Although a complete and accurate assessment of the death toll from the Cultural Revolution is not possible until the Chinese government opens its archives, available publications and documents indicate unambiguously that there were extensive collective killings. In the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution, during a major political shift, local governments conducted extensive investigations of the atrocities. The reports were quickly locked up and classified due to a yet newer and more restrictive political climate, but not before statistics and event descriptions found their way into various official publications.

The most systematic among these publications are the county gazet-teers (xianzhi) and province gazetteers (shengzhi). These materials tend to be circumspect because they were highly censored. The compilers of these reports were given specific orders to record “sparsely” the “negative side” of past political campaigns, and for the most part they did so. However, the documents are nonetheless extremely valuable. The data, mainly gathered in the mid-1980s, cover almost all of China, and here I use statistics that were derived from these reports as the baseline estimate of the number of collective killings. There are more revealing documents but, unfortunately, they are not readily available to the public or academic institutions. However, some documents occasionally were leaked to researchers.

In this chapter, I establish the case of collective killings through these two types of written materials: local gazetteers and leaked documents.

OVERVIEW

The previous chapter tested, on Japanese datasets, the validity of the argument that levels of civic engagement may rise dramatically in the wake of wars a) when wartime mobilization has equipped citizens with the skills that are necessary for participation and b) when the preexisting associational legacies provided fertile ground for the rapid expansion of civic activities. Higher levels of membership growth between 1945 and 1955 were seen in areas of Japan that had been more highly mobilized and which had exhibited relatively high levels of civic activities prior to war. These factors indeed propelled civic engagement to new heights once the war ended, regardless of how much physical or economic damage the region had incurred.

This chapter moves beyond the Japanese context and tests the broader applicability of the framework on data from thirteen countries that experienced World War II. Moving beyond the Japanese context also allows the study to test more explicitly for the validity of the victory/defeat hypothesis. Chapter 4 did test for the validity of one variant of the victory/defeat hypothesis: the idea that different levels of physical damage may produce the differential growth of civic engagement in the wake of wars. It found the empirical evidence for this hypothesis to be quite weak in the Japanese case. However, physical damage is not always synonymous with victory/defeat per se, which are national-level variables; while defeated countries may often incur higher levels of damage than victorious countries, the correlation is not perfect.

Conventional accounts of the impact of war on civil society typically paint a bleak picture of the prospects for civic life in the wake of wartime defeat. Defeat usually reduces incomes, interrupts education, and inflicts psychological trauma on a citizenry, all of which should lead citizens to withdraw from public life. By contrast, in victorious countries, it is argued, as these damages tend to be much more limited, there should be no fall, and possibly even a rise, in levels of civic engagement in the immediate postwar period.

This project has questioned this conventional wisdom. As argued in Chapter 1, Japan in the wake of World War II provides a key case for examining the relationship between war and the postwar growth of civic engagement. Since Japan was so thoroughly defeated by 1945, if the conventional political science wisdom were correct, it would be an especially unlikely case in which to find any increase in postwar levels of civic engagement. Wartime destruction was severe, postwar economic conditions deteriorated precipitously, and educational opportunities were cut short on a large scale. Moreover after the war, the experience of foreign occupation, as well as the series of occupation reforms that sought to thoroughly remake not only Japan's preexisting political and economic institutions but even the Japanese mind, could easily have added a new layer of trauma and even a demobilizing culture of defeatism. Yet, despite all of these adverse conditions, civic life actually blossomed in immediate postwar Japan.

OVERVIEW

As noted in Chapter 1, little empirical data outside of the United States have thus far been compiled on the changes in the trajectory of civic engagement in the wake of wars. Chapter 1 further explained why collecting data on the case of mid-twentieth-century Japan would be especially useful as a test of the standard victory/defeat hypothesis.

What in fact happened to levels of civic engagement in Japan in the wake of defeat? How do the postwar levels of voluntary participation compare with the prewar period? This chapter presents the results of an original mining of Japanese voluntary association and government archives. Much of the data presented in this chapter have never been systematically compiled, either in the Japanese or English language.

Drawing on these data, the chapter advances five main claims:

1. 1) In absolute terms, levels of membership grew to much higher levels in the postwar period compared to the prewar period. The available data generally exhibit a sharp rise in memberships during the first postwar decade, even before Japan's economic “takeoff” began around the early to mid-1950s.

