Patricia L. Maclachlan

Consumer politics in postwar Japan : the institutional boundaries of citizen activism

Part 1: Japanese Consumer Advocacy from Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Perspectives 1. Toward a Framework for the Study of Consumer Advocacy2. Consumer Advocacy in the United States and Britain3. The Politics of an Emerging Consumer Movement: The Occupation Period5. The Post-1968 Consumer Protection Policymaking System and the Consumer Movements Response4. Consumer Politics Under Early One-Party Dominance: 1955 to the Late 1960s7. The Right to Safety: The Movement to Oppose the Deregulation of Food Additives6. The Right to Choose: The Movement to Amend the Antimonopoly Law9. The Right to Be Heard: The Past, Present, and Future of the Japanese Consumer Movement8. The Right to Redress: The Movement to Enact a Product Liability LawIntroductionPart 2: Case Studies: The Impact of Japanese Consumer Advocacy on Policymaking

From subjects to citizens: Japan's evolving consumer identity

One of the most puzzling features of the postwar Japanese consumer movement has been its tendency to support pro‐producer goals in its political campaigns. This can be attributed to a distinctive postwar consumer identity that is rooted in the values and beliefs of the broader political economy and that stresses compromise among contending interests. Employing the theoretical language of ‘framing’, I explore the historical evolution of that identity, its impact on the consumer movements political preferences, and the appearance of more adversarial ‘consumers‐as‐citizens’ on the political landscape. Along the way, I show how the organized consumer movement is both a reflection and a harbinger of changing approaches to democratic participation in postwar Japan.

The Electoral Power of Japanese Interest Groups: An Organizational Perspective

What explains the electoral staying power of many Japanese interest groups in the wake of electoral reform? Electoral explanations provide part of the answer; candidates in elections to both houses of the Diet continue to face incentives—many of them unintended—to court the organized vote. But missing from such accounts is an explanation of why economically noncompetitive groups provide the bulk of such support. The primary reason for this, I argue, is organization. As a result of their historical linkages to the bureaucracy, many interests developed hierarchical, national organizational structures that enabled them to carry out a variety of vote-gathering functions that the parties had trouble performing themselves. Although electoral reform and long-term demographic trends have weakened the electoral influence of interest groups, these organizational complementarities between groups and the parties continue to matter in Japanese elections—including under conditions of two-party competition. To illustrate these points, I trace the evolution of interest group politics from the era of LDP dominance through the rise of two-party competition and the LDPs recent return to power, using postmasters associations and agricultural cooperatives as case studies.

The Kantei vs the LDP: Agricultural Reform, the Organized Vote, and the 2014 Election

At first glance, agricultural reform was a nonissue in Japan’s 2014 lower house election. Neither the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) nor the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) paid more than perfunctory attention to the issue in their election manifestos; nor did individual candidates, most of whom went out of their way to avoid talking about it on the stump. Given the centrality of agriculture to the third arrow — or “structural reform” component — of Abenomics, as well as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s proclamation that the November 21 Diet dissolution would be the “Abenomics Dissolution” (Asahi shimbun, November 22, 2014), this glaring omission may strike some readers as surprising.

Japanese Farmers in Flux: The Domestic Sources of Agricultural Reform

The politics of Japanese agricultural reform is rapidly changing. Once dependent on foreign pressure, reform is now fueled by a deepening farm crisis and a breakdown in postwar political alignments. Focusing on the Abe government’s reform of Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, we explore Japan’s expanding capacity for executive leadership in the farm sector on behalf of market-oriented change.

