0520080920.University.of.California.Press.Losing.Face.Status.Politics.in.Japan.Nov.1992

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Preface
No issue has been as central to twentieth-century democracies as that of equality. Most of the
great struggles of this century have been waged in the name of equality: class conflict in Britain
and elsewhere; the Third World struggle for independence from colonialism; demands in
virtually all countries for the extension of suffrage to previously excluded people; pressures by
women, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups for redress of their grievances; even
demands for equity in taxation. In a broader sense, the ideal of equality has been basic to the
notion of the modern state itself.
[1]
Certainly no major state, whether democratic, socialist,
communist, or authoritarian, has been able to avoid confronting, and having in some way to
address, demands from within society for greater equality and participation.
Yet from the standpoint of the state, no principle has been as thorny to deal with as this central
issue of equality. Disparities in wealth, intelligence, talent, and all manner of other attributes arc
ubiquitous in social life. Moreover, people's consciousness of inequality has increased
dramatically in recent years as a result of a broad range of factors, from improved
communications that make inequities in the distribution of wealth, benefits, and privileges more
visible to ideological changes that legitimate the struggle for greater shares of the pie. Indeed,
some have argued that the "crisis of democracy," to the extent that one in fact exists, is due to a
growing inability of democratic states to accommodate all the pressures from below by the many
claimants who want more of whatever there is to get.
[1] Dankwart Rustow,
A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization
(Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1967). See also Sidney Verba et al.,
Elites and the Idea of Equality:
A Comparison of Japan, Sweden, and the United States
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1987), for a major recent work on the centrality of equality as an issue.
According to a study by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Watanuki Joji, the failure of
the state to cope effectively with the challenge posed by people's wholesale pursuit of equality
and freedom had by the mid 1970s resulted in a delegitimization of authority and an erosion of
popular trust in leadership.
[2]
Serious ills in socialist systems revived faith in democracy and the
free market in the late 1980s, but democratic systems had yet to overcome their basic problems.
This book explores the problem of equality in one country: Japan, heralded today as the site of an
economic "miracle" and a state with an enviable record of stability and effective rule. It looks at
how struggles over equality are waged in Japan and how authority responds to them. Because
inequalities take various forms, the focus of this book is on disparities in social status based on
age, gender, ethnicity, caste background, and other attributes beyond the powers of the individual
to change. I call struggles over such inequalities "status politics."
The issue of equality has special importance in Japan today as a result of value changes that have
occurred there, particularly since the end of World War II. Some 120 years ago, centuries after
feudalism had ended in most of Europe, Japan was still a feudal society characterized by
hierarchical status relations and a traditional Confucian ideology that saw inequalities in social
relations as natural and legitimate. Although communitarianism at the village level, where most
of society lived, provided a basis for solidarity and resistance to higher authority when
conditions became unbearably oppressive, profound status differences were taken as given.
These traditional norms and values persisted relatively unchallenged up to the end of World War
II, legitimizing the many prerogatives exercised by status superiors over their inferiors and
teaching inferiors to defer to those above them and to accept their lot. From the time of the
Allied Occupation (1945–1952), however, as democratic values have been introduced into the
legal system, the schools, and other institutions and Japan has become increasingly
internationalized, the situation has undergone major change. Indeed, the past forty years have
seen a marked increase in popular consciousness of inequalities in Japanese life, and today status
inferiors seeking to alter the terms of social relationships can call on the counter-ideology of
egalitarianism to support their demands.
This book focuses on three specific protests over issues of equality that have arisen during the
past few decades. The cases involve groups who
[2] Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Watanuki Joji,
The Crisis of Democracy
(New
York: New York University Press, 1975), 3–9.
¯ xi ¯
traditionally have been assigned positions of social inferiority and who, in the postwar period,
have sought to improve their lot in the name of equality: young people, former outcastes, and
women. By examining a series of status-based conflicts, we will explore the conditions that
generate such conflicts, the various ways the status-deprived express their grievances, how they
mobilize and organize, and the goals they seek.
These questions are important from the standpoint not only of assessing the successes and
failures of status-based struggles in Japan, but also of examining Western theories regarding how
interest groups arise and seek legitimacy in democratic societies. Implicit in the work of
numerous writers who have studied the rise of interests in democracies—from E. E.
Schattschneider to Mancur Olson and Terry Moe—is a developmental model the end products of
which are relatively permanent, highly professionalized, and institutionalized "organized
interests" of the kind able to play a role in policymaking.
[3]
Less organized interests—including
relatively amorphous, impermanent groups or movements—are seen as less stable, and therefore
less significant, forms of political life that may or may not survive a transition (generally
assumed to be desired by the members) to such an end condition. Organized interests, in contrast,
are viewed as inherently expansionist in their drive to maximize resources, from money to
members.
Behind this developmental model lie many assumptions, first and foremost of which being that
organized interests can, by maximizing their resources, gain access to policymaking. "Access to
policymaking" itself is thought to involve the active participation of organized and
bureaucratized interest groups, operating through their professional staffs, in the actual decision-
making process, whether by influencing legislation, as in the United States, or by joining in
corporatist arrangements, as in Sweden. In Anselm Strauss's terms, organized interest groups
become involved in the actual "negotiations," or bargaining, of policymaking.
[4]
The case of interests in Japan, I will argue, calls this developmental model into question and
challenges the assumptions on which it rests. Although organized economic interests, including
big business and the agricultural lobby, enjoy an astonishing level of access to policymaking in
[3] Terry M. Moe,
The Organization of Interests: Incentives and the Internal Dynamics of
Political Interest Groups
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Mancur Olson,
The
Logic of Collective Action
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); E. E.
Schattschneider,
The Semi-sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America
(New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967).
[4] Anselm Strauss,
Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order
(San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978), 1–7.
¯ xii ¯
Japan, when it comes to noneconomic interests the story is quite different. Given their limited
access to policymaking at the national level, less organized interests such as social protest groups
may have little incentive to become more institutionalized. In a society in which the dominant
positive response of authorities to interest-group claimants is likely to be unilaterally granted
concessions rather than actual admission to the bargaining process, there may be little to gain
from amassing the staff or other organizational resources needed to play a role in policymaking.
Indeed, at least in some cases, less organized interests may find it more advantageous to
minimize
their resources, to limit their group to those most committed, and, through various
strategies, to present themselves as victims in order to trigger a paternalistic response on the part
of the authorities. Certainly the study of how and why interests arise, organize, and pursue their
goals in Japan poses important challenges to theories of interest groups and the assumptions that
underlie them.
After focusing on the protest groups in chapters 3 through 7, I will turn in chapter 8 to an
examination of how authorities respond to conflicts over equality as they unfold, and the
consequences of that pattern of response, as a way of assessing how well Japan is coping with an
issue that has proven so difficult for most states in the twentieth century.
In addition to exploring the question of equality in Japan, a major aim of this book is to look at
how, in a broader sense, the Japanese deal with social conflict. Social protest may arise over
many issues, ranging from quality-of-life concerns to economic ones. Status-based conflicts, for
many reasons to be set out here, constitute a "worst case" of protest in Japan, both from the
standpoint of persons attempting to press their grievances and in the view of authorities who
must in some manner respond. Issues of equality are difficult to resolve in any country, but
especially so in Japan, for in their essence all status-based protests involve an assertion of self,
claims of entitlement, and demands for oneself and one's group that fly in the face of the
Japanese "ideal model of protest," according to which some kinds of protest are judged to be
more acceptable than others. Thus protesters face major obstacles in pressing their case, and
authorities may in response bring into play a full range of conflict-management strategies, from
"soft" backstage acts of appeasement to "harder" methods of social control. By studying
Japanese struggles over equality, then, we can look both at how one country is dealing with a
challenge that is felt worldwide and, at the same time, at how Japanese authorities approach the
problem of social conflict in general.
The response of authorities to protest has an important bearing not only on the particular
developmental pattern that interests will undergo in
¯ xiii ¯
society but also on our understanding of how democracy works in practice. Conflict theorists and
many political scientists—Schattschneider and Giuseppe DiPalma are two examples—have long
upheld the value to political systems of allowing social grievances to be aired and of creating and
maintaining institutionalized channels for the resolution of social conflict, arguing that openness
to conflict and responsiveness to new interests assure the long-term health, viability, and stability
of democratic systems.
[5]
Protest movements, some hold, advance the "statemaking" process
itself. In Western democracies, moreover, these views of social scientists are generally backed by
both average people and public officials (even though official support sometimes proves more
rhetorical than real when actual social protests arise).
Authorities in Japan, as we shall see, take a dramatically different view of social conflict and
protest, and of what should be done about it. The legacy of Confucianism, with its emphasis on
harmony as a social good, causes even rhetorical tributes to the value of airing social grievances
to be rare. Meanwhile, the tests that a social protest must meet if it is to be judged legitimate by
the watching public and potential supporters are rigorous. If social conflict cannot in the end be
avoided, authorities in Japan seek to contain it to the extent possible, using strategies that tend to
marginalize protesters and to keep the protest outside existing channels and institutions of
conflict resolution and policymaking.
At the same time, however, in what is a crucial part of the "Japanese formula" for handling social
conflict, authorities do address—if less adequately than protesters generally would like—the
issues raised as a means of heading off future conflicts. In daily life the unilateral granting of
preemptive concessions is powerfully supported by societal norms that enjoin status superiors to
avoid abusing their authority, to anticipate the needs of inferiors, and to be sensitive to how their
behavior is viewed by the watching public. At the national level these same norms, which
combine elements of paternalism and of communitarianism, have translated into a society in
which social welfare measures compare favorably with those in place in the United States, and
where the gap between the rich and the poor ranks Japan near Sweden as one of the more
egalitarian nations—economically speaking—in the world. Given the country's extraordinary
record of stability and governability in the postwar era, Japan's approach of privatizing social
conflict while granting preemptive concessions challenges the assumptions of many conflict
theorists and invites examination
[5] Schattschneider,
The Semi-sovereign People;
Giuseppe DiPalma,
The Study of Conflict in
Western Society
(Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1973).
¯ xiv ¯
by scholars and policymakers alike. Yet it is important to look as well at the costs of this
approach, its consequences for the overall pattern of interest-group representation in society and
the conditions on which it rests, and at how and why the Japanese approach to social protest may
be changing in Japan today and in the future.
I am indebted to a great many people and institutions for their help while I worked on this book.
Fieldwork was conducted in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1978 with the generous assistance of the Japan
Foundation, and in a follow-up visit in 1985. Sakamoto Yoshikazu was kind enough to arrange
for my affiliation with the Faculty of Law of the University of Tokyo for the earlier period, and I
am grateful to him and to other faculty members and staff there for the aid they offered me.
[6]
Ishida Takeshi, then of the University of Tokyo and now retired, extended to me the same
willing assistance, insightful comments and suggestions on my work, and warm hospitality that
he has extended to so many other American scholars working in Japan.
My research in Japan could not have gone forward without the generous help of Uchida Mitsuru,
of Waseda University, and Muramatsu Michio, of Kyoto University. Akamatsu Ryoko, former
director-general of the Women's and Young Workers' Bureau of the Ministry of Labor, and her
husband, Hanami Tadashi, of the Faculty of Law, Sophia University, both of them friends for
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