Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 742 of 742 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
After the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident, Japan adopted a government-led mid-and-long-term decommissioning roadmap and set completion at roughly 30โ40 years after cold shutdown, treating the work as continuous risk reduction rather than a one-off rebuild.
Japan put the government in front of the operator, broke an unprecedented nuclear clean-up into staged milestones, invited international review and treated each step as risk reduction while preserving a long horizon for work that cannot be rushed safely.
Preconditions
A state capable of holding responsibility across electoral cycles and coordinating the operator, regulator and local communities
Technical institutions and international reviewers able to test milestones under deep uncertainty
A funding and monitoring system that can keep safety work moving while revising methods as evidence changes
Where else it has been used: Long-horizon decommissioning roadmaps travel to other countries facing nuclear accidents or legacy hazards, but Fukushima makes the precondition explicit: a plan must be a living risk-reduction system with independent review, not a distant completion date.
Limits: A roadmap horizon is a planning commitment, not evidence that decommissioning will finish on time, within cost or with public consent. The technical condition of fuel debris and contaminated water remains uncertain, and the government and operator report progress within their own programme. The case measures willingness to plan across decades and revise stages, not successful completion.
Japan Science and Technology Agency ran 42 COI-NEXT co-creation centres in April 2023, 30 full-scale and 12 in a development stage, most led by universities and some by national research institutes, which in fiscal 2022 counted 1,073 participating organisations, 256 universities and research institutes and 817 companies and others, with 2,566 participants from the company side.
JST funds a university-led centre for up to ten years around a stated vision for society, requires the university's leadership to commit and firms to contribute resources, and steps down its funding in the final years so the centre must find its own.
Preconditions
Universities with industry-liaison offices able to run a multi-partner centre
Firms willing to second staff and contribute in kind over years
A funding agency able to commit to a ten-year horizon with stage-gate reviews
Where else it has been used: COI-NEXT succeeds the 2013 to 2021 Center of Innovation programme (COI STREAM) and carries over its centre format, adding regional centres led by local universities with municipalities and local firms.
Limits: The source is the funding ministry's own briefing, written to defend the programme's budget before a government spending review, and the participant counts are its self-reported totals. The counts are on PDF page 13 (printed page 12) and the centre counts on PDF page 10 (printed page 9). The organisation counts are for fiscal 2022 alone and are now more than three years old. The category is 'companies and others' (ไผๆฅญ็ญ), which can include municipalities and other non-academic bodies, so 817 is an upper bound on firms. The ministry's claim that external income of about 15.4 billion yen already exceeds about 14 billion yen of support counts resources the firms provided at their own valuation. The 2020 start year is inferred from the heading 'activities FY2020 to FY2022' on the same page. MEXT's fiscal 2026 budget sheet plans support for about 37 centres in the main fields, fewer than 42, which partly reflects centres graduating from support.
๐ฏ๐ตJapansince 1999still operatingbears on Public-private collaboration
Under the 1999 PFI Act, Japanese national and local governments had published implementation policies for a cumulative 1,219 PFI projects by 31 March 2026, 80 of them public facility operating concessions, with a cumulative initial contract value of ยฅ10.47 trillion (104,730 hundred-million yen).
The national government legislated a standard route for private finance, design, construction and operation of public facilities, and a Cabinet Office promotion office published guidelines, case collections and annual counts, so that municipalities could procure schools, waste plants and civic buildings through PFI and, from 2011, grant operating concessions for airports and water works.
Preconditions
Fiscal pressure on local governments that made spreading capital costs over a service period attractive.
Large domestic contractors and banks willing to form special-purpose companies for small and mid-size local projects.
A central promotion office able to issue standard guidance and keep the national register of projects.
Where else it has been used: Japan adapted the UK PFI model in 1999 and kept using and widening it, adding concessions in 2011, while the UK stopped using it for new central-government projects in 2018.
