ABSTRACT
Scholarship on Japan in three fields is extensive and indispensable for this monograph, as it provides valuable foundations for the arguments I develop. The objective of this chapter is to draw out the lessons from Japanese politics and policymaking—including the bureaucracy, health policy and health care system, and law and medicine—and to identify the descriptive characteristics of context conditions and salient structural elements and properties. The chapter concludes with a few fault lines associated with drawing the wrong lessons from Western experience and applying them to non-Western societies.
