Despite reduced incomes, diminished opportunities for education, and the psychological trauma of defeat, Japan experienced a rapid rise in civic engagement in the immediate aftermath of World War II. ...Why? Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan answers this question with a new general theory of the growth in civic engagement in postwar democracies. It argues that wartime mobilization unintentionally instills civic skills in the citizenry, thus laying the groundwork for a postwar civic engagement boom. Meanwhile, legacies of prewar associational activities shape the costs of association-building and information-gathering, thus affecting the actual extent of the postwar boom. Combining original data collection, rigorous statistical methods, and in-depth historical case analyses, this book illuminates one of the keys to making postwar democracies work.
This open access book examines why Japan discontinued its quarter-century history of troop contribution to UN Peacekeeping Operations (1992–2017). Japan had deployed its troops as UN peacekeepers ...since 1992, albeit under a constitutional limit on weapons use. Japan’s peacekeepers began to focus on engineering work as its strength, while also trying to relax the constraints on weapons use, although to a minimal extent. In 2017, however, Japan suddenly withdrew its engineering corps from South Sudan, and has contributed no troops since then. Why? The book argues that Japan could not match the increasing “robustness” of recent peacekeeping operations and has begun to seek a new direction, such as capacity-building support.
The Ise shrine complex is among Japan's most enduring national symbols, and A Social History of the Ise Shrines: Divine Capital is the first book to trace the history of the shrines from their ...beginnings in the seventh century until the present day. Ise enshrines the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the imperial ancestress and the most prominent among kami deities, and has played a vital role in Japan's social, political and religious history. The most popular pilgrims' attraction in the land from the sixteenth century onwards, in 2013 the Ise complex once again captured the nation's attention as it underwent its periodic rebuilding, performed once every twenty years. Mark Teeuwen and John Breen demonstrate that the Ise Shrines underwent drastic re-inventions as a result of on-going contestation between different groups of people in different historical periods. They focus on the agents responsible for these re-inventions, the nature of the economic, political and ideological measures they took, and the specific techniques they deployed to ensure that Ise survived one crisis after another in the course of its long history. This book questions major assumptions about Ise, notably the idea that Ise has always been defined by its imperial connections, and that it has always been a site of Shinto. Written by leading authorities in the field of Shinto studies, this is the essential history of Japan's most significant sacred site.
Japanese scholars have begun to challenge conventional wisdom about effective labor organizing, and Ikuo Kume has written the first book in English to advance their controversial theory. Since at ...least the early 1980s, the power of organized labor has weakened in most advanced industrial countries. The decline of organized labor has coincided with the decentralization of labor-management relations. As a result, most observers assume that decentralized labor is destined to lose power in a capitalist economy, and that enterprise unions will tend to be docile and powerless. Kume documents the one notable exception. The Japanese trade union confederation has steadily grown in importance, expanding its scope beyond individual companies to national policy making. Kume traces the achievements of enterprise unionism in private firms. Labor, he argues, slowly gained legitimate corporate membership by establishing joint institutions with management. By the 1960s, labor-management councils, stimulated by foreign competition, had become a widespread feature of Japanese industry. Soon unions were regular participants in the government deliberation councils and in the information exchange that shaped policy when inflation hit the Japanese economy. The unions had become a full partner by the 1980s and were crucially involved in the 1993 defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party after thirty-eight years of rule.
Until the early 1990s, Japanese education was widely commended for achieving outstanding outcomes in global comparison. At the same time, it was frequently criticized for failing to cultivate ...'individuality' and 'creativity' in students. Wide-ranging education reforms were enacted during the 1990s to remedy these perceived failings. However, as this book argues, the reforms produced a different outcome than intended, contributing to growing disparity in learning motivation and educational aspiration of students from different class backgrounds instead.
Takehiko Kariya demonstrates by way of empirical sociological analysis that educational inequality in Japan has been expanding, and that a new mechanism of educational selection has begun to operate, which he calls the 'incentive divide'. Casting light on recent changes in Japanese society to critically reassess educational policy choices, this book's quantitative and qualitative analyses of the 'mass education society' in post-war Japan offer important insights also for understanding similar problems faced in other parts of the world at present.
