This article has two objectives. One is to explain the rise of female political representation in local assemblies in Tokyo's 23 Special Wards. The other is to examine how political women in Japan have or have not changed since the publication of Susan Pharr's Political Women in Japan in 1981. When Tokyo first saw the emergence of a new type of local assembly women in the 1990s, they consisted of well-educated suburban housewives who led the Seikatsusha Nettowaku movement. In the past 15 years, however, Tokyo has witnessed a decline in ‘housewife politicians’ and a further diversification in the types of political women. This article pays special attention to a new type of political women called Mama Giin (literally, mommy politicians). Mama Giin are professional working mothers, who have become local assembly women to address deficiencies in childcare services. Their numbers increased as socio-economic changes and party realignment reshaped supply and demand for female candidates in Tokyo. Most of them accept the gendered responsibilities for childcare very much like Pharr's New Women did in the 1970s. The younger cohorts of highly educated women enjoy greater job options and life choices unavailable to the New Women of their mothers' generation. However, they do not necessarily challenge Japan's patriarchy. This article examines the biographies of female local politicians in Tokyo's 23 Special Ward assemblies to understand the rise of Mama Giin.

Politicians' voice pitch is known to affect voters' evaluation of the candidates in the US. But to what extent is this true outside of the American context? To address this question, we conducted an original survey experiment in Japan. Our findings are threefold. First, in contrast to previous studies, voters in Japan do not systematically prefer lower-pitched over higher-pitched female politicians. Second, our findings suggest heterogeneity in the effect of voice pitch by voters' gender – while Japanese women are indifferent as to female candidates' pitch levels, men are more likely to prefer female candidates who speak at lower pitch. Third, preliminary analyses reveal limited evidence that female candidates' political experience conditions the effect of voice pitch over voters' willingness to vote for that candidate. Our findings suggest that lowering pitch is likely to increase female candidates' electoral prospects by attracting male voters without backlash from female voters.

Observers have long debated how societies should invest resources to safeguard citizens and property, especially in the face of increasing shocks and crises. This article explores how social infrastructure – the spaces and places that help build and maintain social ties and trust, allowing societies to coordinate behavior – plays an important role in our communities, especially in mitigating and recovering from shocks. An analysis of quantitative data on more than 550 neighborhoods across the three Japanese prefectures most affected by the tsunami of 11 March 2011 shows that, controlling for relevant factors, community centers, libraries, parks, and other social infrastructure measurably and cheaply reduced mortality rates among the most vulnerable population. Investing in social infrastructure projects would, based on this data, save more lives during a natural hazard than putting the same money into standard, gray infrastructure such as seawalls. Decision makers at national, regional, and local levels should expand spending on facilities such as libraries, community centers, social businesses, and public parks to increase resilience to multiple types of shocks and to further enhance the quality of life for residents.

More than 50 studies have examined the programmatic incumbent support hypothesis, which posits that once enacted, programmatic policies increase electoral support for the incumbent. Despite the careful attention to causal inference in this work, empirical findings have been strikingly inconsistent. We make the case that these inconsistent results are likely explained by incumbents' strategic responses to the enactment of a programmatic policy. Specifically, incumbents have good reasons to distribute different amounts of non-programmatic goods to voters who do and do not receive a programmatic policy. To examine this conjecture, we turn to the case of Japan, where municipalities receive allocations of non-programmatic goods and vary in their eligibility for a programmatic policy (a snow subsidy) according to plausibly exogenous factors. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design, we find that municipalities receiving the programmatic policy receive systematically more non-programmatic goods than municipalities that do not.

Japan, and its alliance with the USA, is central to the unfolding politics of the new space race. This essay draws attention to the ways the Japanese state has positioned its geopolitical and geoeconomic interests related to space in the context of the US–Japan alliance. It probes the material and ideational elements that are driving the Japanese state to closer alignment with its formal ally in the military, civilian, and commercial space domains. But while all these realities bode well for alliance collaboration, there are reasons to be cautious. While the Japanese state has proactively aligned its space policy and postures with the USA, it is not forever caught in the US orbit. Given the uncertain fate of US domestic politics that bears on great power competition, Japan is also prudently positioning for how the status of its ally may evolve. This is what complicates straightforward projections about alliance cooperation and balance of power politics in the unfolding international space order.