Limits: The count is of projects whose implementation policy was published, which the Cabinet Office tracks by its own survey; a published policy is not a delivered asset, although the note says projects cancelled during service or abandoned before service began are excluded. Most projects are small and local: the sectoral table in the same annex shows local governments sponsoring the large majority (for example 397 of 454 culture and education projects), so the record evidences a widely used procurement route rather than large national infrastructure. The contract value covers initial contract amounts where a public payment was fixed and excludes concession fees, and the annex itself says it differs from the project-scale measure in the 2026 PPP/PFI Action Plan. Nothing here shows value for money or service quality. The figures are read from charts and a table in a PDF (project counts on page 1, contract values on page 2, concessions on page 3, sector table on page 4); the summary page at https://www8.cao.go.jp/pfi/pfi_jouhou/pfi_joukyou/pfi_joukyou_r7.html states 1,219 and 80 in text. The Cabinet Office is the programme's own promoter.
Japan's national and prefectural governments trained 225,176 people through public vocational training in fiscal year 2023, 95,752 of them jobseekers and 114,552 people in work, and a further 44,699 through job-seeker support training.
The national government, through polytechnic centres run by its employment support agency, and the prefectures run free vocational courses for jobseekers and fee-based upskilling for employees, contract much of the jobseeker training to accredited private providers, and route trainees through Hello Work offices.
Preconditions
A national network of public vocational schools and polytechnic centres
Unemployment insurance and a training allowance so jobseekers can afford to attend
Employment offices that refer trainees and track whether they find work
Where else it has been used: Korea's employer training system and Germany's Federal Employment Agency vouchers do similar work. The Japanese model is distinctive for keeping a large public provider of its own beside contracted private training.
Limits: The figures sit in a table on page 10 of a PDF. The 225,176 total includes 14,872 school-leaver trainees who are mostly young people entering work, not adults returning to learning. Against a labour force of roughly 69 million, public training reaches well under one percent of workers a year; most adult learning in Japan is employer-provided and is not counted here. Trainee counts say nothing about the quality of training beyond the employment rates the same table reports for jobseeker courses.
Japan's cross-government regulatory sandbox, created in 2018 under the Productivity Improvement Act and made permanent in 2021 under the Industrial Competitiveness Enhancement Act, had approved 33 demonstration plans involving 152 businesses by 19 March 2025, across mobility, IoT, fintech and healthcare.
The Cabinet Secretariat opened one government-wide window where a firm can propose a time- and participant-limited trial, and the minister responsible for each affected law approves it after checking with an expert committee, so ministries must answer within fixed timelines and use the trial data to review the rule.
Preconditions
A cabinet-level secretariat with authority to route a proposal to every regulating ministry
A statute that lets ministers approve trials without first amending the underlying law
Firms willing to publish trial plans and results for the data to inform rule changes
Where else it has been used: Built on the UK FCA's fintech sandbox but widened from one regulator to all ministries; Korea's 2019 regulatory sandbox took the cross-sector form further and reports far higher approval counts.
Limits: The count comes from the sandbox's own secretariat in a promotional briefing, not a statistics release. Thirty-three plans over more than six years is about five a year, a modest rate for an economy of Japan's size, and the count says nothing about how many trials led to a permanent rule change; the annex lists some special measures (for example a 2020 insurance-law exception for P2P insurance) but the briefing gives no total of rules amended. A plan is counted at approval, not completion, and several approved plans are small single-firm demonstrations. The briefing's annex dates each approval: 19 of the 33 plans were approved by October 2020, and about three a year since, with one in 2024, so the scheme's use slowed sharply after its first two years. Japan runs other experimentation regimes (national strategic special zones, the grey-zone resolution system, the FSA fintech hub) that are not in this count, so it understates sandbox-type activity as the construct defines it while also overstating it as evidence of reform.
By July 2024 Japan reported 93.08 million My Number Cards held, about 75% of the population; 73.71 million had valid health-insurance-card registrations in June 2024, while 566 businesses used the public-key identity infrastructure.
