Is Japan enigmatic because it is unique? Problems of social and economic policy in contemporary Japan challenge myths about uniqueness. By focusing on comparable problems, this essay notes the limits of world views about Japanese uniqueness and the exceptionalism of countries.

An aim is to unbundle areas that illustrate the policy process and reflect on models of policymaking. In the diversity within Japan, policy-making in specific areas reflects on the approaches of corporatism, pluralism, and state-centered theorists.

Across policy areas, instructors will discover problems of Japan's industrial society that are nonetheless comparable to elsewhere. Throughout East Asia, scholars note the distinct social, ideological, and historical contexts that challenge past social theory. A leading Asian country can offer rich additions to a course on comparative politics and public policy. In Japan, one also can emphasize familiar features of industrial society, economy, and polity that test various approaches and models of policymaking. Using areas of labor, welfare, agriculture, and education as examples, instructors may pursue these and additional topics found from the bibliographies and readings.

“The wrenching testimony of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, accuser and accused, constituted a defining moment for the country that will forever change how the U.S. Senate reviews Supreme Court nominees” (Biskupic 1991, 2948). Thus did sober, factual Congressional Quarterly judge the consequences of the Hill-Thomas hearings. Most news accounts were considerably more fervid. Reporters as well as commentators claimed that the hearings demonstrated that the confirmation process is a complete fiasco.

The Hill-Thomas hearings did not expose some fundamental flaw in the process per se. To be sure, a lot of less than admirable behavior and some procedural misjudgments characterized the latter part of the Thomas confirmation hearings. But a situation such as this one will always be difficult for the Senate or any similar body to handle. Structural changes in the process cannot make it easy or painless. Most of the “reforms” proposed would not work or would be counterproductive.

According to a second theme in the media coverage, the hearings demonstrated that senators—at least the ones on the Judiciary Committee—are incompetent, inadequate for their jobs, and out of touch with the American people. To the contrary, I think that both Democrats and Republicans followed strategies that made excellent sense given the political context in which they operated. Incompetence is not the problem.

If the simple process and personnel-based critiques are off base, was the widespread disquiet the hearings generated misplaced? There are reasons for concern but somewhat more subtle ones than those most often raised.

E. E. Schattschneider was a self-proclaimed “realist.” It seems an honest label for one whose theory of politics begins with a newspaper report of a fist fight that escalated into a riot and whose ultimate criticism of democratic theory is that those who defined the term never saw a modern democracy in operation. Schattschneider made no pretense of being a political philosopher, yet his hard-boiled practicality seems well-informed by classical political thought. Indeed, his idea of politics is Aristotelian to the core, though recast rather like a Shakespearean play updated in the vernacular, setting, and dress of West Side Story. As such, Schattschneider's politics defy easy categorization in the political science of his time. Widely respected and honored within the discipline, he seems nonetheless a kind of anti-hero—a bit out of step with his peers and skeptical about much of the prevailing “wisdom” in the discipline.

Schattschneider was out of step as well with the reformist politics of his time. A child of Progressivism, he was schooled at the University of Wisconsin and shared the general optimism of Progressives—their passion for social and political engineering, their faith in a democratic politics and an informed citizenry. But unlike most Progressives, Schattschneider was concerned more with politics than with democracy. For him, politics was fundamental; it was the foundation upon which democratic government had to be built.

Until recently, the nomination of a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court had little public opinion relevance. Questions might be raised about the nominee's qualifications, perhaps including his or her liberalism or conservatism, but the American people tended to acquiesce in Court appointments. That changed during the Reagan administration, when opponents of the president's choice of Robert Bork decided that public opinion did matter and effectively campaigned to turn the public against Bork.

The Thomas nomination, however, raised even more questions about public opinion. Race and the role it should play in Court nominations was as important as Clarence Thomas's legal opinions. And, as soon as Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment became public, other aspects of public opinion came into prominence.

E. E. Schattschneider's Party Government, published fifty years ago, is one of the early classics of behavioral political science. The enduring popularity of this book, however, stems less from its impressive analysis of the actual workings of American party politics than its advocacy of democratic reform. Party Government was a strong blow in behalf of “responsible party government,” a creed that has had an important influence on political science. Schattschneider later chaired the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association, which produced the famous report “Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System,” published in 1950. Much of the argument of the report was anticipated by Party Government, which advocated “party centralization” to overcome the local and sectional tendencies that defined traditional partisan politics in the United States (Schattschneider 1942; Committee on Political Parties 1950).

Schattschneider considered political parties as perhaps the most archaic institutions in the United States: the American party system continued to operate as it had before the Civil War, that is, as two loose coalitions of state and local organizations, with very little national machinery and cohesion. The major parties were able to control the electoral process and bring people to the polls. Nevertheless, they failed to organize the nominees they elected to office into an effective, cohesive team for control of government. “Nearly all of the conflict and confusion of American government,” Schattschneider (1942, 30) claimed, “can be traced to the failure of the parties on this point.”

