Academics, politicians, journalists, foundation executives, development assistance officials, regimes and their opponents alike throughout the world – they have all joined the civil society bandwagon. Civil society's most ardent advocates could not be more effusive: it is the “hitherto missing key to sustained political reform, legitimate states and governments, improved governance, viable state-society and state economy relationships, and prevention of… political decay” (Harbeson 1994: 1-2). Its detractors, on the other hand, dismiss civil society as a “new cult” (Wood 1990: 63), an idea that “is seductive but perhaps ultimately specious” (Kumar 1994: 130).

It was not always so. Although the origins of the idea of civil society, a realm independent of the State, go back to classical antiquity and it was central to the intellectual debates of early modern Europe, it virtually disappeared from political discourse in the mid-nineteenth Century before being resurrected in the 1970s. A term that became “the motherhood-and-apple pie of the 1990s” (McElvoy 1997: 30) made no appearance in the International Dictionary of the Social Sciences written in the 1960s. The renewed popularity of civil society resulted from a variety of overlapping and sometimes contradictory forces (Keane 1988b: 1; 1998: 35).

Given the twentieth-century penchant for ideologies such as fascism, communism, socialism, and social democracy, a reaction against centralized State power should have come as no surprise, but civil society explicitly reentered political discourse during the struggle against totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.

Salvador Giner (1985: 254) wrote of civil society that “the imprecision of the notions used may perhaps be more symptomatic of the object described by them than a reflection of carelessness on the part of its Interpreters. In stark contrast to the clearly defined boundaries of its ‘opposite’ entity, the State, those of civil society must always remain unclear. For the State, demarcation is all, whereas for civil society ambiguity – the ambiguity that stems from a certain kind of freedom – is all.” I disagree. Many contemporary commentators define civil society in determinedly idiosyncratic ways. The boundaries of the State are anything but clear. And neither is it clear why the concept of civil society must remain ambiguous. It is notoriously difficult to define, however.

John Keane has written eloquently of this difficulty. “Civil society has no natural innocence; it has no Single or eternally fixed form,” he observes (1988a: 14; cf. Harbeson 1994: 23), and even when investigations focus on the present alone, “modern civil societies have comprised a constellation of juxtaposed and changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, an essential core or generative first principle” (1988b: 19). The very concept of civil society is contested, and the problem has only worsened over time: “The ‘language’ of civil society … increasingly speaks in tongues, in accordance with different rules of grammar and conflicting vocabularies” (1998: 52). This confusion has led some scholars (e.g., Honneth 1993; Kumar 1993) to question the usefulness of the term. The answer, though, is not to discard it, but to clarify it and formulate it in such a way that it illuminates a specific problem at hand.

Introduction

In the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci writes that “the counting of votes is only the final ceremony of a long process” (quoted in Przeworski and Sprague 1986: 7). Although one can interpret this remark in many ways, for my purposes it means two things: first, that politics – winning and keeping power – is a structured process in which votes are only occasional indicators of continuing, long-term struggles. The study of electoral outcomes alone never suffices because the greater part of politics – institution building, agenda setting, coalition formation – happens well before voters go to the polls. Second, elites consciously shape those processes, making deliberate choices within and about them. Politics, then, concerns both “long processes” and the strategies pursued by the political actors who drive them.

This chapter explores the “long processes” of Japanese politics. In particular, it takes up the puzzle of long-term conservative rule and its petit-bourgeois social bases, the groups that would seem likely to be among the greatest enemies of the conservatives and their pro-industry policies. Rice agriculture and small retail served as the chief social bases of conservative rule from the 1950s into the 1990s. Together, agriculture and retail supplied some three-quarters of the vote of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the 1950s and nearly one-half in the late 1980s. The two sectors owed their electoral clout not only to their numbers but to their high turnout, stable conservative support over time, organizational strength, and bloc-like voting behavior.