Japan built one nationally recognised credential and progressively connected it to health insurance, public accounts, online procedures and private identity verification, using legal changes and a central digital agency to extend the rail while responding to implementation problems.
Preconditions
A national resident-number and civil-registration system that can anchor one credential
A central authority able to align ministries, municipalities, hospitals, banks and software providers
Correction, support and privacy mechanisms that can handle errors as the identity rail expands
Where else it has been used: Foundational digital identity can travel, but Japan's experience shows the difficult second phase: linking a widely issued card to many services while retaining a way to correct records and support people who cannot rely on an app.
Limits: Card holdings and registrations measure administrative reach, not active use, accuracy, privacy, accessibility or whether services became easier. The Digital Agency aggregates government and survey data, and the health-insurance and private-sector figures cover different dates and definitions. A high stock of cards can coexist with misregistrations, support burdens and people who cannot use a digital credential.
๐ฏ๐ตJapansince 2011still operatingbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan completed the planned 29,654 public-housing units by December 2020, completed 18,226 higher-ground residential-land units, opened about 570 kilometres of reconstruction roads by December 2021 and restored all damaged railways by March 2020.
29,654 housing units, public-housing units completed in the reconstruction plan, 2020-12. 570 kilometres, reconstruction roads opened to traffic, 2021-12. Reconstruction Agency of Japan, progress to date, retrieved 2026-08-31.
The move, and what it needed
Japan set a ten-year reconstruction frame, created a dedicated agency and combined higher-ground relocation, public housing, roads, rail restoration and livelihood support, reviewing the programme as the ordinary disaster areas moved from emergency recovery toward long-term revitalisation.
Preconditions
A national fiscal and administrative framework able to coordinate prefectures and municipalities after a catastrophic shock
Land-use, housing and infrastructure plans that can move people and assets out of hazard zones
A staged review process that separates completed physical works from the longer social and nuclear-recovery problems
Where else it has been used: Large post-disaster reconstruction agencies are a common response, but Tลhoku demonstrates why the physical delivery ledger must remain beside population, livelihood and social-recovery measures rather than being treated as the whole recovery.
Limits: Completion of housing, roads and railways shows delivery against a public programme, not whether communities regained population, livelihoods, trust or long-term safety. The agency notes that nuclear-disaster areas and support for evacuees continue, and the figures mix planned units, roads and different completion dates. A completed asset is not the same as a recovered place.
Japan's MEXT GIGA School programme reached a one-device-per-student environment in 1,810 of 1,812 local school authorities (99.9%) by the end of fiscal 2022, with the remaining two scheduled to finish during fiscal 2023.
The national ministry set a clear one-device standard and channelled grants, procurement guidance and network support through local school authorities, while vendors supplied hardware and software and schools adapted use to their own classrooms.
Preconditions
Central funding and a simple, measurable service standard that local authorities can procure against
Procurement, connectivity and technical-support capacity in every school authority
Teacher training, maintenance and replacement plans that continue after the initial hardware push
Where else it has been used: Rapid school-device rollouts travel during crises, but Japan's experience shows that physical coverage is only the first gate; sustained capability depends on support, content and renewal budgets after the delivery headline fades.
Limits: The completion count means a device was in a student's hands and a school network was usable; it does not measure learning, teacher workload, device quality, replacement costs or equal use at home. MEXT reports the authority survey and the last two authorities were still finishing after the reference year. Delivery of hardware is therefore a national implementation milestone, not proof of better education.
๐ฏ๐ตJapansince 1994dismantledbears on Large project delivery
Japan decided in December 2016 not to restart the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor and moved to decommissioning after a 1995 sodium leak, a 2010 restart followed by equipment trouble and 2012 inspection failures; the approved plan targets roughly 30 years of decommissioning.
After repeated technical and inspection failures, Japan stopped trying to restart a strategically important prototype, created a government-led decommissioning team and converted the remaining work into a staged thirty-year plan with external oversight and local coordination.