Why study Japan? Research on contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy faces headwinds from the relative geopolitical decline of Japan and scholars skeptical about single-country studies. An overview of Japanese politics publications in English-language journals over the past four decades suggests the subfield remains active and robust. However, there is still room to grow. I argue that Japan is a harbinger state, which experiences many challenges before others in the international system. As such, studying Japan can inform both scholars and policymakers about the political challenges other countries are likely to confront in the future. In turn, scholarship on Japan offers a critical opportunity to develop theoretical insights, assess early empirical evidence, and offer policy lessons about emerging challenges and the political contestation surrounding them. I consider the reasons why Japan so often emerges as a harbinger across issue areas and suggest areas for ongoing scholarly attention.

The editors and authors provide a brief postscript about the contributions and the legacy of Susan Pharr for each author and the field of Japanese politics.

This paper highlights the concept of dignity as the cornerstone that justifies hate speech regulations in democratic societies. In political theory and constitutional law, the primacy of dignity as the moral and legislative justification for regulating hate speech has already been addressed by dignitarianism, especially in the course of debate with free speech advocates. We aim to augment this important claim in the normative literature with empirical data. Specifically, based on our survey conducted in Japan, where its first national anti-hate speech law had only recently been enacted and ordinary citizens were thus less predisposed of the debate, we show that citizens' concerns about the dignity of a targeted victim lead them to support regulations. Our analysis further clarifies the possible mechanisms of the dignitarian rationale, revealing not only the people's public-centered expectation regarding the societal consequences of hate speech, which dignitarians emphasized, but also the importance of more individual-based judgments regarding morality and justice, in shaping their regulatory attitudes.

Recent scholarly efforts to reveal the political effects of transnational terrorism are encouraging. They contribute to our understanding of how terrorism affects the targeted societies. We attempt to extend this line of research by examining the political impact of domestic terrorism. Domestic incidents overwhelmingly outnumber transnational incidents. In addition, the differences between domestic and transnational incidents may produce political outcomes. We examine the impact of domestic terrorism on the political survival of national leaders in the targeted societies. Our cross-national time-series analysis on a worldwide sample of 172 countries over the 1970–2014 period shows that domestic terrorism has a significant positive impact on leadership change. This impact is robust to various estimation techniques. This result suggests that heightened incidents of domestic terrorism hasten the removal of incumbent leaders in the targeted societies.

This paper mainly deals with the relationship between citizens' levels of news exposure and their behaviors toward the president's corruption scandal in South Korea. In particular, we examine how an individual's level of news exposure affected his/her level of political information about the corruption scandal, perception of then President Park Geun-hye's responsibility for corruption, and participation in anti-Park protests or counter-protests. In this paper, we argue that more exposure to consistent news reports of the president's corruption increases the amount of information citizens with different political dispositions have in common. The more their sets of political information overlap, the closer their perceptions and behavioral choices regarding a corruption scandal are likely to be.

This study explores whether and under what conditions foreign aid can help improve the donor country's image in countries that did not receive aid. We identified a world heritage site restoration project, which is visible, localized, has no political strings attached, and deals with global public good, as a most-likely type of foreign aid that can generate this positive effect. In light of the literature suggesting that tensions with the target country undermine public diplomacy effectiveness, we expect the positive effect will be more pronounced in non-recipient countries with which the donor country has a more amicable relationship. To empirically investigate our argument, we field a survey experiment in a developed non-aid-recipient country, Australia. We provide information to the Australian public about an aid project to restore the Angkor Monument in Cambodia conducted either by China or South Korea. We find that information on Korea's aid to Cambodia improves the image of Korea and the willingness to cooperate with the Korean government among Australians. No such effect, however, is observed in the case of similar aid by China whose relations with Australia have been strained in multiple domains. Our findings have policy implications for donor countries seeking to utilize the soft power element of foreign aid as a public diplomacy tool.