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Regulation, Governance, and ‘Capture’
Commentary on My Case Studies and Theoretical Trends
Yuichi Murakami
1. Introduction
Hokkaido University Public Policy School (HOPS), which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, was established on the concepts of (1) fusion of the human, social, andnatural sciences, or of law, politics, economics, and engineering; (2) partnerships of academics and practitioners; and (3) ‘glocal’, or a combination of global and local perspectives. This paper aims to present the research that I, as a faculty member of HOPS, havebeen working on related to the above-mentioned concepts, place them within the recent
theoretical trends of regulation, governance, and capture, and extract research agendas tobe discussed in my future research.
Regulation, whether economic or social, is not a sanctuary from the recent trend‘from government to governance’. Scott (2001) defines ‘regulatory space’ as ‘a whole regulatory system of policy process, institution, implementation, various actors, their norms,
attitudes, ideas, and diverse mechanisms of control’. If we see standard-setting, implementation, and enforcement as in the ‘regulatory space’, regulation is also in the midstof a recent academic and practical wave of governance, and there is a certain need towatch a structural transformation of regulatory space and its background from a perspective of public administration (PA) (Murakami 2013a-b). As for PA, it is critical for regulators to prevent capture that ignores public interest in the world of dispersed andfragmented resources and information.
In this paper, I first review recent trends of theoretical discussion on regulatory space,governance, and capture in each chapter and comment on my related case studies in Japan. As for regulation (2), I review a framework of regulatory governance (2-1), a concept of regulatory capitalism (2-2), and a shift from simple command and control (2-3).
As for governance (3), I discuss concepts of the governance network (3-1), meta-governance (3-2), and shadow of hierarchy (3-3). As for capture (4), I refer to a definition of
the problems of public/private interest (4-1), a concept of ‘corrosive capture’ (4-2), and‘cultural capture’ (4-3), relying on many previous works. In each part, I apply these theoretical frameworks to actual cases in Japan that I have been working on, such as regulations on wooden buildings (Murakami 2013c), automobiles (Murakami 2013d), electricalappliances (Murakami 2013e), ships (Murakami 2014), and others.
This paper is expected to provide a Japanese model and Japanese dynamics of ‘regulatory space’, as well as further research agendas to be examined, which will surely be productive for political science as a whole. If regulatory capture is commonly misdiagnosed
and mistreated because of its staleness and detachment from practice (Carpenter and* Associate Professor since April 2014 at Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Law, Hokkaido
University (yuichim@juris.hokudai.ac.jp)

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Moss 2014: 3), it should be meaningful to compare the conventional framework or theoretical reaching-point with real cases in Japan, so as to refine and develop them.