2. 2) Levels of postwar membership growth were at least as rapid for associations that operated under fairly liberal conditions during the prewar and wartime periods as those that had been more repressed.

3. 3) In the immediate postwar era, membership in groups with more “indigenous” Japanese origins appears to have risen at rates that are comparable with groups with more “Western” origins.

4. 4) There is some evidence that associations that were suppressed by the U.S. occupation exhibited less rapid increases in memberships compared to those that were not; but in either case, by 1955, membership appears to have grown in absolute terms.

5. […]

OVERVIEW

Chapter 2 presented new data on the rise of civic engagement in Japan in the wake of World War II. It demonstrated that, contrary to standard expectations, Japan experienced a sharp rise in levels of civic engagement in the initial decade after the war across several different types of groups. This rise was well under way even before economic growth had begun to take off. At the same time, Chapter 2 also showed the presence of considerable variation in the extent of this rise across different Japanese prefectures. To explain these findings, Chapter 3 took a step back from the Japanese case per se to rethink the more general relationship between war and civic engagement. It offered a new theoretical framework that focuses on how experiences of mobilization during wartime equip citizens with new skills that they can apply with renewed vigor after war's end, particularly if preexisting legacies from the prewar period permit the rapid revival of organizations and help to disseminate information on those groups.

The next four chapters test the validity of the framework presented in Chapter 3. The present chapter uses quantitative analysis to assess the explanatory power of the hypothesis on the change in levels of civic engagement between the prewar and postwar periods in Japan at the prefectural level. Chapter 5 then moves beyond the Japanese case and again uses quantitative analysis to test the broader applicability of the framework on thirteen countries that were affected by World War II. Chapters 6 and 7 then return to the case of Japan and perform process-tracing analyses of specific groups in particular cities, illuminating the causal mechanisms that could not be captured by the quantitative analyses in Chapters 4 and 5.

OVERVIEW

This chapter continues to process-trace the mechanisms through which prewar legacies of participation and wartime mobilization shape the growth of postwar civic engagement. In particular, it compares the postwar revival of participation in judo in the two cities of Fukuoka and Yokohama. Judo offers a useful contrast with the YMCA that was the focus of the previous chapter. Whereas the YMCA was repressed by the Japanese government during the war due to its Western origins but then was subsequently viewed favorably by the U.S. occupation for the same reason, judo, with its more “indigenous” origins, was favored by the militarist regime during World War II but then was actively discouraged by the U.S. occupation forces, as they believed it propagated militaristic values. Despite this adverse political climate, participation in judo grew during the postwar period across Japan, albeit at a slower rate than the YMCA (see Chapter 2, Figure 2.6). The number of new members rose every year, from 3,033 in 1946, to 4,301 in 1947, to 6,550 in 1948, to 8,103 in 1949. The fact that judo grew at all during this period highlights the strong bottom-up impetus for growth in civic engagement in Japan in the immediate postwar period; while occupation policies may have had some effect in discouraging this growth, they were not able to quench it. As this chapter will demonstrate, a major source of this bottom-up surge in participation was wartime mobilization.

Hiroshima, 1949. Four years earlier, the atomic bomb had completely destroyed the city. There were still many visible signs of damage. In the midst of this devastation, Hiroshima's first professional baseball team came into being.

Professional baseball had been founded in Japan in 1934, but Hiroshima had never had a professional team. Yet baseball at the high school level had been enormously popular in Hiroshima before the war, and the local Hiroshima Commercial High School had won three titles at the national high school baseball tournament (Koshien) during the prewar period. As early as November 1945, a team of local baseball players began playing with the U.S. Occupation forces. Thus, in April 1949, when Matsutaro Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri Giants, announced a plan to re-organize Japanese professional baseball into two leagues and to vastly expand the number of teams, local business leaders in Hiroshima sprang into action and sent in an application. They saw baseball as a way to revitalize the war-torn city. The new Hiroshima Carp, as the team would be called, was accepted into the Central League, and in 1950 the team played its first full season. Crowds flocked to the stadium to watch the games.

The problem was funding. Most of the professional teams that were in existence at the time were owned by big corporations that were willing to run a deficit on the team in order to generate publicity for their main line of business.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 pointed out that most of the existing theories of participation would expect a country's victory or defeat to crucially determine its trajectory of civic engagement in the wake of wars. Chapter 2 presented new data to show that, contrary to these expectations, civic engagement rose at an impressive rate in defeated Japan in the wake of World War II. It also demonstrated the substantial variation in the extent to which civic engagement grew in the wake of war across different Japanese prefectures.

