Everyday Perspectives on Security and Insecurity in Japan: A Survey of Three Women’s Organizations

The existing research on Japanese security focuses mainly on the nation state and conceives of male elites as the key bearers of relevant knowledge about the phenomenon. This article problematizes these biases by zeroing in on women’s everyday-oriented perspectives, which fall outside the scope of security politics as traditionally conceived. More specifically, it analyzes the rich material provided by a survey of the members of three major Japanese women’s organizations, using a mixed-method approach premised on statistical methods and qualitative content analysis. The results show that the Japanese women in our sample accommodate and reproduce content from dominant elite views about security and insecurity. However, they also challenge and at times ignore these perspectives by identifying a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives, notably those related to environmental degradation and Japan’s political development. 3: Respondents concerned about militarization are more likely to support a political agenda premised on protecting Article 9.


Introduction
This article analyzes Japanese women's everyday-oriented perspectives on security and insecurity. It investigates whether members of three major women's organizations reproduce and reinforce, or challenge or ignore, dominant views in the national security debate. This debate revolves around an abstract reality derived from state-centric ideas of threat and is driven by national-largely, but not entirely, male-elites: politicians, bureaucrats, analysts, and journalists. For the past three-quarters of a century, the main dividing line in the national security debate has been whether Japan should preserve the 'pacifist' Article 9 of its constitution and try as far as possible to avoid involvement in great power politics, or revise the article to deal more efficiently with a host of perceived threats. The latter position has become increasingly dominant in the past two decades. The existing research on Japanese security has shown primarily that China and North Korea are pinpointed as security problems for Japan and that revision of Article 9 is construed as a solution, along with reinforcement of the Japan-US alliance (e.g. Auslin 2016; Hughes 2016). Even research that has otherwise sought to problematize phenomena and concepts largely taken for granted in the literature on Japanese security has arguably defined security in relation to state survival and male elites and maintained a focus on similar issues (Hagström and Hanssen 2016;Gustafsson et al. 2018Gustafsson et al. , 2019Hanssen 2019). Thus, the existing literature on Japanese security has paid scant attention to the fact that security is a layered phenomenon that exists and is shared in ways that extend beyond the purview of national elites (Åhäll 2019: 150;Sylvester 2013: 17-21). This is problematic, in particular because those topics that become known as 'security issues' tend to be dominated by a gendered dynamic through which women are downplayed, silenced, or in various ways 'encouraged' to retreat to traditional feminine roles (Parashar 2016;Wibben 2016). At the same time, the existing research indicates that women are relatively less concerned about security as defined in relation to war or the use of military force and relatively more concerned about security defined as personal safety (Wagnsson et al. 2020). It also shows how militarization and militarism intertwine closely with patriarchal structures (Cockburn 2010).
In line with the gender literature, women in Japan have commonly been represented as 'more emotional than rational' and thus as unsuited to political participation (Hirata Kimura 2016: 17). LeBlanc noted back in 1999 that Japanese housewives, and perhaps Japanese women more generally, were seen as less experienced, impractical, or even ignorant (1999: 24). All this may help to explain why their political lives are systematically understudied and why they are underrepresented in the analysis of matters related to security and insecurity in Japan. It also helps to explain why only relatively few of them-in proportion to their share of the population-are part of the national elites that produce materials that even competing academic perspectives build their analyses on.
While the Japanese government has begun to address gender inequalities, most notably in the so-called Womenomics policy initiated by former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, women's empowerment in Japan has not been very successful thus far. Although the number of women in leadership roles has increased somewhat in recent years, Japan has had the worst record for women's political representation among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for an extended period, showing how limited women's access to power is (Dalton 2017;Tsuji 2017). Women are still overwhelmingly excluded from influence in Japanese politics (Steele and Miyake 2021: 166-169). Japanese academia also has an ambivalent attitude to gender issues, and indeed to debates on gender in the first place. While there have been attempts to create a more substantial 'home' for such issues and debates, women and the study of gender are under-represented in Japanese academia (Steele 2016). It is therefore no surprise that the security domain-traditionally the bastion of male elites-greatly ignores such perspectives, and that the right to name security threats in Japan is assigned largely to male-dominated institutions and leaders. 2 Although this article surveys and examines Japanese women's perspectives on security and insecurity, it does not seek to reify women as bearers of fundamentally different views either. Some female politicians and pundits, for example Inada Tomomi and Sakurai Yoshiko, are known for vocally labeling other states as threats and for urging Japan to remilitarize (Sakurai n.d.;Inada 2010). Nor does the article seek to reify the view that 'politics' and 'the everyday' are completely separate. Previous research has shown, for example, that grassroots women associated with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) can get their concerns reflected in party proposals, but also that their perusal of the party's women's magazine Riburu influences their political views (Tsuji 2019). While these findings are not necessarily generalizable to security politics, they at least reveal a number of links between elite politics and women's everyday lives. To problematize these tendencies, as well as the tendency to reify sources of insecurity and the instruments for handling them, the article seeks to uncover potentially heterogeneous perspectives. In other words, our aim is to investigate the extent to which Japanese women reproduce and reinforce, but also challenge or ignore, 'dominant' views on security and insecurity that national elites largely understand as common sense.
