After decades of relative stability, Japanese politics underwent an extreme makeover after 1990. Fundamental change has come to the electoral system, the party system, local government, the central bureaucracy, the cabinet, non-governmental organizations, and several fields of public policy. Alterations in the party system alone are so complex that there is probably not a person alive who could relate from memory all the foundings, mergers, and dissolutions of political parties that have occurred. The long-term impact of these changes is as yet unclear, but this book does a fine job of analyzing where things stand today. In short, it is an outstanding interim report on the recent political transformation of Japan. It asks whether formal institutional change has thus far altered the substance of politics, and, more specifically, whether the many reforms are making Japan more democratic.

The book begins with an excellent overview by Ellis S. Krauss and Robert Pekkanen. They describe concisely pre-reform politics, the new electoral system of 1994, various steps that have enhanced the power of the cabinet and prime minister, and the way that the reforms came together in the lower-house election of 2005. This chapter provides the necessary context for the more focused essays that follow.

Dyron Dabney asks whether Japan's new electoral system has produced party-centered, issue-oriented campaigns, as its sponsors had hoped, and the corresponding decline of personalistic, patron–client politics. In 1994, the electoral system for Japan's lower house shifted from one of medium-sized, multi-member districts to a mixed system of single-member districts and regional proportional representation. Dabney's research focuses on three politicians of the centrist, anti-Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) opposition, one each from urban, suburban, and rural districts. Relying upon interviews, the candidates’ self-reports, and participant observation, he coded his data to measure the frequency of various campaign activities. Direct appeals to the voters through devices such as the mass media and telephone solicitation were indeed salient, as the reformers would have wanted, but over time the candidates complemented such means with more traditional, personalistic appeals through social networks. Some change has occurred, then, but as the careers of these young politicians evolved, the old ways became more visible. The politicians’ personal support organizations, the koenkai, are alive and well.

This conclusion is seconded by Naoko Taniguchi, who tracks the prevalence over time of Diet members who were the children or grandchildren of politicians. Such second-generation Diet members account for 30% of the lower house and 40% of all LDP Diet members. The percentage of second-generation candidates winning elections has been as high as 80% since the electoral reform, marking no real change. Despite reform, then, politicians are still inheriting the political resources of their forebears, including their koenkai, which remain vital means to victory.

Gill Steel brings different data to bear on the question of whether elections since 1994 have concentrated more attention on parties and their platforms, and less on the candidates. Focusing on the elections of 1986, 1996, and 2003, he examined the correspondence between public opinion polls and ideological surveys of politicians. He found that post-reform party platforms had gravitated toward the median voter, but policy issues ‘only occasionally’ influenced voters’ choices when compared to membership in social networks and various demographic traits of the electorate. It is unclear whether the move toward the political center resulted from electoral reform or other factors.

Eiji Kawabata shifts attention from parties and elections to bureaucratic reform. He nicely summarizes the administrative reforms effected by Prime Ministers Nakasone (early–mid 1980s), Hashimoto (mid–late 1990s), and Koizumi (early 2000s). All of these reforms affected the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), which is the centerpiece of Kawabata's analysis. Nakasone privatized Nippon Telephone and Telegraph and deregulated telecommunications; Hashimoto expanded the cabinet office and merged various ministries, depriving MPT of some of its authority; and Koizumi reorganized the Japanese postal service. The postal service served as a massive bank and insurance company as well as delivering the mail, and it had become a bountiful source of pork-barrel politics. The reforms have made politicians less dependent on the bureaucracy in policymaking, and thus Kawabata answers a ‘qualified yes’ to the question of whether these reforms have made Japan more democratic. Hashimoto's reforms seem especially consequential, since they bolstered the cabinet's direct staff and increased the number of political appointees to the ministries, thus freeing the prime minister from over-reliance on bureaucrats.

Chapters 7–10 direct attention to local politics. This is a welcome perspective. Japanese local government has not received the attention it merits in English-language research, and its study offers insights into politics as it affects average Japanese.

Sherry L. Martin examines women's representation in local assemblies. Here the reform era has had a major impact. For four decades after the US Occupation, women's share of subnational assembly seats stood at about 2%. Now women hold 8.4% of the seats in town and village assemblies and 7.5% in prefectural assemblies. The local elections of April 2007 marked the sixth consecutive election in which women candidates set a record for success. The Basic Law for Gender Equality passed in 1999 encouraged local governments to increase women's participation, and NGOs such as the Citizen's Network and WINWIN have encouraged women's political involvement. Women's presence on shingikai bodies, which engage civil actors in governmental policy deliberations, rose from 16.1% to 31.3% over 1996–2006. Interestingly, Martin found that women's electoral success did not vary with that of the opposition parties, as it had in the past. Moreover, although women candidates do better in urban than rural electoral districts, their growing electoral success is evident in both.

Robert J. Weiner arrives at a less sanguine view of the reform era in his statistical study of the opposition parties’ competitiveness in prefectural assembly elections. Here the LDP remains dominant. There was little electoral competition at the prefectural level before the changes of the early 1990s, and there has been little since. Weiner gauges the opposition's competitiveness by counting the number of losing candidates who won at least 70% as many votes as the lowest winner in a district, and also by measuring the gap between the strongest single runner-up and the lowest winner. By these measures, there has been no increase in competitiveness since the era of party realignment began. In more than 40% of single-seat districts, not a single challenger wins even 70% of the winner's vote total. Today's leading opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), does not hold a majority in even one prefectural assembly. Weiner attributes this outcome to rational, strategic behavior on the opposition's part. Most electoral districts for prefectural assemblies elect only one or two representatives. This makes it easy for potential challengers to determine if they have a chance to win. Where they do not, the leading opposition parties have opted not to expend valuable resources to sponsor a challenger.

Robin M. LeBlanc uses interviews and participant observation to undertake two case studies of grassroots political activism. In one instance, a citizens’ association arose in a town of 30,000 people to protest the government's plan to build a nuclear power plant. Despite the project's unpopularity, bureaucrats and the local mayor continued to press for the plant. The protesters used a recall petition to force the mayor's resignation and got several of their members elected to the local assembly, where they arranged a formal referendum that went against the project. Once the project was cancelled, however, the protest group disbanded. The other case involved a mayoral election in a large city of 530,000. An independent journalist defeated a candidate who had the backing of nearly every political organization in the city. Key was the role of an NGO called Citizen's Party, which sends staff to help independent candidates organize their campaigns. While both case studies document increasing democratization, LeBlanc notes that neither protest group collaborated with similar political movements elsewhere in such a way as to sway national politics.

Yuko Kawato and Robert Pekkanen evaluate the effects of the Special Nonprofit Organization (NPO) Law of 1998. This law made it easier for NPOs to gain legal status, operate without bureaucratic interference, and qualify for tax breaks and government grants. Impressively, the number of NPOs with legal status increased from 1,176 in 1999 to 31,581 in 2007. Yet the authors note that the fundamental structure of Japan's civil society has changed little. There are still a large number of local service organizations but a paucity of national-level advocacy groups. Nonetheless, NPOs have worked to implement local welfare policy, increased social capital by enabling people to network, gained access to the major political parties, and actively petitioned the government for their constituents.

The quality of the research in this volume is uniformly high. Although the subject matter is a moving target, the authors have analyzed the changes under way with admirable clarity. The contributions are methodologically diverse and speak to one another on the central theme of democratic change. There were a few places where some comparative data might have enriched the analysis, and the book could use a chapter on the end of rapid economic growth with its many implications for governance. Overall, however, this book is an invaluable tool for anyone seeking to make sense of Japan's rapidly changing political landscape.