2. Regulation
2.1 Regulatory GovernanceSome researchers who focus on institutional design and effective regulatory culture
have established new regulatory governance, and some have noted a transformation fromcommand and control style regulation to new styles. New regulatory governance promotes entrepreneurial cooperation between academics and practitioners in the emerging
regime, in which various public and private actors, with various strengths and specialties,
take part in social ordering, such as regulatory standard setting and enforcement. Regulatory governance provides a third means of fighting government or market failure; it canbe placed somewhere along the spectrum of top-down and bottom-up approaches after aconsideration of the causes of their failure.
Lobel (2013: 66) briefly mentions the following eight features of regulatory governance: (1) increased participation of non-state actors, (2) public-private collaboration, (3)diversity and competition within the market, (4) decentralization, (5) integration of policy domains, (6) non-coerciveness (‘soft law’), (7) adaptability and constant learning, and(8) coordination.
Largely because of a dilemma between regulatory resource shortage and responsibility
pursuance, government regulatory agencies involve private actors and various regulatory
tools. Regulatory governance broadly contains substantial and procedural rules of governmental compulsion, dynamics of internal processes and organizations, and various forms
of self-regulations. In the case of electrical appliances, a process toward regulatory governance is observed; as the market grows larger, not only government agencies but also
various private and semi-private (non-profit) actors participate in standard-setting andimplementation in the regulatory space. Besides traditional command and control (giving
approval, license, prohibition, or penalty on violation), softer regulations such as industrial voluntary regulations, insurance mechanisms, and mutual accreditation between
public, private, or agreed countries are utilized and added, explicitly or implicitly, to theregulatory system.
One of the next theoretical challenges of regulatory governance is its legitimacy. It canbe supported by efficiency, specialty, and the participation of regulatory stakeholders. The
problem may not be simply resolved by deregulation but often rather by re-evaluating
the positive and systematic interrelationship between public and private, regulator andthose who are regulated, and hard tools and softer ones.
2.2 Regulatory Capitalism
Although some predicted that in the trend ‘from government to governance’ privatization and deregulation would liberalize the market; others expected a re-regulatory society
to come. In reality, 30 years after the first neoliberal administrative reforms underThatcherism, Reaganomics, and the like in Japan, what we see now is ‘regulatory capitalism’, even though it is not a ‘regulatory explosion’ in the extreme sense. In a zero-sum
world, deregulation and more dependence on the market would reduce governmental
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discretion. However, if we premise the positive-sum, deregulation may result in a governmental challenge to enhance its discretion in quality, rather than simply in quantity(Murakami 2013g).
Murakami (2013c) notes that standard-setting and implementation of safety regulations on automobiles and electrical appliances, which always face high pressure toward
international harmonization, are delegated both in form and in substance to manufacturers, engineers, and other private stakeholders who have specialties, act globally, and establish worldwide networks. It does not mean deregulation, however; government
regulatory agencies do not give up their authority to coordinate policy negotiations between stakeholders, design various norms with legal techniques, and write rules of theselection process among plural public and private regulatory institutions including international agreements and voluntary ones of industry unions.
Under regulatory capitalism, the processes of privatization, deregulation, marketizationin each country, and the emergence of various forms of regulatory institutions are not incontradiction with each other. Regulatory schemes—such as conventional regulatory
schemes, global standards, and private self-regulations—have some publicness, efficiency,
and legitimacy. They are established in a sophisticated, multi-level regulatory governancesystem at the international, national, and local levels.
It should be emphasized here that the selection or competition process among various
regulatory institutions or schemes consists of regulatory capitalism, and that it is borderless according to the international community of specialists and engineers who have aninterest in regulations. This phenomenon is especially notable in regulations on electricalappliances and ships.
For example, electrical appliances are subject to regulations to prevent electrificationand other risks and failures caused by electromagnetic interference. The regulatory
system has an aspect of domestic implementation of global regulations from the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Comité international Spécial des Perturbations Radioélectriques (CISPR), while there are also voluntary regulations introduced
by industry unions in addition to the statutory regulations based on the Electrical Appliances and Materials Safety Act (EAMS Act) and the Radio Act. There is a ‘division of labour’ among them. They have their respective labelling or marks so that retailers andconsumers can choose which labelling, or regulatory scheme, to rely on. Cashore, Auld,
and Newsom (2004) discuss how labelling is designed to harness the market choices ofconsumers for the regulatory project. Regulatory capitalism partly means using the market as a regulatory mechanism, as opposed to the neoliberal schema of markets as theantithesis of regulation (Braithwaite 2008: 8). Recent deregulation in Japan has introduced third-party certification and manufacturer self-certification systems and even individual consumer certification systems. The rising importance of international regulations
and advancement of science and technology may have reduced governmental discretionin policymaking. However, recent amendments to statutory regulations push governmental agencies to conduct on-site inspections and to wield punitive powers, by means of
implementing the EAMS Act as an umbrella of the safety regulation system.
Murakami (2014) found three major aspects of discussions in the International MariSpecial Edition of Annals, Public Policy Studies 2015, Hokkaido University