Section 2 draws on the critical and feminist security studies literatures to explain the move from a single-handed focus on security as anchored in male-oriented and state-centric paradigms to everyday perspectives that take the life-worlds of women seriously. Section 3 outlines how we collected empirical material on Japanese women by conducting a survey of 447 respondents in collaboration with three major Japanese women's organizations. The following sections employ a mixed-method approach to reveal patterns in the respondents' views on matters related to security and insecurity. Sections 4 and 5 use conventional statistical tools to tally and explore the answers to the survey, highlighting several notable themes and tendencies. Section 6 employs qualitative content analysis to dissect the handwritten comments, unpacking the diverse ways in which women conceive of security and insecurity in contemporary Japan. The article concludes by noting that respondents from one organization more actively reproduced and reiterated dominant elite views on security and insecurity-both threat perceptions and a wish to revise Article 9-while respondents from the other two organizations were more critical of them. We also found that women from all three groups contested and to varying degrees also ignored elite views on security and insecurity, defined in state-centric terms, while emphasizing a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives.

Everyday Security Beyond States and Male Elites: Critical and Feminist Approaches
Security is an essentially contested concept and its meaning depends on both context and perspective. Historically, particularly until the end of the Cold War, security studies took the state as its main referent object, and analyzed security issues top-down, either from the perspective of the international state system, or by focusing on state level decision-making processes. Broadly speaking, security studies has been preoccupied with the protection of borders from international threats, and with ensuring state capacity to counter such threats militarily (Khalid 2019: 38;Tickner 2001: 4, 38).
From the 1990s onward, more comprehensive and human-focused notions have increasingly begun to challenge state-centric views of security. The perhaps most forceful challenge has come from critical and feminist security studies. Having grown out of a more general epistemological critique, critical and feminist approaches ask questions about how knowledge regarding security is constituted, who and what is to be secured, and what assumptions and logics underlie and reproduce the enactment and theorization of security. For instance, since men largely populate the world of strategic thought, it tends to take militarized and masculine norms as a standard for how to act (Cohn 1987: 687-690;Tickner 2001: 3-4, 16;Öberg 2018: 500-504;Khalid 2019: 39-40). State-centric practices have thus been criticized as privileging certain 'male-oriented' views on security, epitomized by the notions of 'rationality' and 'hard security', which are valued more highly than the 'emotional' and 'soft' behavior typically associated with women (Enloe 2013: 10, 2016: 55). In fact, even more alternative frameworks, such as securitization theory (Buzan et al. 1998), have adopted some of the same biases as the research they set out to critique-not only state-centrism but also a focus on elites.
Critical and feminist security studies, in contrast, have shifted the emphasis to individual insecurities, most notably perhaps women's insecurities, and the way they are embedded in everyday social structures. These strands of the literature have emphasized that failure to recognize the role that gender hierarchies play in the construction of the security phenomenon risks making scholarship less factually correct (Sjoberg 2010: 1-5). Enloe ([1989] 2014) has argued that despite their important influence on the world, women have been largely dismissed as private, local, domestic, and trivial. She writes: 'We are not just acted upon; we are actors' ([1989] 2014: 35). Hence, critical and feminist security studies have taken a more bottom-up approach, focusing on everyday security issues, with gender as a central analytical concept (Tickner 2001: 3-4, 48;Croft and Vaughan-Williams 2017;Khalid 2019: 39).
Proponents of everyday International Relations (IR) thus analyze more 'ordinary' perspectives on, experiences of, and encounters with security and insecurity (Jarvis and Lister 2013; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016). They have illustrated how the subjects of security negotiate acts of elite securitization and sometimes try to securitize their own insecurities (Hoogensen and Rottem 2004;Jarvis and Lister 2013;Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016). Feminist research has a long-standing history of approaching women's everyday experiences as a site for redefining and resisting dominant patriarchal understandings of the world (Wibben 2011). It has illuminated how different processes and aspects of everyday life act on and mold world politics. By arguing that security research must pay attention to details beyond the scope of state-centrism and ask how seemingly peripheral details matter, this research emphasizes that different processes are not separate (Acuto 2014; Mannergren Selimovic 2019) and that perspectives voiced at the local, national, and global levels can interplay and contradict each other (Bubandt 2005).
The work associated with the everyday turn seeks not only to problematize normalized assumptions in IR, including the state-centric focus on male elites, but also to remove them. Nonetheless, Mac Ginty cautions that while the everyday can be disruptive and subversive, it is not free from dangers: 'The local level is often the site of exclusion, patriarchy and discrimination' (Mac Ginty 2019: 238). It can also reproduce elite views uncritically. This is arguably why some researchers are more 'circumspect about the everyday as a site for progressive politics while at the same time emphasizing that it is not a somehow passive or inert realm' (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016: 44).
In sum, scholarship on gender and the everyday has highlighted how women's subjectivities, experiences, and actions are obscured in conventional research, and increased curiosity about how women are involved in the workings of world politics and matters related to security and insecurity. In our attempt to problematize elitist and state-centric views on security and insecurity in Japan, this article follows critical and feminist approaches in shifting the focus to the perspectives of 'ordinary' women.

Surveying Japanese Women: Three Women's Organizations
Consequently, this article seeks to investigate the extent to which Japanese women reproduce and reinforce, but also challenge or ignore, dominant male elite views about security and insecurity. We weighed several different methods for gathering empirical material, including interviews, participant observation, and textual sources. However, since our aim is to reveal broad trends of how women relate to security and insecurity, it made most sense to conduct a survey. Needless to say, this method far from exhausts the subject matter but is a pragmatic and highly practical way of gathering a considerable amount of relevant data in a limited period of time.
