The rich democracies, struggling to reassemble their economies and civil societies in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, are at an inflection point. If the recent global health crisis had not shone a light on the limits of modern democracy, the intensifying effects of global climate change would have done so. We need a new set of questions for orienting the future aims of democratic politics—questions that reach beyond the neoliberal fixation on global market competition. Tessa Morris-Suzuki's Japan's Living Politics, a collection of case studies of grassroots attempts to pursue the full potential of democracy through self-conscious rearrangements of daily life and small experiments with community, education, and life practices that challenge the values of a Japanese state almost single-mindedly devoted to the expansion of economic power, is an interesting entry into this political-historical moment.
Most of the cases that Morris-Suzuki has chosen are from the first half of the twentieth century, and with few exceptions, most are drawn from communities in mountainous Nagano Prefecture. Her case studies include the White Birch Teacher's movement of the 1910s that sought to restructure children's education to encourage greater freethinking; the production and sale of arts and handicrafts by peasant art cooperatives; a new village movement of egalitarian, noncapitalist intentional communities; farmer and worker continuing education initiatives; and public centers for raising youth consciousness about political ideas quite distinct from those dominant in the Japanese state. She follows some of the movements that were focused on drawing attention to the costs of industrialization into late twentieth-century actions, including a citizens’ initiative referendum against a waste disposal project. The “living politics” of Morris-Suzuki's title refers to the tight connection that the actors in her case studies draw between the organization of key aspects of daily life and humane political, economic, and social outcomes.
Morris-Suzuki argues that her attention to the early twentieth century allows us to develop a fuller understanding of the long history of experimentation with democratic community in Japan. She also claims that by looking at experiments in living politics, mostly in Nagano, far beyond the urban sprawl of Tokyo, she can challenge the assumption that the formal institutional hierarchies of the urban center are necessarily the birthplace of all political innovation. Other than grouping her cases under the general heading of “living politics,” Morris-Suzuki eschews an overarching argument about the political ideology of the groups and individuals she presents in the book. Rather, she looks for “resonances,” or “the intermingling of ideas and actions that inspired informal life politics” (p. 24) among them, following some linkages that involve particular individuals but also exploring connections across ideas and people pursuing similar projects in places as distant as India and Great Britain.
For example, many of the Nagano-area experiments in education, arts, and model village life that Morris-Suzuki presents are in some way connected to Kobayashi Tatsue (1896–2001), for whom Kobayashi Tatsue Peace and Handicraft Folk Hall in Saku City, Nagano, was named. She describes a 2013 visit to the hall to participate in a citizens’ education event in which speakers discussed Japan's peace constitution and critiqued fair-trade negotiations with the United States. She opens her account with experiments with democratizing education in the same area during the early 1900s. Kobayashi was captivated by visions of an internationalist humanism that he encountered in the White Birch journal founded in 1910 by Japanese elites connected with the Peer's School. Kobayashi briefly tried life in a cooperative “New Village” in northern Kyushu founded by the White Birch writer Mushanokōji Saneatsu. Illness forced Kobayashi's return to Nagano, where he became part of a group of area educators known as the White Birch Teachers. In the postwar era, he was a supporter of a Saku City health care cooperative that became an important Japanese model for meeting rural health needs.
The many different sorts of self-empowerment, cooperative, and local autonomy-oriented experiments that Morris-Suzuki traces in her text exhibited ideals collected from internationally renowned thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy, William Blake, Auguste Rodin, William Morris, and Rabindranath Tagore that influenced the elite founders of the White Birch journal. In general, these visions, like William Morris's well-known Arts and Crafts movement, seem to have shared a focus on humanizing elements of self-determined life practices in an era of industrialization and rapidly growing economic inequality. As manifested in Nagano villages and other rural contexts, these experiments emphasized the importance of individual self making, even in very humble contexts. They were visions of community life that drew on socialist critiques of the exploitative force of capitalism and celebrated the proletariat and the peasantry but nonetheless were not truly Marxist. Moreover, just as these Japanese experimenters tested ideas of community, they borrowed from their international reading and travel. Some of their practices found homes beyond Japanese shores. British potter and social reformer Bernard Leach drew inspiration for his work from a visit to Japan in the early 1900s; the establishment of Bishan, a Chinese rural revitalization experiment founded in 2011 in Anhui Province by the filmmaker Ou Ning, draws on ideas from Mushanokōji's New Village movement (pp. 58, 80–81).
Many of these ideals’ Japanese pursuers, including some of Kobayashi's associates from the White Birch Teachers days, ran afoul of the ever more controlling Japanese state in the lead-up to World War II. Others, seeing a connection between localism and nationalism, pressed their understandings of living politics into a justification of loyalty to Japan's imperial project in the 1930s. Whatever their mixed fate during the war years, related grassroots efforts to build a politics foregrounding small revolutions in the practices of everyday life resistant to the pressures from big ideologies, state institutions, and capitalist markets have continued in Japan until the present.
Morris-Suzuki's case accounts are full of details that give the reader ample reason to agree that the history of experimentation with self-government in Japan is long, full of vitality far from the center of state power, and has always been simultaneously rooted in local tradition and internationalist in scope. Morris-Suzuki's prose is accessible, and her careful tracing of the threads of transnational—or, as she says, “translocal”—debates about living politics that conceptually connect the experiments in rural Nagano with global concerns is illuminating (p. 65), shining a light on overlooked visions of how to answer the question of how we are to live together, a question pressing enough to have been made the theme of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial.
Japan's Living Politics, then, is full of value. But perhaps because she does not want to smother the voices of bottom-up activists, Morris-Suzuki resists taking full authorial control of her narrative. While she argues long and hard for the importance of the Japanese case in the study of democracy, she does not do enough to explain the benefits and limits of her mostly Nagano focus. Nor does she provide a full enough analysis of what unites her many case histories. I do appreciate the fact that Morris-Suzuki has not obscured the particularities of the political practices she examines by squashing them too forcefully into a theoretical agenda. Nonetheless, I worry that many of the very readers for whom she has argued these experiments in Japanese democracy might be instructive will struggle to draw lessons from the tangle of names, dates, and local references that weigh upon her “resonating” case studies. What, in sum, do we learn from attending to these experiments with such care? And what is lost if we forget them? Morris-Suzuki has given us sufficient foundation to care about these questions. I, for one, would like her to go one step farther and tell me what she thinks their answers might be.
