Japan Study as a Public Good in Asia

This chapter will discuss the social welfare system and governance transformation in Japan. We focus on the critical determinants for governance transformation and the transition of the welfare-state in Japan from the perspective of relationships between multiple segments such as the state and market, government and private sector, family and individual. The construction and formation of the national welfare system in Japan had achieved remarkable improvements during the period of the 1950s to 1970s. However, the Japanese welfare-state has been transformed after 1980s. Issues addressed include who should be responsible for social welfare; how responsibility can be taken for problems of the social welfare system and; the power bargaining and related controversies that were carried out between the government, market, private sector, families, and individuals. In this chapter, we will gain insight into the truth about the transformation of the social welfare system in Japan, through analysis of the processes of social governance transformation that are unfamiliar to many people.

A declining birthrate and aging population have been considered a negative factor in their effect on security, as well as on lower economic growth and financial deficits. This is because various effects can be expected, such as difficulty of recruiting self-defense forces, limited financial capacity of citizens associated with lower economic growth, and financial pressure on defense-related expenditures due to an increase in social security spending. The problem of a declining birthrate and aging population is not unique to Japan. Indeed, most East Asian countries are experiencing similar patterns, and the shift is particularly eminent in Korea. In light of these circumstances, this chapter will discuss and compare how Japan and Korea, who share the same demographic problems, perceive those problems and how they are trying to overcome them from a security perspective. It will then conclude by considering the possibility of cooperation between Japan and Korea.

This chapter examines the impact of computing, internet and information technology (IT) on Japanese studies in the last three decades. For better or worse, modern technology has changed the landscape of Japanese studies beyond recognition in many different ways. This study provides a historical overview of the uses of word processing, computers, the Internet and IT technologies to study Japan from the 1980s to the present, and weights the pros and cons of using modern technology in Japanese Studies. Whether technology has improved the quality of research, changed the attitudes and methodology of researchers, promoted international collaboration and created problems in research ethics will be discussed.

Modern technology has developed at a ferocious pace and some have responded to it inhumanely. As a result, a phenomenon of “humanistic concerns in the age of high technology” has surfaced. Consequently, interdisciplinary debates about social technology research have started to develop. It is the current author’s belief that we need to examine how Japanese society, which is at the cutting edge of science and technology, has been dealing with disadvantages and social problems induced by science and technology. To address this, the current chapter examines the case of social technology research in Japan.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Justice of Japan (as of December 2015, Immigration Bureau, Ministry of Justice), the number of long-term foreign residents in Japan exceeds 2.68 million, and the number of Chinese is more than 785,000, accounting for 30.9% of foreign residents of Japan. Study abroad students and ordinary students account for 105,000 of this total and a majority of the remainder consists of a group commonly referred to as the new overseas Chinese or Chinese. Their number is estimated to exceed 500,000. How do these people living in Japanese society exist, and how do they relate to Japanese society? What is the state are their identities? This chapter explores these questions through an examination of the life histories of some new overseas Chinese.

Disability in many countries is stigmatized. The stigma causes people with disabilities to not appear in public areas or identify themselves as “disabled,” a definition which judges them as not as able or as good as other people. Struggling to remove the stigma can begin with replacing the term “disability” with the non-discriminatory one of “different ability”. People with disability have “ability.”

The aim of this study is to explore the role of advertising on market confidence recovery, which is defined as regaining the intention of potential tourists to visit (visit intention) a post disaster destination. In particular, We will focus on the impact of different types of media advertisements on visit intention to a  post-disaster destination, as well as the interactive impact of destination image on visit intention, by comparing the situation in severely damaged regions with other regions of Japan after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.