Faculty Members at Yale
Year 2007-2008
- Junko KATO
During of Stay: September 2007- August 2008 - Takuji OKAMOTO
During of Stay: October 2007- March 2008 - Archive
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Junko KATO
Ph.D. in Political Science (Yale, 1992)
Professor of Political Science, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics at
the University of Tokyo
When I was a graduate student at Yale from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Japanese studies attracted both public and scholarly attention in the United States. Japan’s political stability and policy continuity were often attributed to the uniqueness of the Japanese political economic system and society. On the contrary, among the Asian countries much attention today is absorbed by China. Some deplore declining interest in Japan. However, I do not necessarily think this disadvantageous to the promotion of Japanese studies. In the 1980s a very distorted description and inaccurate picture dominated public understanding of Japan, which inevitably influenced academic discourse. Now we have a much better context for more careful, thoughtful and reliable research in Japanese studies.
I started my Ph.D. program in political science with an interest in studying Japanese politics from a comparative perspective. I have developed this interest into multiple country studies, comparing plural democratic countries in North America, Europe and East Asia. This research experience lead to the publication of two books in comparative politics and has enabled me to develop my own perspective on Japanese studies. There are two distinct academic practices in the field of Japanese studies. One is examining first-hand materials and information in depth and ensuring a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the facts and cases. The other is rephrasing the facts and cases particular to Japan so as to compare with those of other countries and societies and/or finding a specific pattern or rule in observed behavior and mechanisms. These two practices are often regarded as incompatible with and contradictory to each other. However, I believe that a mutual reinforcement is possible between them. I am also convinced that the Todai-Yale Initiative will be an ideal vehicle for this. In the Initiative those in humanities and in the social sciences will work together closely both at Todai and Yale.
I have further strengthened the interdisciplinary and comparative orientation of my research. I am now extending my research interests to include questions relating to more basic patterns and essential rules in human behavior using cognitive scientific approaches. This is still a very new field in Japan and in the United States. I am analyzing human judgment of political differences applying geometric models to human cognition as well as working on political psychological experiments using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). In this growing field, I am organizing the Todai-Yale Initiative symposium titled “Mind, Brain, and Society: Neurocognitive Approaches to the Social Sciences” (Luce Hall Auditorium, Yale University, April 25, 2008) with Marvin Chun as a co-organizer.
Selected publications in English
Books
Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State, Cambridge University
Press. 2003.
The Problem of Bureaucratic Rationality: Tax Politics in Japan.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994.
Single-Authored articles
"Public Pension Reforms in the United States and Japan: A Study of Comparative
Public Policy," Comparative Political Studies, vol. 24, no. 1
(1991): 100-126.
“Rationality and Institution in Politics: Three Varieties of Neo-Institutionalists,”
British Journal of Political Science, vol. 26, part 4 (1996): 553-582.
“When the Party Breaks Up: Exit and Voice among Japanese Legislators,” American
Political Science Review, vol. 92, no.4 (December 1998): 857-870.
Co-Authored Articles
With Michael Laver, “Theories of Government Formation and the 1996 General
Election in Japan,” Party Politics, vol. 4, no. 2 (1998): 229-252.
With Michael Laver, “Dynamic Approaches to Government Formation and the
Generic Instability of Decisive Structures in Japan,” Electoral Studies,
vol. 20, no.4 (December 2001): 509-527.
With Bo Rothstein, "Government Partisanship and Managing the Economy:
Japan and Sweden in Comparative Perspective," Governance.
vol. 19, no.1 (January 2006): 75-98.
Book Chapter
"Internal party organization in the Italian Christian democrats and Japanese
liberal democrats: factional competition for office, clienteles, and corrupt
exchange," in Junichi Kawata ed. Comparing Political Corruption and
Clientelism (London: Ashgate Publisher, 2006) (With Carol Mershon).
On-Going Works
“Competition for Power: Party Switching as a Means of Changing
Party Systems in Japan” (with Kentaro Yamamoto; forthcoming in a volume
edited by Carol Mershon and William Heller)
“Coalition Governments, Party Switching, and the Rise and Decline of Parties:
Changing Japanese Politics since 1993” (with Yuto Kannon; under review)
“Euclid was sometimes an unnecessarily sophisticated social scientist:
Geometric modeling of political difference” (with Kensuke Okada; draft)
“Diversification of political space into Minkowski metrics” (with Kensuke
Okada; draft)
