Why do Japan–South Korea relations remain tense despite repeated efforts to overcome the past? Elite narratives in Japan and South Korea reify the bilateral relationship as a difficult problem. For the Japanese policy elites, the difficulty is due to South Korean unwillingness to embrace a future-oriented relationship; whereas for the South Korean policy elites, the source of the problem is the unwillingness of the Japanese to sincerely address past wrong-doing. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy of an intractable mutual misapprehension, suggesting that the difficult relationship is here to stay. I analyse pronouncements by both the Japanese and South Korean policy elites appearing in official documents and media reports for clues into the manner in which the bilateral relationship is reified into a difficulty purportedly due to the recalcitrance of the neighbour. The narratives consistently show that both the Japanese and South Korean policy elites consider the onus of improvement lies with the troublesome/insincere neighbour. In short, the bilateral relationship is a clash of realities, with the logical conclusion being that the difficult relationship will persist for the foreseeable future.

This study addresses the question of why so many of the world's legislators are lawyers or law graduates. Drawing from previous studies on lawyer-legislators and electoral systems, it develops the argument that ‘first-pass-the-post’ single-member district electoral systems presume a principal-agent logic of representation and are therefore conducive to political parties selecting representatives with either occupational experience or educational training in the field of law. By contrast, proportional representation (PR) elections presume a microcosm model of representation incentivizing parties to select candidates representing diverse demographic and occupational backgrounds. This conjecture is tested by examining legislator backgrounds in three large parliaments with mixed electoral systems: Germany, Japan, and South Korea. As expected, single-member plurality elections are linked to a greater share of lawyers and law graduates in parliaments compared to those elected via PR even after controlling for several alternative explanations.

Public support for protection is typically attributed to economic self-interest. Beyond pocketbook anxieties, a competing approach, however, contends that sociotropic attitudes dictate foreign policy preferences. Researchers, however, have faced difficulty in disentangling sociotropic attitudes from pocketbook concerns in observational studies. This article addresses this problem by utilizing a priming experiment to examine the relationship between socio and egotropic attitudes. In line with the predictions of the sociotropic framework, individuals are less certain about the egotropic effects of trade and sociotropic attitudes are found to influence egotropic perceptions by reducing uncertainty about the pocketbook effects of trade. In contrast, the study fails to find support for the hypothesis that individuals project egotropic concerns onto societal evaluations. The results of the study suggest that future research should pay careful consideration to the relationship between socio and egotropic attitudes when modeling and analyzing trade-policy preferences.