Japan's Elite Research Articles

Japan's elite motor companies unite to develop hydrogen engines

Japan's elite motor companies unite to develop hydrogen engines

Recruitment of Administrative Elite in Japan and Bangladesh

Recruitment of Administrative Elite in Japan and Bangladesh

How Well Do Political Elites Represent the Voice of the Citizens?: A Comparison of Equality Views in Japan

Growing economic inequality has been recognized as a serious problem that needs to be solved in Japan. However, there is disagreement about the point at which inequality becomes intolerable and how much the government should intervene to reduce inequality. How do political elites and ordinary citizens perceive current inequalities, and what stance do they take on addressing them? A wide gap between the attitudes of these two groups would suggest that the political elite in Japan do not adequately represent the citizens. Therefore, based on survey data, this study’s aim was to compare political elites’ and citizens’ views on equality. Analysis revealed congruence in equality views among the elite groups heavily involved in policy formation, such as the ruling party, bureaucrats, business leaders, and citizens with high incomes and prominent occupations. These groups tend to perceive the status quo as being equal, tolerate social inequality, and endorse “individual self-reliance.” The results highlight that in contemporary Japan, a higher stratum of society is correlated with higher responsiveness from the mainstream elite in policy formation related to equality, suggesting that political processes may perpetuate economic inequality.

Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan by Sabine Frühstück

Reviewed by: Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan by Sabine Frühstück Davinder L. Bhowmik (bio) Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan. By Sabine Frühstück. University of California Press, Oakland, 2017. xi, 276 pages. $85.00, cloth; $34.95, paper; $34.95, E-book. The focus of this magnificently illustrated monograph on children, war, and play in Japan's modern and contemporary eras is on the use value of the metaphorical child in an array of textual and visual media. In a nutshell, Frühstück's argument is that children and childhood are instruments by which war is naturalized and peace sentimentalized. That children are similarly deployed in times of national conflict and in the absence of war is the paradox alluded to in the work's subtitle. Playing War is comprised of two parts, "Playing War" and "Picturing War." "Playing War" consists of two chapters, "Field Games" and "Paper Battles"; chapters on "The Moral Authority of Innocence" and "Queering [End Page 549] War" make up "Picturing War." In the first body chapter, "Field Games," Frühstück examines how children conceive of war as play on the ground, on paper, and on the screen and argues that children's "little wars" connect to the "larger wars" the nation-state of Japan engaged in beginning with the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars and extending to the Asia-Pacific War. Readers learn how, from the Meiji period onward, elites in government and education agreed on the importance of raising children to be prepared for war and debated about how best to achieve this end. Following Karatani Kojin whose "The Discovery of the Child" posits the "child" of today was only of recent vintage, Frühstück explains the process whereby in late nineteenth-century Japan the child becomes distinguishable from the adult and molded through education into a citizen-subject. In her 2016 ethnography, The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan, Andrea Gevurtz Arai expounds on this point: [K]ey theorists and historians of the modern category of childhood— Jacqueline Rose, Claudia Casteneda, Carolyn Steedman, Denise Riley, Stefan Tanaka, and Karatani Kojin—each situate issues of youth management and control within the new times of capitalist modernity and the structures and timelines of comparison that modern nation-states began to impose on each other.1 Through an analysis of contemporary newspapers, textbooks, and journals, Frühstück shows how military play (think King of the Hill) was repeatedly promoted as a means of preparing for war. Indeed, the author argues, such play soon became normalized, and by naturalizing the advance from playing to making war, Japan's elite created a clear trajectory from child to soldier (p. 56). The author deftly uses primary and secondary sources to build her argument, as demonstrated by including discussion of, for example, global concerns about the effects of modernity on children. American historian Lisa Jacobson noted that many adults worried that "an effeminate, postfrontier urbanism was robbing their boys of virility" and added that Daisy Air Rifles promised "to restore manly vigor to pampered middle-class boys" (p. 45). Despite all that separated them, Frühstück concludes that the child is the precursor to the soldier, that child and soldier are both liminal, and that each is the infinite mirror images of the other (p. 56). Having established a link between child and soldier in chapter 1, in "Paper Battles" the author shows how children's war games, which often included detailed maps, became ever more bound to the development of children's bodies and minds as Japan moved from nation formation to empire building. Sugoroku, games "similar to the ancient Indian game Snakes [End Page 550] and Ladders (known in the United States as Chutes and Ladders)" (p. 64), would presumably reverse the deleterious effects of modernity by allowing children to imagine invasion and war. Children's publications, rife with pictorial maps, added a geographical-imperialist dimension to reading. Wartime cartoons like Norakuro depicted a lowly dog-soldier steeped in adult notions of racial superiority, colonization, and just war (p. 84). In the 1950s...

