This is an admirably constructed book. It is clear, concise, and forceful, with good evidence and examples that illustrate observations and arguments. It is also a book that challenges many of the conventional paradigms of the study of Japanese politics. One of the tenacious tenets of the paradigms is that Japanese society, Japanese politics, and Japanese culture are resistant to forces coming from outside and that they try to keep their organic whole with cohesion and consistency. Jennifer Chan-Tiberghien says no, at least not always yes, to this conventional wisdom.

The issues the volume focuses on are the pill, sexual harassment, military sexual slavery, domestic violence, and child prostitution. The models the author attempts to refute in explaining those five issues are those of bureaucratic dominance, party politics, interest groups, and network state/triumvirate. The model the author proposes in explaining the policy changes on the five issues as revealed in the 1990s is called “the model of embedded network state.” By that she means that the Japanese state has been embedded in global human rights norms and that the social agents at home that digest and diffuse those global human rights norms have been vigorous and tactful in transforming ideas and passions into policy legislation and eventually the start of good social practice.

As the author notes, the five global conferences concerning global norms, including gender and human rights, that were held in the mid-1990s were not necessarily vigorously attended to by Japanese government officials. But by the middle of the current decade, the global norms such conferences upheld have been more or less accepted by Japan not only at the grassroots level, as evidenced by the extraordinary growth of nongovernmental and quasi-governmental organizations and their movements on such issues (Adam Schwartz and Susan Pharr, eds., The State of Civil Society in Japan, 2000) but also at the high level of legislators and bureaucratic leaders of various agencies, as evidenced by a number of laws to enhance the practice of global norms in these areas. In other words, Japan joined a global epistemic community of gender and human rights issues in the 1990s.

As I was reading the book, I vividly recalled what I myself experienced in connection with gender issues. While working as assistant secretary general of the United Nations assigned to carry out the programmatic activities of the United Nations University (UNU) in the mid-1990s, I had a brief but important conversation with my counterpart who directed the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), an agency which specializes in gender issues. One of the common features of both agencies is that they do not necessarily enjoy a good funding position. My colleagues and I bemoaned it. We felt that we could somehow coordinate our voices to enhance our budgetary situations whenever occasions arose. I then muttered rhetorically and sotto voce that the UNIFEM deals with a straightforward single issue, whereas the UNU has to deal with a multitude of issues that affect humankind. To my great regret and distress, however, this sentence triggered her vigorous refutation to the effect that the UNIFEM deals with the multitude of issues that affect all of humankind, that the agency deals with them from the gender angle and that the gender angle permeates all of humankind. I immediately retracked my last sentence and surrendered. Although it would be too much to generalize from one individual's encounter with global gender and human rights issues to national political changes, I may as well surmise that more than a few Japanese citizens came to grapple with gender and human rights issues in the critical period of the 1990s.

To explain the growing acceptance of global norms in gender and human rights, the author gives a good account of a number of social changes that helped the state and society to move in that direction. First is the steady weakening of collectivism and the growth of the individual. Her own accounts, as well as other survey data including the AsiaBarometer (Takashi Inoguchi et al., eds., Values and Life Styles in Urban Asia, 2005), give a strong testimony to this observation. Second is the steady deemphasis on the informal, often extralegal, and not necessarily transparent ways of resolving conflicts of interests and the concomitant steady but slow increase in using law and law professions to handle social conflicts. On this trend of Japanese society, the projected number of newly established law school students and those who are likely to enter law professions, tripling of the current size in ten year's time, offer strong evidence. Third, the metamorphosis of the nature of social networks from largely hierarchical to increasingly horizontal must be pointed out. The author's own accounts, as well as a number of empirical and experimental data (Toshio Yamagishi, The Structure of Trust, 1998; Takashi Inoguchi, “Broadening the Basis of Social Capital in Japan,” in Robert D. Putnam, ed., Democracies in Flux, 2000), attest to this proposition. Fourth, the intensely territorially national setting of Japanese society has been loosened somewhat by the tide of globalization. Evidence can be found in the importance of national identity in Japan in comparison with that of other Asian countries. Two-thirds of Japanese respondents designate national identity as their primary identity, whereas approximately 85% of Korean and Thai respondents place their national identity as primary (Values and Life Styles in Urban Asia). Postnational, postmodern, and postmaterialist respondents have increased in number.

This reviewer's positive evaluation of the book may be mildly qualified by one methodological reservation. The author makes skillful use of interviews, especially with those working in nongovernmental organizations with advocacy missions. Since the expansion and empowerment of various civil society organizations were remarkable in the 1990s (Yutaka Tsujinaka, ed., Civil Society and Interest Group Organizations in Japan, 2002), this approach has been successfully and deftly deployed. Yet one cannot underestimate the tenaciously resilient power of bureaucratic agencies and the increasingly critical intervention made by the Prime Minister in creating new niches of his own vis-à-vis bureaucracy, the governing party, and public opinion.

To sum up, Gender and Human Rights Politics in Japan is a neat book that challenges conventional paradigms with a very solid assemblage of evidence.