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Yuichi Murakamitime Organization (IMO) on recent amendments to the MARPOL 73/78 and SOLAS
conventions for ships; (1) to strengthen existing regulations in the Convention; (2) toimplement the concept of the Goal-Based Standard, or multi-layered structure of public
and technical private standards; and (3) to implement the Formal Safety Assessment(FSA) as a tool for assessing regulatory options. IMO regulation has several unique features. First, clusters of stakeholders are so diverse and multi-layered that regulatory
disputes often become global issues, and political pressure concerning safety and environmental protection and regulation reinforcement tends to affect the regulation rightaway. Second, regulatory implementation or enforcement is much more difficult thanjust setting a target or standards. This is why some member countries have recently
examined more effective regulatory methods, such as the improvement of Port State
Control and additional supervision of ship operations or its human factors. Finally,
probabilistic risk assessment, such as FSA, has been well designed and used in order tobalance the social benefits that ship transport yields, and its potential risks that can be
diffuse and complex. Such a technologically uncertain and hard-to-grasp concept of risk
makes regulatory space more complicated and more vulnerable to regulatory capture.
2.3 Shift from a Simple Command and Control
Murakami (2013f ) reported that structural transformation of regulatory space is theresult of international harmonization, diversification, refinement, and specialization ofregulated technology, the associated manifestation of conflicts of interest, and dispersionof regulatory capacity. In the regulatory space, a governmental agency, in order to carryout its mission, must examine the regulatory process from a distance rather than work
directly on the policy, sometimes using conflicts of interest between other governmental
agencies or private organizations as leverage, so it controls or manages the regulatory system as a whole. Regulatory agencies maintain their commitment by doing so and strategically enhance their roles and discretion. They procure technical information throughcooperation with engineers, their communities, and the industrial unions behind them.
Regulatory agencies have some autonomy in relation to those who are regulated, suchas in (1) arranging the regulatory process or the forum; how to set agendas (values to be
conscious of ) or the schedule of the policy process, and which stakeholders to invite into
the decision-making process or who to join with to implement policy without difficulty,(2) establishing the ‘social infrastructure’ of the regulatory statute system; how to incorporate international technical standards and specifications into existing statutes, how far
to extend the territory of governmental statutes or regulations, and how to build a ‘division of labour’ between public and private, and (3) choosing appropriate institutions anddesignations of regulatory implementation tools; how to make delegated regulation more
effective by incorporating self- or third-party certification, or implementation process ofvoluntary regulations. Besides simple command and control, such as governmental certification, prohibition, or penalty for violation, as observed elsewhere, various tools for
managing the regulatory space are actively produced under complex governance.
Regulatory agencies try to reduce ‘agency slack’ with private partners and to establish
the partnership as a social management system. Their effectiveness depends on the quality of the regulatory space, where the idea that not only the regulator in a narrow sense
but also private actors involved in regulatory implementation are responsible for safety
and security, and they possess effectiveness and justification for their intension and skills
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to carry out regulatory procedures, according to the abovementioned understanding.

3. Governance
3.1 Governance network
Governance network study has addressed the institutional legacy of neoliberal administrative reform in the 1980s; a large dependence on conventional hierarchical bureaucracy is replaced by more dependence on semi-market and network, and the following
transformation of government is an issue for discussion. Global restructuring has intensified the tendency led by the activation of the global economy and the rise of regional integration, as in the case of the European Union. To make public policymaking andimplementation more stable, organizations must become more dependent on others, andtheir relationships must therefore become more complicated. Regulatory authority or
power is dispersed between the public and private sectors in the plural network thatspreads physically and functionally.
There are several strands of thought within governance network study (Rhodes 2012:34). The first is the ‘Anglo-governance school’, which began in the UK, which begins,
against the conventional wisdom of the hierarchical Westminster model, with the notionof policy network or sets of organizations clustered around a major government function
or department of the professions, trade unions, or big business. Secondly, Mayntz,
Schapf, and their colleagues were among the first to treat networks as a mode of governance, not as an interest group intermediation (as briefly reviewed later). Thirdly, Dutch
researchers such as Klijn and Koppenjan pioneered the concept of network management,
which caught on rapidly and mutated to embrace partnerships and collaborative ‘management’. Attention to the governance network turned from describing its growth inpractice to the normative implications of democratic governance, such as how to participate in networks with legitimacy and accountability (Richardson (2002), Sørensen andTorfing (2009), and the like.). Fourthly, the American political science school caught up
with the European trend with an instrumental view relevant to public managers, andbrought its characteristic modernist-empiricist skill set to bear through large-N studies on
the governance network, in contrast to the case studies favoured by Europeans.
Along with the emergence of the governance network, the concept of public administration has also changed, including in Japan, in the past several decades (Murakami
2015a). In the past, public administration was conceptualized as ‘the role played by bureaucracy’, and the discipline was characterized by a popular textbook, Nishio (2001:47), as ‘focusing on the collective actions of public bureaucracy for political investigation’. Recently, however, the approach to understanding public administration broadly as
a provision of public service and not as a limit on the providers for bureaucratic groups
has been rising. Soga (2013: 3) defines PA broadly as the discipline used ‘to understandmodern society through investigation of the division of labour and delegation between
politics and administration, ministries, and agencies, the government and private sectors,
the central and local governments or states, and international organizations, as well as thereasons for the division’. According to another textbook Morita (2000: 133), the change‘from unified governance by authority to mutual cooperation and multifaceted coordination by many independent bodies so as to establish stable society’ has become a major
research theme for today’s public administration scholars. This change is called ‘fromSpecial Edition of Annals, Public Policy Studies 2015, Hokkaido University