Koizumi and Japanese Politics: Reform Strategies and Leadership Style (review)

on page 9 that their Japan’s Political Marketplace is “easily the most infl uential book on Japanese politics in the past quarter century” seems peculiarly North American. Finally, it seems hard to understand why the authors are so dismissive of cultural explanations. They appear to accept an essentialist version of “culture,” following Nakane Chie and popular Nihonjinron-type writings. But realistically, culture changes over time; it represents the ways in which people in a given space and timeframe see the world, and what their assumptions about it are. These are affected by many issues, including the kinds of institutional factors analyzed in this book. But to take a particular example, a society with a culture of pervasive corruption (of which there are many) will behave differently from a society lacking such a culture, so that identical legislation will have quite different effects in the short to medium term (and perhaps the long term) in the two societies. The rigid exclusion of cultural explanations from this book deprives it of a dimension that could have enriched its argument. But this observation touches on a massive area of dispute. Anyone interested in Japan and/or in party politics should read this book. The LDP was indeed a stellar party in terms of staying in power. How brightly it shone in governing Japan will no doubt be debated for many years.

Spending without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan (review)

and Keidanren and labor unions (Hasegawa Harukiyo) and should be valued for this contribution alone. Patricia Steinhoff’s chapter on boundary change in the criminal justice system stands out for both its substantive and theoretical contributions. Steinhoff considers how a variety of external and internal forces have interacted to shift the boundaries of the criminal justice system. This chapter develops two fascinating case studies to show how complex interactions among global initiatives, international norms, and bureaucratic, political, and social movement-driven pressures have enhanced the rights of crime victims and their families and have extended the reach of the criminal justice system internationally. Quite strikingly, the boundary shifts do not favor the accused. This chapter also expands the analysis of relevant actors by considering two distinct social movements infl uencing criminal justice boundaries: New Left protest movements on the one side and neoliberal and neoconservative civil society organizations on the other. The case study approach nicely illustrates many of the key dynamics at play, and the conclusion explicitly addresses what the boundary change that has resulted looks like. Finally, a concluding chapter would greatly enhance the book’s overall contribution. The absence of a conclusion marks a missed opportunity for developing connections, synthesizing fi ndings, and furthering our understanding of boundaries. For example, the chapters on rogue states and piracy both focus on states and actors that operate outside international society, but similarities and differences are not developed. Similarly, the Shinoda and Uchiyama chapters could be synthesized to better highlight the signifi cance of Koizumi’s leadership in boundary shifts as well as to highlight why successors have failed. Comparisons between the mechanisms involved in shifting boundaries at the international and national levels could also be considered in a concluding chapter. Although the theoretical development of boundaries is uneven and a concluding chapter is lacking, this book makes a solid substantive contribution in its discussion of several policy areas from the Koizumi period to the present.

Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West (review)

ing and learned to craft opposition-proof alliances that transcended traditional political, ideological, and public sector/private sector divisions under the banner of NPM and its promise of a “loose-tight” arrangement, they stopped short of delivering on that promise. Instead, they have opted for a “tight-tight” arrangement in which authority over both inputs and outputs still rests with elites at the national, state, and municipal levels, rather than devolving to school principals, teachers, and parents. Thus, “after a dozen years of restructuring their K-12 education systems, the U.S. and Japanese national governments have reached a crossroads. . . . There is emerging evidence that gaps between structural reform rhetoric and enacted policy have created stress and dissatisfaction among American and Japanese teachers” (p. 190). Meanwhile, resource inequities persist, while “as a result of continuing bureaucratic regulation of school admissions, the competitive effi ciencies, innovations, and excellence predicted by school choice advocates have not materialized” (p. 189). In Nitta’s view, the solution to this crisis is not to abandon structural reform but to take the next logical step by delegating more authority to school principals in both countries and by engaging teachers “in the process of reform so they buy into it rather than resisting it” (p. 191). Given the logic behind structural reform in general, and New Public Management in particular, it is not surprising that there is little discussion in this book of the inputs that Nitta associates with the traditional education reform track: curriculum content, pedagogy and teacher training, educational technology, and so forth. At best, then, this particular study illuminates one dimension of a complicated, multidimensional process. But while we wait for other scholars to address this lacuna, Nitta has given us plenty to ponder and to debate.

Closing the Shop: Information Cartels and Japan’s Mass Media. By Laurie Anne Freeman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 256p.

Although Japan scholars have long been aware that media institutions facilitate state efforts to curtail the free flow of information within Japanese society, Closing the Shop is the first comprehensive treatment of this important topic. The book was well worth the wait.