In 1998, the “Law to Promote Specified Nonprofit Activities” (NPO Law) was legislated in Japan. The constant lobbying by civil society organizations from many areas of activity drove the development of this legislation. This paper examines why social movement coalitions across these areas of activity were built. Before the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, the social ties of civil society organizations had existed since the 1980s. They had also shared ideas about the NPO Law through inspection tours in the United States. After the earthquake, the bill was discussed in Congress; during this period, different ideas about the NPO Law in each area of activity prevented a coalition, but a compromise was reached eventually. In the end, the fact that the bill was almost passed by the House of Representatives, and the possibility that it might be dropped at the House of Councillors, strengthened the coalition across all areas of activity. This paper demonstrates the diverse and dynamic sides of the NPO Law legislation movement in Japan.

This study examines the management of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in Japan by focusing on marketing and comparing “professional nonprofits” that obtain their revenue from sources such as commercial activities with “volunteer nonprofits” that rely on financial resources such as donations and membership fees. A pilot study conducted in 2014 found that although majority of the NPOs were financially strained, professional nonprofits were financially well placed than volunteer nonprofits. In this study, these two different types of NPOs are compared in terms of marketing perceptions, practices, and the issues that they face. The study’s sample group responded to questionnaires that had been developed based on existing marketing literature. The results indicated that professional nonprofits are “marketing oriented,” adopt more marketing approaches than volunteer nonprofits, and are less likely to struggle with issues such as lack of financial resources, aging personnel, lack of a donation culture, and the lack of public recognition of NPOs and their activities. In-depth interviews will be undertaken in future research to explore the detailed reasons for these responses, which will provide key insights for nonprofit management.

This article identifies conditions required for forming coalitions between environmental NGOs (ENGOs) and the government through a comparative analysis of four ENGO advocacy cases regarding the 10^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was held in Japan, 2010. The existing studies have not considered the empirical conditions of building coalitions and instead, they have ideally expected that such coalitions should lead to the development of environmental policy. Therefore, this research shows that such coalitions can result in the stagnation of policy under certain select conditions for coalition formation. The article’s analytical framework is based on the theory of coalition building in social movement studies.

The findings of the comparative analysis are as follows: first, prior social ties between ENGOs and the government promote coalitions, although coalitions can be formed without such ties. Second, the expertise of ENGOs is not related to coalition building in these cases. Third, coalitions can be built when ENGOs propose policies and prospective projects that they themselves can implement. Such proposals can lead to coalitions despite a lack of alignment with the previous position of the government. In conclusion, an ENGO’s self-implementing proposals can be one of the select conditions for coalition formation and can result in the stagnation of present-day environmental policies.