Making Medicine a Business: X-ray Technology, Global Competition, and the Transformation of the Japanese Medical System, 1895–1945 by Pierre-Yves Donzé

Reviewed by: Making Medicine a Business: X-ray Technology, Global Competition, and the Transformation of the Japanese Medical System, 1895–1945 by Pierre-Yves Donzé Sumiko Otsubo Pierre-Yves Donzé. Making Medicine a Business: X-ray Technology, Global Competition, and the Transformation of the Japanese Medical System, 1895–1945. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xiv + 199 pp. Ill. $139.99 (978-981-10-8158-3). In his monograph, Pierre-Yves Donzé analyzes the impact of X-ray equipment on the transformation of Japanese medicine into a business between 1895 and 1945. He argues that in pre–World War II Japan, the radiological device industry, doctors, and hospitals all played a decisive role in the shift. Japan's exceptionally competitive market resulted from a large number of small hospitals that competed by investing in compact and cheap X-ray instruments and employing radiologists to lure patients for profits. X-ray equipment manufacturers like Tokyo Electric, a Japanese partner of U.S.-based General Electric (GE), and Shimadzu worked closely with medical doctors, who sought to establish radiology as an autonomous specialization rather than an auxiliary field. Japan's health care market evolved without either a Christian/philanthropist tradition or strong state intervention. The strengths of this book lie in its multicontinental and multilingual research, comparativeness, and data visualization. Donzé examines Japanese, English, French, and German sources, including documents held at the Siemens Archives in Germany. He is well versed on comparative literature in business history and puts his case study in the context of similar experiences in the West. Although desirable data were often unavailable (pp. 17, 19, 32, 47, 75, 86, 92, 134, 138, and 150), the author converts accessible data into thirty charts and graphs. I find discrepancies between common perceptions and Donzé's findings fascinating. Japanese industrialization is often characterized as state-led, and the Japanese market is frequently criticized as closed to foreign companies.1 However, [End Page 628] this study challenges such generalizations, as the state intervened in the technomedical business market minimally and GE did well in prewar Japan. German and U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs), Siemens and GE, originally dominated the X-ray machine market in pre–World War I Japan. While Siemens protected its patented inventions and used its Japanese partners only to assemble and distribute expensive high-end products (pp. 118–19), GE collaborated with Japanese subsidiaries by sharing technology and involving local partners in patent management, R&D, and marketing (pp. 116–18), which resulted in Siemens' struggle and GE's success. Strategies mattered in opening business frontiers for foreign MNEs. Typical of any pioneer work, this book invites further analyses. Patients' role in shaping the medical market place is noticeably missing. What supports the author's assumption that patients chose hospitals because of their X-ray devices? What kind of diseases did patients suffer from? For what medical ailments did orthopedic surgeons, internists, dermatologists, obstetricians, and dentists utilize radiological tools diagnostically as well as therapeutically? The answers may have better explained the nature of tensions between radiologists and specialists in existing medical fields. Were different X-ray tools developed and marketed according to the needs specific to specializations and diseases? Unlike Donzé, who is generally silent to these questions, Barbara Bridgman Perkins reveals that radiation therapy was applied to cancers of the uterine cervix as surgeries often killed women and GE's high voltage X-ray technology was a promising new invention for cancer treatment in the interwar West.2 Also, the book does not analyze the colonial and military dimensions extensively. However, Imperial Universities in Taipei and Seoul were an integral part of Japan's elite academic network, doctors moved around the empire, and companies operated in these colonies before 1945.3 Wars, including World War I, prompted and diffused medical technological advances.4 This book could have benefitted from thorough editing and indexing. But its content offers a fresh way to look at the history of medicine in Japan from a techno-business and comparative perspective. It also provides valuable insights into prewar Japanese history. [End Page 629] Sumiko Otsubo Metropolitan State University Footnotes 1. Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925– 1975...

The Shift of Japanese Foreign Policy: A Tilted Middle Way

This paper will take a closer look at where Japanese foreign policy made three remarkably orientational changes at the historical crossroads of the Meiji restoration in 1868, American occupation in 1945–1952, and in the post-cold war era of the 1990s. During the post-cold war era, there arose prolonged policy debates where political elites in Japan reached a consensus of its foreign policy’s new direction, namely a “middle way” mainstream policy. But this “middle way” can be defined as “tilted,” meaning that under different circumstances, different ruling elites would exhibit different tendencies. The policy consensus on this is reflected in some heated internal debates, which have had a profound impact on Japan’s relations with China and the USA.

