National Security Environments, Patriotism, and Japanese Public Opinion

Abstract

This study examines Japanese reactions to neighboring countries' behavior by addressing possible micro-motives, such as patriotism, the rational demand for national defense, and retrospective policy evaluation. This theoretical development leads to distinctive hypotheses from different motivations and directly tests them using macrodata (not survey data). This research will apply this framework to Japanese politics and will show that foreign threats stimulate patriotism in the public mind and enhance political support for national leaders. It will also demonstrate that the Japanese public has no optimistic view of the new prime minister and that the honeymoon effect in previous research may be confounded with the patriotic effect because the new leader is less experienced and is often challenged by foreign countries.

Discursive diversion: Manipulation of nuclear threats by the conservative leaders in Japan and Israel

“…Regardless of the publisher's intention, such coverage of North Korea could have assisted Abe to gain public support and pass controversial bills to complete his sweeping security policy reforms (c.f. Hughes, 2015;Kagotani 2015;Ryu, 2018). This possibility has been shown in our study based on psychological experimental (Segev et al 2022).…”