Preconditions
A regulator and review process able to expose inspection and management failures
Political authority to end a sunk-cost programme despite regional and industrial commitments
A technical decommissioning institution with funding, specialist staff and a safe plan for fuel, sodium and waste
Where else it has been used: Monju travels as a lesson in stopping: adaptive capacity includes an orderly exit from a prestige technology when safety and management evidence no longer support restart, plus a plan that preserves knowledge while removing the hazard.
Limits: The decision to end the programme and its planned duration do not quantify total cost, opportunity cost, safety performance or the amount of equipment actually removed. The government account describes the policy and management failures and the successor decommissioning plan; it is not an independent assessment of the nuclear programme's full social effects.
๐ฏ๐ตJapansince 2012delivered and closedbears on Large project delivery
Japan's Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency built the 125 km Kanazawa to Tsuruga extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen from 2012; its authorised cost rose from 1.1858 trillion yen in 2017 to 1.6779 trillion yen after a second increase of 265.8 billion yen in March 2021, completion slipped one year to the end of fiscal 2023, and the line opened on 16 March 2024.
16,779 100 million yen (oku-yen), authorised project cost after the march 2021 revision, 2021-03. 2,658 100 million yen (oku-yen), cost increase approved in the march 2021 revision, 2021-03. Board of Audit of Japan, fiscal 2020 audit report, chapter 4 item 11, retrieved 2026-10-01.
The move, and what it needed
The transport ministry authorised a state construction agency to build the line on a politically accelerated deadline; when the agency disclosed a second overrun late, the ministry set up an external verification committee, downgraded the agency's performance rating and issued a statutory improvement order, and the Board of Audit examined the causes in its annual report.
Preconditions
A specialised state construction agency with decades of high-speed rail experience
Independent audit and ministerial evaluation that can publish an overrun against a named project
Funding arrangements (lease fees, existing-line sale proceeds, local contributions) able to absorb an increase without stopping the works
Where else it has been used: Japan's verification committee and audit report resemble the UK's National Audit Office reviews of HS2; the difference is that the Japanese line opened within one year of its revised date while HS2 was cut back.
Limits: This is a delivery with a large overrun, filed because the construct asks for cost and schedule performance, not as a success. The overrun against the 2017 authorised cost is about 41 percent (1.6779 against 1.1858 trillion yen), a figure computed here, not published; against the 2012 plan it cannot be computed from this source. The final outturn cost after the March 2021 revision is not in the audit report, and the opening date comes from the delivery agency's own page. The one-year slip is measured against a deadline that the government had itself pulled three years forward in 2015, so part of the 'delay' is a political acceleration that did not hold. Some of the increase reflects new seismic standards and a consumption-tax rise, which an auditor might count as scope or price change rather than poor management; the audit office and the ministry's own verification committee nonetheless found weak reporting from site to headquarters and inadequate ministry oversight, and the ministry issued a formal business-improvement order. One project is not a national track record.
Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency reported 732,223 volunteer fire-corps members on 1 April 2025, a fall of 14,458 in one year in the local disaster-response corps that it describes as a core of community resilience.
Japan embeds trained local volunteers in municipal fire organisations, gives them equipment and a formal role in prevention and disaster response, and is now adding function-specific and student units as the general membership base shrinks. The erosion shows that a long-standing civic institution needs an active recruitment and role-design strategy to remain deployable.
Preconditions
Municipal fire organisations able to train, equip and insure residents who serve alongside professional crews
A social norm and compensation structure that make recurring emergency service compatible with work and family life
Flexible roles, youth and women recruitment, and a data system that reveals membership and participation gaps
Where else it has been used: Volunteer emergency corps travel when local legitimacy is matched with practical support and flexible participation; simply asking communities to volunteer does not replace equipment, training or a reason to stay.
Limits: Membership is a capacity proxy, not the number of volunteers who turn out, hours trained, response quality or lives and property protected. The agency reports a one-year decline but this record does not identify its causes or establish a long-run causal trend; local corps differ in duties, age structure and recruitment, and the national total can hide uneven resilience.