"As crisis and precarity become regular features of our 'new normal,' Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change and the Transformation of the Japanese State is a timely collection of essays. It provides us with a single point of reference on the scope, scale and impact of the various crises faced by the Japanese state and its people over recent years, as well as the diversity in responses. In fact, it was a crisis?the triple disasters of 2011's earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns?that provided the editors with the inspiration for this volume and they are to be applauded for extending their analysis beyond this milestone event and assembling a balanced and representative team of expert contributors across a wide range of topics from the social via the political to the economic, from the domestic to the international. Both individually and collectively, these essays represent a must-read for anybody curious about recent developments in Japan and where the country might be headed." ? Hugo Dobson, University of Sheffield

"This innovative, broadly conceived volume offers a series of fresh, up-to-date, convincing portraits of recent political, diplomatic, economic, and demographic challenges facing Japan. Rather than cataloguing 'Japan's Problems,' it incisively adopts a cohesive theoretical stance on crisis narratives, showing how pervasive accounts of national decline become opportunities for political entrepreneurs to enact their visions of a stronger, more secure Japan, even when their proposed solutions are at best partial or even ruinously self-serving. Judicious, compelling, and insightful, this volume makes important contributions to our understanding of the problems and problematic solutions now facing advanced industrial nations." ? David Leheny, Waseda University