The paper attempts to construct a global model of a social contract using well-known metaphors of two great philosophers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke. By modelling a global social contract, I mean the formulation of a social contract using two sets of data: one is global citizens' preferences about values and norms while the other is sovereign states' participation in multilateral treaties. Both Rousseau and Locke formulate their versions of social contract theories in the national context of eighteenth-century Europe. This (...) paper tries my hands on extending their theories to the global context. This paper attempts to link empirically the relationship between global citizens' preferences as gauged by the World Values Survey and sovereign states' participation in 120 multilateral treaties deposited to the United Nations. To see the link between citizens and treaties (quasi-legislative outcomes, sort of), dimensional similarities of the cosmos of citizens' preference and the cosmos of sovereign states' willingness to join multilateral treaties are examined. Once done, all the sovereign states are located in each of the two cosmoses, citizens and states, and the correlation coefficients between them are measured. Based on these empirical results, the nature of the global quasi-legislative process is clarified. Conclusions and implications are drawn. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the examination of the attitudes of the in two regions of the globe, both with respect to basic relations between citizen and state and with respect to the extent to which affects these relations. These questions have too long been discussed primarily at the level of elites or on the basis of assumptions or about what the reactions of the people at large may be. By providing at least some evidence pertaining to both these questions, (...) the study thus aims at beginning to fill a gap which has long needed to be filled and at giving the debate on and on some of the empirical basis which it badly needs. (shrink)

Samuel Huntington's influential clash of civilizations hypothesis (Huntington, 1993; Huntington, 1996) has been widely debated, but empirical tests of his ideas about core states remain limited at the micro-level. In this paper, we bring new evidence to bear, focusing on the : Greater Asia and the Pacific. Using the AsiaBarometer, we examine the extent to which publics in the region identify with the core states of the supposedly most contentious civilizations in the region and the factors that influence those perceptions. (...) We give attention to the role of globalization and nationalism and whether both may be subsumed by religiosity as Huntington suggests. Our descriptive evidence affirms some of the tensions between the US, China, and Islamic-predominant Asia identified by Huntington as areas of potential conflict. At the same time, we find no evidence to suggest that attitudes toward core states are zero-sum; Asian publics often see rival powers as mutually good influences. Using multivariate analysis, we find that religiosity, as the clash paradigm surmises, boosts Iranian influence and undermines American influence in several predominantly Islamic states. We also find, contrary to Huntington, that overall exposure to foreign cultures leads to a more positive assessment of American influence among Chinese and Pakistanis, as well as American perceptions of China. When foreign exposure influences perceptions of Iran, the effect is modestly, but consistently, negative. Taken together, the findings raise questions about two key assumptions of the Huntington framework and suggest that alternative approaches in recent civilizations literature show greater empirical promise. (shrink)

The Asia Barometer was launched on 6 May 2003 with an international symposium held at the University of Tokyo. It was executed in ten Asian societies in summer 2003. With the first AsiaBarometer survey data in their hands, Asian social scientists got together at the University of Tokyo in January 2004 to present and discuss their papers and discuss the second AsiaBarometer survey to be conducted in summer 2004. In March 2004 discussion papers came out from the Institute of Oriental (...) Culture, University of Tokyo. By the end of 2004 the AsiaBarometer Sourcebook will come out also. This research note summarizes the AsiaBarometer's aims, scope and strength. (shrink)

Most of the current scholarship focuses on the functional aspects of regionalism such as economic and security issues, and the literature tends to be too focused on American or European concerns. Despite the early examination of varied ideas of Asian regionalism, there remains a substantive lack of critical scholarship that focuses on the study of Asian ideas, proposals, and visions of regionalism.

Japan is geographically located on the fringe of Asia. Japan's location is often divided between those arguing that Japan is inside Asia and those arguing it is outside Asia. Japanese ideas of Asian regionalism are thus immensely varied. This article details a number of Japanese ideas on Asian regionalism with author/agency, scope and method specified. Special mention is made of weak integration of government agencies, thus causing proliferation of many Japanese ideas within Asia. With the increasing self-assertiveness of China, the (...) apparent peaking out of American hegemony, and the steady rise of non-Chinese Asians, Japan tries to maintain enduring alliance with the United States, to invigorate interdependence with China, and to reinvent new relationships with the countries of the East Asian Summit. Japanese ideas of Asian regionalism take those templates as guidelines to develop new ideas of Asian regionalism. (shrink)

