Japan’s ‘consensual’ variety of digital capitalism and its global relevance

ABSTRACT

Data regulation has been framed as a global battle between the market-driven US, the state-driven Chinese, and the rights-driven EU models. We argue that Japan is pursuing a distinct fourth, consensus-driven approach. It is based on soft regulation and aims at striking a balance between privacy concerns and commercial and public interests in the usage of data. The concept of consensus is deeply rooted in Japan’s legal tradition. Its application to data regulation is apparent in the domestic certification scheme for information banks and the international initiative ‘Data Free Flow with Trust’. We also show that Japan’s COVID-19 countermeasures relied on data strategies fully compatible with its consensual regulatory model. By combining rights-driven and market-driven aspects, Japan can potentially mediate between the EU and the US regimes. Japan’s approach also offers an attractive alternative for countries that do not want to pick a side in the Sino-American competition.

KEYWORDS:

• Data regulation
• digital transformation
• global governance
• international relations
• Japan
• surveillance capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The debate was later published in book form (Schirrmacher 2015) and Zuboff references several articles from it in (Zuboff 2015).

2. Not coincidentally, Zuboff’s book (Zuboff 2019) shows optimism towards European regulation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Lucas 2020).

3. The Japanese Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI), which corresponds to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), uses the term kojin jōhō, despite the fact that there would have been a literal translation of personal data (kojin dēta). Generally, legal texts do not offer a clear distinction between data and information (Bygrave 2015).

4. ‘[M]iddle powers in the Indo-Pacific are engaging in a new type of diplomacy, one that includes lobbying, insulating, and rulemaking in the realms of security, trade, and international law, to protect their national interests from Sino-U.S. strategic competition’ (Nagy 2022, 162).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harald Kümmerle

Harald Kümmerle is Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo. His research interests include the history of mathematics, digital humanities, new materialism, and critical data studies. Publications related to this work include ‘Japanese Data Strategies, Global Surveillance Capitalism, and the “LINE Problem”’ (2022, in Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research) and “More Than a Certification Scheme: Information Banks in Japan Under Changing Norms of Data Usage” (2023, in A. Khare and W. W. Baber (eds.) Adopting and Adapting Innovation in Japan’s Digital Transformation).

Franz Waldenberger

Franz Waldenberger is Director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo. He is on leave from Munich University where he holds a professorship in the Japanese Economy. His research focuses on the Japanese economy, corporate governance and international management. He is editor in chief of the international peer reviewed journal Contemporary Japan. His recent publications include The Future of Financial Systems in the Digital Age (2022, co-edited with M. Heckel).