To get access to respondents, we approached 10 Japanese women's organizations in August-November 2018. To the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive list of organizations from which to choose. All things being equal, we prioritized organizations with large memberships and those which function as umbrella organizations. Several of these emphasize on their websites that they support Article 9, and their members are thus more likely to be critical of dominant views in the national security debate. While they hold views more aligned with the center-left in Japanese politics, we also strived to pinpoint organizations more clearly aligned with parties on the center-right, as well as those whose members might hold political views that are more open-ended.
We contacted these organizations by fax, e-mail, web forms, social media, and-in some cases, eventually-telephone. An early response from an organization that declined to participate forced us to reconsider how to explain the study in Japanese. Its president responded in a fax message: 'Since our establishment in 1952, we have conducted activities to promote world peace (sekai no heiwa), but we have not concretely discussed security (anzenhoshō)'. Before receiving it, we had been describing our area of interest as 'Japanese women's views on security (anzenhoshō)'. However, we realized that the term implied exactly the biases toward elites and security understood in state-centric terms that we sought to problematize. Moreover, women acquaintances told us anzenhoshō had little to do with their daily lives-some even referred to it as 'scary' (kowai) as it seemed closely related to national defense and preparations for war. To understand Japanese women's perspectives on security and insecurity, we thus reformulated our communication with organizations and later designed the survey by complementing the term anzenhoshō with other terms that have less elitist and state-centric connotations. Hence, we not only inquired about the respondents' sense of 'threat' (kyōi) but also what they are 'afraid of' (kowai) and what they are 'anxious' about (fuan). In our communication, we even used the loan word sekyuritii (security) in an attempt to summarize what we were looking for with more precision.
As mentioned above, one organization declined to collaborate with the research project, whereas a few others either said they would 'positively consider' our request or did not reply in the first place. These initial contacts eventually led to meetings in Tokyo in November 2018 with three large organizations: JA zenkoku josei soshiki kyōkai, the Japan Agriculture National Women's Organization Council (JANWOC); Shufu rengōkai, the Japan Housewives Association (JHA); and Kokusai fujinnen renrakukai, the International Women's Year Liaison Group (IWYLG). During the meetings, all three organizations agreed to distribute a survey to their members. Each organization made specific requests and we continually circulated new drafts back and forth until all parties were satisfied and could agree on use of the same survey.
Established in 1900, JANWOC is an enormous organization with 625 branches and 520,000 members around Japan. The emphasis is on women engaged in farming, but others can also join (JA zenkoku josei soshiki kyōkai homepage n.d.). Previous research has shown that many farmers support the LDP (George Mulgan 2013) and our conversations with JANWOC representatives indicated close bonds with this liberal-conservative party, which has been in power for most of the postwar period. JANWOC distributed the survey at its annual convention in January 2019, introduced with the help of a brief pre-recorded video message in which we introduced the study. We received answers from 384 women and it has not been possible to calculate a dropout rate.
The other two organizations arguably have more social-liberal or social democratic profiles. The JHA has been specializing in consumer rights activism since 1948 and the IWYLG has been devoting itself to activism related to 'equality, development, and peace' since 1975 (Shufu rengōkai homepage n.d.; Kokusai fujinnen renrakukai homepage n.d.). These organizations also differ in that they largely organize other organizations and have a more limited individual membership. JHA President Arita Yoshiko, for instance, explained that the JHA has 14 member organizations and only about 30 individual members. The IWYLG has 34 member organizations (Kokusai fujinnen renrakukai homepage n.d.) and, according to its president, Kamiya Masako, JANWOC had been a member until recently. The JHA and the IWYLG asked individual members and representatives of member organizations to participate in the study. They also asked the latter to distribute the survey to their members. It is unclear how many women the survey reached but when we returned to Tokyo in August 2019, the IWYLG and the JHA delivered 46 and 17 responses, respectively. Arita Yoshiko explained what she considered a low return by saying that it was difficult to ask Japanese women about their political views in the spring and summer of 2019. Despite the anonymous format of the survey, she said some members might have been afraid to participate out of fear that they might be identified by an LDP-led Japanese government that was seen as increasingly clamping down on individual rights. We decided to keep all three organizations in the study to gauge the diversity of views among Japanese women. However, the smaller sample sizes from the IWYLG and the JHA increase the likelihood that the data collected may not be representative of these groups-a drawback that is taken up again in the analysis.
While we set out with the ambition to survey Japanese women, it is difficult to generalize from our findings to that larger group. First, the sampling was neither completely random nor sufficiently systematic, and the sample size is relatively small. Second, since all the respondents are members of three civil society organizations, they may be relatively more interested in political issues than is the average Japanese woman. Third, as mentioned above, the three organizations have their own political biases and organizational belonging could thus help to explain why the perspectives of members of the three groups differed. This is also something we address throughout the article. With some women systematically underrepresented in our sample-notably young women and women from minority or migrant backgrounds-it may not be possible in the final analysis to draw conclusions about the population of Japanese women as a whole. Nonetheless, the data collected has provided an initial understanding of an under-researched group.
We used statistical methods to investigate the tendencies exhibited by the answers to the survey questions (Appendix A). Use of these methods may be unconventional in the study of everyday IR, as it has focused mostly on linguistic and narrative constructions of experiences, encounters and understandings (Acuto 2014; Vaughan-Williams 2016). Yet statistical methods can help pinpoint tendencies and themes in a large material. Meanwhile, as Wibben writes, 'there is always more than one point of view and more than one story to be told' (2011: 2). We have done our best to take seriously the call to 'engage the voices of all women' (Wibben 2011: 5) in the study, to bring out possible heterogeneity. Most importantly, we gave respondents a chance to elaborate on the questions in a brief handwritten section at the end of each survey. We later analyzed this with the help of qualitative content analysis.

