El comercio transpacífico entre América Latina y Asia Oriental durante el período previo a la Segunda Guerra Mundial ha sido escasamente estudiado. En este artículo, analizamos la construcción desde Argentina del vínculo mercantil con Japón entre 1934 y 1940. Al hacerlo, ponderamos las oportunidades y las limitaciones que surgieron en un contexto de des-globalización económica, y arrojamos luz sobre las posibilidades de diversificación geográfica del comercio exterior argentino. Abordando diversas fuentes de los sectores público y privado, el estudio revela que las iniciativas gubernamentales por profundizar los lazos con el socio oriental, apoyadas por los agroexportadores, enfrentó críticas de los empresarios textiles, quienes acusaron a Japón de ejercer dumping financiero y social.

Conservative parties and politicians are often caught in a dilemma regarding immigration policies. Business interest groups and xenophobic populist forces both support conservative political parties but expect fundamentally different immigration policies. Japan is a rare case among advanced democracies that has experienced neither large-scale immigration nor the emergence of xenophobic populism. Yet, Japan’s conservative government, facing the reality of a rapidly aging and declining population, has begun to loosen immigration policy. We analyze the ruling party politicians’ policy positions on foreign worker intake and demonstrate that their views have shifted in a pro-foreign-worker direction, especially among legislators representing rural areas that have seen a sharp increase in foreign residents.

This Research Note is based on interviews with stakeholders and advocates for child safeguarding in Japan’s entertainment industries conducted by the researchers in Tokyo in July 2024. We argue that, if, as suggested by new legislation, there is an intention to apply UK-style “safeguarding” understandings to prevent reoccurrence of child sexual abuse such as that perpetrated by Johnny Kitagawa in Japan, there are four key barriers to overcome that necessitate increased information-sharing and cooperation between stakeholders in government and industry: precarious work, a reluctance to regulate, a lack of industry accountability, and a lack of societal awareness of child sexual abuse and its impacts.

In Japan in the 1920s, several financial crises and government policy led to bank mergers and the consolidation and expansion of branch networks. Using unique historical bank branch-level lending and deposit data, we show that branch banking integrated peripheral markets with the rest of the country, with large urban banks – those headquartered in Tokyo and Osaka – using deposit supply shocks in peripheral areas to fund lending in their core markets. While these findings support contemporary concerns about branch banking draining funds from peripheral markets, we argue that the export of liquidity by urban banks likely represented an efficient reallocation of credit, driven primarily by competition in funding markets. Faced with high-yielding lending opportunities in central prefectures, urban banks bid up deposit rates in peripheral areas, raising local banks’ funding costs. Local banks responded by lowering intermediation margins and reducing lending to traditional industries, which suggests that they shifted their lending to less risky and more efficient customers. We speculate that this competitive reallocation of capital across regions and sectors allowed banks to maintain a functional specialization in different customer segments, which may explain the continued coexistence of small relationship lenders and large integrated arm’s-length lenders in local banking markets.

Seabirds are experiencing a decline in their populations because of climate change and human activities. Understanding their spatiotemporal dynamics is crucial for effective conservation, but the distribution and movement patterns of pelagic seabirds are not yet fully elucidated. In the present study, we investigated the seasonal movements and wintering areas of Swinhoe’s Storm-petrel Hydrobates monorhis, a Near Threatened species that breeds primarily on islands in the north-western Pacific. The data analyses of geolocators retrieved from four birds showed that Swinhoe’s Storm-petrels migrated across the north-western Pacific and Indian Oceans and wintered in the Arabian Sea. The distance between their breeding colony and the wintering area was approximately 6,700 km, and the tracking distance for a seasonal migration exceeded 12,000 km. The migration pathway was characterised by large-scale movements in both north–south and east–west directions in the Eurasian offshore regions, which previously had been inferred from direct observations at such areas but not empirically confirmed. Wintering areas in the Arabian Sea overlapped with regions where plankton blooms are triggered by the monsoon in winter, which may produce high marine productivity and support the wintering of Swinhoe’s Storm-petrels in this sea area.

