Characteristics Of Japan Research Articles

Japan's Approach to Peacebuilding in Afghanistan: Money, Diplomacy and the Challenges of Effective Assistance

Japan has been a principal player in international assistance to Afghanistan, ranked second only to the United States in its overall financial assistance disbursed since 2002. This article places a spotlight on the largely underappreciated subject of Japan's primarily non-military and economic infrastructure-oriented assistance by articulating three major characteristics of Japan's policies and practices in Afghanistan — relatively large disbursements for reconstruction programmes, designating disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration as Japan's niche area, and substantial reliance on international organisations for fund disbursement. Despite its comparatively advantageous position vis-à-vis other donors, Japan has faced a set of institutional and structural impediments to carrying out effective stabilisation and reconstruction assistance, not just in Afghanistan, but also in other conflict-prone and fragile societies. These include, among other things, the shortage of expertise, bureaucratic pressure for ‘cash burning’, inter-agency coordination problems, and waning political interest. As a result, this article argues that Japan has been underequipped to provide peacebuilding assistance on the large scale it committed in Afghanistan. If Tokyo hopes to safeguard its major investments in Afghanistan, it needs to revive the substantive political leadership it exercised in the early years of Afghan peacebuilding.

The Making of a Bicycle Nation

Japan is one of the great bicycle nations of the world, ranking alongside the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark in terms of per capita bicycle ownership and use. This article reviews the history and characteristics of Japan as a bicycle nation. It examines the emergence of a distinctive bicycle culture that offered personal mobility to ordinary people in prewar Japan and traces the contribution of the bicycle to postwar Japan's social and economic development. It reviews postwar bicycle history in: the period of reconstruction and recovery (1945-1956); the period of high economic growth (1957-1973); the period of rapid motorization (1974-1991); and the period of raised environmental consciousness (1992-present). The conclusion seeks to offer reasons for the persistence of Japan's vibrant and pervasive bicycle culture.

Japan's New National Border Strategy and Maritime Security

This paper targets the transformation of sea security issues for Japan, which is obliged to consider itself a seafaring country in order to fulfil its responsibility in a global society where the US guarantees freedom of navigation over the high seas. I introduce Japan's remote border islands in the introduction and survey the characteristics of Japan's sea security framework in the following section. After introducing Japan's current legal arrangements on ocean policy, I highlight Japan's maritime interests and evolving strategies. My argument here is not necessarily analytical; rather, I aim to enumerate Japan's border challenges and to share basic knowledge about Japan's sea border works for future empirical and comparative studies. Given Japan's energy and transportation dependence on sea routes, securing not only the sea border but also the far seas is critical for Japan's stability and management. In short, the improvement of the coast guard system and anti-piracy operations deployed far from Japan (particularly in the Straits of Malacca and the sea area off the coast of Somalia) matter to Japan.

A Research on the Characteristics of Japan's Video Games Focused on the Connection of Japan's Traditional Play Culture

This research discusses the unique characteristics of Japanese video game from the cultural viewpoint of Japan’s traditional play. It starts with the possibility that Japanese video game can share the characteristics of traditional Japanese play. Accordingly, this research first considers the connection between play and video game for a theoretical background, by comparing their theoretical definitions and characteristics. Particularly, it shows the research direction from the viewpoint of Ludology that approaches video game from the aspect of play. Second, the characteristics of traditional Japanese play are examined in connection with Japan’s inherent animism culture. Based on such characteristics, the common characteristics and backgrounds of Japanese video game and traditional Japanese play are discussed from the ‘spatial’ aspect of game, from the ‘identity’ aspect of game characters, and from the ‘motive’ behind playing game.

Characteristics of Japan’s Annexation of Korea and the Japanese Colonial System: A Comparison of Korean and Taiwanese Legislation System

Characteristics of Japan’s Annexation of Korea and the Japanese Colonial System: A Comparison of Korean and Taiwanese Legislation System

The Characteristics of Japan's Software Industry and Offshore Development in Dalian, China1

In recent years, Japan's software industry has increased its revenue. However, with strong need to reduce the sale price, both firms and employees share the pain. The main products by the Japanese software industry are ordered software such as software to be imbedded in home appliances or software for system of financial institutions. Therefore, software industry faces the difficulty to raise the price, and the firms need to deploy the offshore development in order to cut the cost. The major destination of the offshore development is China. The reasons are cheaper wage, huge number of engineers, ability of learning Japanese, and geographical accessibility. When using the offshore development, firms need to achieve both reducing the cost and stabilize the demand fluctuation. Many large firms establish their subsidiary for cheap product and accept additional demand at mother plant. Small and medium firms use the intermediating company, which has long experiences of business with both Japanese and Chinese business. After several years since offshore outsourcing to China started, we cannot observe the strengthening of the collaboration of firms in the clustering such as Dalian Software Park. Rather than that, firms are facing the need to change their strategy because the wages are increasing even in China.JEL Classification: F15, F21, L86

Reply to Hudorovic et al. Enhancing the transferability of region-specific findings: characteristics of Japan's cardiovascular surgery system