“Civil society” may well be the Holy Grail of our time. Scholars and statesmen seek it with a fervor that borders on the spiritual. And recognizing it among the more mundane chalices has stymied many in their quest. For a historian of state-society relations like myself, the Charge of investigating civil society in Japan raises a thorny set of problems. Civil society has occupied an important place in modern Japan, I argue. Yet if we are to appreciate its complexities, we must first consider the limitations of a historically applying “civil society” to Japan.

The idea of civil society is rooted in a time and a place. Both are distant from modern Japan. Its origins are distinctly European, dating back to the classical Greek term koinonia politike and the Roman societas civilis. For much of European history, civil society referred to self-governing towns or cities. The emphasis was on the word “civil,” which connoted a “citizen,” or a member of the polity endowed with certain rights to participate in governance. The concept of civil society assumed its present-day meaning, most scholars agree, during the latter half of the eighteenth Century and the early nineteenth Century in Western Europe. Particularly in the Anglo-American world and France, “civil society” began to describe a society or Space that not only lay outside the control of the State but whose vibrant exchange of ideas monitored and limited State authority. Against the backdrop of the American and French revolutions, this new type of civil society grew out of a “fear of State despotism” (Keane 1988b: 35-39, 65). In this sense, civil society was composed of voluntary, self-organized associations, such as learned and reading societies, moral reform groups, and Masonic lodges (Trentmann 2000: 1).

For most theorists, the concept of civil society extends beyond institutions to include specific, constitutive values, and among the most important of those values is trust. Adam Seligman (1992: 147), for example, observed that “the concept of social trust is essential to any idea of civil society, in the West as in the East.” Although many scholars and pundits have assumed otherwise (e.g., Fukuyama 1995), both surveys and experiments consistently demonstrate that levels of general trust in people and society are not high in Japan. In fact, they are appreciably lower in Japan than in the United States. Why are Americans more trustful than Japanese, and what are the implications of this difference? I seek to answer this question by means of empirical research, and I conclude that different kinds of social intelligence are adaptive in American and Japanese society. Driven by a variety of factors, including economic trends such as globalization, Japanese society is changing, however, and with it the incentives that advantage different kinds of social intelligence, their attendant attitudes of trust, and the resulting shape of civil society. In sum, Japan is moving from a security-based society in which individuals pursue cautious, commitment-forming strategies to a trust-based society in which individuals pursue more open, opportunity-seeking strategies.

Are Japanese More Trustful Than Americans?

It is often claimed that business practices in Japan are based on trust to a much greater degree than in the West, where business practices are more heavily based on contracts.

The concept of civil society inspires, irritates, or confounds depending on the context and whose judgment is brought to bear. Civil society consists of sustained, organized social activity that occurs in groups that are formed outside the State, the market, and the family. Such activity on the part of groups and individuals cumulatively creates a domain of discourse, a public sphere. Nonstate, nonmarket, nonfamily actors and activities are myriad in any society, however, and there will inevitably be debates over what to include and exclude in considering that vast sphere in which people come together to create social life and public discourse. But these uncertainties should not obscure the value of a concept that offers a powerful analytical tool for thinking about the associational landscape that exists in any given country, the forces that shaped it, the nature of social experiences within the various groups that comprise it, and the ways in which these terrains vary across nations.

Building on the existing literature on organized social life there, civil society provides precisely such a tool for analyzing associational life in Japan. A rich tradition of scholarship traces the country's early civic legacy in the feudal era and before (see Garon, this volume).

Independence and Accountability in Japan and Italy

This chapter explores the role and rule of law by telling a tale of two Systems for prosecuting corruption. In Japan, prosecutors have “limited independence” from outside political influence. In Italy, prosecutors are largely insulated from the world of electoral politics. This difference makes for a huge difference in the nature and scope of corruption prosecutions.

