Walter Hatch

Japanese Business into the 21st Century: Strategies for Success

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Building Legislative Coalitions for Free Trade in Asia: Globalization as Legislation by Megumi Naoi (review)

Yet they undercut their position by beginning the chapter with a lengthy description of the many criticisms of civil juries in the United States, which they then have to try to refute. The two succeeding chapters, on the global proliferation of lay participation systems and on civil jury trials in Okinawa, are interesting in their own right. They are rather weak as support for extending lay participation in Japan to civil trials, however. Of the many nations they discuss that have instituted lay participation systems in the past few decades, virtually all include only criminal cases, and none has instituted an all-citizen civil jury. And in the decade Okinawa held jury trials, there evidently were only four civil trials. In the fi nal substantive chapter, the authors utilize the Fukushima nuclear disaster and subsequent civil lawsuits and criminal complaints against Tokyo Electric Power Company (operator of the nuclear power plant), nuclear power plant manufacturers, and the Japanese government to demonstrate what they characterize as the inadequacies in the existing system for holding business and government offi cials accountable, as well as the potential for civil juries to ensure such accountability. Here again, the case studies of the legal claims arising out of the nuclear disaster are interesting and valuable in their own right. Yet, while advocating adoption of the civil jury in order to increase liability for businesses and government offi cials may appeal to some members of the general public, that strategy does not strike me as a recipe for political success.

Turning Western, turning Asian: a study of Japanese ‘identity’ from a Gramscian perspective

Abstract Cultural analysis, an increasingly popular approach, contributes to our understanding of comparative and global politics by drawing needed attention to non-material factors. In some forms, however, this approach may also strip political actors of agency, treating norms and ideas as external, independent and determinative. Gramsci offers a useful corrective, highlighting the elusive link between material and non-material factors. I invoke Gramscian analysis to explain the otherwise confounding volatility in Japanese norms of identity, norms that over the past 150 years have appeared to flip-flop between “Western” and “Asian” poles. This case study reveals that dominant forces in Japan have used these competing social constructs to consolidate their hegemony or advance their particular interests at different historical moments.

Japanese Investment in the World Economy: A Study of Strategic Themes in the Internationalisation of Japanese Industry (review)

common threads running through the chapters in the book. The fi rst point they make is that the continued survival of practices associated with the prereform political system is explainable as being a consequence of the continuing practical utility of these practices in the postreform context and is not the outgrowth of any inherently “Japanese” cultural pattern. Their second point is that in contrast to the relatively slow pace of change in national-level politics, the rise of politically active women, NPOs, and nonparty citizen groups do seem to be signifi cantly changing the face of politics at the local level and along a path that deepens democracy. The third is the critical role of individual leadership on the part of executive offi ceholders of the sort exemplifi ed by Koizumi in pushing the system toward the more democratic patterns envisioned when reforms were originally implemented. Finally, the editors observe a general consensus among the contributing authors that attitudinal changes have outpaced changes in political practice and an apparent implicit agreement among them that bigger change consistent with the democracy-deepening institutional logic of the political reforms of the 1980s and 1990s is on the horizon, although exactly when such change might happen is hard to predict. If there is one complaint about the book that comes to the fore as a result of reviewing in the wake of the installation of a DPJ majority government, it is that the book simply does not pay enough attention to the DPJ. To be sure, the DPJ is not ignored entirely. But the attention it gets is in the context of analyses of the party system as a whole, and the book’s take-home message is that the gains the party system made were the outgrowth of it becoming more like the “reformed” LDP that Krauss and Pekkanen describe. Is this really the whole story? In the absence of studies, for instance, detailing the internal organization and dynamics of the DPJ, it is hard to say. This fi xation on LDP governance at the expense of the opposition party was not an oversight of the contributors to this volume alone but rather something characteristic of the fi eld of Japanese politics as a whole.