Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effects of critical the changes of the meanings of certain key political terms of Japan's agricultural policies in the last 50 years through a text analysis of the Agricultural White Paper.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the effects of critical the changes of the meanings of certain key political terms of Japan's agricultural policies in the last 50 years through a text analysis of the Agricultural White Paper. For decades the Japanese Agricultural Minister has been pursuing certain policy goals including the improvement of food self-sufficiency rate and the protection for domestic producers. So, on the surface, there does not seem to be much changes in the Ministry's policymaking. However, although those policy goals stayed the same, its actual policies have changed substantially over the time. What explains the changes in policies under the same policy goals? One possible explanation for this intriguing puzzle is that certain key terms in the policy goals such as food self-sufficiency rate or trade protection might have changed their meanings substantially from time to time. Therefore, we hypothesize that even though the Ministry has been making policies trying to achieve the same goals, its policies end up consisting of different contents from its past policies, as some key terms used to depict its goals contain different meanings. To examine the substantial changes in key terms of Japanese agricultural policies, we conduct a quantitative text analysis of the Agricultural White Paper published in the last 50 years. We expect that our text analysis allows us to detect incremental changes in the meanings of those key terms, and we will try to examine how those changes were translated into actual policies while searching for the reasons why the meanings and policies changed during the time period. We also expect that this study reveals the motives behind the Abe Administration's agricultural policies that seemed to have deviated from the government's policies in the past.