Global Solidarity? Philanthropic Legitimacy, Justice, and Vulnerabilities in Japanese Foundations

This article analyses how Japanese philanthropic foundations—particularly the Nippon Foundation, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and the Toyota Foundation—conceptualize and implement transnational solidarity in their environmental and climate programmes. Through a comparative examination of domestic (Japan) and transnational (Southeast Asia and the Pacific) interventions, the study explores how discourses of sustainability, resilience, and protection against vulnerability reshape priorities of social and environmental justice within Japanese philanthropy. The analysis draws on a theoretical framework combining environmental justice, postcolonial solidarities, and philanthropic legitimacy to examine how foundations articulate notions of vulnerability and moral responsibility. Based on a corpus comprising institutional documents and interviews with NGO partners and researchers, the study shows that Japanese philanthropic foundations mobilize a rhetoric of environmental justice grounded in values of social harmony, risk prevention, and regional leadership. However, the findings suggest that these interventions often express a selective form of solidarity, in which environmental vulnerabilities deemed “neutral” or technically solvable are prioritised over structural social injustices such as inequality, marginalisation, and economic dependency. This selectivity reinforces the foundations’ humanitarian soft power function and contributes to the construction of Japan’s moral legitimacy on the Asian stage, without consistently addressing the root causes of vulnerability. By illuminating these tensions between global solidarity and the implicit hierarchisation of vulnerabilities, the article offers a critical contribution to the study of environmental philanthropy and moral geopolitics in Asia.