This article examines how the labor and community structures of female skin-divers, the Japanese ama and Korean haenyeo, believed to exemplify the primitive ability to adapt to extreme climates, became staple research subjects for global adaptation-resilience science. In the context of development studies, adaptation-resilience discourse has been seen as reflecting the emergence of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, this article frames adaptation-resilience as a reactionary technological response that emerges in times of scarcity and crisis. This article demonstrates how the discourse can be traced back to interwar Japanese physiologists, who saw themselves as rescuing Japan from the ills of modernity through a socio-biological development program that drew on the diver’s adaptability as a means to create subjects not only capable of surviving extreme deprivation but willing to do so in the service of the community and the state. These scientists and their research were taken up uncritically in the postwar by international science and development organizations, who found in them a shared vision of a labor-intensive and low ecological impact model of community-rooted development that offered a sustainable and healthier alternative to capitalism, one that could help humanity overcome crises of modern excess such as climate change. However, sustainability meant the valorization of absolute austerity as a development goal, ruling out relief for suffering marginalized populations. This article therefore suggests that resiliency-based development entraps its subjects in a regime of self-exploitation that forces them into a constant state of emergency, paradoxically deepening their vulnerability in the process.

This paper examines how automated multiphasic health testing and services (AMHTS), which were originally developed in the United States but never widely adopted there, gained traction in Japan despite being excluded from the country’s public health insurance system. Drawing on Fitzgerald et al.’s theory of interlocking interactions, we show how Japanese physicians and other stakeholders reframed AMHTS as a streamlined and affordable alternative to Ningen Dokku, Japan’s high-cost, elite medical checkup service. This creative reinterpretation helped spur efforts by actors such as the National Federation of Health Insurance Societies (Kenporen) to provide health screening subsidies outside the formal insurance framework, which supported the widespread adoption of the AMHTS by middle-class consumers. We introduce the concept of the “democratization of premium health services” to explain how care originally designed for elite users was redefined as both accessible and trustworthy. By highlighting how symbolic framing can promote innovation diffusion even beyond formal institutional boundaries, this study contributes to the business history of health care.

Do improved family policies meet women diplomats’ concerns about balancing work and family? Using a feminist institutionalist approach, the article analyzes the interaction of formal and informal institutional rules, the role of informality, and interactions between actors and rules to address whether and how family policies improve women diplomats’ experiences balancing work and family. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with Japanese women diplomats — most at the top ranks of diplomacy — surfaces the informal institutional rules at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). The article finds that informal institutional rules along with the lack of transparency in promotion limit the effectiveness of family policies.

Sanseitō is a fringe Japanese political party founded during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that has won several seats in the National Diet since 2022. Initially coming to prominence as a promoter of anti-vaccine narratives, the party has since promoted a conspiracist worldview that connects to more conventional right-wing nationalism and addresses a much broader range of issues and beliefs. In this article we outline the core tenets of this worldview and examine how attention to its construction as a participative political ideology sheds light on the party’s political actions and motivations.

Across the developed world, citizens typically file many more administrative appeals than administrative lawsuits. Yet, in contrast to the rich literature on court decisions, little is known about the determinants of administrative appeals decisions. We seek to fill this scholarly gap. An important feature of administrative review panels is that typically only some of their members have professional legal training. Drawing on original data on Japanese prefectural-level Administrative Complaint Review Boards (ACRBs), we show that ACRBs with more private attorneys rule more often against agencies. Consistent with a socialization perspective, we find preliminary evidence that ACRBs with more experienced private attorneys rule more often against agencies. We also find that, consistent with insights from both political insurance theory and the literature on technocratic appointments, more recently elected prefectural governors are more likely to appoint more private attorneys to ACRBs and that governors’ ideological orientations have little effect on their choices.

The sentiment expressed in a legislator’s speech is informative. However, extracting legislators’ sentiment requires human-annotated data. Instead, we propose exploiting closing debates on a bill in Japan, where legislators in effect label their speech as either pro or con. We utilize debate speeches as the training dataset, fine-tune a pretrained model, and calculate the sentiment scores of other speeches. We show that the more senior the opposition members are, the more negative their sentiment. Additionally, we show that opposition members become more negative as the next election approaches. We also demonstrate that legislators’ sentiments can be used to predict their behaviors by using the case in which government members rebelled in the historic vote of no confidence in 1993.