annai.ai

How much of a Japanese policy is settled before you hear of it?

Each dot on this page is a public record: an announcement, a consultation or a bill. Scroll to see where the text of a policy can still change, and where it cannot.

annai: Japanese policy, stage by stage
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Each dot is one announcement from a Japanese ministry or regulator. On Friday 18 September 2026 there were 129.
They came from 14 bodies, from health and transport to the nuclear regulator. Nobody reads all of them.
For a telecom operator, one of the 129 mattered: a call for comments on the frequency reallocation plan. It had a deadline.
A call for comments is a consultation: the stage where a draft is public and can still change. Japan ran 765 of them in fiscal 2009.Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, FY2009 survey, p. 5
418 of them received comments.
And in 136 of those, about one in three, the final text differed from the draft.Source: MIC survey of consultations, FY2009, p. 5: 136 of 418
Later stages are much less open. In the 2025 regular session the cabinet submitted 59 new bills to the Diet.
56 passed. 12 of them were amended, more than usual, under a minority government. The rest passed exactly as the cabinet wrote them.Source: Nikkei, June 2025
Change itself is uneven. Across Western democracies, most year-to-year budget changes are tiny and a few are enormous: long quiet, then a sudden jump.Pattern: Jones et al., American Journal of Political Science, 2009. The shape here is a sketch, not their data.
So the question is never only what is changing, but at which stage. annai places every item on the chain and marks its window: open, narrowing, closing or closed.

The science

Why the stage matters more than the headline

Political scientists have studied the timing of policy change for four decades. Four findings explain why a signal from the first stages is worth more than one from the last.

Policy windows

Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 1984

Change happens when a recognised problem, a ready proposal and political will meet. Such moments are brief. When one closes, the next may be years away.

Punctuated equilibrium

Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Jones et al., 2009

Policies stay stable for long periods and then change suddenly. Budget data from many democracies show the same fat-tailed shape. A quiet month says little about the next one.

The Collingridge dilemma

Collingridge, The Social Control of Technology, 1980

Early on, a rule is easy to change, but its effects are hard to see. By the time its effects are clear, it has become costly to change.

Path dependence

David, Clio and the Economics of QWERTY, 1985

Early choices constrain later ones, because costs and habits build around them. Early decisions also last longest.

Four cases

What windows look like in Japan

1895

Two purchases split a national grid

Tokyo's utility bought German generators running at 50 Hz. Osaka bought American ones at 60 Hz a year later. Japan still runs both, and east and west can exchange only as much power as the converter stations between them allow: 2.1 GW since 2021.

Converter capacity between east and west 2.1 GW now 3.0 GW planned, end of FY2027
Path dependence: a decision taken in months, still costing money 130 years later.
1970

Fourteen laws in one session

After years of pollution cases, the extraordinary Diet of 24 November to 18 December 1970 passed all 14 pollution bills the government submitted. The Environment Agency opened on 1 July 1971. (ERCA)

Punctuated equilibrium: slow change for a decade, then a whole field rewritten in 25 days.
2011

A bill approved on the morning of 11 March

The cabinet approved the renewable-energy feed-in tariff bill that morning. The earthquake struck in the afternoon and delayed its submission. The Diet passed it on 26 August 2011, and it took effect in July 2012. (House of Councillors research office, p. 2)

Policy windows: a shock can delay a window, reopen it, and change who is paying attention.
2025

An AI law, fixed three months before it was news

Japan's AI Promotion Act was submitted to the Diet on 28 February 2025 and promulgated unchanged on 4 June. An alert set for promulgation arrived three months after the text had stopped changing. (House of Councillors bill record: passed without amendment)

The Collingridge dilemma: by the time it was widely reported, it could no longer change.

What you get

Everything in your policy areas, placed on the chain, for ¥75,000 a month

One price for your whole organisation, however many people use it.

Every item on the chain

Each item in your three areas is placed at its stage, from council to law in force, with what came before it.

The window, with the days left

Open, narrowing, closing or closed. Consultation deadlines are counted down, so nothing closes unseen.

Ministries and regulators, daily

Their announcements, e-Gov consultations and council pages, with new sources added as we go. An ordinary Friday brings well over a hundred announcements, and annai reads them all.

English, with the Japanese source

Every title is translated, and every fact links to the government document it came from.

A weekly brief

What opened, what is closing and what moved, written for the people you report to.

Your team's notes on each item

Shared across unlimited users. What you track and write is never sent to a language model.

Search across everything

Every announcement, consultation and council document collected, in one place.

Set up with you

We define your three policy areas together at the start, and adjust them as your work changes.

¥75,000 a month

Per organisation, before tax. Unlimited users, three policy areas. We are starting with a small number of teams.

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