap existed for the evidence-driven style. Using causal mediation analysis, we also found that, compared with the verdict-driven style, the evidence-driven style of deliberation reduces the gender gap by lowering women's tendency to agree with men. One possible explanation from the viewpoint of gendered communication is that women were more confident in evidence-driven deliberations. This psychological effect is a factor that is harder for facilitators to control and thus the evidence-driven style can be effective even with the presence of facilitators. This paper demonstrates the importance of studying how deliberations are conducted and how deliberation styles can affect the content and the consequences of policy deliberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international economic order is undergoing significant change. Most recently, key countries have been seeking to increase their level of economic security, including through increased industrial subsidies. Regulating subsidies is controversial, but undisciplined subsidy payments could be harmful for the healthy functioning of markets and balanced development among nations. In this regard, the GATT-WTO has regulated subsidies, but it has not been fully functional in recent years, and reform efforts do not appear to be bearing fruit soon. Therefore, in parallel with WTO reform efforts, reliance on other approaches, such as discipline through free trade agreements (FTAs), should be considered. Disciplining subsidies through FTAs is inherently difficult, given the cross-border nature of subsidies on the one hand and the geographical limitations of the FTA's scope of application on the other. In recent years, however, such disciplines in FTAs have begun to appear, starting with EU FTAs. Thus, this article explores the possibilities and limitations of the discipline of subsidies through FTAs, using Japan's FTAs as a case study, to approach the path to international control of subsidies. Accordingly, this article first reviews the range of related issues and developments, including characteristics of subsidies, the rationale for subsidy discipline in trade agreements, recent challenges to multilateral subsidy discipline, the current status of subsidy discipline through FTAs, and the background of subsidy discipline in EU FTAs. The article then identifies the WTO-plus elements that are distinct to subsidy disciplines in EU FTAs and discusses their implications. Through these, it highlights the perspectives needed when considering subsidy discipline through FTAs, examines Japan's FTAs in light of these perspectives, and presents the findings and implications thereof. Considerations are given to Japan's FTA/trade policy as a background for its subsidy discipline through FTAs, the current status and characteristics of subsidy disciplines in Japan's FTAs, the Agreement Between the European Union and Japan for an Economic Partnership's (JPN-EU) subsidy-related provisions as drastic change, the effects on the Asia-Pacific region, and future prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to examine the relative validity of food and nutrient intakes and overall diet quality scores derived using a newly developed dietary assessment questionnaire (food combination questionnaire, FCQ). Dietary data were collected from 222 Japanese adults (111 for each sex) aged 30–76 years using the online FCQ and then the 4-non-consective-day weighed dietary record (DR). The median of Spearman correlation coefficients for sixteen food groups was 0⋅32 among women and 0⋅38 among men. The median of Pearson correlation coefficients for forty-six nutrients was 0⋅34 among women and 0⋅31 among men. The Pearson correlation coefficient between the total scores of Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015) derived from the DR and FCQ was 0⋅37 among women and 0⋅39 among men. The corresponding value for the Nutrient-Rich Food Index 9.3 (NRF9.3) total scores was 0⋅39 among women and 0⋅46 among men. Bland–Altman plots for these diet quality scores showed poor agreement at the individual level, although mean difference was small for the HEI-2015 (but not NRF9.3). Similar results were obtained using the paper version of FCQ, which was answered after conducting the DR, except for somewhat high Pearson correlation coefficients for the total scores of HEI-2015 (0⋅50 among both women and men) and NRF9.3 (0⋅37 among women and 0⋅53 among men). In conclusion, this analysis may lend support to the possible use of the FCQ as a rapid dietary assessment tool in large-scale epidemiologic studies in Japan, but further refinement of this tool should be pursued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this short essay is to further reflect on sociology in Japan by supplementing discussions on the three sociological papers compiled in this volume and adding critical perspectives. Discussions, and arguments, will be provided on the three thematic categories, namely, ‘international sociology’, sociology of culture as well as language use, and the global academic market, the latter addressing not merely sociology but also other social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a constructional account of the longstanding issue of the optional quotative to-marking on manner-adverbial mimetics (or ideophones) in Japanese. We argue that this optionality comes from the availability of two morphological constructions - the bare-mimetic predicate construction and the quotative-adverbial construction - to a set of mimetics. On the one hand, the bare-mimetic predicate construction incorporates previously identified phonological, syntactic, and semantic conditions of the bare realization of mimetics. This construction is instantiated by bare mimetics (e.g. pyókopyoko 'jumping around quickly') in combination with their typical host predicates (e.g. hane- 'jump'), and they behave as loose complex predicates with more or less abstract meanings. As with 'say'- and 'do'-verbs, these complex predicates involve quasi-incorporation, which is a constructional strategy for the morphosyntactic integration of mimetics into sentence structures. On the other hand, the quotative-adverbial construction introduces mimetics to sentences with a minimal loss of their imitative semiotics. This fundamental function is consistent with the wide distribution of quotative-marked mimetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between unconventional monetary policy (UMP), measured through shadow interest rates, and housing markets for the USA, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Euro Area using a set of time-varying parameter vector autoregressive models. Our findings suggest that the monetary policy transmission mechanism to the housing market has not changed with the implementation of quantitative easing or forward guidance for most economies considered. A counterfactual exercise provides some evidence that UMP has been particularly successful in dampening the consequences of the financial crisis on housing markets in the USA, while the effects are more muted in the remaining countries considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although preceding studies on Japan's foreign aid tend to report that Japan's aid policy is receptive to US pressure, it remains unclear which direction the US wishes Japan to assist its aid programs and how bureaucratic politics of Japan reduces the magnitude of US influence. This paper pursues the first attempt to provide a theoretical framework for the direction of US influence on Japan's aid provision and to explore whether its impact varies across different types of aid. I utilize a new dataset on Japan's Official Development Assistance from 1971 to 2009 and employ both ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares regressions to handle the issues of reverse causality and joint decision-making. The combined results of quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that the US tends to urge Japan to complement its aid efforts rather than to substitute them as substitution will allow Japan to increase its clout in strategically important recipients and the US attempts to minimize this risk by asking Japan to disburse aid in tandem. I also find that the allocation of Japanese grants is more receptive to US pressure than that of loans because the former is left to the discretion of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that uses external pressure to win bureaucratic turf wars, whereas loans are determined through consultations among multiple agencies with constituencies that prioritize Japan's domestic interests. The findings are robust across different model specifications and different samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]