Transnational Corporate Elites in Japan: International Career Mobility in East and South Asia

Although mainstream globalization literature has attempted to provide an empirical proof of the rise of transnational business elites using several indicators, it is still not clear how to pinpoint transnationality and to establish whether globalization has led to the erosion of nation‐state boundaries through worldwide mobility and networks, as globalization theorists argue. Using empirical data on career paths and mobility over three decades in Japan – compared with other East Asia economies and India – we examine the shift in career mobility. First, we maintain that a comprehensive understanding of social, political and cultural dimensions need to be considered in a discussion of transnationality. Second, we suggest that the globalizing economy does not necessarily lead to the weakening of the nation‐state territory and its institutions in all sociocultural and political dimensions. In particular, transnationality in career mobility in Asian economies is not greatly evident. We propose instead that a new career pattern, which we call brain circulation, highlighting the importance of international experience, has emerged.

Economic Growth in the Governance of the Cold War Divide: Mikoyan's Encounter with Japan, Summer 1961

Using recently declassified documents from Moscow, this article recounts Anastas Mikoyan's trip to Japan in the summer of 1961. The trip served as an inflection point in the commercial relationship between the Soviet Union and Japan—a relationship that by the end of the decade had become the most extensive between the Soviet Union and a country of the “free world.” The article indicates that narratives focusing on ideologies of great-power rivalry during the Cold War tend to miss the kinds of global ideological currents that shaped many states’ behavior after 1945. Mikoyan's discussions with political and business elites in Japan suggest that an ideology of economic growth increasingly underlay concepts of political governance on both sides and ultimately allowed for the kind of cooperation that characterized Soviet-Japanese relations.

Understanding public acceptance of elite sport policy in Japan: a structural equation modelling approach

Research question: Considering the current upward trend of public investment in elite sport, the importance of the public's acceptance cannot be ignored; however, little has been reported on the public's attitude towards elite sport policy. The present study seeks to answer the following research question: What are the significant socio-psychological determinants that influence public acceptance of the promotion of Japan's elite sport policy?Research methods: Data were collected from 921 Japanese respondents by means of a Internet-based survey. Five socio-psychological constructs were analysed in order to identify their impact on public acceptance of elite sport policy: personal benefit, social benefit, risk, trust, and athletes as role models. Structural equation modelling was used to test the causal model consisting of 10 hypotheses.Results and findings: Public acceptance is positively determined by their perception of personal/social benefits and negatively by perceived risks. These constructs are further determined by the public's trust in elite sport policy actors and athlete role model perception.Implications: The present study deepens the discussion on, ‘How a nation can increase the public acceptance of elite sport policy?’ and found theoretical and methodological approaches to fill the research gap. To enhance public acceptance of elite sport policy, policy-makers should focus on the social benefits and values that stem from promoting the policy and variable measures. The development of athletes who act as role models is a crucial requirement of the current Japanese elite sport system, as this construct has the strongest total effect on public acceptance.

Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State by Janis Mimura (review)

