The case of Japan has a great potential to enhance theorizing on global change, including with the broadening of perspectives beyond Europe. Manuel Castells, for instance, including the Asia-Pacific and Japan in his seminal work, argued that in the Information Age, states are caught between and called into question by the opposing trends of globalisation on the one hand and powerful expressions of local collective identity on the other. According to Castells, this compels states to decentralize power to local and regional political institutions. Hence, ‘nation-states may retain their decision-making capacity, but, having become part of a network of powers and counter powers, they are dependent on a broader system of enacting authority and influence from multiple sources. The theory of power, in this context, supersedes the theory of the state’. Therefore, analyses of power relations can only be done meaningfully with reference to specific policies, such as they are analysed in this project. Pointing to the negative social and environmental consequences of industrialization, that is ‘first modernity’, as well as the dissolution of old certainties in the present times of the ‘second modernity’, the prominent sociologist Ulrich Beck, similar to Castells, argued that, paradoxically, states must de-nationalize and internationalize in order to fulfil their national interests. He and other Risk Society theorists therefore see a new form of states emerging through the mechanism of a ‘cosmopolitan moment’, that is in essence the realization by people that they have to deal with each other beyond national boundaries in order to find solutions to the major problems of our time, and to build effective frameworks of global governance. Indeed, if the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe has not put in doubt the very purpose of the state and its institutions, what else would? Yet, the political consequences of profound socio-economic change, the conceptions of emerging network states and cosmopolitan states in particular, remain tenuous. As Craig Calhoun points out, there remains a teleological (Eurocentric) bias toward cosmopolitanism, and Richard Samuels noted in his analysis of 3.11 crisis management and post-disaster politics, that the call has been ‘for recovery, not for change’. However, the questions what precisely is being recovered, and, whether this recovery is sustainable, remain to be answered.