The SSRC and the Japan Foundation New York have awarded new research grants to five teams leading cross-disciplinary, cross-national research teams working on better understanding of important social issues. The projects address informal caregiving in aging societies, populism in the age of artificial intelligence, migrant civic inclusion, healthcare spending, and demographic futures in Japan.

The Abe Fellows Network at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), made possible through support from the Japan Foundation New York, is pleased to announce five new collaborative grant projects. The Abe Fellows Network builds on a more than 30-year partnership between the SSRC and the Japan Foundation to foster collaborative research between US and Japanese scholars. This initiative pairs scholars from the Abe Fellows Network and the U.S.-Japan Network for the Future, another Japan Foundation program administered by the Mansfield Foundation, with junior scholars to support new collaborative work.

The grantees’ projects span disciplines and fields. One initiative, led by Michiko Ueda, will compare how Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom support caregivers, identify gaps in existing policies, and explore how emerging technologies — such as artificial intelligence tools — can provide accessible and scalable assistance. Through policy analysis, stakeholder engagement, and a survey of caregivers in Japan, the project will generate practical recommendations to improve support systems and inform the responsible use of technology to enhance caregiver well-being in aging societies.

Japan’s healthcare system uses a nationally-regulated fee-for-service payment system and has minimal gatekeeping for specialist care, creating a valuable setting for studying how the healthcare system influences the physician-level co-occurrence of low-value care and high-value care in primary care. Findings from Japan help inform healthcare reforms in other aging societies in Europe, East Asia, and other regions by identifying ways to reduce unnecessary “low value” care while preserving access to beneficial “high value” care. A project led by Atsushi Miyawaki aims to (1) develop standardized measures of low-value and high-value care that can be compared across Japan and the U.S. (and other countries); (2) examine whether physicians in Japan who provide more low-value care also provide more high-value care and conduct exploratory analyses to assess whether similar patterns may be observed in the U.S.; and (3) disseminate findings to inform payment reform and quality-improvement policies. They use large-scale Japanese clinic-based healthcare data, as well as U.S. Medicare claims data for preliminary comparison and assessment of cross-national applicability. 

Amy Catalinac will lead a team that uses the case of Japan as a lens through which we can deepen scholarly understanding of the conditions under which voters with longstanding ties to established political parties become untethered to those parties and sympathetic to populist, far-right, and anti-immigrant rhetoric and parties. A large literature has established the role that technological change, financial crisis, and globalization-induced economic shocks such as import competition and offshoring have played in the increased sympathy for these agendas in the United States and Europe. The team’s hypothesis of different outcomes in Japan centers on compensation, finding it likely that certain features of Japanese politics have facilitated the effective targeting of compensation, in the form of government policies, at communities most impacted by these forces. 

The number of foreign residents in Japan has increased drastically in recent years yet remain largely absent from civic and political life. Another project led by Yunchen Tian asks why, by comparing Japan with Taiwan and Norway: Taiwan shares Japan’s structural conditions as a destination for Southeast Asian labor migration, while Norway represents a case where formal integration infrastructure has created clearer channels for migrant participation. By examining how institutional design, state policy, and civil society shape migrants’ ability to organize and advocate for themselves, they aim to identify what enables or blocks migrant self-organization and inform more inclusive policy across all three countries.

In 2007, Japan became the world’s first hyper-aged society, with over 20% of its population aged 65 or older. Japan’s population has become older and smaller, with more than 30% of its population over 65 and fifteen consecutive years of overall population decline. The ramifications of these changing demographics stretch beyond economics: an aging society means strained defense industries, harder trade-offs in alliance commitments, and pressure on the legal and cultural frameworks that define Japanese national identity. Led by Tom Le, this project brings together four experts in Japanese security, political economy and supply chains, quantitative methods and public opinion, and legal frameworks for a structured, multi-round debate on demographic futures. The project takes seriously the economic, gendered, and structural causes of demographic change, rooted in the cost of raising children, workplace cultures that place unique burdens on women, delayed marriage driven by economic precarity, and social norms around family formation.