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government to governance’.
Network, formerly discussed as a solution to market or government failure or thetranslation of the state-market relationship (like Samuel’s ‘reciprocal consent’) in the political economy school, has been recognized as a technique for public management andpublic governance (Goldsmith and Eggers 2004). Tsujinaka (2000) clarifies through empirical research that the hierarchical relations between Japanese government agencies andpressure groups has transformed into a horizontal, loose, open, fluid, and less frequent network of information after the period of stable economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s.
3.2 Meta-Governance
The emergence of a governance network means, in a sense, that government loses its
presence, which has attracted some theoretical criticism. Some argue that transformation
toward a governance network strengthens governmental control because government reconsiders a mix of policy tools. As a result, obligatory tools and regulatory commands
and controls lose their importance and effectiveness, and softer ones are more broadly
and effectively used. According to dominant theories such as Levi-Faur (2012), though,the private sector and the market are increasingly important; governments are still at thecentre of governance, and they control governance by building relationships with the private sector at various levels; public administration is the mix of regulations of various
forms and methods formulated and implemented together by governments and the private sector. Therefore, both government and governance are evolving, spreading, and increasing their influence on society.
A governance network, in contrast to a conventional hierarchical ‘government’, then,brings up another question: What is the role of government and what are its limits inthe emerging horizontal network? Sørensen and Torfing (2009), public administration researchers at Roskilde University in Denmark, also examine this issue. They argue that, inthe network, careful meta-governance, or ‘governance of governance’, mostly by politicians and public managers, is necessary in order to ensure that the network contributes
to the effective and democratic governing of society. They also provide us with a systematic account of tools and methods for ‘meta-governors’ to deploy. Notably, their focus ison the impact of governance networks on what they broadly define as effective and democratic governance. According to them, the principal actors in the ‘governance network’interact through negotiations, which possibly combine bargaining with consensus-seeking
deliberation. When a governance network is first formed, there are no agreed uponnorms, procedures, or constitution to predetermine where and how a legitimate decision
is to be made. The on-going interactions among the network actors, however, will eventually lead to the formulation of a framework of rules, norms, values, and ideas that isboth precarious and incomplete. The institutionalized interaction facilitates a self-regulated policymaking process that always proceeds in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ cast by public/private meta-governors.
Bevir (2009: 131) describes meta-governance as ‘an umbrella concept that describes therole of the government and its characteristic policy instruments in the new governance,
where the governing is no longer a government monopoly’. The role of the government
has shifted away from the direct governance of society, or command and control, to themeta-governance of the actors, that is, the indirect steering of the actions and interacSpecial Edition of Annals, Public Policy Studies 2015, Hokkaido University

