ABSTRACT
The Japanese are idiosyncratic in their perception of social and national risk. In the World Values Survey, their degree of anxiety about future unemployment, education, and possible involvement in war, terrorism, and civil war is considerably higher than objective indicators, demonstrating excessive risk perception, which is referred to as the “Anxiety over Governance Index.” This excessiveness presumably arises from Japanese people’s sense of worry over the future governance of their country. Analysis of data from 32 countries in waves 6 and 7 of the World Values Survey, including Japan, confirmed the excessive level of risk perception among the Japanese and revealed that this perception was reduced when the country was perceived to be democratically governed. In other words, the index was precisely related to perceptions of governance. Finally, in this chapter, anxiety over governance is conceptually formulated in a more sophisticated way, as a pair conception, with political distrust and anxiety over governance expressing diffuse negative evaluations of the past and the future, respectively. It is hypothesized that the high level of anxiety over governance among Japanese citizens is an accumulation of multifaceted negative evaluations of aspects of Japanese national politics.
