But those can mostly be explained within each moral framework (e.g. social conservatism is keeping the us vs. them mentality: "no social benefits for immigrants" or similar).
Keep in mind these are not totally coherent, precisely defined theories, but instead are formed subconsciously by growing up in a particular social environment.
And to clarify, the main point of the article is that in Japan politics is not organised around how people stand on these moral questions, not that these debates don't happen. The article does not, for example, make the claim that in Japanese criminal politics there isn't a debate between redemption and retribution but rather that positions of the individual politicians in this debate will not correlate very much with their party allegiance.
Why? In my understanding the overton window is a sliding frame on an axis, so it makes no statement about the axis, only about the position on the axis.
> And to clarify, the main point of the article is that in Japan politics is not organised around how people stand on these moral questions, not that these debates don't happen.
Yes, that is what I have understood from the text, too. I find it hard to believe that there is no ideological consistency there (how are people able to make moral decisions without them, i.e. integrate their behaviour with their sense of identity?), though just as in the west the ideology and the actual political practice can obviously differ widely.
I guess it's a technical and semantic objection: A (one dimensional) window by necessity has two endpoints, and "pole" is a word that defines a point. Your use of pole is however more in the sense of direction rather than endpoint; an axis is a direction and as such can be defined by any two points along it and no set of points have such a privileged position that they warrant the label "pole".
> I find it hard to believe that there is no ideological consistency
Again, it's a statement about how parties are organised and not about how people in general believe the world works. Though I suppose this circumstance also implies there is a fairly dominant agreement on the essentials of the world-view.
I think they meant another dimension than you. I've looked into the underlying value systems in the US and Germany as part of my phd, and the underlying moral frameworks are essentially identical: there are two basic ideas of how a society should look like (the progressive and the conservative idea), and what each idea consists of is almost identical (modulo country-specific weights).
* criminal justice: redemption vs. retribution
* social safety: more of it, and collectively organized vs. less of it, and individually organized
* abortion/women's rights: pro women vs. contra abortion
* environmental protection: important vs. unimportant
* education: focus on equal opportunities for all vs. focus on elite institutions
and so on.
The actual parties differ of course, and the overton window of "mainstream" political views certainly do. But the underlying moral dualism has the same two poles.