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tions of the relatively autonomous stakeholders now involved in governing society.
Kohara (2015: 298) eruditely translates Murakami’s (2013a–f ) findings into ‘meta-regulation’, or ‘regulation of regulation’; government agencies in charge of safety regulation
have experienced significant pressure toward international harmonization of technicalstandards, knowledge dispersal in the regulatory space, and sophistication of principalagent relationships among public and private actors. Although it appears that regulatory
discretion shrinks in this situation, government agencies view the regulatory process froma seemingly neutral and distant position, and manage or control the whole regulatory
system with various substantial or procedural regulatory schemes. Government agencies
strategically expand their regulatory discretion in a qualitative, if not quantitative, senseon ‘meta-regulation’.
3.3 Shadow of Hierarchy
Meta-governance, or meta-regulation, concerns the existence of informal government
control of coordination, bargaining, or diplomacy in the space of governance. Althoughmeta-governance takes various forms according to the governance network, a common
factor in what many researchers mention on governance is that government steers theboat rather than rows it (providing public services directly in a conventional sense).
Non-governmental actors do not only take on many facets of public policy implementation and service provision but also regulate themselves partly in response to public pressure. Governments govern organizations that govern civil society (governance ofgovernance). Those organizations, like private, voluntary, or governmental organizations
but separated from the executives, are unique, in that they have some autonomy fromgovernment, which is unable to manage them as it would internal organizations withtools that usually work within the governmental bureaucracy.
The way government controls or meta-governs civil society is to design rules for thegovernance game and let the actors play as they like. Rhodes (2012: 37) calls it ‘shadowof hierarchy’. Héritier and Lehmkuhl (2008) refer to a similar concept, supposing two
coexisting systems of (1) the territorially bounded democratic government and (2) sectoral governance in the governance sphere, as with the European Union. They find ‘pureself-regulations’, ‘regulated self-regulations’, and ‘co-regulations’ at the interface of thetwo systems, and that, in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’, there is a ‘tug of war’ of upward anddownward pressure to alter the ‘territory’ of government and governance (Lane 2009).
They illustrate how government threatens private actors by presenting the possible effectsof taking legal regulatory action, of altering the informal relationship into a formal one, ofconstant monitoring, or of de facto influence through budget and personnel resources.
Rhodes (2012: 37) discusses tools of government by which government brings about
institutional transformation and re-designation of the market. One is ‘storytelling’, withwhich government arranges dialogues, pulls out meanings and beliefs among the related
actors, and attempts to transform their behaviour. ‘Storytelling’ could refer to any of thefollowing: the bureaucratic power of extending a social campaign backed by the government’s reputation, which Carpenter (2011) examines; ‘reframing’ of the regulatory context (from regulatory reform in wooden buildings as a safety issue to a policy forregional development with grown wood use and for reconstruction and retraining of anindustrial community of builders and individual carpenters); policy coordination (asSpecial Edition of Annals, Public Policy Studies 2015, Hokkaido University

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when the automobile industry failed member manufacturers); and establishment of an‘umbrella statute’ that covers and locates in regulatory processes most of the public/private substantial/procedural schemes of safety regulation on electrical appliances. Anotherexample is ‘resource distribution’, by which government as a relatively neutral mediator
allows actors to work across borders, tipping the balance in the governance network,makes judgments on disputes as an authorized judicial court, changes the constitutionalmix, and takes action against governance network malfunctions. Government can use various tools in various situations in the meta-governance approach to public management.

4. Capture
4.1 Public/Private Interest
Carpenter and Moss (2014: 13) define regulatory capture as ‘the result by which regulation, in law or application, is consistently or repeatedly directed away from the public
interest and toward the interests of the regulated industry, by the intent and action of
the industry itself ’. This definition is robust because it can accommodate both legislative
and administrative capture. It is quite well known that industry, which can more easilyorganize itself for political mobilization than consumers, who are dispersed across regulatory space, is able to push, through the political process, politicians and regulatory organizations for favours. Stigler (1971) explained this process in terms of cost and benefit
analysis; the marginal cost of large and senior companies to exercise political power is sosmall and their marginal benefit is so big that it is easier for them to put pressure on theadministration to make regulations advantageous for them.
As for the above-mentioned definition of regulatory capture, a concept of ‘public interest’ should not be taken for granted, because it is one of the most disputable mattersof argument in political science or society in general, with various risks. Carpenter andMoss (2014: 14) ask for a defeasible model of ‘public interest’ to find evidence of regulatory capture. Carpenter (2014, 61) considers four possibilities to grasp the concept: (1)a stipulated concept, on the basis of accepted theory or a broad range of empirical evidence, (2) a republican understanding, whereby long-run judgments of democraticallyelected public officials or aggregated public opinion suggest that the people’s judgment issuperior (though somewhat biased) to that of any other actor, (3) a technocratic or scientific approach, which refers to clear evidence with partial or full information given by
aggregated empirical studies from the scientific literature, such as medicine or publichealth, and (4) a procedural evaluation, or as he puts it ‘focusing on circumstantial evidence’, by trying to identify the special interests involved and examine those institutions
and outcomes that would seem consistent with their having been advantaged.
Murakami (2013c–e) translates into ‘public interest’ a decrease in fire outbreak inwooden buildings, a decrease in the dead and injured in car and ship accidents, and adecrease in emergence of faulty products and consumers’ complaints. It is understandable
enough that a serious accident at a nuclear plant is the result of a power company’s regulatory capture, as mentioned later. However, it is true that this is only ‘circumstantial evidence’, and it does not tell us causality of capture or regulatory outcome. Besides, public
and private interest may not be as binary as before. Needless to cite CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) linked to ‘enterprise value’ or reputation in the stock market, private
actors have more or less responsibility to the public. Practitioners may answer our quesSpecial Edition of Annals, Public Policy Studies 2015, Hokkaido University

