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A New Test of the Nuclear Taboo: The Security Environment and Japanese Public Support for Nuclear Weapons

Speaker: Professor Atsushi Tago and Dr. Shoko Kohama

Post-war Japan has been characterized by a strong socio-cultural taboo about nuclear weapons, possibly due to its status as the only country that has sustained nuclear attacks. The Japanese public has been assumed to possess a deeply ingrained aversion toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Using a survey experiment, we seek to ascertain whether the Japanese aversion toward nuclear weapons is unconditional or can be “broken” under deteriorating security environments, such as the withdrawal of the U.S. security-nuclear umbrella, increased North Korean nuclear-weapons testing activity, or movement by South Korea toward the attainment of a nuclear arsenal. We find that the Japanese nuclear taboo may come under stress in the face of deteriorating security environments. Additionally, we found that the elasticity of Japanese attitudes with respect to the nuclear option in the face of external security deterioration may be largely derived from individual-level characteristics, such as individual-level views about the use of force, trust in the Prime Minister, and social-dominance orientation. At the end of this talk, we will also present a new experimental design that replicates and extends a China-Japan crisis de-escalation experiment (Quek and Johnston 2018) using a national survey in Japan.

About the Speaker

Atsushi Tago is Professor of International Relations at the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University (Ph.D. in Advanced Social and International Studies, University of Tokyo, 2007). He specializes in the scientific study of international politics. Currently, he is a Principal Investigator of CROP-IT (Collaborative Research on Political Information Transmission), a project funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and conducts scientific research on Public Diplomacy. He was appointed a PRIO Global Fellow from 2017.

Shoko Kohama is Associate Professor at the Public Policy School, Hokkaido University. She received her Ph.D. in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia in 2014. An expert on international security, her research primarily concerns peace and prosperity in post-conflict countries, including issues of recurrent war, socio-economic recovery and hostile communication among former belligerents. Her articles have appeared in Political Communication, the Washington Post's Monkey Cage, and several other journals.

Date: 2019-11-01, Fri
Time: 16:30
Venue: Room 966, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Poster link: https://ppa.hku.hk/files/20191101.jpg
Photo Album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/mGCCp7HmhfgzBknaA

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