Descriptive Statistics
The first aim of the survey was to acquire a broad overview of respondents' perspectives on security and insecurity, and particularly to probe how these perspectives relate to dominant elite views. This section reports on the questions and the distribution of answers with regard to demographics, women's views on security as defined in the elitist and state-centric sense (again, anzenhoshō), respondents' positions on Article 9, and their threat perceptions, fears, and anxieties. A translated version of the survey is attached as Appendix A.

Demographics
We asked respondents to give their age group and their prefecture of residence. Of the responses received, 68.6% were from women aged between 60 and 79, while 23.8% were from women aged between 40 and 59, and only 6.4% of the total sample were aged between 20 and 39. Those aged 80 or over made up 1.1% of the sample. Hence, our findings are skewed toward the perspectives of women aged 60-79. The uneven age distribution was unintended and is far from ideal. That said, the loss of voice, status, and agency regarding security issues is arguably even more tangible for older women than for women from younger age groups (Holstein 2015). At the same time, Japan has an aging population and 33% of the population in 2016 was aged 60 or above (Statistics Bureau of Japan 2020: Chapter 2). We collected surveys from all the prefectures in Japan apart from Toyama but several areas with higher urban concentrations, notably Tokyo, were overrepresented ( Figure 1).

Women's Views on Security
To investigate whether Japanese women believe security is related to peace or something 'scary', as some women acquaintances remarked when we embarked on the study, we asked respondents for their views on security as defined in the elitist and state-centric sense, namely anzenhoshō. We gave respondents nine options and asked them to mark up to five. Here and throughout, we grouped the answers from JHA and IWYLG respondents together, partly because the number of answers from each organization was small, and partly because we perceived their ideological profiles as similar. The analysis confirmed this assumption.
The groups display similar tendencies ( Figure 2). Two noteworthy differences are that members of JANWOC believe more strongly that security is something that the government takes care of, whereas more members of the two other organizations consider security to be something that concerns them. While this question also shows that around one-fifth of all women consider security to be something scary and different from peace, almost three-quarters believe that peace and security are related. This therefore contradicts some of the reactions we received when we embarked on the survey.

Positions on Article 9
When Japan's constitution was adopted in 1947, Article 9 famously relinquished Japan's sovereign right to wage war or to use force or the threat of force 'as means of settling international disputes' (Clause 1). It also established that 'land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained' (Clause 2). Throughout the postwar era, the LDP and other conservative forces have sought to revise Article 9 to enable Japan once again to use war as an instrument, if deemed necessary. This is the stance of the current LDP administration. In July 2014, then Prime Minister Abe declared that he had reinterpreted Article 9 to allow for collective self-defense, meaning military action together with allies. In the postwar period, Japan's Communist Party and the Japan Socialist Party primarily opposed revision of Article 9. Such resistance has since been carried on in the Diet by the remaining center-left political forces and outside of parliament. The center-right has gained momentum in recent years, and the dominant elite view is that Article 9 should be revised. Yet, significant hurdles to revision remain, as it would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers plus a simple majority in a popular referendum (Hagström 2010).
Article 9 has thus been central to Japanese elite debates on security and insecurity. Because we wished to analyze what women think of such elite debates, we asked for respondents' views on Article 9 and went on to explore how they relate to other questions in the survey. The question on Article 9 provided a clear watershed between the organizations, as members of JANWOC provided answers that differed from those provided by members of the IWYLG and the JHA (Table 1). In short, while 92.1% of respondents from the IWYLG wished to protect Article 9, only 34.4% of JANWOC respondents took the same position. The rest of the JANWOC member respondents wished to tinker with Article 9 in one way or another, although only 2.1% supported a full-fledged revision. The direction of these differences largely reflects the organizations' ideological profiles, as suggested above.

What Japanese Women Feel Insecure/Anxious About
One question asked respondents to pinpoint what makes them feel insecure/anxious (fuan). We gave respondents 15 options, ranging from more traditional security issues that are conspicuous in the dominant elite debates and largely relate to state-based threat perceptions, to issues that are less visible there but could be classified as non-traditional security issues. We asked them to mark up to five. Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of the answers, clustered by organization.  JANWOC members marked an average of 4.3 items while members of the two other organizations marked an average of 4.7 items. The environment and climate change, threats from China and North Korea, and food security were the top three security concerns of JANWOC members, whereas JHA and IWYLG members were most worried about nuclear energy, the environment and climate change, and militarization. Environmental issues were thus the biggest shared concern. JANWOC members were relatively more apprehensive about international tensions, and especially the two states that dominant elite security debates most frequently securitize: China and North Korea. They were also slightly more concerned about issues related to food-perhaps unsurprisingly, as food security is one of the organization's main agenda items. Members of the JHA and the IWYLG were relatively more concerned about extreme ideologies and harassment, in addition to nuclear energy and militarization.
Since the survey allowed respondents to pick up to five choices, we also explored whether there was any dominant combination. Figure 4 displays the most common constellations of answers among those with at least four occurrences. There were nine unique combinations in total. The single choice of the environment and climate change occurred most often in the pool of surveys, followed by threats from China and North Korea. The two security concerns are not mutually exclusive, however, as demonstrated by the 22 respondents who selected both. Moreover, the third most common combination included both of these answers in addition to food security, food self-sufficiency, and international tensions. Figure 4 shows that the survey respondents regard security as multidimensional and encompassing several different issues.
