Tables and Figures v
Susan Pharr
Introduction: Recognizing Civil Society in Japan 1
Frank Schwartz
Context
1 What Is Civil Society? 33
Frank Schwartz
2 From Meiji
to Heisei: The State and Civil Society in Japan 64
Sheldon Garon
3 Capitalism and Civil
Society in Postwar Japan:
Perspectives from Intellectual History 99
Andrew Barshay
4 Japan’s
Civil Society Organizations in Comparative Perspective 129
Tsujinaka Yutaka
Robert Pekkanen
6 After Aum: Religion and Civil Society in Japan 205
Helen Hardacre
7
State-Society Partnerships in the Japanese Welfare State 238
Margarita Estévez-Abe
The
Nonmarket Activities of Economic Actors
8 Redefining
the Conservative Coalition:
Agriculture and Small
Business in Japan 273
Robert Bullock
9 The
Death of Unions’ Associational Life?
Political and Cultural
Aspects of Enterprise Unions 305
Suzuki Akira
10 The Struggle for an Independent Consumer
Society:
Consumer Activism and the State’s Response in Postwar Japan 344
Patricia Maclachlan
Part Four
State-Civil
Society Linkages
11 Media and the Internet in the Development
of Civil Society in Japan 381
Laurie Freeman
12 A Tale of Two Legal Systems: Prosecuting
Corruption in Japan and Italy 412
David Johnson
Part Five
Globalization
and Value Change
13 Trust and
Social Intelligence in Japan 451
Yamagishi Toshio
14 Building Global Civil Society from the
Outside In?
Japan’s Development NGOs, the State, and International
Norms 479
Kim Reimann
Conclusion:
Targeting by an Activist State: Japan as a Civil Society Model 508
4-1 Number of Incorporated Organizations in the United States,
Japan, and Korea by Type
4-2 Incorporated Associations in the Survey Instrument (Japan, the
United States, and Korea)
4-3 The Absolute Number, Composition, and Density per 100,000 Persons of Associations, 1960-96
4-4 Number of Associations in the Telephone
Directory
4-5 The Proportions of Different Types of Civil Society Organizations in Japan, the United States and Korea
4-6 Correlation Between the Per Capita Number
of Associational Establishments and Total Establishments in All Industries
4-7 Correlation Between the Per Capita Number
of Employees
in Associational
Establishments and Total Establishments in All Industries
4-8 Correlation
of Fluctuations in the Per Capita Number of Associational Establishments
and Total Establishments in All Industries
4-9 Correlation of Fluctuations in the Number of Per Capita Employees in Associational Establishments
and Total Establishments in All Industries
4-10 The Relative Strength of Advocacy
Associations in Terms of Organizational Resources
5-1 Civil Society Groups in Japan
14-1 Japanese Government Support for NGOs,
1991-98
I-1 The
Incorporation of Nongovernmental Organizations Under the NPO Law
4-1 Japanese
Civil Society Organizations in Institutional Perspective
4-2 The
Number of Associational Establishments in Japan, the United States, and Korea
4-3 The
Number of Associational Establishments in Japan, the United States, and Korea
4-4 Formation of Civil Society
Organizations in Five Sectors in Japan, the United States, and Korea
4-5 Formation of Civil Society Organizations
in the Producer, Social Service, and Advocacy Sectors in Japan, the United
States, and Korea
5-1 Civic Group Employment as a Percentage of
Total Employment
5-2 Public-Interest Legal Persons by Number
of Employees
13-1 The Effect of Positive or Negative Information on High and Low Trusters’
Estimations of a Target Person’s Trustworthiness
13-2 Low, Medium, and High Trusters’ Accuracy in Predicting Others’ Choices
in Prisoner’s Dilemma Experiments
13-3 The Relationship Between the Relative Standing
of Colleges and the Average Trust Score of Their Students
14-1 Number
of International Development NGOs per million, 1967-1996/98
14-2 Growth
of Japanese International Development NGOs, 1877-1997
15-1 State Orientations Toward Civil Society and
the Scope of State Policies: Four Possibilities
Preface
Susan J. Pharr
Substantial time has now passed since the term “civil society,” central to an earlier era of political discourse, regained favor to help conceptualize the social transformations that contributed to the collapse of state socialism across Eastern and Central Europe. The outpouring of academic works and popular writing since then on civil societies, past and present, across the world’s disparate regions attests to the power of the concept and its ability to transcend national boundaries. Coupled with the related concepts of social capital and the public sphere, civil society offers a powerful analytical tool for thinking about ways in which people, individually and in groups, link to broader political, social, and economic arrangements, whatever the country.
As the term is used in this book and
as most scholars today would agree, civil society consists of sustained,
organized social activity that occurs in groups that are formed outside the
state, the market, and the family.
But given the extraordinary range of settings —from cafes and dinner
parties to union halls, trade associations, and charities — in which people in
any nation come together, it should come as no surprise that the term has been
applied in a variety of ways, even when it comes to Western countries with
liberal democratic systems in common and similar institutional arrangements and
civic traditions. Extending the term
still further to illuminate developments in nondemocratic systems presents
still greater challenges. Indeed, the efforts to apply the term to all these
various settings highlight how important it is not only to develop a conceptual
framework that travels wells, but to consider how, in any given context, civil
societies emerge in the first place and become transformed over time.
