Since the turn of the century, food safety has been one of the most important issues in many governments. This article explains the prerequisite for governmental administration concerning food safety, such as the SPS Agreement of the World Trade Organization and the Codex Alimentarius. It further explains the Codex definition of the term “food safety”, relationship between food safety and science, risk analysis related to food safety, and necessary scientific areas, for improving food safety including regulatory science and methods of sampling and analysis.

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The role of local governments -prefectural and municipal governments- is very important for promoting food safety administration in Japan. They approve and authorize the license to food business operators, inspect and guidance them based on food hygiene laws and regulations. Besides, they establish own ordinances in line with regional situations to promote food safety measures.
Despite that, once a problem or accident happens, it results often in a social confusion. In this article, structural problems and challenges of our food system are examined and requests for researchers to establish regulatory science in food safety area are presented.

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The framework of risk analysis is internationally recognized principle for food safety management. In this article, the previous researches regarding food safety are collected from six international journals including Food Control, Food Policy and Risk Analysis, and they are classified according to three elements of risk analysis-risk assessment, risk management and risk communication. From these results, it is reviewed what are achieved and what are further demanded to proceed food safety administration based on risk analysis.
Roles of social scientists for food risk analysis are also discussed. One of the important roles is to provide data and make evaluations regarding social and economic impacts of risk reduction options.

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Regulatory science (RS) is expected to play a vital role for risk analysis process within regulatory system on food safety. In this paper, based on the definition of RS elucidated by Science Council of Japan, two aspects of RS are taken into account; one is RS's role to support administrative decision-making and the other is its role to adjust or orient how science/technology is applied to society. However, the very nature of emerging science/technology poses various issues related to these two aspects of RS. In this paper I will exemplify these issues using the case of food nanotechnologies (FN), such as difficulty of creating regulatory definition of FN and unintended dynamics caused by introduction of regulatory actions. In the latter part of this paper, I will describe current situation of regulatory developments of FN in US, EU and Japan, and draw preliminary lessons currently FN is facing based on the information drawn from three research experiments, including participatory methods and expert panel in Japan.

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