Discourse Power and Strategic Adaptation: A Diachronic Analysis of Japan's Science and Technology Policy Discourse (2018–2024)

Abstract

Drawing on annual editions of Japan's Integrated Innovation Strategy (Togo Innovation Senryaku) issued by the Cabinet Office between 2018 and 2024, this study constructs a dedicated corpus of 8,312 valid tokens and applies a combined methodology of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies and the Discourse-Historical Approach to conduct a systematic diachronic investigation of Japanese science and technology policy discourse. The analysis identifies three successive phases of strategic discursive shift: a crisis mobilisation phase (2018–2020) in which narratives of external threat were deployed to legitimise systemic reform; a blame-shifting phase (2020–2022) in which stigmatising discourse directed at academic institutions cleared the way for administrative power expansion; and a value reordering phase (2023–2024) in which the lexical foregrounding of shakai (society) and human-centred rhetoric completed a transition from competitive to social narration. Operating across five discourse strategies—nomination, predication, perspectivation, argumentation, and intensification or mitigation—the policy discourse achieved a deep-level transformation from alignment with international agendas to autonomous framework construction and from economic priority to social priority. This transformation is interpreted as both a strategic discursive response to the intensification of Sino-American technology competition, the COVID-19 pandemic, and domestic institutional crisis, and as a reconstruction of discursive power through which Japan, having encountered setbacks in hard-technology competition, seeks to occupy the moral high ground of an advanced nation in social problem-solving as a means of breaking through at a lower competitive register.