Building on
the wealth of recent research on civil society, this book seeks to respond to
these needs and to make three main contributions.
First, it traces the rise of civil society in modern Japan, a country that offers a unique Laboratory for thinking about how, if we consider the whole sweep of Japanese history from the country’s accession to modern statehood in 1868 to the present, civil society fares under conditions ranging from authoritarianism to fascism to liberal democracy. Although the primary focus of the volume is contemporary Japan, several chapters (by Sheldon Garon, Andrew Barshay, and Tsujinaka Yutaka) look explicitly at the post-1868 evolution of civil society and thought about it in Japan, and many other authors examine aspects of the country’s civic legacy as it affects civil society today.
Second, this book goes beyond the condition of civil society to explore
the role of the state in shaping
civil society over time — hence its title.
Largely because the resurgence of interest in civil society stemmed from
developments in Eastern and Central Europe, where social groups and movements
emerged to challenge crumbing socialist regimes, most media accounts and,
indeed, a sizeable share of academic writing have tended to cast civil society
in an oppositional role in relation to the state. And, of course, glimpsing civil society in a country like Poland
when it is in the midst of a profound regime shift can lend credence to such a
view. But once one’s perspective
encompasses lengthy periods of time and a host of countries, the critical role
played by states in setting the parameters within which social groups arise,
organize, and operate — even if and when they challenge state authority —
becomes obvious.
This book thus extends the work of Nancy Bermeo
(2000), Theda Skocpol (1999, 1996), Jonah Levy (1999), and other scholars who
have emphasized the state’s role in shaping civil society in America, France,
and Europe more generally. The book
fully acknowledges, and indeed explores in the Japanese context, the dynamic
forces (e.g., rising education levels, technological change, international
norms) that deeply affect the nature of civil society, independent of state
policies. But its central contribution
is its focus on the role of state policy in contouring the associational
landscape over the long haul.
Third, the book seeks to clarify the concept of
civil society. In any country, the
range of non-state, non-market activities is quite large, and scholars debate what
to include. “Who likes may snip verbal
definitions in his old age, when his world has gone crackly and dry,” Arthur
Bentley (1908, 199) once observed, but the fact of the matter is that civil
society’s continued utility as an analytical term hangs on whether it will come
to be applied in consistent ways across widely varying political systems,
Western and non-Western alike. Based on
the extensive research conducted by our contributors as well as a broad survey
of the relevant literature, this book argues that understanding how civil
societies take shape over time requires the inclusion of a broad range of
actors and activities. Thus, unlike
some previous authors (but like many others), our conception of civil society
actors embraces the non-market activities of economic actors (e.g., business
organizations and trade associations, labor unions, consumer groups) and the
societal activities of religious groups, and also includes groups that stand at
varying distances from the state. At
the same time, our long time horizon leads us to focus on sustained, organized
group activity rather than spontaneous, informal activities — the coffee klatch
or picnic with friends. Although
informal activities obviously influence the nature of social life and are
important for generating social capital (Putnam 2000), the central dynamic in
modern, complex nation-states is between communities of interests that seek to
shape the larger political and social reality around them on the one hand and
governments on the other.
The book is divided into five
parts. The first deals with the
theoretical and historical context of our topic. In the volume’s introduction and Chapter One, Frank Schwartz sets
out the rationale for the volume and situates our use of the term among the myriad
meanings contemporary Western authors have assigned to “civil society.” Next, Sheldon Garon surveys the
evolution of civil society over the course of Japan’s modern history. He traces its role in shaping the state and,
conversely, the state’s role in shaping society from Japan’s rise as a modern
state in the Meiji era (1868-1912) to the democratic interlude of the
Taishō era (1912-26), the period of fascism and wartime control, and the
postwar era, in which civil society grew and diversified. No discussion of civil
society in Japan would be complete without an account of the discourse among
Japanese themselves on the subject, which Andrew Barshay provides in Chapter
Three. As he shows, it was not until
the collapse of the imperial system that accompanied Japan’s defeat in World
War Two that the concept of civil society eclipsed the notion of imperial
subjecthood and gained moral legitimacy in Japanese discourse.
Part Two investigates the nature of associational
life in Japan. Tsujinaka
Yutaka puts the organizational aspects of Japan’s civil society in perspective by
comparing them with those of the United States and South Korea in Chapter Four. Drawing on longitudinal data for the period of 1951 until 1999,
his analysis reveals and seeks to explain an overrepresentation of business
associations within an overall pattern of multiplying and diversifying interest
groups. In Chapter Five, Robert Pekkanen shows how
the structure of incentives resulting from state policies has given rise to a
particular pattern of civil society development in which public advocacy groups
remain small in number and size, local, and underfunded. Helen Hardacre in
Chapter Six analyzes a fundamental anomaly in postwar Japan: despite few
restrictions on religious activities, organized religion has had a remarkably
weak position in Japanese society. And in Chapter Seven, Margarita Estévez-Abe
illuminates the role Japan’s state plays in promoting civil associations by
detailing the close state-society partnership that has developed in the domain
of social welfare provision.
