It is often argued today that a deep and troublesome gap across the Atlantic has been developing and that Europeans and Americans no longer share the same view of the world. On the basis of data gathered in the 2002 Transatlantic Trends Survey, held in the USA and six European countries, this article assesses whether there is indeed such a gap at the mass level. It focuses on three major dimensions of world views: (1) perceptions of threats (2) the sense of affinity with other countries in terms of allies, friends or foes, and (3) attitudes toward the use of force, both in general and in specific circumstances, more particularly the war over Iraq. It concludes that European publics in 2002 looked at the world in a way that is rather similar to that of many ordinary Americans including harbouring deep reservations about the conduct of certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Both publics share fundamental worldviews. On Iraq, Europeans and Americans agreed in some respects (such as the necessary role of the UN) but disagreed on other. In many respects at the mass level the differences across the Atlantic are of degree, and not fundamental. They result from disaffection with the present administration rather than with US policies in general. Moreover, the alleged European ‘anti-Americanism’ is a misnomer, which hides the considerable sympathies and warm feelings towards America, and the perceived common interests and values.

This article explores the relationship between diversification and energy security risks. It uses portfolio theory to conceptualise energy security as an insurance mechanism against disruptions to energy import markets. It provides quantitative measures of systematic and specific risks associated with Japanese energy imports during the period 1970—99. It suggests that Japan's policy of diversification of energy import sources has reduced specific risks, although fundamental changes in the political and economic structure of international energy and, in particular, oil markets have also significantly reduced systematic risks. The article concludes that, despite their limitations, portfolio measures provide a much more theoretically and methodologically robust indicator of energy import security than traditional measures of dependence.

The timing of the Japanese Government's acceptance of the United Nations multilateral treaties governing several environmental concerns indicates Japan's priorities: biodiversity, global warming, and depletion of the ozone layer. Banning transboundary movement of hazardous wastes is the least prioritized, as indicated by Japan's failure to accept the Ban Amendment to the Basel Convention. The Japanese Environment Agency's policy statements and budget allocations between 1985 and 2000, as well as other official statements and programs, likewise indicate the same priorities. Moreover, of the three priorities, global warming is the top.

Japan, which has been looking for a niche in world leadership, has found it in global warming concerns. However, it would be hard for it to maintain a leadership role in global environmental concerns if it would not be able to play a proactive role in the more technologically, economically and politically difficult task of banning transboundary movement of hazardous wastes.

Japan is regularly criticized for the malapportionment of its election districts. In contrast, the United States has problems with gerrymandered election districts, even though district boundaries are crafted with meticulous attention paid to population equality among its districts. Japanese redistricting practices prevent gerrymandering of district boundaries, but at a cost of tolerating higher levels of malapportionment than would be allowed in the United States. I analyze the effects of Japan's redistricting rules and find that they have effectively prevented any malapportionment or gerrymandering that benefits a specific political party. I also show that in terms of actual votes cast, the Japanese system produces greater equality between districts than the results obtained in the United States, suggesting that US redistricting practices could be improved by modeling them after the Japanese example.

Urban elites and their relative income levels are windows on the emerging socioeconomic order in China. We add to the research literature a new view that economic sectors are the institutional contexts in which different elites seek their material gains. Conducting a trend analysis with 1988 and 1995 national surveys of urban China, we found that political, administrative, and managerial elites maintained consistently higher levels of income relative to professional elites, but this applied mainly to a monopoly sector of industries that were restricted to state operation. Managers in the open industry sector that allowed for free entry and exile experienced income declines relative to professionals within the sector, even though the former had moderately higher income levels than the latter in 1988 and 1995. All elite groups in the monopoly sector retained higher incomes than their counterparts in the open sector in 1995, but not necessarily in 1988.

The loss of life that resulted from the sinking of the fisheries training vessel Ehime Maru by the nuclear submarine USS Greeneville off Hawaii in February 2001 exemplifies the risks to United States–Japan alliance relations posed by US global military deployments. Following a pattern of incidents involving the US military in Japan itself, the collision violated Japanese expectations of benevolence from its stronger partner and put considerable pressure on the government to seek public apology and reassurance. This article examines the interplay of culture, national security interests and domestic politics in framing both perceptions and diplomacy during the crisis. While differences at both the cultural and security levels complicated diplomacy, asymmetry in the respective domestic political stakes, combined with overriding and largely congruent security interests, helped the United States to provide Japan with the requisite reassurance. After a decade of alliance drift, both Japan and the United States were determined to forestall defection by their alliance partner.

Three hundred years ago per capita incomes in China and Japan were about equal and fairly close to the global mean. At the end of the twentieth century Japanese per capita incomes are about as high as Western incomes and about seven times as high as Chinese incomes. How could this happen? Manchu China and Tokugawa Japan did not establish equally safe property rights for merchants and producers as the West did. But political fragmentation and feudalism within Japan provided something like checks and balances against arbitrary government which China lacked. Moreover, a similar lack of respect for merchants in both countries had more favourable consequences for early commercialisation in Japan than in China.

Japan's revolution from above led to a much earlier and faster restoration of orderly government than China's protracted decay of imperial rule first and its revolution from below thereafter. Whereas the Japanese revolution from above implied the preservation of human and social capital, the Chinese revolution from below led to a massive destruction of both. Moreover, Japanese nationalism was oriented toward the conquest of foreign markets and economic supremacy earlier than Chinese nationalism. This provided another Japanese advantage over China.