We then wished to further scrutinize the notion that China, North Korea, and other East Asian states pose threats to Japan, which featured strongly in the responses of around half of all JANWOC members. We gave respondents 11 options-most of which are common in elite debates-and asked them to mark up to five. JANWOC members marked an average of 4.0 items while members of the two other organizations marked an average of 3.0 items. This difference is arguably unsurprising given that JANWOC members were more inclined to portray China and North Korea as security threats in the first place ( Figure 5).
Respondents from all the organizations were most worried about the environment and the pollution coming from East Asian states. They differed in that JANWOC members again expressed more concern about the issues salient in the dominant Japanese elite debates, notably China's military expansion, the lack of transparency in military affairs, territorial issues, the abduction issue, missiles, the differences in values, and food. JHA and IWYLG members, by contrast, were relatively more worried about nuclear weapons and history issues.

Statistical Analysis: How Attitudes to Article 9 Relate to Other Security Concerns
This section analyzes how Japanese women's security concerns correlate with their attitudes to Article 9 of the constitution-the issue that is again seen as the watershed in elite debates about security and insecurity. To do so, we selected five predictors from Question 3 based on a careful appraisal of the descriptive statistics and theoretical priorities.
First, we expected threat perceptions of China and North Korea to be an influential predictor of whether respondents support the reinterpretation or revision of Article 9. More specifically, we expected respondents who perceive China and North Korea as threats to be supportive of a political agenda premised on reinterpreting or revising Article 9. As mentioned above, the existing research reveals a broad elite consensus that China and North Korea pose threats to Japan and argues that Second, we expected concerns about Japan's economic decline to reflect deep-seated anxieties related to the country's erstwhile identity as an economic great power (Hagström 2021). The debate over whether Japan must revise Article 9 to 'take responsibility' and 'make contributions' commensurate with Japan's standing took off a few years after the 'economic bubble' burst in 1988, and it has frequently been suggested that Japan might compensate for its economic decline by adopting more activist security and defense policies (Ozawa 1994;Drifte 1996). More generally, the IR literature on status and recognition expects militarization and aggression to be legitimized more easily in states where leaders believe their status concerns are not adequately recognized (e.g. Lindemann 2010).
Hypothesis 2: Respondents concerned about economic decline are more likely to support reinterpretation or revision of Article 9.
Third, we expected respondents concerned about militarization (gunbi zōkyō) to be supportive of a political agenda premised on protecting Article 9. In a Japanese context, militarization has connotations of great power politics, and Japan's postwar pacifism was defined in contradistinction to great power militarization and aggression (Hagström and Hanssen 2016;Hanssen 2019). Although the survey does not associate militarization with Japan per se, in hindsight we believe that respondents interpreted it to refer to the kind of domestic developments, of which some of them are wary. Fourth, we expected concerns about nuclear power to correlate with an inclination to protect Article 9. Public resistance to nuclear power was accentuated in Japan after the nuclear incident in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Existing research finds an important overlap between the burgeoning anti-nuclear movement and previous social movements in Japan, notably the peace movement. Ogawa (2013) draws on the work of the sociologist Charles Tilly to suggest that old and new social movements overlap more generally, and that Japan is not unique in this sense.
Hypothesis 4: Respondents concerned about nuclear power are more likely to support a political agenda premised on protecting Article 9.
Lastly, concern about the environment and climate change was the most common answer to Question 3, which is why we included it as a variable in the analysis. These issues cut across many different cleavages, such as age, partisan divides, and overall political attitudes. They are promoted by vocal social movements, which might be expected to have a connection with other social movements resisting nuclear power and the revision of Article 9.
Hypothesis 5: Respondents concerned about the environment and climate change are more likely to support a political agenda premised on protecting Article 9. Table 2 presents the summary statistics on the variables included in the analysis. The independent variables are all binary variables and take a value of either 0 or 1. The dependent variable is constructed from the answers to Question 7, which has four levels: protect Article 9, reinterpret Article 9, partially revise Article 9 but protect its basic ideas, and fully revise Article 9. We performed a series of ordered regression analyses on our main models. We assumed that the four different steps in our dependent variable were ordered; that is, that respondents who preferred partial and full revision of Article 9 would have more 'revisionist' attitudes than those who preferred to protect Article 9. The dependent variable had 36 missing observations, so our final models included 411 observations. In an additional model specification, we controlled for age by including a binary construction of the four-category age variable, which grouped respondents in two categories: those aged between 20 and 59, and those aged 60 and above. The former group consisted of 131 respondents, while the latter had 305. Ten respondents did not disclose their age. Figure 6 plots the distribution of the independent variables across the different levels of the dependent variable.

