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

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.