Visions of Democracy and Peace in Occupied Japan

Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti heads the Berl Katznelson Chair for the Study of the Labor Movement and is senior lecturer in the Social Science and Civics Department at Beit-Berl College, research fellow at the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and chair of the Israeli Association for Japanese Studies.

This book brings an original perspective to the study of the US occupation of Japan and the development of Japanese democracy. It identifies pro-democracy legacies from the pre-democratic era underlying Japan’s leading politicians’ and political parties’ embrace of democracy, albeit a ‘Japanized’ version. It analyzes their ‘visions’ of the future of Japan’s democracy—primarily by painstaking reading of the Diet debates over major issues, such as the wording of the New Constitution. Combining political history and comparative politics, the book explains why Japanese democracy has been one of the few non-Western survivors among Huntington’s ‘Second Wave of Democratization.’

• Chapter One: The Dilemma of Postwar Japan: A “Washington-Made” or a “Homemade” State?Part One: Background Data for Discussing Occupied Japan’s VisionsChapter Two: American InconsistencyChapter Three: Modern Imperial Japan’s Pro-Democratic LegaciesChapter Four: The Main Parties of Occupied Japan Part Two: Dynamism of Visions (with Alon Lewkowitz)Chapter Five: Ratifying a “Dictated” Constitution Chapter Six: “To Rearm or Not to Rearm?” That is the Question… Chapter Seven: Adopting an “American Peace” EpilogueChapter Eight: Japanized Visions of Democracy and Peace