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tionnaire that they do not push their selfish interests through the regulatory process. Thisis recognized as a limitation of interviews or oral history, on which quite many qualitative researchers rely when conducting fieldwork. One way to negate this problem is tofind and compare interviews with other, objective evidence.
4.2 Corrosive Capture
Carpenter and Moss (2014: 16), who advocate for sophisticating capture theory
through more systemized empirical research, emphasize that their definition of capture
does not require a captured policy process resulting in more rent-enhancing regulation,
as Stigler (1971) imagined. Previous research on capture following Stigler has mentionedthat regulatory policy is largely funded by those most interested and able to buy it, and,as a result, newcomers to the industry find it difficult to join the competition. The ‘entry-barrier capture’, which put the reduction or weakening of regulation somewhat out ofsight, is likely to be linked even to a policy prescription of recommending deregulation.
On the contrary, Carpenter and Moss (2014: 16–7) say that a capture policy process
can also produce less public interest-serving regulation, which reduces the regulatory
costs that industry has to pay. They call this kind of deregulation ‘corrosive capture’. Particularly with the rise of health, safety, and environmental regulation, industry-specificregulators have become less common, along with industry pressure to reduce the scope of
regulation (Moss and Carpenter 2014: 452). Deregulation, which previous studies haveeven recommended dealing with ‘entry-barrier capture’, is no longer a panacea for regulatory capture. Corrosive capture is described as potentially taking the form of reduced
entry but is far more commonly observed in the reduction of costly rules and enforcement actions that cut into the profits of industry, or those who are regulated.
What interests me is that such ‘corrosive capture’ may be more common in Japan, as
the National Diet of Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation
Commission pointed out in its report published in 2012: ‘our investigation focused on
the significant lobbying role taken by FEPC [The Federation of Electric Companies ofJapan] on behalf of the operators, and scrutinized the relationship between the operatorsand regulators. The Commission found that the actual relationship lacked independence
and transparency and was far from being a ‘safety culture’. In fact, it was a typical example of ‘regulatory capture’, in which the oversight of the industry by regulators effectively
ceases. We found examples of this in the neutering of revisions in the Guideline for
Anti-Seismic Design and the improper discussions that took place on regulating severe
accident countermeasures’ (quoted from the executive summary, p. 43). It is true that thedoor to enter into the Japanese power market is still narrow (though institutional reformis beginning to separate electrical power production from power distribution and transmission), but the above-mentioned ‘regulatory capture’ is not likely to have contributed
to entry barrier but to have brought cost reduction and some benefits for existing powercompanies.
Corrosive capture, I think, can also be explained by organization theory, or possible
deviation in principal-agent relationships. In regulatory standard setting and implementation, the governance network, or the administrative guidance (or gyousei-shidou) system in Japan, may be seen as a mix of plural principal-agent relationships. The dilemma
occurs when private partners (the agent), whose large discretion given through the conSpecial Edition of Annals, Public Policy Studies 2015, Hokkaido University