Japan began its process of catch-up with the West about hundred years earlier than China. In both countries high savings and investment as well as human capital formation contributed to growth. China was held back first by political instability and later by diluted property rights and distorted incentives. In the last quarter century, however, China has re-established incentives, opened up its economy, and established some substitute for private property rights. It has done well enough to have already overtaken the Japanese economy in size. The size gap between the two economies is likely to widen quickly, whereas the still huge gap in per capita incomes will narrow only very slowly.

The 1990s is perceived in Japan as a lost decade, but it also was a decade of profound political, economic and institutional transformation. Books and articles reviewed here analyze this unprecedented change from diverse angles. Authors are in agreement that Japanese political economy has undergone major transformation in the 1990s. However, over the issue of how much and in what area those changes have occurred, authors take different standpoints. Also as to what would be the shape of future political setup, they provide us with divergent scenarios.

In the South Korea's 16th National Assembly (NA) elections held on 13 April 2000, there was widespread speculation that the Citizens Alliance's (CA's) public interest blackballing campaign against ‘unfit’ candidates increased voter cynicism and decreased voter turnout, as it was the lowest ever for NA elections. We empirically evaluate this speculation by conducting logit analyses of individual voter survey data as well as regression analyses on district-wide aggregated data on turnout. Although we find that cynical voters are likely to be more sympathetic to CA's blackballing campaign, we do not find any evidence that the campaign decreases voter turnout. These findings are consistent with Kahn and Kenny (1999) who argue that voters respond well to the negative information if it is presented in an appropriate manner.

Elections to Japan's upper house, the House of Councillors, are ‘secondary’ elections, that is, elections that do not choose the government. Among the implications of this secondary status is that the party system is primarily determined elsewhere, by the system used in the general elections that do choose the government. From 1947 through 1993 the system used in general elections fostered a multiparty system that did not sit easily with the many single-member districts of the House of Councillors. Since 1996 general elections use a system based primarily on single-member districts, which is fostering a two-party system. As a two-party system emerges, we should expect the single-member districts of the upper house to become more and the multi-member districts to become less congruent with the party system. The 2004 House of Councillors election presented us with our first example of what two-party elections might look like in future upper house elections. The overall results do indeed indicate the advent of the two-party system with the major parties winning 96% of the seats in the district tier and 71% in the PR tier.

This study explores the role that news coverage plays in the allocation of Japanese development aid. Conceptually, it is expected that democratic foreign policy officials, including those working in bureaucratic governmental structures will try to match the magnitude of their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of the recipient. News media salience serves an easily accessible indicator of that domestic political importance and, in the case of foreign aid, this suggests that higher levels of news coverage of a less-developed country will lead to higher aid commitments. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the level of news coverage is a statistically significant factor in Japanese aid distributions. More significantly, the analysis demonstrates that separating grant aid from other forms of aid is critical for the empirical examination of the determinants of Japanese aid.

The general election in November 2003 and the Upper House election in July 2004 indicate that the Japanese politics is going from a one party dominant toward a two major party system. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) narrowly keeps a majority in both Houses by merging the New Conservative Party and by forming a coalition with New Komeito.

Japan created ‘the PKO Law’ in 1992 to provide a legal framework for international peacekeeping activities, following its financial involvement in the Gulf War of 1991. This paper argues that the PKO Law imposed certain restrictions which complicated the missions of the Japanese Self Defence Forces (SDF) and civilian personnel in operational fields. Post 11 September (2001), the Japanese government created a new legal framework for counter-terrorism and dispatched its SDF personnel to the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET).

Executive turnovers during September 2003 and September 2004 were moderate, as was the case the preceding year. The reason for this is that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has made it a rule to limit change of cabinet members (Inoguchi, 2004). The Liberal Democratic Party's Presidential election took place in September 2003, giving approval to Koizumi to continue without rival candidates. Koizumi reshuffled his cabinet on September 22, with key cabinet ministers kept intact. They included Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, Welfare and Labor Minister Chikara Sakaguchi, Economics, Finance and Monetary Affairs Minister Heizo Takenaka. Besides a portfolio to each of the two coalition partners, Koizumi saw to it: (1) that the execution of his structural reform would be spearheaded by a non-compromising reformist academic, Takenaka; (2) that faction-based appointments be reduced to a minimum by appointing those who are not tainted by old-fashioned factional affiliations and ties, i.e., three non-parliamentary members and four female ministers.

Conventional theories of government formation have assumed that the coalition formation process starts after legislative elections are over and the distribution of parliamentary seats becomes common knowledge. This perspective, however, ignores the important constraints that the formation of electoral coalitions may exert on the formation of the government. This article argues that the electoral system of Hungary provides very strong incentives for political parties to build electoral coalitions, which are also identified as alternative governments before the electorate.

When the last opinion polls were published one year ago, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was enjoying a high approval rate despite Japan's poor economic performance. The poll conducted in June 2003 showed that 48.2% of the public supported the Koizumi administration, which is an exceptionally high number in comparison with the approval rates of historical LDP prime ministers and their cabinets. Only 29.5% of those polled expressed dissatisfaction with the administration. Today, however, public support for Koizumi is on a sudden decline. Just as Koizumi's managed to sustain public support throughout 2003, his loss of support in 2004 manifests a peculiar quality; he is now losing popularity despite Japan's significant economic improvement.

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.

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.