Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper evaluates the alignment between Japan’s international environmental commitments and domestic sustainability priorities toward 2050. The paper finds Japan advances green norms strategically while prioritizing energy security, industrial competitiveness, and Indo-Pacific influence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how environmental challenges, particularly decarbonization commitments toward 2050, reshape Japan’s approach to regional and global governance. Framed through the lens of public diplomacy and multi-stakeholder environmental policymaking, the study evaluates Japan’s dual strategy of advancing international sustainability norms while addressing domestic resource and energy security imperatives. Through a comparative analysis of key literature, national policy frameworks, regional cooperation initiatives such as the Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC) and the Asia Energy Transition Initiative (AETI), and Japan-driven innovation pathways including hydrogen, LNG, offshore renewables, and perovskite solar technologies, the paper explores the strategic drivers behind Japan’s green mainstreaming and the coherence between its external commitments and internal sustainability priorities. Primary data from semi-structured interviews across public, private, and third-sector actors further illuminate institutional motivations, economic-environmental policy convergence, and areas of implementation tension. The findings demonstrate that Japan positions green governance as a tool for international leadership, industrial competitiveness, and diplomatic norm-setting, yet prioritizes technologies and policy designs that reinforce national security interests and state-business coordination. The paper concludes that Japan’s green governance model is neither purely activist-driven nor externally imposed, but strategically negotiated, domestically anchored, and outward-projected as a pillar of Indo-Pacific influence and green economic statecraft.

Keywords: Japan, green governance, environmental diplomacy, public diplomacy, decarbonization, energy security, Indo-Pacific, multi-stakeholder governance, hydrogen policy, perovskite solar innovation.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This report examines the relationship between the concept of renovation and the urban landscape of 1990s Tokyo, focusing on the special feature “Tokyo Renovation” in magazine SD(October 1999 issue) and the 2001 publication of the book, Tokyo Renovation: 93 Stories of Building Conversion.

Paper long abstract

Generally speaking, renovation refers to the restoration, regeneration, or renewal of existing older buildings. Architect Taro Igarashi reflects in Renovation Studies (2003) that renovation techniques began to be adopted in Japan's architectural world only after the 1990s. Furthermore, according to Manjo Shimahara, Director of the Next HOME'S Research Institute, the seeds of renovation could be observed in Tokyo's street scene —specifically around the Ura-Harajuku area— from the mid to late 1990s. The concept of “renovation” gained wider recognition when the architecture magazine SD (October 1999 issue) featured a special section titled “Tokyo Renovation.” From the above, it is clear that the architectural technique and concept of renovation gained active acceptance among the Japanese public from the 1990s onward. On the other hand, why did this architectural technique and concept come into the spotlight in Tokyo specifically from the 1990s? An interesting point to note is the emergence of urban discourse centered on Tokyo in Japan from the 1980s onward, which began to discuss the cityscape. Moreover, it is impossible to overlook the fact that the leading proponents of such urban theories are also engaged in discussions about renovation. This report examines the relationship between the concept of renovation and the urban landscape of 1990s Tokyo, focusing primarily on the special feature “Tokyo Renovation” in the aforementioned architecture magazine SD and the 2001 publication of the book of the same name, Tokyo Renovation: 93 Stories of Building Conversion.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

The presentation shows how Japanese flood-control documents frame nature —especially rivers—as manageable hazards. This technocratic environmental discourse legitimises expert control and restricts citizens’ meaningful participation in river governance.

Paper long abstract

How environmental and climate-related issues appear in public discourse—through media coverage, administrative communication, or formal government agendas—shapes public understanding and legitimizes particular policy responses (Leipold et al., 2019). In the Japanese context, research has examined the evolution of climate-security discourse (Kameyama and Ono, 2021), the relationship between disasters and neoliberal governance (Okada, 2013), and the moral and behavioural expectations embedded in state disaster-preparedness policies (Kitagawa, 2016). However, little attention has been paid to how natural environments, especially rivers, are discursively constructed in government documents and how these constructions guide disaster-risk governance.

Drawing on the concept of cognitive frames (Lakoff, 2010) and scholarship on environmental discourse (Sina et al., 2019), this presentation investigates how rivers are represented in state documents dealing with disaster risk reduction. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of publicly available meeting minutes and reference materials for citizens, produced by the government-led Heavy Rain Inspection Committee, Flood Control Council, and the Flood Control Scientific Committee, following the devastating floods that struck southern Kumamoto Prefecture in July 2020. These meetings were convened to assess damage and to plan future flood-control measures for the Kawabegawa and Kumagawa. Our analysis reveals that “the river” is overwhelmingly framed as a source of danger requiring technical oversight and infrastructural intervention. Through this framing, the river becomes an object to be controlled, and authority is vested primarily in state institutions and engineering experts who are positioned as the legitimate actors capable of designing effective risk-reduction measures.

We conclude by discussing the broader implications of these technocratic constructions of rivers for collaboration between local government and citizens. Framing the river as a governable hazard aligns with long-standing state priorities for land and river development, yet it narrows the space for participatory policymaking. In the documents, citizens are cast as non-experts, expected to receive and accept official explanations rather than contribute to shaping river governance strategies, despite their legally prescribed engagement in the political process. This approach limits opportunities for inclusive dialogue and constrains the development of more community-centred approaches to disaster risk reduction.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Investigating affects of fear and grief in Ueda Sayuri’s Kemonotachi no umi (2022) through the lens of 'ecosickness' challenges notion of negative affects and demonstrates how these emotions can shape new posthuman identities and foster positive responses to environmental change.

Paper long abstract

Futurity, liquid landscapes, and the possibility of human extinction are at the heart of Ueda Sayuri’s Ōshan kuronikuru shirizū (Oceans’s Chronicles Series 2009-2022). In a future in which land has been submerged by the rising seas and life is only possible under water, the survival of the human is no longer a certainty. A new species of hominids and sea creatures become the last remnants of what once were the humans inhabitants of the world. In the last volume in the series, Kemonotachi no umi (The Sea of Beasts 2022), Ueda brings together four short episodes, previously unpublished, that once again explore how we think and ‘comprehend the enormity of species extinction’ (Weik von Mossner 2014). In these narratives, the voices of the nonhuman tell the history of a future in which humans are only a memory of the past. The nonhuman entanglements presented in the Ocean’s Chronicles Series are further problematized in this last volume by letting the posthuman existences narrate their own futures. The four stories represent a posthuman alternative to anthropocentrism and highlight the affective affordances inherent in a time of environmental change. By mapping the affective rhizomatic network of posthuman species inhabiting the sea, the four episodes in Kemonotachi no umi explore the affective conflicts resulting from the simultaneous connection to and dramatic separation from the human species of the posthuman sea folk. The characters are learning how to dwell with tragedy (Deyo 2018) as survivors in a time of cataclysmic environmental disasters and they also explore feelings of mourning and grief for a past and a species they did not know. Ultimately, this paper examines the collection's 'ecosickness' (Weik von Mossner 2014) and how feelings of nostalgia for the past and fear of the future can lead to positive affective responses to environmental changes. By dwelling on fear and nostalgia as affects that ‘do not function as predictably as we might think’ (Weik von Mossner 2014), the paper demonstrates how the characters are able to find the fluid stability of a new posthuman and nonanthropocentric existence in an unstable and constantly changing liquid world.