Most studies that explore attitudes towards immigration conceptualize immigrants as economic migrants. The limitation of this approach is that it emphasizes economic costs and benefits while ignoring the humanitarian logic that forms the basis of refugee admission. To date, few studies have developed and tested theories that explain public support for admitting humanitarian migrants. Our article fills this gap. We argue that dispositional and situational triggers related to humanitarianism shape public attitudes towards refugees: When natives are predisposed to help others in need (humanitarianism) and/or refugees are seen to be victims of randomly occurring events, the public is more likely to support refugee admission. We test this theory using observational and experimental data from a country that accepts few resettlement refugees, Japan. Our study uses a ratingbased conjoint which randomized crisis event, place of origin, access to public housing, and degree of political support for receiving refugees. We find that humanitarianism predicts public support for admitting refugees more strongly than it predicts support for economic migrants. Moreover, we show that people with a higher level of humanitarianism prefer to admit refugees who flee natural disasters and wars as opposed to those who escape from political repression.

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We investigated the role of information about social norms in shaping people's policy preferences concerning the current hate speech situation in Japan. More specifically, using a web-survey experiment, we tested whether two types of information, bandwagon message and anti-discrimination message, would influence the respondents' attitudes towards government regulation against hate speech. Our analysis shows that the bandwagon message slightly changed some individuals' responses to hate speech regulation and made them conform to the majority opinion. To be more precise, those who are predisposed to give socially desirable answers were more influenced by the bandwagon information. The anti-discrimination message also slightly changed the individuals' responses but in the opposite direction. * gmurakam(a)fc.ritsumei.ac.jp ** nishizawa(a)mail.doshisha.ac.jp

When I was a teenager, my family would drive to my parents' hometown by car in the summer. Car navigation systems were uncommon in those days, so my mother navigated with a paper map while my father was at the wheel. At one point, she told my father to 'turn left on the next sign' (sic), and he followed her direction. Soon, however, she was surprised and asked, 'Why are you going in the opposite direction?' Now, this surprised my father, and he replied, 'Because you told me to turn left.' After some 'he said, she said' discussion, my mother finally admitted that she had confused left with right. In explaining her error, she added, 'Although my mouth may have said "left," I meant "right."' In almost two decades, this is one of my family's most memorable stories, and I still reflect on the significance of my mother's ultimate excuse. What if, as my mother had insisted, her 'left' really meant 'right' for the rest of us? Could we still communicate effectively if we did not realize the difference in our uses of left and right? Endo and Jou's new book, Ideorogii to Nihon Seiji, reminds me of this family experience, because their central concern runs parallel to the question above: what if the younger generations' understanding of 'left,' or in this case 'kakushin,' is diametrically different from the traditional understanding of the same term among the older generations? In the political arena, can we still communicate effectively in the absence of a commonly agreed yardstick to describe politics? These are legitimate questions for one to ask before building theories based on political labels of left and right. A large part of Endo and Jou's new book is a translation of their earlier work, Generational Gap in Japanese Politics, published in English in 2016. 2 They have added three new chapters (Chapters 4, 6 and 8) to examine the causes and consequences of their findings. In the following, I first briefly summarize their major argument and focus on two of the new chapters. I then discuss the contributions and implications of their findings, specifically on the contested nature of ideology and party politics in Japan. 1 I thank John McAndrews for his helpful comments and suggestions on the earlier version of this review.

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