Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State

Looking at Japan, traces crisis narratives across three decades and ten policy fields, with the aim of disentangling discursively manufactured crises from actual policy failures. Mired in national crises since the early 1990s, Japan has had to respond to a rapid population decline; the Asian and global financial crises; the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown; the COVID-19 pandemic; China’s economic rise; threats from North Korea; and massive public debt. In Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State, established specialists in a variety of areas use a coherent set of methodologies, aligning their sociological, public policy, and political science and international relations perspectives, to account for discrepancies between official rhetoric and policy practice and actual perceptions of decline and crisis in contemporary Japan. Each chapter focuses on a distinct policy field to gauge the effectiveness and the implications of political responses through an analysis of how crises are narrated and used to justify policy interventions. Transcending boundaries between issue areas and domestic and international politics, these essays paint a dynamic picture of the contested but changing nature of social, economic, and, ultimately political institutions as they constitute the transforming Japanese state. Sebastian Maslow is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Sendai Shirayuri Women’s College in Japan. He is the coeditor (with Ra Mason and Paul O’Shea) of Risk State: Japan’s Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty. Christian Wirth is Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Griffith University Asia Institute. He is the author of Danger, Development and Legitimacy in East Asian Maritime Politics: Securing the Seas, Securing the State.