Translated into English for the first time, the Japanese language version of Education Reform and Social Class in Japan won the first Osaragi Jiro Prize for Commentary sponsored by the Asahi shinbun. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Japanese studies, education, sociology and social policy.
In large corporations in Japan, much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as "office ladies" (OLs) or "flowers of the workplace." Largely nameless, OLs serve tea to the men and ...type and file their reports. They are exempt from the traditional lifetime employment and have few opportunities for promotion. In this engaging ethnography, Yuko Ogasawara exposes the ways that these women resist men's power, and why the men, despite their exclusive command of authority, often subject themselves to the women's control. Ogasawara, a Japanese sociologist trained in the United States, skillfully mines perceptive participant-observation analyses and numerous interviews to outline the tensions and humiliations of OL work. She details the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that OLs who are frustrated by demeaning, dead-end jobs thwart their managers and subvert the power structure to their advantage. Using gossip, outright work refusal, and public gift-giving as manipulative strategies, they can ultimately make or break the careers of the men. This intimate and absorbing analysis illustrates how the relationships between women and work, and women and men, are far more complex than the previous literature has shown. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998. In large corporations in Japan, much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as "office ladies" (OLs) or "flowers of the workplace." Largely nameless, OLs serve tea to the men and type and file their reports. They are
exempt from the trad.
How is democracy made real? How does an undemocratic country create new institutions and transform its polity such that democratic values and practices become integral parts of its political culture? ...These are some of the most pressing questions of our times, and they are the central inquiry of Building Democracy in Japan. Using the Japanese experience as starting point, this book develops a new approach to the study of democratization that examines state-society interactions as a country adjusts its existing political culture to accommodate new democratic values, institutions and practices. With reference to the country's history, the book focuses on how democracy is experienced in contemporary Japan, highlighting the important role of generational change in facilitating both gradual adjustments as well as dramatic transformation in Japanese politics.
Science, technology, and medicine all contributed to the emerging modern Japanese empire
and conditioned key elements of post-war development. As the only emerging non-Western
country that was a ...colonial power in its own right, Japan utilized these fields not only
to define itself as racially different from other Asian countries and thus justify its
imperialist activities, but also to position itself within the civilized and enlightened
world with the advantages of modern science, technologies, and medicine.
This book explores the ways in which scientists, engineers and physicians worked
directly and indirectly to support the creation of a new Japanese empire, focussing on
the eve of World War I and linking their efforts to later post-war developments. By
claiming status as a modern, internationally-engaged country, the Japanese government
was faced with having to control pathogens that might otherwise not have threatened the
nation. Through the use of traditional and innovative techniques, this volume shows how
the government was able to fulfil the state's responsibility to protect society to
varying degrees.
The article analyzes the foreign policy of Abe Shinzō, one of the most notable and unusual political figures of contemporary Japan, who was twice the head of Japanese government for a total of almost ...nine years. It traces how his political philosophy formed under the influence of ideological views of his relatives, prime ministers N. Kishi and E. Sato, as well as his father, Abe Shintarō. It also considers Abe’s approaches to building Japan’s relations with the countries which are most important for its interests. Abe was perceived as a devoted ally of the U.S. in Washington. He established relations of confidence with presidents Obama and Trump. For this purpose, he strengthened Japanese-American military-political cooperation, took steps to support American strategy in the Asia-Pacific region. He implemented, even if without substantial results, steps to stabilize relations with China, trying to combine policy of containing Beijing with efforts to develop bilateral ties. Abe paid substantial attention to relations with India, including for the purpose of the idea, which was put forward by him and supported by the U.S., to establish quadrilateral cooperation of “democracies” in the Indo-Pacific region – the U.S., Japan, India, and Australia. His policy on the Korean direction was not successful. The relations with Pyongyang remained in deadlock, and, with Seoul, the most acute bilateral problems were not finally solved. Abe also paid great attention to policy aiming to conclude a peace treaty with Russia on the basis of a radical improvement of Japanese-Russian ties in all spheres. The reasons for his failure in these directions are discussed in this article. The article evaluates Abe’s efforts aimed at developing governmental documents and making the Diet adopt laws determining the basic directions of the foreign and military policy of the state. The author characterizes the results of the activity of S. Abe in the sphere of foreign policy and assesses its influence on the formation of the course of the Japanese government after his resignation.
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