Based on extensive field research, Daniel Aldrich’s and Akihiro Ogawa’s books explore the complicated nature of civil society in Japan. Aldrich shows the potential of civil society in the siting of controversial facilities like nuclear power plants, dams, and airports while Ogawa shows how the state delegated to non-governmental organizations responsibilities to manage the growing demands of an aging society. Both draw pessimistic conclusions about the dominance of the government and bureaucracies over civil society in Japan, but provide great insights that help us understand some of the political factors that contributed to the nuclear crisis in March of 2011, and the role Japan's NGOs played in the response to the disaster.
Daniel Aldrich's book should be read by anyone interested in Japanese politics in general and those who want to have a deeper understanding of the politics behind the siting of what Aldrich calls “public bads”: facilities that impose costs directly upon a community. When and where will nuclear power plants be placed? In Japan, in more than half of these controversial siting cases, the government used coercive instruments such as police force and land expropriation. Aldrich's analysis is based upon fieldwork and data from 500 localities with case studies of nuclear power plant, dam, and airport-siting controversies in Japan and France. He also uses archival work and interviews conducted over twenty months abroad. His main argument is that the nature of civil society in a local area conditions the state's response. Where civil society in a local area is strong, the state behaves strategically by providing incentives for compliance such as side payments and persuasion. For example, compensation was given to politicians and fishing cooperatives in exchange for the siting of nuclear power plants. When civil society is weak and unorganized, the state typically relies on coercive strategies to bring the project to fruition, including eminent domain and staged public hearings.
Aldrich defines civil society as “sustained, organized social activity that occurs in groups that are formed outside the state, the market, and the family” (p. 15). These groups were not necessarily engaged in protest and he envisions them to be “relatively autonomous groups that can support or contest state initiatives” especially at the local level (p. 15). Farmers and fishermen's cooperatives, in particular, regularly played an active and vital role in the siting process. They opposed nuclear power plants because of concerns about health risks and contamination of foodstuffs (p. 11). In depopulated localities with weak civil society, they usually ended up with multiple facilities (pp. 40–41 and graph on p. 47) while those with active fishing and farming cooperatives had none. Aldrich is rigorous and systematic in trying to explain the variation in siting public bads not only across Japan, but across the US and France, and provides original and impressive data to support his arguments.
However, when Aldrich says that cities like Kariwa and Kashiwazaki hosted several reactors because of the presence of powerful and long-term incumbent LDP representatives, he highlights a fascinating and compelling political dimension to this story that remains unexplored. It would be interesting to see if the siting of “public bads” changed in any meaningful way as it did in other regulatory areas when the political system changed after 1993.
Aldrich’s book is a comparative study, but his French case studies are based more on secondary reports and anecdotes than the Japanese ones. It is Aldrich's very impressive fieldwork in Japan and the insights drawn from that extensive fieldwork and archival research that distinguishes his work and makes it essential reading for any student of Japanese politics and political science. He does an elegant job of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore these important questions, and makes a significant contribution to the fields of Japanese and comparative politics.
Aldrich's book is based on original data he compiled from hundreds of cases in Japan and France, but Ogawa's data comes from one case. He immersed himself in the daily operations of one NGO for over 2 years. Ogawa's book is about the dramatic increase in the number of such organizations after the earthquake in 1995 and the passage of the NPO (nonprofit organizations) law in 1998. Through his fieldwork and in-depth case study analysis, he provides a discouraging story of the dominance of the Japanese state and bureaucracy over this third sector, or civil society. His argument is that the NPO law and the increasing number of NGOs and NPOs was not the result of some bottom up movement or a deepening of Japanese democracy, but that the law was passed to advance the interests of the state and its neo-liberal agenda. He says that the national government asked the organizations to do more but with less funding, and dedicated a lot of resources in public relations campaigns to cultivate a new culture of volunteerism to support this shift to the third sector. His argument is compelling and he provides frank depictions of what happened within his NGO and other NGOs in their daily operations and budgets because of the changes that accompanied this law.
Through these deeply personal portraits and stories, Ogawa shows us how this policy change impacted the staff and volunteers within the organization, as well as the beneficiaries of the organization. The law, which prohibited any political or religious activity, clearly promotes certain types of NPOs over others, and was not intended to favor the development of a more active civil society. Instead, the national government delegated responsibilities to municipalities and NPOs to help manage the increasing burdens associated with the aging crisis and launched a campaign to cultivate a culture of volunteerism to support the work of the private sector and these organizations in providing services to the elderly without government funding. Through his fieldwork interviews, Ogawa shows how the national government directly influenced and guided the creation of a third sector by promoting volunteerism through its “borantia” PR campaign (p. 96) under this NPO Law.
Sometimes the book feels too much like a personal account, and there are long sections of self-reflection. Ogawa's book is at times deeply personal and often revealing but the analysis would have benefited from the inclusion of more cases. However, he is clear that he set out to do something very different from conventional data-driven political science, and employed anthropological and ethnographical research methods to tell stories that cannot be captured by data alone. He traded breadth for depth, which clearly has advantages and disadvantages. In the introduction and beginning chapters of the book, he explains how he came from a background in journalism and became inspired by the idea of “action research” and immersion in his subject (pp. xi, 186–87). He succeeds in telling us what happened over time in this one organization, but does not have enough evidence to support the generalizations he makes about the impact of the NPO law on civil society across a wide range of organizations. The main strength of Aldrich’s book is in how he is able to explain variation in siting across many cases and across countries; the main strength of Ogawa’s book is in his richly detailed and intimate accounts of the impact of the NPO law on his single case study, which may or may not be representative. Though the two books use different approaches, they greatly deepen our understanding of civil society in Japan, and demonstrate the continued value and importance of fieldwork.
Both books show how the Japanese state advanced its interests at the expense of its own people, and have passages that foreshadow the crisis of March 2011. Aldrich's book includes an especially disturbing account of how the government manipulated the public hearing process to shut out citizen activists to make sure that a TEPCO nuclear power plant would be constructed without delay or obstruction (pp. 130–31). He provides numerous examples of how procedures and the hearing processes were structured to give the appearance of consultation and inclusion, but really were designed to advance the interests of the nuclear and utilities industries. The implications of Aldrich's book are profound when we think of what happened in March 2011, and why there are so many nuclear power plants in Japan. Though Ogawa's book shows how the third sector can be manipulated to serve the state, some of the NGOs highlighted in Ogawa's discussion were at the fore of the response to the disaster in March 2011, such as Peace Winds Japan. These two books complement each other well and greatly deepen our understanding of civil society and democracy in Japan. It will be interesting to see how Japan's civil society develops post-3/11/11 and whether the groups and organizations Aldrich and Ogawa studied will shape the policy agenda.