Reviewed by: Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State by Janis Mimura Christopher W. A. Szpilman Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State. By Janis Mimura . Cornell University Press, 2011. 240 pages. Hardcover $39.95. Janis Mimura's Planning for Empire examines the ideas and activities of civilian and mili­tary bureaucrats who prepared Japan for total war in the period 1930-1945. Drawing on a wealth of largely untapped primary materials and journals, 1 the work focuses specifically on a group of elite bureaucrats, predominantly graduates of Tokyo Imperial University, and army staff officers who were the driving force behind the reorganization of the Japanese economy in the 1930s and 1940s. After Japan's defeat, the reforms paved the way for the so-called Japanese economic "miracle" of the postwar years. As Mimura shows, inspiration for these reforms came from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. [End Page 348] In the 1930s, world capitalism was in crisis. Though there were many differences between fascists and communists, both agreed on one thing: given the failure of laissez-faire capital­ism, central planning offered the only way out. Japanese bureaucrats were watching the to­talitarian experiments in Germany and the Soviet Union with great interest, and a number of them became convinced that it was vital to introduce central planning and a command economy in Japan to allow the country to weather the world depression and to achieve its destined greatness by territorial expansion. These bureaucrats are the subject of Mimura's pioneering study. Compared to their Nazi and Bolshevik counterparts, Japan's reform-minded bureaucrats and army officers labored under a major disadvantage-they had to contend with powerful opposition from conservatives and others who felt their interests threatened by radical change of any kind. But unlike in Germany and Soviet Russia, they had a unique opportunity to give a command economy a trial run before unleashing it at home. In 1931 the Japanese army had annexed the northern territories of China known as Manchuria, turning it into a puppet state. A number of works have been published on Manchuria and on the introduction of a com­mand economy in Japan, 2 but Mimura's is the first English-language synthesis that traces the history of central planning in Japan from its inception in the corridors of power in Tokyo, through the experimentation period in Manchuria, to its final implementation in Japan. Mimura's contribution is particularly valuable precisely because it deals with men who were in a position to put their ideas into practice. The fact that most of these men have been consigned to historical oblivion does not diminish their importance. The civilian bu­reaucrats included Kishi Nobusuke, Hoshino Naoki, Minobe Yōji, Mōri Hideoto, Miyazaki Masayoshi, Sakomizu Hisatsune, and Okumura Kiwao. Army men are generally not considered bureaucrats, but Japan's elite staff officers' outlook was perhaps more bureaucratic than warrior-like. Endless factional infighting that divided and weakened the Japanese army bears witness to their bureaucratic spirit. In the 1930s several relatively low-ranking, reform-minded bureaucratic staff officers with radical views, including Ishiwara Kanji, Tōjō Hideki, Suzuki Teiichi, Akinaga Tsukizō, and Ikeda Sumi­hisa, found themselves in positions where they could influence the course of history by for­mulating and executing important policies. That they were able to do so was initially due to a strange abdication of duty by their superior officers, and later to their close collaboration with civilian reformist bureaucrats. Japanese bureaucrats have always claimed to stand above party politics and shun ideol­ogy. Yet, as Mimura's book shows, many civilian and military bureaucrats were involved in politics and were certainly not above assuming strong ideological positions. Perhaps the best known of all civilian bureaucrats, Kishi benefited throughout his long bureaucratic and political career from friendships he had formed with various right-wing activists as a stu­dent at Tokyo Imperial University. On the military side, Tōjō, Suzuki, and Katakura Tadashi, for example, were active in organizations of a political nature as early as the 1920s. Mōri and Okumura were the most ideological of the bunch and had no inhibitions about...

Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan

AbstractThis essay will consider gendered aspects of Cool Japan ideology as found in government‐sponsored texts and imagery, as well as in other international arenas. Although scholars have recently offered critiques of Cool Japan as a form of nationalistic nation branding, uses of an objectified femininity have rarely been included in these analyses. By displacing female innovations and creativity in cultural production to the margins, Cool Japan reifies and officially promotes male geek culture. We find general dematerialization of the producers of Cool Japan ideology, which in turn becomes characterized as creative, quirky, edgy, and benign, thus masking the way Cool Japan has been produced, critiqued, imagined and endorsed primarily by male elites in Japan and internationally. This discussion suggests that Cool Japan's otaku ethos does not include women and girls who fail to conform to a narrow model of cute femininity, thus maintaining and promoting structures of gender stratification. In addition, the global spread and government exploitation of uncomplicated cuteness (kawaii) often confounds a flat understanding of the aesthetic with a gendered perspective and its expressions in girl culture. Women and girls are contained in Cool Japan ideology, and are not usually represented as shaping, resisting, creating or critiquing Japanese popular culture.

Michael Shiyung Liu, Prescribing Colonization: The Role of Medical Practices and Policies in Japan-Ruled Taiwan, 1895–1945, Asia Past & Present: New Research from AAS (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2009), pp. x + 286, $25.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-924304-57-6.

Michael Shiyung Liu, Prescribing Colonization: The Role of Medical Practices and Policies in Japan-Ruled Taiwan, 1895–1945, Asia Past & Present: New Research from AAS (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2009), pp. x + 286, $25.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-924304-57-6.