On the basis of seven questions asked in the AsiaBarometer survey conducted by the author in 2003 in ten Asian societies, Uzbekistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, China, Korea and Japan, the author analyzes the key dimensions of social capital, permeating the ten societies, (1) general trust in interpersonal relations, (2) trust in merit-based utility; and (3) trust in social system and comes up with the five groups of societies on the basis of three major dimensions of social (...) capital and comes up with the five groups of societies (1) China and Vietnam, (2) Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan, (3) Malaysia, Myanmar and India, (4) Japan and Korea, and (5) Thailand. Conceptual examinations are also done in relation to the work done by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Weltzel and broad empirical corroborations are noted. (shrink)

The Koizumi Administration got off on the right foot with a high approval rate over 85 % in April 2001, and swept Upper House Election held three months later (Inoguchi, 2002). However, it lost the support of legislators, media, and constituents because of his failure to get the reform process off the ground. Most salient of the legislative records is that the batting average of the cabinet sponsored bills has experienced a dramatic fall in the 153rd (27 September to (...) 7 December 1001) and 154th (21 January to 31 July 2002) sessions, registering the second lowest figure for the last decade. Clearly the Prime Minister's legislative coalition has been significantly weakened (see Table 1; see Table 2 for the distribution of seats by political party). (shrink)

This article examines the cross-level causal relationship between macro-political settings and micro-political attitudes in eleven Asian societies using the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey (China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) and the 2006 South Asian Survey (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). After extracting the four underlying dimensions of political attitudes from the broadly comparable questions used in the two surveys, the study first detects national differences in terms of (1) citizens' attitudes toward political activities other than voting, (...) (2) their commitment to a democratic system, (3) their political frustration, and (4) their confidence in their ability to govern themselves. Then, regression analysis examines the possibility that the micro-level variations in each of the four dimensions of political attitudes are related to the abundant macro-level variations found in these Asian countries. The results show that although the country-level predictors for citizens' attitudes toward direct political actions are common to both regions (ethno-linguistic fractionalization and the degree of institutionalization of preference articulation), factors influencing the variations in other dimensions are different. Specifically, the effects of political competitiveness and inclusiveness are more salient in South Asia than in East Asia. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to review Japanese Political Studies in Japan (JPSJ) circa 2000 for the purpose of identifying the trends of JPSJ and gauging its scope, subject areas, and methods. I then identify the key questions asked in JPSJ, i.e. for the third quarter of the last century: (1) What went wrong for Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, which had been seemingly making progress in the scheme of and was with a ? (2) What is the (...) secret of Western democracy in excelling itself in terms of keeping freedom and accumulating wealth? For the last quarter of the last century: (1) Why is Japanese politics shaped so heavily by bureaucracy? (2) Why are its citizens so weakly partisan in their voting choice? (3) How are politics and economics intertwined in policy making and electoral behavior? Following these trends in JPSJ in the latter half of the last century, I identify the three trends that have emerged in the first quarter of this century: (1) historicizing the normative and institutional origins of Japanese politics, (2) putting Japanese politics in comparative perspective, (3) the new self-conscious impetus for data collection and theory construction. Despite the steady tide of globalization and the strong influence of American political science, market size, long tradition, and language facility, lead political scientists in Japan to think and write more autonomously. (shrink)

Japanese society is often said to be one with a high premium on social capital. Two major theses have been put forward with regard to social capital in the last few years. One, advanced by Putnam (1993), is that social capital enables democracy to work. In other words, the historically acquired and accumulated social capital in terms of the propensity of individuals to engage with others in community and associational life facilitates the task of democratically working out the resolution of (...) conflicts of interest and collectively producing good public policy. The other, advanced by Fukuyama (1995), postulates that social capital allows the creation of prosperity. In other words, a high level of social capital enables business firms to take risks and stretch networks fully in the creation of wealth on a large scale for a prolonged period of time. (shrink)

This paper tests the hypotheses that the tide of globalization undermines or reinforces the traditional types of social capital. Using the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey data and applying two-level logit regression analysis, this paper found that social capital related to sense of trust or human nature and interpersonal relations can be augmented by globalization, while social capital regarding familialism and mindfulness can be weakened.