Hospital volume is sometimes used as a surrogate measure for numerous care processes that directly influence patient outcomes. This is because individual processes and inherent technical skills are not well characterised and are difficult to measure. For some procedures, higher volume, particularly at the surgeon level, may translate directly to better clinical judgement and technical proficiency in the operating room. Such processes may be hard to transfer to lower-volume providers. Higher-volume centres may also differ with regard to other processes of preoperative and postoperative care, which could be adopted by lower-volume centres [1]. To better understand the volume—outcome relationship in cardiovascular surgery, our current study focussed on practices, including processes and structures, that could be related to perioperative mortality risk associated with any cardiovascular procedure. Processes refer to the care that patients actually receive, and structures are the environment in which the care is delivered [2]. We confirmed a volume—outcome relationship similar to that reported in the European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery [3]. It must be pointed out, however, that health-care systems relating to cardiovascular surgery are not necessarily identical across regions. The relative strengths of processes and structures (especially the surgeon’s procedure volume and hospital procedure volume) might differ from one region to another. In this respect, we thought the ability to generalise our findings is limited, as Hudorovic suggested [3]; it would be useful to take steps to enhance transferability of our results. For readers from other regions, it might be useful to describe region-specific characteristics of the cardiovascular surgery system in Japan. Our previous study [4] indicated that an average of 3.3 cardiovascular surgeons participate in each cardiovascular surgery in Japan. This is because Japan does not have a nurse practitioner system or a physician assistant system. Even when a young surgeon leads the surgery, expert surgeons often participate as assistants. In additional, 95% of centres have meetings among cardiovascular surgeons more than once a week. Further, a majority of Japanese centres share information and experiences regarding all cardiovascular surgeries performed at their centres, thus the volume effect specific to a surgeon might be difficult to differentiate from the hospital volume effect. These region-specific characteristics might lead to differences in the relative impact of surgeon volume and hospital volume between Japan and other countries. If we could take such region-specific characteristics into consideration, even findings specific to a given region might become transferable (even if they cannot be generalised to all regions).

Characteristics of Japan’s Commodities Index and its Correlation with Stock Index

The commodity indexes associated with Japan’s commodity - futures markets were formed in 2008 and publicized by the Tokyo Commodity Exchange and the Tokyo Grain Exchange. In this paper, I used these indexes to analyze the properties of Japan’s commodity futures as portfolio investments, and could confirm that they possess investment characteristics that differ from stocks, and that commodity investors can enjoy favorable “diversified investment” effects if leveraged skillfully.

An Analysis of the Characteristics of Japan's Existing FTAs

An Analysis of the Characteristics of Japan's Existing FTAs

日本の大学発ベンチャーの産業別・地域別・起業者別特性

日本の大学発ベンチャーの産業別・地域別・起業者別特性

Pitchers and catchers: Politicians, bureaucrats, and policy‐making in Japan

Yasuhiro Nakasone draws on his five years as Prime Minister of Japan and over forty‐five years as a member of the Diet's Lower House to analyze some of the fundamental characteristics of Japan's policy‐making process. He asserts that Japan urgently needs to reconstruct this process, so that political decisions are entrusted to elected politicians rather than to unelected bureaucrats. But he stresses that politicians must also have the responsibility to stand up for their principles, and be willing at times to go against the popular consensus. Yasuhiro Nakasone is chairman of IIPS and a member of the House of Representatives. He was assisted in the preparation of this article by IIPS Visiting Research Fellow Philipp Schuller, a doctoral candidate at Oxford University. An earlier and partial version of this article appeared in the October 1994 issue of Intersect.

Overview of rivers and water resources in Japan

This paper describes the climatic and topographical characteristics of Japan. Derived from these conditions, Japan's rivers tend to be short and precipitate, and severe flooding has been common since early times. Since the end of the last century widescale river improvement works have been undertaken for various reasons. There has been a rapid increase in the productivity of farm land as a result of improved irrigation, and the industrialization and urbanization of Japan have been facilitated. Problems have arisen, however, particularly in regard to pollution and landscape degradation.

Urban coastal zone and port development in Japan

Abstract Despite the intensive and diversified utilization of the country's coast, there exists in Japan no overall management system for coastal land and water areas as a whole. Instead, strong sectoral management systems are actively developed all along the coast. With respect to urban coasts, Japan presents a rather unique case of management. The urban coastal zone comes, often entirely, under the jurisdiction of port management bodies, the objectives and responsibilities of which are considerably different from those of port authorities in the Western countries. These bodies act as though they were coastal management agencies rather than solely port managers in a conventional sense. After presenting an overview of major coastal uses in Japan, this paper discusses the principal characteristics of Japan's urban coastal management, using as an analytical basis a functional framework for coastal zone management developed by the author.

Some Characteristics of Japan’s Economy and Securities Market

Some Characteristics of Japan’s Economy and Securities Market

EMPLOYMENT STRUCTURE IN THE SERVICE INDUSTRIES*

The development of the service industries is a recent and prominent trend in advanced nations. In the case of Japan too, this trend first became more or less visible during the 1960's. It took the form of a gradual shift of employment in both absolute numbers and in relative percentages to the service sector. However, the influence exerted by this trend differs according to the specific type of business within the service sector. Therefore, in this paper I intend to clarify the influence not merely of major groups, but also of subgroups as well; and at the same time to analyze the characteristics of Japan's service industries through an international comparison.