Elites in the Industrialization of China and Japan, 1850-2000

Countries commencing industrialization with relatively low levels of agricultural productivity, hence low wages, enjoy advantages that can also prove host to daunting challenges. The chief advantage is a relatively elastic supply of labor for manufacturing; the chief challenge is how to free up farm labor for factory employment through the raising of labor productivity in farming. Key to raising agricultural labor productivity is providing incentives to increase effort levels including hours worked – access to markets being crucial – and improving the quality of labor as measured by health indicators and educational attainment. The willingness of elites to promote improvements in infrastructure – physical infrastructure in the form of roads and railroads and hydroelectric systems; human capital enhancing infrastructure augmenting the educational attainment and health of populations in rural areas; and financial infrastructure – and to invest directly in factories is crucial to the process by which labor is transferred from farming to manufacturing activities. During the period 1850 to 1935 elites in China tended to resist the requisite changes while elites in Japan did not. This legacy played a crucial role in shaping the nature of post-1950 economic development in the two countries.

Japan's Elite Networks at the Apex of Power

Japan's Elite Networks at the Apex of Power

Law's Dominion and the Market for Legal Elites in Japan

In this Article, we present data on legal elites in Japan - legally trained university graduates poised to pursue successful careers either as fast-track bureaucrats or lawyers handling sophisticated business transactions. The data show a marked shift in employment patterns over the past decade: increasingly, Japan's most elite university graduates are forsaking the bureaucracy for law. We find that changes in Japan's underlying economic, political, and legal institutions are a primary cause of this shift. We argue that this trend is not a temporary phenomenon, but reflects a more fundamental transfer of authority in Japan from the bureaucracy to the legal system. The evidence sheds new light on two longstanding debates: the impact of law and lawyers on economic success, and the bureaucracy's role in the governance of the Japanese economy. The data we examine are hard to square with the widespread view of Japan as Exhibit A for the proposition that societies encourage economic growth by steering their most talented youth away from redistributive legal careers. Rather, the data indicate that in Japan (as elsewhere), talented college graduates pursue positions of power, prestige, and profit. While those positions were once located in the elite economic bureaucracy, they are now migrating to the legal system. Contrary to the evidence of stagnation in the economic and policy environments flowing out of Japan in recent years, close examination of the career choices of Japan's most highly regarded youth reveals a society in transition.

The Policy Process and Social Policy in Japan

Postwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The first systematic and detailed study ever published of the socioeconomic backgrounds and career patterns of higher civil servants in early postwar Japan, up to the end of the 1950s. MacDougall, Terry Edward, ed. 1982. Political Leadership in Contemporary Japan. Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies, No. 1. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan. A collection of essays on the practice and style of leadership exercised by Japanese ruling and opposition party leaders, local politicians, and influential individuals without formal office or title. Spaulding, Robert M., Jr. 1967. Imperial Japan's Higher Civil Service Examinations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Still the most detailed and comprehensive study available in English of the higher civil service examination system in prewar Japan. Takane, Masaaki. 1981. The Political Elite in Japan. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, The University of California. A translation of a 1976 Japaneselanguage book on the determinants and patterns of social mobility and the behavior and performance of the political elite in modern Japan. Verba, Sidney, et al. 1987. Elites and the Idea of Equality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. A comparative study based on survey data of the ideas of equality held by members of various elites and actual practices in Japan, Sweden, and the United States. About the Authors

Women and Inheritance in Japan's Early Warrior Society

In the second half of the Kamakura age (1190–1333), Japan's elite warrior society began to undergo a gradual but radical structural transformation. The outline of this change was the shift from a divided to a unitary inheritance practice, with a progressive consolidation of family property and authority into one “chief” (sōryō), to the exclusion of his brothers and sisters. Kinship relations changed accordingly. As in the twelfth-century Mâcon described by Georges Duby, there was a progressive emphasis on lineal solidarity, along with a trend toward multiplication of independent branch lines. Through this shift, each warrior family sought territorial and organizational cohesion—a requirement for survival in an atmosphere of intensified social unrest and competition.

The sociocultural context of nursing in Japan.

Both by the standards of American nurses and in the eyes of the Japanese public, nurses in Japan appear subservient. In this paper I explore this situation from three perspectives. Most Japanese nurses lack a sense of professionalism which the nursing elite in Japan as well as sociological theory attributes to the low educational levels of the nurses. The second perspective investigates the nurses' functional role as intermediary between the medical world and the many patients who regard physicians as socially distant. Thirdly, Japanese nurses might be considered the "housewives" of the hospital in terms not only of their physical duties but also of their caretaking role. If the housewife analogy holds, the values, behavior, and attitudes that give Japanese housewives their satisfaction and their autonomy would considerably alter the role of the nurse in the delivery of cosmopolitan medical care.

The Political Elite in Japan

The Political Elite in Japan

The Political Elite in Japan.

The Political Elite in Japan.