Japan's political trust deficit

Abstract

This introductory article to the special issue on ‘Trust and Mistrust in Contemporary Japan’ lays out key trust concepts used in social science research. It then turns towards the Japanese case, summarizing important research on the notion of trust and Japanese politics and society, according to which trust levels are comparatively low. The subsequent part provides an overview on the case studies that scrutinize issues related to political trust in particular. As the contributions invariably point to low levels of political trust, we finally reflect on problems in Japan's politics in relation to the notion of trust.