What moves Japan? Critical junctures and the ideational foundations of capitalism

This paper addresses a central question: what moves Japan? It offers a crucial intervention in the literature on critical junctures and institutional change by challenging the prevailing binary between contingency and path dependence. Existing models tend to portray change as either abrupt departures from the norm or as gradual drift. This, I argue, fails to account for how institutional repertoires are strategically reactivated over time. Through an original framework of recursive reweighting, this paper theorizes a trilemma at the heart of Japanese capitalism: a structured tension between communitarian, developmental and financialized logics, in which the dominance of any two requires the marginalization of the third. This theoretical claim is tested through a process-tracing study of Japan’s COVID-19 response which reveals a patterned sequence of institutional recalibration over five phases of crisis governance. Rather than inventing new institutional paths, Japan reconfigures dormant elements of its own repertoire to respond to shifting pressures.