Discussion of Findings
We first conducted a series of bivariate ordered logistic regressions to reveal relationships between the predictors of interest and our main dependent variable. 3 Models 1-5 report the results of this 3. We performed all the analyses with the help of RStudio version 1.1.463 (RStudio Team 2020). Specifically, we used the package mlogit (Croissant 2020) to fit the multinomial logistic regression, and the package nnet (Venables and Ripley 2002) for the ordered regression models. We used packages stargazer and sjPlot (Lüdecke 2020) to produce the tables. In addition, ordered logistic regression relies on the proportional odds assumption, meaning that the distance between each level in the dependent variable is proportional (Brant 1990). To ensure that our models did not violate this assumption, we ran the Brant test using the package brant (Schlegel and Steenbergen 2018). Lastly, a multicollinearity check was conducted using the package performance, which returned a low level of correlation among the independent variables in Models 6 and 7 (Appendix B). step (Table 3). Individually, concerns about threats from China and North Korea, economic decline, and the environment and climate change exerted positive effects on the dependent variables. This means that the respondents worried about these three phenomena were more likely to have a more revisionist attitude to Article 9. While the directions and significance levels of the first two effects provided support for H1 and H2, the positive effect of the environment and climate change variable contradicted H5. However, in the bivariate regression, this variable was not statistically significant. Meanwhile, as expected by H3 and H4, respondents worried about militarization and nuclear power were more inclined to support the protection of Article 9. These two factors were significant at the 99% level of confidence. Model 6 in Table 3 presents a multivariate analysis of all the above variables. Here, the directions of the relationships remain similar. Since it is difficult to interpret the sizes of these effects using the log odds scale, we present the coefficients of Model 6 in terms of odds ratios (Table 4). Model 6 shows that for respondents whose security concerns included threats from China and North Korea and economic decline, the odds of being more likely to support changes to Article 9 were 2.1 and 1.92 times higher, respectively, than those who were not concerned about these issues. By contrast, for respondents worried about militarization, the odds of being more supportive of changes to Article 9 were 73% lower compared to those who did not chose this option. Similarly, respondents with concerns about nuclear power were 42% less likely to support Article 9 alterations (either reinterpretation or revision) than those who did not chose this option. In addition, concerns about the environment and climate change increased the likelihood of supporting revisionist measures to Article 9 by 1.52 times. This effect is marginally significant in this model (P = 0.068). The results of Model 6 are thus consistent with H1-H4, but not with H5.
Model 7 expands on the results of our main model (Model 6) by including age as a control variable. The results indicate that older respondents may be more inclined towards revisionism, but a lack of statistical significance makes the correlation between these two factors unlikely. Here, although the first four predictors continue to support H1-H4, the environment and climate change variable once again exhibits a non-significant effect. Note: For the independent variables, which are mostly binary variables that take a value of either 0 or 1, the mean and standard deviation values help contextualize the distribution of the responses.
That the data shows no support and even contradicts the proposed direction of H5 is a surprising result. For one, the environment and climate change were one of the most common concerns among respondents, regardless of organizational affiliation. To explore this outcome further, we ran an additional model with a restricted JANWOC-only sample (Model 8). However, even within the JANWOC sample, this variable continues to display a similar positive, non-significant effect. Furthermore, JHA/IWYLG members' overwhelming disapproval of the revisionist agenda does not seem to be driving this trend. This contrasts with concerns about nuclear energy, which were most salient in the JHA/IWYLG sample and which, with their data excluded, produce an insignificant effect. In any case, given the low response rate and smaller sample size from this group, we only make this comparison under a high degree of uncertainty. Nonetheless, it may be interesting to probe why concern about environmental issues is associated with stronger support for the revision or reinterpretation of Article 9. We explore this issue further in the next section.
Finally, we also tested the hypotheses using multinomial regression analysis and report the results in Appendix C. Since the levels of the dependent variables were assumed to be equal and not to have a specific direction, the multinomial regression method suffered a small information loss compared to ordered regression. That this method produced results that were similar to Model 6 therefore adds robustness to our main analysis. We also wish to make one caveat: the binary nature of our predictors prevented us from capturing the varying degrees of respondents' concerns. The space constraints Note: Models 1-5 report the effects of individual predictors, while Models 6, 7, and 8 are multivariate. Model 8 has a restricted sample of only JANWOC members. *P < 0.1; **P < 0.05; ***P < 0.01.
imposed by our survey collection method meant that we could not use a point-based rating scale for each of the response items.

Content Analysis
To further investigate the relationship between the respondents' perspectives on security and insecurity and dominant elite views, we performed qualitative content analysis of the handwritten comments that appear in 56.2% of the returned surveys (251 of the 447). 4 This method is used to search for the presence of certain words, themes, or concepts within a text corpus, to understand their meanings, and relationships between them. We did this by developing a coding frame abductively-that is, by moving back and forth between a preconceived idea of the categories that might be relevant and an updated understanding based on close, iterative reading and hand coding of the comments Note: Odds ratios measure association by quantifying the relative odds that a specific outcome will occur given the existence of a predictor. Here, emboldened P values are considered to be significant if they fall under the 0.05 threshold. As a result, the variable the environment and climate change is not considered as statistically significant here.
4. Most of those who left comments made only a brief remark. Excluding the responses that left no comment, the average comment length was 75.6 characters for the JANWOC members and 142.9 characters for the JHA/IWYLG members. Shorter comments may not have much content but might still invoke well-known views. Japanese characters include at least a whole phoneme (hiragana and katakana), and some can even contain up to a full word (kanji), so a set number of Japanese characters typically contain more meaning than the same number of characters in a language that uses the Latin alphabet.
