Suchergebnisse

First published in 1999, this book offers a new study of local government in Japan. There is an enormous amount of information about Japanese local government that has not yet appeared in English. With the author's local familiarity, elected local officials and local residents have been extraordinarily open and forthcoming. This allows a rethinking of the topic by mobilising a multitude of solid factual material. Japan has dealt with the dramatically increased public sector, but has done so in a setting of institutional centralisation. How has central authority sought to find ways of managing the continuous expansion of state activities? How have local authorities responded to central government's initiative in integrating state administration? The answers the book gives to these questions present an alternative understanding of Japanese local government.

The book is about new dynamic forces that are driving change in Japan. It is developed around two key concepts of civil society and social capital. The focus is on pathways to Japan's social renewal that promotes stronger communities and more participatory citizenship beyond the reach of economic growth

Controlling urban sprawl are the overarching challenges facing cities worldwide. This article delves into the pivotal role of policy entrepreneurship throughout the planning and implementation phases of compact city initiatives. Drawing insights from the experiences of Aomori City and Toyama City in Japan, this study scrutinizes the drivers behind the shift toward urban compactness and its consequent outcomes. The incorporation of policy studies theories into the realm of compact city development has been scant. To bridge this gap, the research leverages process-oriented theories from policy studies to dissect the decision-making processes guiding compact city development in these two pivotal municipalities. Through this investigation, it is revealed that the effective transition to compact urbanization in Japanese municipalities predominantly stems from policy entrepreneurship. The author posits that this achievement is primarily attributed to adept local mayors who possess the acumen to cater to specific local needs.

AbstractThis article examines Japan's policymaking capacities necessary to address the issue of low fertility, while harnessing the process-oriented theories of policy studies. The author asks why Japan's policy to increase fertility has not worked as well as some other countries whose efforts have proven more successful. The focus of this study is on process-oriented capacities, which can be defined as an ability of actors involved to avoid conflicts and cooperate on solutions at each stage of the policy cycle. To explore these capacities, or the preconditions for enabling policy options available for the actors, the policy process is investigated using process tracing observations for causal inferences drawing on governmental data, insights from policymakers, comprehensive literature reviews, and pertinent news reports. The author contends that the involvement of broker-entrepreneurs, who recognize opportunities and navigate obstacles, plays a pivotal role in preventing conflicts among stakeholders. Nevertheless, empirical data indicates that merely sidestepping conflicts does not necessarily enable policy effectiveness.

What age a state designates as appropriate for voting rights raises a range of democratic and empirical issues. The lowering of the voting age in Japan in 2015 was the biggest expansion of the country's democratic franchise since 1945, yet it happened in an abrupt manner. Lowering the voting age was not a significant issue among the Japanese public until the mid-2000s and the government began supporting the move officially only in 2014. Why then? What happened to precipitate this decision? This study argues that the circumstances governing the period before the policy decision was made are crucial to understanding what followed. In the prevailing theories of policy change, analysis has focused much more on the phase of decision making over policy; public opinion, policy beliefs, and policy transfer have been prominently cited as the major reasons for lowering the voting age in other countries. In contrast, this article claims that the policy opportunity spillover, from constitutional revision to voting age, was a necessary condition for lowering the age. The discussion of constitutional revision incidentally opened a policy window to another issue area, in this case voting age. The findings help us answer the question of what time period we need to examine in order to discern actual policy dynamics. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

The growing challenges of environment and sustainable development stretch across scales of geographic space and require action at multiple levels of jurisdictions, such as individual level, community level, national level, and global level. Multilevel governance and cross-scale coordination will open up opportunities for a variety of stakeholders to participate in decision-making. While potentially increasing the capacity of governance, the cross-scale and multilevel approaches may face a difficulty in policy coordination created by the plurality of stakeholders and be attended with organizational complexity. This article will examine the potential of subnational participation to make a policy choice, mediated by local governments, to be congruent with global strategies and national mandates in a consistent way. To this end, it will bring a new perspective to Kitakyushu City's experience in Japan as a heuristic test case study. My claim is that subnational actors occupy a strategic position to straddle the division between state and society, between the center and the periphery, and between the domestic and the foreign so they can act as an intermediate agent in reconnecting local action with national policy and turning global strategies into local action for problem solving. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

This article will examine the determinants of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) policy adoption in Shibuya, one of the twenty-three city wards of Tokyo, by taking an actor-specific approach to the first case of officially recognized same-sex partnership in Japan. How did the sexual minority issue become the subject of official agendas? How did actors both inside and outside the municipal government seize agenda-setting opportunities for government action? The results indicate that key policy makers' entrepreneurship played a primary role in the official recognition of same-sex partnership by linking policy solutions with agenda-setting opportunities. This analysis demonstrates that the adoption of municipal LGBT policy does not necessarily reflect the redistribution of non-material resources, such as citizen values, but rather resembles the patterns of welfare politics. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

This study will examine the determinants of local Japanese government involvement in decentralized international cooperation by taking an actor-specific approach to three outstanding cases: Shiga Prefecture, Kitakyushu City, and Yokohama City. It will look beneath the aggregate relationships to more qualitative evidence of localized motives for Japanese cooperation with developing countries.