Given the confluence of stagnant economic growth, loss of educational opportunities, and psychological devastation that Japanese citizens faced in the immediate postwar period, conditions in Japan should have been particularly adverse to any rise in civic engagement. If the victory/defeat hypothesis cannot explain a case of defeat as complete as Japan's, this leads us to question the applicability of the hypothesis in any case.

Why might levels of civic engagement rise in the wake of war, even in the face of devastating defeat? And what accounts for the variations in the extent to which voluntary participation rises in the wake of war? The present chapter takes a step back from the Japanese case and develops a new theoretical framework to explain the more general relationship between war, on the one hand, and the postwar trajectory of civic engagement, on the other.

OVERVIEW

Chapter 4 used quantitative analysis to demonstrate that the combination of path-dependency effects from the prewar period and wartime mobilization crucially shaped the rise of civic engagement in Japan in the initial postwar decade. Participation in youth and religious organizations grew more rapidly in areas where levels of participation had been high prior to the war and that were highly mobilized during wartime. Conversely, areas that had seen low levels of participation during the prewar period and/or were less mobilized during the war saw lower rates of postwar membership growth. Chapter 5 then showed that mobilization had important effects on postwar levels of civic engagement in thirteen countries in Asia, Europe, and North America.

The quantitative analyses, however, did not test the precise mechanisms through which mobilization and historical legacies would affect civic engagement in the postwar period. A separate investigation is required to confirm the causal relationship between prewar, wartime, and postwar levels of participation at the micro-level. The present chapter and the next seek to further test the validity of the hypothesis presented in this project through historical process-tracing.

Chapter 3 argued that in conjunction with mobilization, prewar levels of voluntary participation leave considerable historical legacies, which survive despite the disruption caused by war. The legacies of prewar associational activities, in particular, are hypothesized to operate via two distinct pathways.

OVERVIEW

War destroys. It claims lives, it damages economic and physical infrastructure, and it reduces opportunities for educational advancement. If a country is defeated, the citizenry inevitably is left traumatized as well. These are hardly conditions that would seem conducive to a growth and enrichment of civic engagement.

This book, however, finds considerable evidence that civic engagement rose dramatically in Japan after World War II and some initial evidence that it also rose in many other war-affected countries during the same period. The rise of civic engagement in Japan also notably predated the country's postwar economic takeoff. How could this be? This book seeks to explain the causes of the postwar growth in civic engagement. A standard explanation points to U.S. occupation policies, which democratized the Japanese regime and introduced freedom of association. But this explanation is inadequate; although the occupation regime removed barriers to civic engagement, it hardly forced Japanese citizens to participate in organizations. The civic space opened up by the occupation had to be filled by the citizens themselves.

The study proceeds in three steps. First, it documents the postwar surge in Japan's voluntary participation. Second, it takes a step back and offers a general theory of the growth in civic engagement in the wake of wars. Third, it tests the theory using both quantitative analyses of data from Japan and twelve other developed countries, as well as qualitative analyses of specific local associations in Japan.

OVERVIEW

Until now, this book has focused on highlighting the factors that shape civic engagement in the wake of wars, both within and across countries. This chapter addresses the “so what?” question. Civic engagement grew rapidly in the wake of World War II in Japan, but what were some of the macro-level consequences of this growth? Existing studies of civil society suggest that a growing civic life in Japan should have had important beneficial effects for postwar Japanese reconstruction. How well is this claim substantiated by the empirical evidence? To address this question, this chapter assesses the relationship between Japan's civil society in the immediate postwar period, on the one hand, and postwar reconstruction, on the other.

A voluminous political science literature now examines the factors that determine the success or failure of peace-building, both for civil and for international wars (e.g., Doyle and Sambanis 2006; Fortna 2004; Hartzell et al. 2001; Humphreys and Weinstein 2007; Paris 2004; Werner 1999), but the majority of studies of postwar reconstruction per se consist of in-depth qualitative inquiries of single cases that have been conducted by historians and/or historical sociologists. This work is valuable in its own right, but there is a need for political scientists to build and test a systematic, middle-range theory of the determinants of successful postwar reconstruction.

This chapter argues that civil society serves as a key variable in facilitating the society-wide coordination that makes reconstruction work.