With the growth of the federal government's responsibilities during the twentieth century, this failing of the traditional decentralized parties represented a distressing deterioration of representative democracy.

The Importance of Japan's Political Economy: The importance of Japan's political economy probably will be more obvious than any other subject concerning Japanese politics. Being the world's second largest economy and the United States' greatest overseas trading partner, and with increasing Japanese investment in America, the politics and policy-making that affect Japan's industry and economy probably have a more direct impact on the lives of more Americans than any other subject concerning a foreign country that American students can study.

With increasing friction over trade and investment beginning to undermine the United States-Japan relationship, one that former Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield liked to call the most important bilateral relationship in the world, Japan's political economy has become the stuff of daily newspaper headlines for many Americans. How much, how, and how well the Japanese state intervenes in the economy to promote economic growth has probably received more attention in the United States in recent years than any other topic concerning Japan. Words previously unfamiliar to American ears, such as “industrial policy,” “targeting,” “MITI,” keiretsu, and so forth, are now common in the American media and in policy debates in Washington about the origins of Japan's massive trade deficit with the United States and what the United States can and should do about it. No college graduate, indeed no American citizen, can claim to be politically literate today without some knowledge of this subject.

The fight over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court was another round in a struggle between Congress and the White House for control over the government of the United States. The intensity of the battle over the Thomas nomination reflected the Republican determination to counter the attacks upon presidential appointees that Democrats in Congress staged in the course of this struggle.

The conflict over the Thomas confirmation became so fierce largely because it turned into a two-way battle. The Democratic attack upon Thomas was met by a Republican counterattack upon Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Republican senators evidently decided that the time had come to fight efforts by Democratic Congresses to curtail the power of Republican presidents.

Battles between Congress and the presidency have become central to American politics in recent years. As the Republicans tightened their hold on the White House and the Democrats their grip on Congress, each party came to despair of gaining control of the opposition's bastion by defeating it in the electoral arena. Instead, each party sought to strengthen the institution it normally controls while weakening the one it regarded as beyond its reach electorally (Ginsberg and Shefter 1990).

In particular, Congress attempted to reduce the president's ability to gain power from his control over the national security apparatus by sponsoring a number of legislative restrictions on the foreign policy powers of the president—the War Powers Act, the Arms Export Control Act, and the Foreign Commitments Resolution.

Japan serves as an excellent case of the anomaly of the economic giant-political pygmy whose ability to influence international events is severely limited despite a manifest desire to play a larger role. Japan's attempts to achieve political standing commensurate with its economic clout internationally have enjoyed only minimal success.

Historical factors, especially its defeat in World War II and the Occupation of Japan by the United States, continue to influence Japan's postwar foreign policy. So too does the so-called “peace clause” of the U.S.-imposed Constitution and the pacifist public consensus that has grown around it.

Since the war Japan's defense alliance with the United States has had an enormous impact on foreign policy, both inhibiting and aiding Japan's relations with other states. Japanese dependence on American defense guarantees sometimes conflicts with Japan's attempts to strike a more independent foreign policy.

Although I have enjoyed five productive and stimulating years in the House of Representatives, my satisfaction is tempered by the conviction that our collective response has often been inadequate to our country's needs. In the near term we are faced with a stubborn recession, the need to ease its pain and to promote economic recovery. But the long-term challenges are even more daunting: laying the groundwork for improved economic performance and an enhanced quality of life by investing in research, education, and training; rebuilding and extending our infrastructure; broadening access to adequate health care; stimulating savings and investment; and achieving budgetary accountability and control.

The 102nd Congress has made some progress on these issues, most notably by approving a major high-way-transit program and an ambitious rewrite of the Higher Education Act. But on many other fronts Congress has found it difficult to act, and the president has offered little in the way of a domestic program save occasional vetoes of Democratic initiatives.

The most obvious immediate barrier to effective governmental action is the federal budget deficit. The failure to correct the problem in the 1980s, when the economy was healthier and could have more easily withstood austerity measures, has left Congress and the president with equally unpromising alternatives: either rely on symbolic, hortatory, and largely ineffectual actions to counter economic adversity, or fund more serious recovery measures at the expense of a dangerous deepening of the deficit.

Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall was the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped produce and was also a product of the 20th-century civil rights movement. President George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed him, a man who had made his professional career in a rapid succession of civil rights appointments in the same Republican administrations that were attempting to reconstruct the policies that Marshall and his successors in national civil rights organizations had created and interpreted.

That Bush nominated Thomas, whose policy positions were so opposed to civil rights law as it had been legislated and implemented, did not prevent these organizations from being riven by disagreement over Thomas's fitness. When Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment became public, these organizations' opinions of the Thomas nomination became even more problematic.

The nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court offers an opportunity to observe the influence and effectiveness of the civil rights lobby on an important policy question.

