This chapter sets out the conceptual framework of the book, examining challenges to democracy in Japan and the world, and recent searches for alternative visions of politics. The end of the Cold War in Europe did not, as some had hoped, lead to a global triumph of democracy. Rather, social frictions associated with the global spread of market capitalism created a crisis of democracy symbolised by the rise of new forms of populism. This crisis has inspired new searches for political alternatives, many of them focusing on grassroots forms of informal politics. The chapter introduces the notion of informal life politics, which will be central to the chapters that follow, and highlights the importance of examining the historical as well as the present-day dimensions of informal life politics in Japan and beyond.