For example, Japan's Recruit Scandal of the late 1980s “came to symbolize an entire political establishment on the take” (Schlesinger 1997: 236). Prosecutors connected more than forty politicians to dubious Recruit payoffs, including nearly every ranking member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yet only two Diet politicians were indicted, neither of whom was prominent. In the 1990s, Italy's “Clean Hands” (Mani Pulite) investigation in the Tangentopoli (“Bribe City”) Scandal also implicated a whole political class, but with radically different results. In all, some 3,000 arrest warrants were issued, and at least 251 members of parliament and five former prime ministers were indicted (Nelken 1996). Ultimately, a small group of Italian prosecutors destroyed or caused the reconstitution of all the major parties of government (Burnett and Mantovani 1998: 6). These two scandals – Recruit and Tangentopoli – arose from similar forms of misconduct – bribery, extortion, and “political financing” – in similarly corrupt societies (Reed et al. 1996; Transparency International 1999). Whether measured by the size of the catch or the consequences of the investigation, however, they had radically different trajectories. This chapter explains why.

For Alexis de Tocqueville (1988: 515–16), “The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations. It is therefore necessary that [government] should not act alone.” Was he right? Japan provides an important perspective on this question.

This chapter argues that intermediate associations can play roles that neither Tocqueville nor contemporary Tocquevilleans have recognized. If Tocqueville emphasized intermediate associations' roles as an external check on government and as a means of civic education, contemporary Tocquevilleans seem more interested in the effect of associations on what Tocqueville called democratic mores. They attribute a good economy, public health, effective governance, and democracy to the aggregate psychological State of a Community. In particular, they value associations because they are thought to promote social capital (e.g., Putnam et al. 1993; Fukuyama 1995; Putnam 1995, 2000; Brehm and Rahn 1997). Associations, whether formal or informal, presumably help Citizens connect to and trust their fellow Citizens. This kind of trust, Robert Putnam (Putnam et al. 1993; Putnam 2000) asserts, can improve both governmental effectiveness and the quality of democracy. Trust between Citizens and government officials, so the argument goes, makes government more effective by making it more responsive (Putnam et al. 1993; Pharr and Putnam 2000). Putnam (2000: chap. 21) also Claims that associations serve as a locus for deliberative democracy.

What is the role of the State in the development of civil society? Rather than a simplistic, oppositional relationship, the state's influence has typically been to shape, not suppress, civil society. Through its direct and indirect structuring of incentives, the State promotes a particular pattern of civil society organization; political institutions structure the “rules of the game,” which in part determine who plays and who flourishes. This pervasive influence can be overt or subtle. Legal, regulatory, and financial institutions and instruments create varying incentives for the organization of civil society by the processes of group formation and development and institutionalization of social movements. Rules on what kind of groups are allowed to form have clear implications, but less obvious are the implications of bulk-mailing discounts for nonprofit organizations, which promote mass memberships, or a difference in access points for interest groups in the policy-making process. In making this argument, this chapter joins an emerging trend of more sophisticated understandings of how the organizational dimensions of civil society are influenced by State action and political institutions (e.g., Carapico 1998; Skocpol 1999; Levy 1999; Chessa 2000).

State structuring of incentives accounts for the pattern of civil society development found in Japan today, with State actions promoting one type of group at the same time they have hindered another. Specifically, small, local groups such as neighborhood associations have been promoted by the State; large, independent, professionalized groups such as Greenpeace have faced a much more hostile legal environment.

In a country where the State was at one time viewed as all-encompassing, the public interest equated with the interests of producers and the private sphere dismissed as the locus of greed, disorder, and incivility (Harootunian 1974), the very notion of civil society (shimin shakai) as a realm of autonomous individuals connected to neither the market nor the State is imbued with almost radical overtones. Be that as it may, many postwar social movement activists have upheld shimin shakai not only as a wellspring of their protests against the lingering supremacy of State and producer interests in Japanese politics, but also as the ultimate beneficiary of that activism. This has been particularly apparent within the organized consumer movement – a movement that, since its inception during the immediate aftermath of World War II, has struggled not only to represent the interests of the country's expanding consumer constituency to State authorities, but also to educate that constituency about their rights and responsibilities as consumers and Citizens (shimin). Their ultimate aim in this regard has been to build a consumer society that is independent of both State and market control. In the face of a traditionally passive political culture and a strong, pro-producer State, however, their efforts have met with mixed results.