(Boréus and Bergström 2017). We coded the content of the respondents' handwritten comments to provide context, nuance, and emphasis to the preceding statistical analysis, and to find out whether they might be challenging or contradicting it and, if so, in what ways. Whereas 34 JANWOC members wrote comments with some connection to security understood as anzenhoshō, only 12 mentioned Japan's neighboring countries, or China and North Korea, as sources of particular 'fear' (osore), 'worry' (shinpai), or 'anxiety' (fuan). Others referred to various topics, but only US bases (4) and territorial issues (3) recurred more than once. None of these comments explicitly mentioned Article 9 of the constitution, but one respondent lamented that Japan was being besieged by a certain 'peace senility' (heiwa boke)-a derogatory term often used by proponents of constitutional revision to push their agenda. By contrast, 11 respondents emphasized their opposition to, or fear of, war and/or their hope for peace or world peace. The latter could be interpreted as a show of support for Article 9. Figure 3 demonstrates that almost half of the JANWOC respondents were indeed concerned about threats from China and North Korea, and the regression models in Table 3 show a statistically significant relationship between such a notion of threat and the view that Japan should reinterpret or revise Article 9-that is, the two main components of the dominant elite perspective on Japan's insecurity and security. However, the handwritten comments indicate that neither issue was particularly high on JANWOC respondents' agendas. Instead, they had a number of more pressing concerns.
Specifically, JANWOC members' security concerns mainly revolved around a host of issues other than those understood in terms of anzenhoshō. However, some of those concerns might well have a more or less implicit connection with Japan's neighboring countries, as seen for example in Figure  5, where it became clear that concerns with the environment/pollution and food were associated with threat perceptions vis-à-vis China, North Korea, and other East Asian countries. In particular, there was a nexus of insecurities related to food (46), the environment (38), disasters such as earthquakes (34), climate change (31), and farming (21). At least two of these concerns co-occurred in 48 comments. Disasters and earthquakes did not appear as categories in the statistical analysis above, and nor did farming, but concerns about food security, the environment and climate change figure prominently in Figure 3. The handwritten comments moreover show that insecurities related to food revolved around a host of related issues, such as food imports (19) and food security (additives, chemicals, intermediate goods) (19), as well as a concern that Japan is not adequately self-sufficient in food (10). The comments clarify that JANWOC members are concerned about this nexus because most of them work in farming and/or food production, and have first-hand experience of how environmental degradation, climate change, and disasters affect their daily lives. This arguably also sheds light on why H5 did not gain support in the statistical analysis above-and therefore why concerns about the environment and climate change increased the likelihood of support for the revision of Article 9, albeit not at a statistically significant level. Some also saw farming and food production as threatened by other factors: the influx of migrants who buy up properties in the countryside but fail to understand local culture (5), and a lack of heirs (4).
Ten respondents from the JANWOC listed population decline as a particular cause for concern, and in this context one suggested that immigration was a solution to the depopulation of the countryside. A few others expressed apprehension that young Japanese women are less interested in getting married or having children, noting that the government must create conditions to increase Japan's birthrate (2). Worries related to children recurred in 21 handwritten comments. There was concern about how Japanese children are currently being raised and educated (7), health issues and allergies (3), the future for children (3), children's food security (3), and bullying in schools (2), as well as a fear that children might have to get involved in future wars (2). The causes for concern mentioned at least three times were: criminality (5), nuclear power (4), various issues related to the national economy (4), the prevalence of selfishness in Japan (3) and among nations (3), and the media's alleged lack of objectivity (3). Some respondents also referred to a sense of insecurity that was confined to their personal lives and related to their own health or the health of family members (7), or their own aging (4), which may be related to the fact that most of the respondents were aged 60 or older, as discussed above.
Some comments indicated that the JHA/IWYLG members subscribed to the most popular (among elites and non-elites alike) criticism of dominant elite views on security and insecurity: that the constitution and Article 9 must be protected to safeguard Japan's peace. These comments also expressed apprehension about the political forces that seek constitutional revision and the wars that Japan could be entangled in should they be successful. Four of the 63 respondents made this connection explicit, and four others wrote that they were afraid of war more generally. One respondent based her opposition to war on her own personal experience of living through and surviving the heavy bombing of Tokyo at the end of World War II.
In their handwritten comments, however, JHA/IWYLG respondents most commonly wrote that they were worried about then-Prime Minister Abe Shinzō and the way society had developed under his rule since 2012. In all, 17 women explicitly mentioned Abe or the 'current' government as a cause for great concern. Another 15 respondents worried about similar issues, which is why it is arguably possible to pinpoint another nexus with fears related to the current government and the direction that Japan is taking as its node. More concretely, besides the concerns about Japan's constitution and the risk of war discussed above, these 32 respondents expressed worries about education (8), especially the increased emphasis on moral education intended to foster servile citizens (6), the increase in right wing extremism, nationalism and hate-speech (6), the 'degeneration' and 'synchronization' of the media (5), the government's lying and forfeiting trust (5), discrimination against racial, ethnic, and political difference in Japan (5), the undermining of Japan's democracy (5), the manipulation of freedom of thought or speech (3), and society becoming increasingly like prewar Japan (2). Four women also worried that these developments more negatively affected children. This nexus is clearly the greatest cause for concern for the JHA/IWYLG members. Based on this analysis, we interpret the concern about extreme ideologies in Figure 3 as apprehension about what these women understood as the extreme ideology of the Abe government, at least in the context of the responses from members of JHA/IWYLG. In fact, only one handwritten comment mentioned concerns about nuclear power, although it was the top choice for JHA/IWYLG members in Figure 3. Three respondents wrote that they were worried about their own aging, and another that Japan's aging is a cause for concern. Two others wrote that women should have more power in Japan. Finally, Figure 3 shows that the JHA/ IWYLG members were worried about the environment and climate change, second only to nuclear power, and only 10.4 percentage points lower than the figure for JANWOC members. However, only three handwritten comments expressed concern about climate change and only two about environmental degradation. Similarly, only two JHA/IWYLG members mentioned disasters including earthquakes.

Conclusions
This article has analyzed whether and how members of three Japanese women's organizations reproduce and reinforce, or challenge or ignore dominant elite views of security and insecurity in the country. We began by drawing on critical and feminist perspectives on security, particularly the insight that security is a layered phenomenon that is shared and experienced as part of everyday life in ways that go beyond state-centric conceptions and elite debates. The article concludes that organizational belonging is an important factor in how security and insecurity are understood, and hence that it is difficult to draw conclusions from our survey about Japanese women as a whole. In short, we found that respondents from JANWOC were more inclined to accommodate and reproduce content from dominant security debates, perhaps unsurprising due to the organization's proximity to the LDP. However, they also contested and to some extent ignored these dominant views by emphasizing a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives. Respondents from the JHA/IWYLG reproduced a popular but diminishing critique of dominant elite views by stressing the importance of protecting Article 9. Nonetheless, they also expressed great anxiety about political developments in Japan more generally, as well as a host of other everyday insecurities.
The statistical analysis supported four of our five hypotheses, albeit to varying degrees. Worries about threats from China and North Korea (H1) were a persistent and significant predictor of revisionist attitudes to Article 9 among Japanese women. Concerns about Japan's economic decline (H2) also displayed a similar effect, although not as strongly in terms of size and direction. This tendency was again particularly emphasized in responses from JANWOC and closely mirrored the dominant elite view on security and insecurity understood in national terms. In contrast, the respondents in our study who were concerned about militarization (H3) and nuclear power (H4) were more in favor of protecting Article 9. H5 was contradicted as concerns about the environment and climate change were negatively rather than positively correlated with support for a political agenda premised on protecting Article 9. This could possibly be explained by the facts that JANWOC members are overrepresented in the study and that they often both support revision of Article 9 and worry about the environment and climate change.
The statistical analysis could be problematized with the help of descriptive statistics. First, all women respondents, regardless of organizational association, were most worried about non-traditional security issues: for JANWOC members it was the environment and climate change, while for the respondents from the JHA/IWYLG it was nuclear power followed closely by the environment and climate change. This helps to substantiate the findings from other geographical contexts that women are less inclined to support a militarized security policy and more apt to have broader perspectives on what it means to care for human lives, including personal safety (Wagnsson et al. 2020). In particular, we know from previous research that women worry a lot more about environmental degradation and climate change than men do (McCright 2010). Second, the more traditional security issues came second for JANWOC members (in the form of threats from China and North Korea), almost 30 percentage points lower than the environment and climate change, and were placed third by respondents from the JHA/IWYLG (in the form of militarization).
The qualitative content analysis served to problematize the picture even further. Traditional security issues were not at all prevalent in the handwritten comments of the JANWOC respondents. Instead, we pinpointed a nexus of issues related to the environment, disasters, climate change, and farming. These findings are very much in line with international studies that emphasize how women's movements tend to regard security issues as interdependent and linked to questions of ecology (Tickner 2014: 13-15). Traditional security issues were more important for the JHA/IWYLG members, and a few of them directly mentioned their support for Article 9 or a strong concern about the LDP government's political agenda premised on constitutional revision and the risk of war. These concerns were also embedded in a broader nexus of other issues, most notably the fear that the then incumbent Abe administration was taking Japan in a dangerous direction. This nexus featured concerns about the increasing emphasis on moral education in Japanese schools, the increase in right wing extremism, nationalism and hate-speech, the degeneration of the media, discrimination against racial, ethnic, and political differences, and an undermining of Japan's democracy.
In sum, the article has demonstrated that Japanese women conceive of security and insecurity in ways that often accommodate and reproduce content from dominant elite debates. That said, we also reveal that members of all three women's organizations contested and to some extent ignored elite debates on security and insecurity by emphasizing a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives. Thus, the article has indicated important gaps between the perspectives of Japanese women on security and insecurity and the topics covered in Japanese security debates dominated by male elites. Finally, drawing on the idea that the role of women in Japanese security studies has been devalued for a long time, our hope is that this article can contribute to the creation of a space in which micronarratives based on women's experiences get more appreciated and become seen as an integral aspect of how 'Japanese security' is assessed.
☐ The environment and climate change ☐ Nuclear energy ☐ Militarization ☐ Economic decline ☐ Food security ☐ Food self-sufficiency ☐ Foreigners in Japan ☐ Crime ☐ Extreme ideologies ☐ Harassment including sexual harassment ☐ Children's security ☐ Own and family's health ☐ Nothing ☐ Other 4. If you think China, North Korea or other East Asian countries pose a threat [to Japan], please mark up to five things you find particularly troublesome. ☐ Protect Article 9 ☐ Reinterpret Article 9 ☐ Partially revise Article 9 but protect its basic ideas ☐ Fully revise Article 9 8. What kind of insecurities do you feel in you daily life? How do you think they could be handled? Please share your views freely.

Appendix B: Multicollinearity Check
To satisfy one of the assumptions of the ordered logistic model, we checked for correlation among the predictors using the R package 'performance'. For all variables, the results are well within common thresholds (VIF < 10, tolerance > 0.10) (Hair et al. 2010). our main models. Lastly, the environment and climate change was also only significant at a weak level of confidence. Since the levels of the dependent variables are assumed to be equal rather than to have a specific direction, the multinomial regression method suffers a small information loss compared to ordered regression. That this method produces results that are similar to Model 6, however, adds robustness to our main analysis. The same caveats pinpointed above also apply here.