Observers have long debated how societies should invest resources to safeguard citizens and property, especially in the face of increasing shocks and crises. This article explores how social infrastructure – the spaces and places that help build and maintain social ties and trust, allowing societies to coordinate behavior – plays an important role in our communities, especially in mitigating and recovering from shocks. An analysis of quantitative data on more than 550 neighborhoods across the three Japanese prefectures most affected by the tsunami of 11 March 2011 shows that, controlling for relevant factors, community centers, libraries, parks, and other social infrastructure measurably and cheaply reduced mortality rates among the most vulnerable population. Investing in social infrastructure projects would, based on this data, save more lives during a natural hazard than putting the same money into standard, gray infrastructure such as seawalls. Decision makers at national, regional, and local levels should expand spending on facilities such as libraries, community centers, social businesses, and public parks to increase resilience to multiple types of shocks and to further enhance the quality of life for residents.

While 3/11 has altered energy policies around the world, insufficient attention has focused on reactions from local nuclear power plant host communities and their neighbors throughout Japan. Using site visits to such towns, interviews with relevant actors, and secondary and tertiary literature, this article investigates the community crisis management strategies of two types of cities, towns, and villages: those which have nuclear plants directly in their backyards and neighboring cities further away (within a 30 mile radius). Responses to the disaster have varied with distance to nuclear facilities but in a way contrary to the standard theories based on the concept of the ‘distance decay function’. Officials in communities directly proximal to nuclear power plants by and large remain supportive of Japan's nuclear power program, while those in cities and towns at a distance (along with much of the general public) have displayed strong opposition to the pre 3/11 status quo. Using qualitative data, this article underscores how national energy and crisis response policies rest strongly on the political economy, experiences of, and decisions made at the subnational level.

This article seeks to explain how, given Japan's “nuclear allergy” following World War II, a small coastal town not far from Hiroshima volunteered to host a nuclear power plant in the early 1980s. Where standard explanations of contentious nuclear power siting decisions have focused on the regional power utilities and the central government, this paper instead examines the importance of historical change and civil society at a local level. Using a microhistorical approach based on interviews and archival materials, and framing our discussion with a popular Japanese television show known as Hatoko's Sea, we illustrate the agency of municipal actors in the decision-making process. In this way, we highlight the significance of long-term economic transformations, demographic decline, and vertical social networks in local invitations to controversial facilities. These perspectives are particularly important in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis, as the outside world seeks to understand how and why Japan embraced atomic energy.

Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability, and Learning. Edited by Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell, and Paul 'T Hart. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 336p. $99.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response. Edited by Howard Kunreuther and Micheel Useem. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2010. 352p. $37.99 paper.

The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters. By Charles Perrow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 388p. $29.95 paper.

Developed and developing nations alike face low-probability but high-consequence exogenous shocks, including ice storms, chemical spills, terrorist attacks, and regional blackouts. Recently, “natural” disasters have dominated the airwaves; mega-catastrophes that claim more than 1,000 lives have become an almost yearly occurrence. In 2010, the Haiti and Chile earthquakes killed more than 200,000 people between them and felt all too familiar to many observers in the West. Before them were Cyclone Nargis in Burma, which took 130,000 lives in 2008; Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,500 New Orleans residents and left 80% of the city flooded in 2005; and the Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed roughly a quarter of a million lives in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand in 2004.

Scholars have argued that there is a broad gender gap in support for the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan. We uncover strong evidence that age, rather than gender, along with rural or urban location, serves as the most critical determinant of party support. Through logistic regression, propensity score matching and simulation techniques applied to four large-scale datasets; we demonstrate that age effects are consistent but slowly diminishing across cohorts between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s. As Japanese women and men age, they come to support the LDP at similar rates controlling for education, income and other demographic factors. We argue that this age gap is a result of socialization and redistribution and not educational levels or socio-economic status, as is often suggested.

I am grateful to Alexander Cooley for his insightful comments and questions.

On September 5, 1995, three United States military personnel abducted and raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl on Okinawa, an island in the Pacific that houses roughly 75% of the U.S. military facilities in Japan. After a month and a half of smaller rallies, more than 85,000 demonstrators gathered in late October that year to protest not only the crime itself but also the presence of the U.S. bases on this string of islands that sit a thousand miles south of mainland Japan. Despite the enormous tragedy of this incident, the widespread international attention it received, and the Okinawan governor's refusal afterwards to renew land to the bases, more than 48,000 U.S. military personnel, their dependents, and civilians remain today on the island, which is roughly the size of Los Angeles. Tragedies at other U.S. bases overseas have similarly not altered the bilateral contracts with the host nation. In 1998, for example, a marine airplane accidentally severed a ski-lift cable for a gondola in Cavalese, Italy, killing all 20 passengers aboard, but this incident did not negatively impact the presence of the U.S. military in that nation.

Two ideographs make up the Japanese word gaijin, the first meaning “outside” or “out of place” and the second meaning “person.” Hence gaijin literally means an outsider or foreigner, and in polite Japanese most speakers opt for the slightly less brusque sounding gaikokujin, which places the emphasis on the foreign nation (koku) from which the alien comes. But as political scientists doing fieldwork abroad, we are all foreigners, if not because of superficial differences such as pigmentation, accent, or dress, then because of our motivations and goals—gaining information, generating and testing hypotheses, and so forth. When we speak to informants abroad—whether in Japan, India, France, or elsewhere—to further our research, we may see ourselves as 800-pound gorillas who can bring conversations to a halt, generate unwanted propositions from nearby residents, and induce stares and pointing.