Although the common formula “between
state and market” generally excludes economic actors from civil society, Part
Three examines the non-market
activities of some of those actors in Japan.
In Chapter Eight, Robert Bullock details how producer groups in the
agricultural and small-retail sectors have won the state protection on which
their survival depends. Suzuki Akira
focuses on the failure of Japanese labor unions to establish a distinctive
associational life in Chapter Nine, and in Chapter Ten, Patricia Maclachlan
reviews the mixed success enjoyed by consumer groups in the quest to build a
consumer society independent of state and market control.
Japan’s place in the world is the
subject of Part Five. In Chapter
Thirteen, Yamagishi Toshio uses experimental methods to investigate the values that underlie ways in which citizens
connect with one another, which is basic to civil society. Contrasting social trust in America and
Japan, his work offers strong support for the view that values associated with
a vibrant civil society are, in fact, gaining ground in Japan. Kim Reimann turns to the international arena
and examines the trajectory of Japan’s international development
nongovernmental organizations in Chapter Fourteen. She demonstrates how state policies constrained their growth
until the late 1980s, and how changing international norms, mediated through
state policies, help account for a turnaround since that time.
Finally, the concluding chapter seeks to integrate
the findings of the book by comparing “pathways to civility” in Japan with
those in Western Europe and America.
States, it holds, can be either “activist” or “permissive” in their
basic orientation towards civil society, but with quite different effects
depending on whether policies apply broadly or are “targeted” (i.e., vary by
group). Except for a relatively brief
period prior to and during wartime, when it imposed broadly-applicable
restrictions on civil society, the chapter suggests, Japan has had an activist
state with targeted policies under which economic interest groups have thrived
while other organizations have encountered widely varying policies. More
broadly, the chapter proposes a framework for analyzing the evolution of
associational landscapes in other countries, including those elsewhere in Asia.
This book grew out of a major
international project on “Civil Society in the Asia-Pacific” organized under
the auspices of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations of Harvard’s Weatherhead
Center for International Affairs, for which Susan Pharr serves as director and
Frank Schwartz as associate director.
Founded in 1980, the Program has long included domestic issues within
its purview. In recent years, a number
of scholars associated with the Program as speakers or postdoctoral fellows
have usefully applied the concept of civil society to the study of Japan, so
the idea for a collective research endeavor gradually took shape. Generous funding from the Japan Foundation
Center for Global Partnership (CGP), which is based in Tokyo and New York, and
the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, which is based in Washington, DC, as well
as Harvard’s Reischauer Institute of Japan Studies made this project and volume
possible.
The overall project, which was conducted jointly
with the East-West Center of Honolulu and was developed in cooperation with
Keio University of Tokyo, has two stages.
The first, which is brought to completion with this book, focuses on
Japan in comparative perspective. The
second, which is under the direction of Muthiah Alagappa of the East-West
Center, focuses on “Civil Society and Political Change in Asia” and extends to
Bangladesh, Burma, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines,
Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Thailand.
The present volume grew out of an international conference held at the East-West Center in January 2000 that brought together some 20 leading scholars on contemporary Japan and other specialists with a deep knowledge of how the civil society framework has been applied to the United States, Western Europe, and elsewhere in Asia. We wish to express appreciation to Charles Morrison, the president of the East-West Center, to Muthiah Alagappa, and to the Center staff, especially Carolyn Eguchi and Ralph Carvalho, for their help and gracious hospitality. We also extend our thanks to Andrew Gordon of the Reischauer Institute; Chano Junichi, Wada Yoshihiro, Ishida Takashi, Susan Hubbard, Oshida Yukio, and Takahashi Rikimaru of CGP; Eric Gangloff and Margaret Mihori of the Friendship Commission; as well as many others who helped us along the way.
In addition to the contributors to this volume,
Muthiah Alagappa, Helmut Anheier, Andrew Gordon, Hagen Koo, Charles Morrison,
Sone Yasunori, and Patricia Steinhoff took part in the Hawaii conference and
made many invaluable suggestions. We
would like to thank Laurie Freeman, who proposed the title for the book, and Gary Allinson, Jeffrey Broadbent, Gerald Curtis,
and Larry Diamond for the input they offered to this project. Before and after the Hawaii conference, the project
convened, sponsored, or otherwise facilitated or encouraged our members’
participation in a large number of seminars, colloquia, and workshops, and also
panels at professional meetings — including annual meetings of the American
Political Science Association, the International Political Science Association,
and the Association for Asian Studies — on topics relating to the project’s
themes. These events, which took place
in venues from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, sought to
spur research and thinking on civil society and to provide feedback to our
authors. Finally, staff members of the
Program on U.S.-Japan Relations — Jana Van der Veer, Kenneth Marden, Andrew
Dusenbery, Laurie Gagnon, Jeffrey Newmark, and John Kuczwara — provided many
hours of assistance in planning and running the Honolulu conference,
administering our grants, and pulling this volume together.