Frank J. Schwartz - Böcker

If the postwar era has witnessed a pluralizing trend in Japan, that is not to say that many diverse, fluctuating groups compete equally in the political marketplace. Instead, small sets of well-organized, narrowly-focused interest groups typically join specific bureaucratic agencies, groups of politicians, and individual experts to dominate policymaking in relatively self-contained issue areas. One useful window on interest-group politics is Japan's system of consultative councils. More than 200 of these councils, or shingikai, are attached to the ministries. Composed of business people, bureaucrats, scholars, journalists, union members, and others, they deliberate on virtually every aspect of public policy. This book reviews the functions and operations of Japan's council system, and presents three case studies of specific governmental decisions involving the use of shingikai in the late 1980s.

For all the obstacles that remain, civil society is burgeoning in Japan, and the idea of civil society is at the core of the current debate about how to reinvigorate the country. This book gathers the insights of American and Japanese scholars from the fields of political science, sociology, social psychology, and history to investigate the nature of associational life and the public sphere in Japan. It goes beyond assessing the condition of civil society to explore the role of the state in shaping civil society over time, and its broad, comparative framework is useful for thinking about civil society not just in Japan, but elsewhere in the contemporary world. Given its wealth of original research and the uniform strength of its individual chapters, this book will appeal to a broad audience of social scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers.

If the postwar era has witnessed a pluralizing trend in Japan, that is not to say that many diverse, fluctuating groups compete equally in the political marketplace. Instead, small sets of well-organized, narrowly-focused interest groups typically join specific bureaucratic agencies, groups of politicians, and individual experts to dominate policymaking in relatively self-contained issue areas. One useful window on interest-group politics is Japan's system of consultative councils. More than 200 of these councils, or shingikai, are attached to the ministries. Composed of business people, bureaucrats, scholars, journalists, union members, and others, they deliberate on virtually every aspect of public policy. This book reviews the functions and operations of Japan's council system, and presents three case studies of specific governmental decisions involving the use of shingikai in the late 1980s.

For all the obstacles that remain, civil society is burgeoning in Japan, and the idea of civil society is at the core of the current debate about how to reinvigorate the country. This book gathers the insights of American and Japanese scholars from the fields of political science, sociology, social psychology, and history to investigate the nature of associational life and the public sphere in Japan. It goes beyond assessing the condition of civil society to explore the role of the state in shaping civil society over time, and its broad, comparative framework is useful for thinking about civil society not just in Japan, but elsewhere in the contemporary world. Given its wealth of original research and the uniform strength of its individual chapters, this book will appeal to a broad audience of social scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers.