Civil Society and Governance in Japan

Resumen

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1. Status quaestionis. 2. Marginality, Social Expectations, and Civil Society. 3. In Search of a Third Way. 4. The Korean Citizen as Local Resident. 5. Cosmopolitan Citizenship.

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Extracto

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Civil Society and Governance in Japan

1. Status quaestionis

THE concept of civil society emerged from the European philosophical and historical experience, and has perhaps found its clearest expression in the United States. But the concept of civil society is more than a unique historical product, and has broader significance for the development of democracies around the world.

Japan seems to possess many of the attributes of civil society. It enjoys a wealth of local associations, a wide variety of news media, and legal provisions for freedom of association and speech. But Japan is far from the consensus society it has often been depicted as. On the contrary, both political elites and the state bureaucracy have often sought to actively avoid engaging the public in serious dialogue. In Japan, what passes for «consensus» (gôi) is often in fact the muted acquiescence of lower status people to solutions imposed by higher status, more powerful leaders.

These practices, norms and ethics inherited from the Confucian tradition have historically buttressed and justified—in a word framed—the bureaucrats’ evaluation of citizen groups, often prompting their quick dismissal or suppression. These values and perceptions have also led to the Japanese state’s more general resistance to providing ordinary citizens with legal, institutional and informational access to power, and reveal the inherent contradiction between paternalistic, technocratic-bureaucratic practices and the maturation of an effective civil society. In Japan, major decisions affecting ordinary peoples’ lives have, in the past, tended to be taken by officials without much reference or importance given to the opinions of ordinary people.

Within the framework of their neo-Confucian values, officials have approached negotiation with the public as persuasion, not open-ended discussion. As exemplified by the decades long Minamata Pollution case, initial suppression of the facts was followed by attempts to persuade local groups, or to bribe them with...

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