Lowering the voting age to 18 years old have increased public interest in voter education in school in Japan. It is expected that more students are interested in politics through voter education and vote in elections. However, it should be pointed out that the recent attitude surveys show that political interest of young Japanese increases though their voting rate decreases. This paper aims to analyze the present political attitude of Japanese youth, to explore measures improving young voters' turnout and to consider the role and limits of voter education. Turnout of the youth is lowered by work on a voting day, political ignorance and apathy, and the lack of a sense of political efficacy. Therefore it is impossible to increase the voting rate of the youth by voter education alone. Higher turnout requires comprehensive measures including making access to political information as well as voting easier. Voter education is useful mainly for improving a sense of political efficacy. Citizenship education is effective to foster political literacy and to raise the quality of vote.

This paper presents a new view of the politics of education in Japan. We understand 1950s education in Japan as a highly politicized issue. On the other hand, we claim new insight into the 1950s; a high degree of politicization made depoliticization paradoxical. We also find the origin of the present “hyper-depoliticized” situation: the lack of citizenship education and political education.
  We analyze the process of depoliticization in the context of three cases. First, the reforms of the education board system and the allocation of teachers established coordinating mechanisms among various actors. Second, the coalitions of the education boards changed. They initially opposed the conservative education reforms, but after the late 1950s, they became depoliticized. At the same time, many principals dropped out of the teachers unions because they wanted to stay away from the conflict of the teachers' performance reviews. Third, the law of political neutrality in education suppressed teachers' political activity. In parallel, however, private educational movements (coordinated with teachers unions) also began to insist that education should be separated from politics.

What can we spell out an active participant of political community in Chinese characer? What can we call it? “Shizoku (士族)”, “Ryoumin (良民)” or “Shimin (士民, 市民)”? It is not easy to answer not only for Japanese but also for all the modern east Asians. The word “komin (公民)” is one of the most powerful answer to this problem among Japanese in 1920's. This paper focuses on Rouyama Masamichi's “Komin-Seijiron” (On Citizenship Education, 1931), and tries to reconstruct his vision of politics and the context in which the “kouminkyoiku” discourse should be situated.
  In this paper, Unlike his contemporary, Oshima Masanori for example, who emphasizes its social and cosmopolite character, Rouyama insists that “komin” should be interpreted as the political unit whose ideal originated in ancient Greece's polis. For Rouyama, politics is ethical and educational activity. This is in the sharp contrast to one of his disciple Maruyama Masao who takes politics as means, not an end.

There are many researches which have focused on civics in the study of citizenship education in Japan. I, on the contrary, consider the secret of it language education, especially the cultivations of logical writing and critical thinking. This paper advanced three main arguments. First, I explain how to cultivate logical writing by the introduction of the teaching method of formula writing which is originally developed. The practices at high school and university illustrate how the students improve one's writing ability. Second, I outline formula questioning; the teaching method of reading classical texts and statistical data. It achieves a measure of success in improving the critical thinking. Consequently, I argue that the formula questioning is applicable to a large class at university. Third, making the factor analysis of the results of questionnaires carried out on those who attend the lecture, I try to find the correlation between logical writing and critical thinking.

In contemporary Japan, many high school Japanese readers have printed a few essays on democracy written by MARUYAMA Masao. These essays are used as materials for citizenship education. Though MARUYAMA did not make so many references to elementary and secondary education, he left behind an unique vision about the institution and curriculum of university. When Japanese universities were restarted after World War Ⅱ “general culture” or liberal education curriculums were introduced by the leadership of NANBARA Shigeru, who had been MARUYAMA's teacher. This reform had been total plan for cultivating citizenship in university students, but its malfunction became obvious in 1960s. In that disorderd age MARUYAMA worked out an unique plan for university getting the idea from the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga.

Knowledge and understanding of politics is the basis for sound political participation. This article, after offering an overview of the purposes, contents and method of political (citizenship) education, finds that democracy is taught as institutions rather than a system of party competition which includes ‘left and right’ or even ‘demagogy’. Therefore it is recommended that also pluralism should be taught as an indispensable element of democracy, and the party system, and that participants should be encouraged to research, compare and discuss the policies and programs of political parties. The doctrine of ‘neutrality of education’ may restrict such teaching, but it is possible and instructive to inform citizen about opinions from both sides of politics for analysis, as well as the history or theories of politics including conflicts and disputes. Lastly, academic institutions are expected to provide society with basic knowledge of politics and election data.

The problem of motivation is an urgent issue for non-ideal political theory which focuses on actual situations and investigates a feasible conception of social integration. Recent political theory, however, has dealt with this problem exclusively from the perspective of the extent to which a conception of social integration should accommodate cultural particularity and has fallen into a hollow universality/particularity dichotomy. In contrast, this article introduces the idea of “epistemic access”, which Critical Theory often uses in ideology critique, into the discussion of social integration and examines the critical-political theories of Honneth and Habermas. By comparing their conceptions of social integration and arguing for the superiority of Honneth's view, this article shows how members in a society epistemically access the universal normative contents a theory should justify, and how they are motivated to realize those contents. In dealing with the problem of motivation in the light of the idea of epistemic access, political theory can find its way out of the dilemma caused by the universality/particularity dichotomy.

On October 29, 1976, the National Defense Program Outline (NDPO) was approved by the Cabinet, which consisted of “Objectives,” “The International Situation,” “Basic Defense Concepts,” “The Posture of National Defense,” “The Posture of the Ground, Maritime, and Air Self-Defense Forces,” “Basic Policy and Matters to Be Taken Into Consideration in Building-Up Defense Capabilities.” The NDPO explained the “defense capability's significance” for the first time, plainly demonstrating the “Concept of Standard Defense Force.”
  This paper establishes that government officials indefense policy―the Director General, defense bureaucrats, and Self-Defense Officials―were apprehensive about the many critical cases on the issue of national defense in the early 1970s. Therefore, they tried to rationalize promoting defense policy and the existing Japan Self-Defense Forces by showing the people that the government had comprehensively formulated the “Concept of Defense Force” and suchlike defense policy.

In the history of political science in japan, Hideo Otake, one of “LEVIATHAN” group, improved political study in japan toward science. The feature of Otake's political theory has been understood as (1) pluralism, (2) positivist and natural scientific, and (3) a very different way from past postwar political science. But Otake's change in after 1980's presses for reconsideration of such image. At first, in 1970's Otake was already trying conquest of the weak point of the pluralism by a concept of shelter of influence and perspective. Next, in 1980's he used framework of ideological conflict and analyzed the cycle of the structural opposition and the political mood. Such change means as conquering the limit of the pluralism as well as introducing a methods which used in history of thought into a positivist analysis of policy process. These show that he succeeded to methods of postwar political science.

This study investigates spatial theories of voting based on candidate-level proximity. Surveys make it possible to map positions of voters and/or candidates on the political space by asking them to answer their ideological positions. However, since respondents interpret and answer survey questions in different ways, there are difficulties that these positions are interpersonally incomparable. To solve this problem, I utilize responses on parties' positions as bridging observations and rescale respondents' positions in a common space. Using the rescaled estimates, I demonstrate that the ideological proximity between voters and candidates has a strong impact on vote choice. The findings indicate that voters do consider positions of individual candidates as well as positions of their parties.