Political Science Quarterly
Volume 114 No. 3 (Fall 1999)

 

Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life
By Sheldon Garon. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998
Reviewed by Akira Iriye

 

Historians of modern Japan have been paying increasing attention to the theme of civil society. This theme, made popular by social scientists writing about Eastern European societies under communist regimes, has been utilized by specialists in other areas of the world in order to determine the degree to which democratic forces have emerged to shape people’s lives. The concept of civil society, of course, is rooted in the Western European and North American experience. Most students of Western civil society go back to G. W. F. Hegel and to Alexis de Tocqueville to locate the origins of theoretical formulations concerning the relationship between the state, the individual, and the public space in between. Whether there has been comparable public space or civil society in East Asia has been a hotly contested issue among historians of China, Korea, Japan, and other countries.

In this book, Sheldon Garon, the Princeton historian, comes close to providing a definitive (if indeterminate) answer to that question as far as modern Japan is concerned. He traces how the state and society interacted in pre-war and postwar Japan through an examination of three issues: welfare, sexuality and gender relations, and religious movements. All three lend themselves to excellent analysis, because such questions as relief to the sick and the indigent, control of prostitution, and incorporation of religious sects into social order are among the most fundamental facing any society.

Japanese society, Garon shows, developed various mechanisms to cope with these problems, including the establishment of private associations created for specific ends. Organizations devoted to women’s wellbeing, for instance, sprang up after the turn of the twentieth century and actively campaigned against brothels and for the eradication of sexually transmitted diseases. These organizations and the men and women who led their movements, however, acted not so much against the state as, in most instances, in cooperation with it. The state, Garon argues, was always interested in “social management” (the term frequently used in the book) in order to preserve order and was increasingly eager to coopt middle-class Japanese in solving various social issues. The latter were usually willing to cooperate with governmental officials to have state endorsement of their programs. (One notable exception was the success of women’s organizations during the 1950s to have the Diet enact an antiprostitution law despite governmental opposition.) There was thus, the author maintains, a greater measure of state-society collaboration in Japan than in most Western countries. And such collaboration has persisted to this day.

The overall argument of the book is to confirm the widely held view that Japanese society, unlike Western democratic societies, is far more extensively controlled by the state. The author’s thesis that middle-class Japanese have tended to turn to the state for guidance and support, that they have been willing accomplices of the government, would not surprise anyone familiar with the literature. Nevertheless, the book is valuable because it shows the steady growth of civic organizations in Japan that have played key roles as “managing intermediaries" between the state and the people. While the persistence of such organizations leads the author to stress that in Japan there has been a marriage of “democratization and social management” (p. 236), these organizations may yet develop with their own momentum. The passage of an NPO (nonprofit organizations) law in 1998 was evidence that nongovernmental organizations had come of age. Although many of them may still fall within the category of managing intermediaries, recent evidence suggests that an increasing number are oriented more toward democratization than toward social management. Should the trend continue, there may indeed develop a sharp discontinuity with the past. In any event, Garon’s book with its stress on continuities between pre-war and postwar Japan in terms of a "close association between the moral reformers and the state” (p. 312) provides a good point of reference to measure changes in contemporary Japan.