In 2005, the Comprehensive National Land Development Act was revised completely and became the National Land Sustainability Plan Act. This is a major switch in the national and regional planning history of Japan. This study examines this big switch from the viewpoint of the critiques of the act.

In this study, the critiques of the National Land Development Plan were compiled from the remarks of the Diet, political parties, newspapers, magazines, and the financial world. These were then analyzed and the following four points were clarified:

1. The main critiques that appeared after the 5th National Land Development Plan,

2. The people who argued against the plan and those who counter argued,

3. The background and the causes for the critiques,

4. The response of the planning authorities to the critiques.

This study explores the journalism award system and award-giving practices at both national and provincial levels in China. Since the 1990s, an established award system has existed in China, through which the Chinese Communist Party and government have tended to define “good quality news” to control journalists and news production. The central argument of this study, however, is that even under an authoritarian regime, differences in award-giving practices are evident at the provincial level. Due to their diverse political economies, provincial governments have various interpretations of “good quality news” and thus attitudes toward media control. Following an empirical content analysis comparing article winners of the national and three provincial―Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong―journalism awards between 1997 and 2017, two conclusions were reached. First, the findings reveal that although the official award system is designed as a top-down structure, there are remarkable differences in the content of award-winning articles at the provincial (horizontal) level; thus, a variance in media control between national and provincial government is demonstrated in authoritarian China. Second, drastic changes can be seen in the award-giving practice of Guangdong and Beijing since Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013: between 2013 and 2017, significantly fewer award-winning articles exhibit watchdog journalism. It is evident, therefore, that the Chinese Communist Party and government exercise less tolerance toward criticism of their power in the media under Xi Jinping.

　新型コロナウイルス感染症では、通常の保険診療へのフリーアクセスが閉ざされ、保健所等が医療へのアクセスを差配する門番機能を果たす配給・統制経済となった。しかし、入院施設が限られて、陽性者は市中や家庭内に逆流を起こした。保健所は、宿泊・自宅療養における経過観察などの必要性を抱え込み、機能崩壊と個人崩壊を起こした。既存の医療・看護の資源を充分に使うことができず、コロナ対策禍を招いた。

Globalization and digitalization have brought challenges to the organization and practices of journalism. Entangled with the changes on the ground, journalism studies have also faced challenges to go beyond its traditional approach toward the ideas, concepts, theories, and methodologies of the studies of journalism. This study examines the discussions on diverse roles of journalism, including developmental and peace journalism in the third world or developing world, and the methodological approach to operationally measure the roles of journalism from the studies on journalism culture. From the accumulated discussion on the diverse roles of journalism, this paper argues that the various roles of journalism cannot be placed as supplementary or alternative to objective or detached journalism. Rather, it elucidates that diverse roles coexist, and different roles of journalism can emerge more prominently depending on the topic, media channel, journalistic organization, and the socio-political context in which journalism is practiced. To understand how the journalistic role is conceived and perceived by journalists, there have been cross-national comparative studies since the late 1990s with the global turn of journalism studies. However, the perception of journalistic roles does not necessarily suggest that the roles are materialized in the outcome. There could be a gap between the perception and the outcome. Considering this discrepancy, global studies on journalism culture incorporate the studies on journalistic role conception/perception (survey) with studies on journalistic role performance (content analysis) and analyze the manifestations of journalism culture by situating those in socio-political context of that given society. This holistic approach to investigating journalism culture is expected to be one of the fruitful ways in examining and tracing the current multi-faceted journalism and its changes.