The Emergence of a Civil Society in Japan

Japanese society has often been portrayed as fundamentally “harmonious” and the Japanese themselves have often been described as hardworking, docile, and politically rather passive, preferring to leave the important decisions about the future of their nation to bureaucrats and politicians. Japanese postwar history has seen its fair share of conflict and protest; however, most of these occurrences are generally considered “exceptions to the rule” because protests and demonstrations have, for the most part, remained singular and local occurrences. Labor union protests in the 1950s, opposition movements against AMPO (Nichi-bei anzen hosh , Japan-US Mutual Security Treaty) and Narita airport, the students’ movement in the 1960s, or the environmental-, peace-, or women’s movements were, however, significant factors in expanding a social stratum of socially or politically interested and active citizens. In the 1960s, it seemed as if one were witnessing the formation of an efficient civil society that could provide a social balance against the dominance of the bureaucracy-based political power structure and one-party rule. By the mid-1970s however, it seemed as if the movements had lost their momentum and the alliance between ruling party and bureaucracy was never in real danger of losing its grip on power. The end of the Cold War and new political opportunities in the former Communist-block states, in Latin-America, in African and Asian countries have triggered renewed political science debate about civil society, its meaning and function, and its importance not only for the political development of newly democratizing states, but also for established democracies, as in the debate about “democratic consolidation”. This article will analyze the changing relationship between citizens and state in Japan and the prospects for a strengthening of civil society. The concept of civil society is still vague and has been defined in many different ways; therefore this article will first examine the development of this concept in Western as well as in Japanese discourse.