ABSTRACT This article examines early twentieth-century British Commonwealth ideologies as historical precursors of empire-related Euroscepticism, with a particular focus on the thought of Reginald Coupland (1884–1952) and Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957). It shows that the liberal internationalists committed to advocating the Commonwealth, Coupland and Zimmern sought to promote an idealized view of the empire by portraying it as a harmonious and multiagency polity grounded in a supposed benign form of nationalism and internationalism. The essay also highlights a relatively disregarded ideological source (...) of the British Commonwealth projects at the time: Edmund Burke. Coupland and Zimmern built on aspects of Burke’s thought – respectively, his account of trust and manners – to characterize their schemes for the empire. Moreover, such Burkean elements helped them to distinguish between the systems of their envisaged Commonwealth and Continental states, among others, Germany. The essay presents Coupland’s and Zimmern’s imperial projects as two significant cases of the incorporation of Burke’s thought into the early century British Commonwealth accounts. (shrink)

In July 2003, Prime Minister Koizumi successfully passed the legislation to dispatch ground SDF units to Iraq in the Diet. His top-down policy process was completely different from Japan's traditional bottom-up system, which Aurelia George Mulgan calls the in which the bureaucrats in the ministries play a central role with the LDP being the only political power to negotiate with them. Mulgan also argues that the system has not changed despite recent institutional changes. On the contrary, this paper illustrates how (...) Koizumi and his Cabinet took advantage of the strengthened authority of the Cabinet Secretariat to initiate policies, and successfully pushed the controversial national security legislation through LDP decision-making organs and the Diet by gaining support first from the coalition partners, presenting a new style of Westminster system. (shrink)

After the collapse of the Cold War system, Japan became more active in contributing to international peace and security. Especially under the Koizumi administration, Japan successfully passed major pieces of national security legislation, such as the 2001 Anti-Terrorism and the 2003 Iraq Special Measure Laws, in a timely manner. A changing international security environment in the Cold War transformed Japan's media and public opinion to a more realistic one, which supported Koizumi's active national security policy and changed the dynamics of (...) party politics. In order to prove this, this study first explores the influence of the Japanese media, especially the press. Next, it presents the opinion of major newspapers and the public on individual national security issues. Finally, it analyzes the press's influence on public over the issue of constitutional revision. (shrink)

The 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami damaged the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. Prime Minister Naoto Kan took this crisis seriously, and made himself personally involved with damage control, especially during the first week. This study examines the responses to the incident by the prime minister's office.

In the fall 2007 Diet session, the largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) showed strong opposition against the government's proposal to continue the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) refueling operations to support maritime inspections in the Indian Ocean. In order to evaluate this parliamentary confrontation, the article compares the handling of this issue with the six past major post-Cold War national security policies. The DPJ constantly presented its own legislative proposals in order to participate in Diet deliberation. DPJ's counter proposals, however, (...) were not always cooperative with the government. This different attitude by the DPJ could not be explained by the public and media opinions or the position of the supporting organization but by DPJ's political calculation. (shrink)

Shigeto Tsuru is one of Japan's most respected senior economists. In these lectures, he provides a reappraisal of institutionalism as a school of thought and discusses its relevance for the issues which the economic profession today must tackle. Tsuru reconsiders Marxian political economy as an 'institutionalist school', which provides a context for the following discussion of J. M. Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Thorstein Veblen. He goes on to present the four key elements of modern institutionalism - i.e., the (...) open-system character of the economy; the problem of planning; the evolutionary process of modern economics; and the normative character of economics - by way of an examination of three present-day institutionalists, Gunnar Myrdal, John K. Galbraith, and K. William Kapp. Tsuru concludes with an evaluation of modern institutionalism and the future of institutional economics. (shrink)

資本主義が混迷を深めるいま、経済学はどんな役割を果たせるか!社会保障の後退、環境問題、金融「カジノ化」から「市場経済と計画経済」等の理論問題までを、縦横に説き明かす。人生哲学も語る。.

The article contributes to debates about core executive capacity by analyzing the British and Japanese cases. First it examines the historical development, contemporary structures and current operations of the two cases. Then it compares their performance in five key areas: overseeing government policy in the domestic sphere; overseeing government policy in the external sphere; managing executive relations with the legislature; overseeing public finances; and managing public relations. It finds that the performance of the two systems is variable both internally across (...) distinct areas of business and, to a lesser extent, comparatively across similar areas. Overall, however, the British core executive is shown to have considerably greater capacity for coordinating and managing policy flows through the system than the Japanese. Governing from the centre is more feasible in Britain than in Japan. (shrink)