Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society

by Rieko Kage

• ISBN13: 9780521192576
• ISBN10: 0521192579
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-12-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Despite reduced incomes, diminished opportunities for education, and the psychological trauma of defeat, Japan experienced a rapid rise in civic engagement in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Why? Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan answers this question with a new general theory of the growth in civic engagement in postwar democracies. It argues that wartime mobilization unintentionally instills civic skills in the citizenry, thus laying the groundwork for a postwar civic engagement boom. Meanwhile, legacies of prewar associational activities shape the costs of association-building and information-gathering, thus affecting the actual extent of the postwar boom. Combining original data collection, rigorous statistical methods, and in-depth historical case analyses, this book illuminates one of the keys to making postwar democracies work.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. vii
List of Figures	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Civic Engagement: The Dependent Variable	p. 19
War and Civic Engagement: A Theoretical Framework	p. 44
Quantitative Analysis: The Rise of Civic Engagement across Forty-Six Japanese Prefectures	p. 64
The Long-Term Effects of Wartime Mobilization: Cross-National Analysis	p. 78
Repression and Revival of the YMCA Japan	p. 95
Wartime Endorsement and Postwar Repression of a Traditional Art	p. 123
Civil Society and Reconstruction in Postwar Japan	p. 140
Conclusions	p. 161
References	p. 171
Index	p. 193
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