This paper is one of the few attempts made by social scientists to measure social capital via psychometric approach, and is the only one of such kind to base its evidence on the AsiaBarometer survey data. After first reviewing the history of social capital, including its conceptual emergence and recent literatures, we expose the issue of difficulty in the measurement of social capital despite its topical popularity. We tackle this measurement issue by applying psychometric procedures to the AsiaBarometer survey data (...) of 2004, 2005, and 2006, focusing on questions pertaining to social capital of ordinary individuals residing in the 29 survey societies. This paper is significant in two aspects. First, using simple statistical procedures, it extracts various dimensions of social capital without first knowing what dimensions to extract. In short, it does not try to measure social capital using some kind of pre-defined concepts such as those outlined in the historical review of our predecessors. Rather, it succeeds in manifesting key factors of social capital by mechanically processing collective responses by individual respondents towards survey questions oriented with social capital. Though the paper does not aim to establish its methodology as a widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, it does give credence and recognition to psychometric approaches as effectives means to measure social capital, which, by its very definition, calls for approaches using collective data to measure notions of individual actions within networks. Second, this paper is the first systematic empirical analysis of social capital in all the subregions of Asia, i.e. East, Southeast, South, and Central. It builds on our earlier works, including the 2006 paper on social capital in Central and South Asia, and gives empirical credence to important concepts on Asian political culture. (shrink)

This study is an attempt to construct a quantitative link for international regimes with global leadership. The country's willingness to lead in solving global issues as the first mover in the formation of an international regime is measured and characterized by analyzing their ratification behavior in multilateral conventions deposited to the United Nations which shape of the global community. For this purpose, a set of quantitative indicators, the Index of Global Leadership Willingness and the Global Support Index, was defined and (...) calculated for each country based on its actual ratification year data for 120 multilateral conventions covering global issues such as peace and security, environment, commerce, communication, intellectual property protection, human rights, and labor. By proposing a framework of global leadership analysis, the study seeks to provide an empirical testing of the transformation of global governance towards cooperation without hegemony paradigm. The paper analyses changes in the leadership willingness indices of selected country groups, such as the G3, G7/8, and G20, over the century and finds that the will to drive the international agenda of these groups of leaders is in decline. Moreover, our study provides evidence to argue that our current world is actually without consistent global leadership across domains of the world affairs. Although several countries still show visible leadership in specific policy domains, such as environment and intellectual property, neither the G7/8 nor the G20 was playing a comparable role to those performed by the G3 a hundred years ago. (shrink)

Little is known about health of the growing subpopulation of the working poor in Japan. We aimed to evaluate health status and healthcare utilization in relation to income among Japanese working adults. We conducted a one-month prospective cohort study using a health diary in working adults from a nationally representative random sample in Japan. Based on the government criterion, the working poor group was defined as earning an equivalent annual income of less than 1.48 million Japanese-yen. For health status, we (...) measured symptomatic episodes and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). For healthcare utilization, we measured frequencies of visits to a physician or pharmacy, and use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). We constructed multiple linear regression models for these measures adjusted for age, gender, and co-morbidity, using annual equivalent income as a 4-level categorical variable. (shrink)

明治大学文学部は、2018年4月に哲学専攻を新設した。いま、なぜ、哲学なのか?アジアにとって、哲学とは何か?理論とプラクティスが、西洋と東洋がクロスする新しい場から5名の創設メンバーが贈る“知”のスタ ーティングガイド。.

林家は、朱子学者・林羅山を始祖とする江戸幕府に仕えた儒官の家柄である。大坂冬の陣の発端となった方広寺鐘銘事件から、史書『本朝通鑑』の編纂、湯島聖堂の創建、大学頭叙任、赤穂浪士討ち入り事件への対応、そし て新井白石との対立まで―。初代羅山・二代鵞峰・三代鳳岡は、歴代将軍の寵用と冷遇に翻弄されながらも、江戸期朱子学の確立に奔走した。その林家三代一五〇年の闘いと事績を描く。.

闇斎門下の個性豊かな諸家の事跡を通して、垂加神道の史的展開を検討すると共に、『日本書紀』神代巻の解釈に見える思想の根幹を明らかにする。.

Was konnen Rechtsvergleich und Rechtsgeschichte leisten? Der Autor beantwortet diese Frage mit Blick auf die Gesetzgebungslehre des deutschen Juristen und Philosophen Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). Er weist nach, dass dessen Gesetzgebungslehre sich im Bereich des Privatrechts grundsatzlich durchsetzte und auf die Gesetzgebung der fruhen Neuzeit grossen Einfluss hatte, obwohl Thomasius kein originales Gesetzbuch verfasste. Der Jurist war der Meinung, man konne durch Rechtsvergleich vermuten, dass eine heimische Sitte, die den gemeinsamen Sitten vieler Volker bzw. dem Volkergemeinrecht entspreche, geeignet sei, ins Gesetzbuch (...) aufgenommen zu werden. Er stutzte diesen Vergleich durch historische Betrachtungen.". (shrink)

江戸時代の儒学者・宗教者である山崎闇斎の思想を、心理学・文化人類学・現代哲学等を取り入れた学際的なアプローチで解明する。.