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tract might have yielded much more benefit as a whole, seek their interest so much as toeven reduce the benefit of the regulator (the principal). A study by McCubbins and
Schwartz (1984) is also applicable—though they focus on the relationship of Congress as
democratic principal and the executive branch as agent—to organization theory of theprincipal-agent relationship in general. Their prescribed model of ‘police patrol’ and ‘fire
alarms’ are in need because the agent has a tendency to try to maximize his interest surreptitiously. This is why strategies and mechanisms for preventing capture are discussed
in academics, some of which will also be discussed later on in this paper.
4.3 Cultural Capture
Kwak (2014: 78–9) names a phenomenon in which the regulated industry can shapepolicy outcomes through influences other than material incentives and rational debate:‘cultural capture’. The capture is cultural because it operates through a set of shared but
not explicitly stated understandings about the world, such as assumptions, lenses, andvocabularies. Cultural capture is also friendly to ‘corrosive capture’ because it is more
likely to be deployed for deregulatory purposes in health, safety, and environmental regulations at the expense of citizens and consumers than for the creation and maintenanceof entry barriers. Traditional capture relies on putting pressure on politicians, the ‘revolving door’, or, as a somewhat softer form of power, campaign contributions. Implicit quid
pro quos are almost certainly more typical, and industry may find even implicit deals
unnecessary when broader influence can be exercised, indirectly, through cultural capture. Some phenomena can also be seen in a sense as ‘cultural capture’ in Japan; corrosive capture of nuclear safety regulation is typical because the safety myth of nuclear
power and inerrancy of nuclear policy or regulatory implementation are often explained
to have been gradually created and established by regulators, power companies, and surrounding stakeholders, even though the origin is not clear. It might be difficult to pin
cultural capture as a cause of corrosive capture, but the above-mentioned storytelling or
reframing can be a factor, as Murakami (2013f: 1103–1104) suggests.
It should be quite natural to extend this discussion to strategies and mechanisms forpreventing capture, although it is rare in political science. Moss and Carpenter (2014:
458–464) enlist, through empirical research, in the volume: (1) dividing power acrossmultiple regulators so that competition among them can reduce the likelihood of collusion between individual regulators and a regulated industry by driving up the cost, (2)introducing and employing administrative procedures so that regulators are effectively
given greater autonomy from legislators and the playing field is levelled across weak/strong interests by requiring greater openness, such as public notice and public comment, (3) media coverage and journalistic scrutiny so that capture follows the public will
toward the legislature or alerts for the public to hidden problems behind the capture, (4)consumer empowerment and the promise of diffuse interests so that consumer interest,
which is unlikely to be represented in the policy process, is counterweighted against concentrated industrial interests, (5) diversifying the sources of independent expertise, suchas through an academic advisory board, so that regulators’ scientific expertise and technical competence heightens their legitimacy and autonomy, and (6) executive review ofregulations based on cost-benefit analysis because an executive department, such as theWhite House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, creates an additional external
check on agency behaviour and decisions through standardized analysis.

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Some of these, such as the administrative procedure law, the consumer protection law,
relatively open membership on the advisory commission (or shingi-kai), an independent
regulatory agency (Murakami 2013g), and executive review through a policy assessment
procedure (Murakami 2015b), have already been realized in Japan, but there is still muchto be done to prevent legislative or administrative capture that does not contribute to
public interest. In addition, it is important to find evidence for the causal relationships
between various captures, weak and strong, and policy outcomes in the regulatory space.

5. Conclusion
This paper reviewed recent theoretical trends and new frameworks of regulation (regulatory governance, regulatory capitalism, and a shift from command and control), governance (governance network, meta-governance, and shadow of hierarchy), and capture(definition of public/private interest, corrosive and cultural capture). Then, it presented
significant evidence for these processes as found in my previous case studies on Japanese
regulations on wooden buildings, automobiles, electrical appliances, ships, and otherproducts. In the Japanese unique (in a sense) system of governance network of public
and private actors, or the gyousei-shidou system in the regulatory space, in which a regulatory agency sometimes willingly joins hands with those who are regulated to implement policy effectively, corrosive or cultural capture, which has been newly defined by
Carpenter and Moss (2014), seems more likely to occur than conventional capture theorists assume. However, the further comparative testing of regulatory practice is still to be
conducted.
My previous case studies are, I believe, not just followers of ‘cutting-edge’ theories andframeworks but also offer suggestions of curious agendas to be scrutinized. Firstly, a casestudy of technical standard setting and implementation, as mine implies that scientifictechnology, not just information as a regulatory resource in general, is a political factor
and an important determinant of the regulatory space. The regulator and those who are
regulated are interdependent in terms of technical knowledge, uncertainty, risks, research,and development and the policies that affect them. Secondly, regulatory implementationand enforcement take place at the local level, and the impact of regulatory capitalism,
such as the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), affects Japanese everyday life and especiallyrural districts, such as Hokkaido. My further research will continue investigating, withdoubt and suspicion, Braithwaite’s (2008: 73) proposition; regulatory capitalism is designed by city dwellers for city dwellers, and we must not lose sight of the fact that it
has failed rural people.

Acknowledgements
This research has been supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) titled ‘Study on Public/Private Collaborative Regulatory System from the Perspective of Public Administration (No. 25780087)’ and the HOPS grant. I would like tothank all the anonymous interviewees and the colleagues in my academic community,
including Dean, Professor Dr Mikine YAMAZAKI, for their sincere cooperation andvaluable advice. However, please note that I am responsible for all the information inthis paper.

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