E. E. Schattschneider spent his professional career at Wesleyan University, an institution that prides itself in being aggressively anti-bureaucratic. Given the age we live in, there is doubtless merit in this stance. But there are costs as well. I say this because when asked to provide a bibliographic listing of Schattschneider's publications, I quickly learned that the written record, so essential to any well functioning bureaucracy, was a sometime thing at the University. There was no official file, I was told, either in the central administration or in the University Archives, that contained information on Schattschneider's career at Wesleyan.

But Wesleyan was also a small place during Schattschneider's years—in 1930, the year Schattschneider joined the faculty, the University graduated 93 seniors. And being a small place, it scrutinized closely the comings and goings of its faculty. It did so, among other ways, in an annual publication with the nondescript title, The Mid-Winter Bulletin. Each bulletin listed, albeit sporadically, faculty activities for the previous year. Here one could read about who attended what professional meeting, who lectured at which university, who spoke to which civic group, and who preached at the then mandatory campus chapel services. One also could read about faculty awards and honors, and about faculty appointments to committees, on and off campus.

Dissatisfaction with paid campaign advertisements in recent elections has generated heartfelt pleas for fundamental change in the ways elections are conducted. Following the example of Australia and until recently West Germany, some have called for an outright ban on television campaign ads in the United States. Others more worried about the effect on last-minute deciders have suggested the application of the French model, where ads are banned during the closing weeks of the campaign (Schoenbach, 1987: Penniman and Ranney, undated).

These calls undoubtably reflect the deep frustration felt by viewers over the poor educational quality of advertisements in the United States. But it is far too simple to blame ads for these deficiencies. The problem of political commercials is as much a function of campaign structure and voter reactions as candidate behavior. Structural and attitudinal changes in the nature of campaigns have loosened the forces which used to restrain elite strategies. The rise of a mass-based campaign system at a time when candidates have powerful means of influencing viewers creates big incentives for media campaigns. Voters are bombarded with spot ads precisely because of the short-term possibilities evident in recent races (West, 1991a; 1991b).

Since the problem of advertisements goes much deeper than ads themselves, it is unlikely that the elimination of television ads would solve the problems which plague American elections. After all, nonsubstantive appeals by candidates did not originate with television ads in 1952. Fluffy rhetoric has a long tradition in American politics (Jamieson and Campbell, 1988).

Race and gender are intimately intertwined in the lives of Black women in the United States. Race constructs the way Black women experience gender; gender constructs the way Black women experience race. In the Senate hearings that pitted the word of Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment accusations of Anita Hill, the great majority of Black women did not believe Hill's accusations. Our analysis will set this disbelief against a background of substantial Black unity on political issues in the United States, Black feminism, television coverage of the event, and Black women's reactions to that television coverage.

Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably form from the primary White composition of all the major feminist organizations, Black women have usually given stronger support to the women's movement than Whites on surveys (see Table for self-identification as “feminist”). Even as early as 1970, 60% of Black women said they supported efforts to strengthen women's status in society, compared to only 37% of White women (Klein 1987: 26), and in 1972 67% said they were sympathetic to women's liberation groups, compared to only 35% of White women (hooks 1981: 148). Also contravening the impression one might form from the composition of feminist organizations, poor women and working class women are as likely as middle-class women to say on these surveys that they consider themselves “feminist.” The survey data are supported by indepth interviews among all classes of Black women.

Fundamental U.S.-West European security and economic relations are being subjected to a thorough re-examination—and potential redefinition—on both sides of the Atlantic. This is occurring as the Cold War is now a topic for historians and as the economies of the 12 European Community (EC) members become increasingly integrated as a result of the EC's 1992 initiative and its ambitious plan for the 1990s. The former Warsaw Pact nations are working to develop stronger economic, political and even security ties with both the United States and Western Europe. The dramatically reduced security threat coupled with strong domestic budget pressures in the United States are leading to a substantial reduction in the American military presence in Western Europe. On the economic front, the EC and the European Free Trade Area are forming a gigantic 19-country free trade area, with the potential of future expansion to include some East European nations. Meanwhile, the United States and Western Europe continue their prolonged deadlock in GATT trade negotiations primarily over the EC's large agricultural subsidies.

The attitudes of European publics toward the United States will play a critical role as European and American leaders sort out their new relationship. Therefore, it is of interest to scholars and policymakers alike to examine the trends in West European public opinion as they relate to America, its policies and its perceived role in the post-Cold War future.

The United States Supreme Court today is an object of intense speculation. After two decades of anticipation by Court watchers, the Court may be ready to enter a new era in its history. Commentators debate what the new era will look like, if it does indeed develop. Will the Court reject altogether its mission of protecting individual liberties? If so, what new role will it adopt?

Because the Supreme Court is an important and intriguing institution, such speculation is understandable. But ultimately, even the most perceptive observers have a limited capacity to predict the Court's direction as a policy maker. These difficulties in prediction reflect a fundamental reality about the Court: its path is not the inevitable product of the political and social forces that shape its behavior. Rather, less systematic factors can influence the Court's path, making the Court's role as a policy maker largely upredictable.