Abstract
Given Japan’s traumatic experience of total war and its comprehensive defeat, Reiko Kage argues that many observers expected Japan’s people to be depressed, disaffected, and apathetic. The evidence, she argues, confounds this expectation; several measures indicate that “civic engagement rose dramatically.” Her book seeks an answer to the question, “How could this be?” (p. 1). As she sees it, specific developments in three distinct periods shaped a “postwar civic engagement boom.” Her own words express her views clearly: “Legacies of voluntary associations from the prewar period” gave citizens of Japan a “configuration of civil society” that afforded a particular set of “opportunities for participation.” Japan’s wartime regime increased participation—involuntary as well as voluntary—in certain forms of civic activity. The postwar constitution then “provided the basic legal framework for associational activities to flourish.” (pp. 164-165). “State” and “society,” in Kage’s view, are neither entirely distinct nor engaged in a zero-sum contest. In mid-twentieth-century Japan, “state capacities and societal capacities . . . expand[ed] in tandem.” (p. 126).
To assemble this book, Kage had to undertake extensive study of historical records. Lacking time machines, historians cannot create their data through their own surveys; they must scavenge through what remains from the past. Kage found “no comprehensive data source on associational memberships” for the prewar, wartime and postwar periods, and indeed she does not attempt to assess what the full range of associational life may have been at any point in time. But she was able to identify membership counts for various years between 1925 and 1960 for the YMCA, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Japan Alpine Club, Judo organizations, a Japanese women’s organization, Rotary International, Japanese Consumer Cooperatives, the Japan Seafarers Relief Association, Christian churches, and labor unions. She also gathered data on population, education, and the economy for each of Japan’s prefectures for as many prewar, wartime, and postwar years as possible.
Summarizing her analysis of this data, Kage concludes that after the war membership increased “consistently,” and often “markedly,” in all these associations (p. 42). In some of the associations more closely related to Japanese culture (the Alpine Club, Judo, the women’s association, the Seafarers Relief), membership was already growing in the war years from the mid-1930s;more generally, practices dating at least from the Meiji Restoration of the mid-19th century helped Japanese people define their postwar options. Kage argues that defeat did not shock Japanese people into passive abandonment of their culture or of civic engagement. Instead, they responded to the disaster of defeat by drawing on prewar patterns; association membership grew strongly right from 1946. It did not wait for support of a revived economy that arrived only with the stimulus provided by the Korean War from the early 1950s.
Kage insists that her account is more persuasive than three alternatives proposed by various earlier researchers: democratization, the policies of the U.S. occupation, and a social response to disaster. Her arguments on these points, each of which compares Japan with the United States and other societies, might have been more fully developed. Her argument about democratization relies in large part on a comparison with the United States. The United States was indeed more democratic than Japan before 1945, so that as she suggests any increase in U.S. civic engagement after World War II cannot be attributed entirely to democratization. Yet the United States did democratize after the war in the sense that it became much more hospitable to such arguably “democratic” forces as labor unions and civil rights for African Americans and other minorities—and for women. With respect to the policies of the U.S. occupation forces, Kage acknowledges that several (surely a greatly disproportionate share) of the associations for which she found data were tied to American culture, and she notes that the U.S. occupation “conferred special social legitimacy” on such associations. But she also emphasizes efforts of the U.S. occupation authorities to discourage or suppress potentially nationalist associations, such as those for Judo, as well as labor unions. Unfortunately, she does not consider the likelihood that many Japanese people may have taken the pragmatic view that Christian entities, Rotary, and indeed associations of many kinds, could be useful for learning about and perhaps influencing the American occupiers (and later, allies and economic partners). Nor does she discuss the possibility that some saw membership in such associations as a way to identify with those who had just scored an unimaginably comprehensive victory over their nation. In general, she provides interesting evidence about membership, but little about the perceptions or purposes of members.
As these questions suggest, a historian is no doubt more likely to see a particular conjunction as enmeshed in a variety of distinctive narratives, rather than as the response of abstractions such as “the state” and “society” to other abstractions such as “war.” Those of us who are especially interested in institutions are also likely to wish that Kage had provided more complete discussions of Japanese religious, economic, and political associations, and of nongovernment as well as state organizations in such fields as health, social welfare, education, and cultural affairs. But this would be to ask for a very different book than the one Reiko Kage set out to write. She focused this book on the important and influential questions raised by such American researchers as Sidney Verba, Robert Putnam, and Theda Skocpol, and she takes her definition of “civic engagement” from the body of literature these researchers have done much to create. She has applied this approach to certain aspects of an extraordinary span of Japan’s modern history, with what appears—to a reviewer who knows very little about Japan—to be exemplary care and creativity, and with due respect for continuity. The approach she chose, like all approaches to social and historical study, comes with limitations. Reiko Kage has made the approach her own, using it to very good effect in a study that will no doubt advance fruitful cross-national studies in the field.
Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan has provocative implications for practice. If Kage is right, legacies of cultural belief and social practice established in the past have more influence on the response to postwar situations than the “shock and awe” that a population may have experienced. She finds little support for the ideas that the recovery of a society, and a rise in civic engagement, requires either democratization or prosperity. Instead, her book supports the view that an effort to reshape a society immediately after even the most devastating experience of wartime destruction, death, and defeat must be very carefully calibrated and will certainly encounter persistent resistance.