Ruining and restoring rivers: The state and civil society in Japan

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 78, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 195-215

  Waley, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CIVIL SOCIETY; STATE ROLE; STATE-LOCAL RELATIONS;

ASIA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; JAPAN;

EID: 28144439316     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/2005782195     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. This view of Japan's postwar history lies at the heart of two important critical examinations, that of Cavan McCormack in his The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996);
2. and that of Jeffrey Broadbent, Environmental Politics in Japan: Networks of Power and Protest (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
3. Brian Woodall, Japan Under Construction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
4. McCormack writes of "an 'Iron Triangle' of politicians and bureaucrats, financial institutions and construction industry" (The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, 11). Much has been written about Japan's Ruling Triad, and I will not elaborate on the nature of this "hard" elite here. See also Broadbent, Environmental Politics in Japan,
5. and Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989).
6. Imada Makoto, "The Voluntary Response to the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake: A Trigger for the Development of the Voluntary and Non-Profit Sector in Japan," in Stephen Osborne, ed., The Voluntary and Non-Profit Sector in Japan: The Challenge of Change (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 40-50.
7. On the history of state regulation of public interest groups, see Robert Pekkanen and Karla Simon, "The Legal Framework for Voluntary and Non-profit Activity," in Osborne, ed., The Voluntary and Non-Profit Sector in Japan, pp. 76-101.
8. Robin Leblanc, Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
9. Lam Peng-er, Green Politics in Japan (London: Routledge, 1999).
10. The full name of the legislation is Law to Promote Specified Nonprofit Activities [Tokutei Hieiri Katsudō Sokushin Hö].
11. For a cautious statement of the former position, see Robert Pekkanen, "The Politics of Regulating the Non-profit Sector," in Osborne, ed., The Voluntary and Non-Profit Sector in Japan, pp. 53-75. The latter argument was put to me in an interview by Adachi Toshiyuki, then a senior official of the Ministry of Construction's River Bureau, 13 July 2000.
12. Timothy Brook, "Auto-Organization in Chinese Society," in Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, eds., Civil Society in China (Armonk, NY. M.E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 22.
13. See also the various contributions to the special edition of Modern China on "Public Sphere"/ "Civil Society" in China, vol. 19, no. 2 (1993), on which the following text is loosely based.
14. John Keane, Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988).
15. B. Michael Frolic, "State-Led Civil Society," in Brook and Frolic, eds., Civil Society in China, p. 58.
16. Tony Saich, "Negotiating the State: The Development of Social Organizations in China," China Quarterly no. 161 (2000), p. 125.
17. Saich, "Negotiating the State," pp. 132 and 133.
18. Muthiah Alagappa, "Civil Society and Democratic Change: Indeterminate Connection, Transforming Relations," in Alagappa, ed., Civil Society and Political Change in Asia: Expanding and Contracting Democratic Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 500 and 501.
19. Pekkanen refers to this in the Japanese context as a dual-structure civil society. See Robert Pekkanen, "Japan: Social Capital without Advocacy," in Alagappa, ed., Civil Society and Political Change in Asia: Expanding and Contracting Democratic Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 223-55.
20. Alagappa, "Civil Society and Democratic Change," in Alagappa, ed., Civil Society and Political Change in Asia, p. 479.
21. Frank Schwartz, Advice and Consent: The Politics of Consultation in Japan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 41.
22. Broadbent, Environmental Politics in Japan.
23. In a similar vein, Daniel Okimoto wrote of "ties of structural interdependence [that] bind the private and public sectors together" in his Between MITI and the Market: Japanese Industrial Policy for High Technology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 236.
24. For a historical analysis, see for example Honma Yoshihito, Doboku kokka no shisō: toshiron no keifu [The Idea of the Construction State: A Genealogy of the Urban Debate] (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1996).
25. Cavan McCormack, "Breaking the Iron Triangle," New Left Review 13 (2002), p. 20.
26. Margaret McKean, Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
27. Robert Mason, "Whither Japan's Environmental Movement? An Assessment of Problems and Prospects at the National Level," Pacific Affairs vol. 72, no. 2 (1999), pp. 187 and 202.
28. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, "For and against NGOs: the politics of the lived world," New Left Review 2 (2000), p.81.
29. Jean-Marie Bouissou, "Ambiguous Revival: A Study of Some 'New Civic Movements' in Japan," Pacific Review vol. 13, no. 3 (2000), p. 336;
30. Leblanc, Bicycle Citizens.
31. Andrew Barshay, "Capitalism and Civil Society in Postwar Japan: Perspectives from Intellectual History," in Frank Schwartz and Susan Pharr, eds., The State and Civil Society in Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), p. 74.
32. The history of environmental movements in Japan and the way they have been handled within the academic literature is examined exhaustively by Hasegawa Kōichi in his recently translated Constructing Civil Society in Japan: Voices of Environmental Movements (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2004).
33. Wilhelm Vosse, "The Domestic Environmental Movement in Contemporary Japan: Structure, Activities, Problems, and its Significance for the Broadening of Political Participation," Ph.D. thesis, University of Hanover, 2000, p. 25.
34. Broadbent, Environmental Politics in Japan, p. 22.
35. Robert Pekkanen, "Japan's New Politics: The Case of the NPO Law," Journal of Japanese Studies vol. 26, no. 1 (2000), pp. 111-43.
36. Patricia Steinhoff, "Kan-Min Relations in Local Government," in Sheila Smith, ed., Local Voices, National Issues: The Impact of Local Initiative in Japanese Policy-making (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 116.
37. Frolic, "State-Led Civil Society," p. 56.
38. Tsujinaka, Yutaka, "From Developmentalism to Maturity: Japan's Civil Society Organizations in Comparative Perspective," in Schwartz and Pharr, eds., The State and Civil Society in Japan, p. 83.
39. Robert Pekkanen, "After the Developmental State: Civil Society in Japan," Journal of East Asia Studies vol. 4, no. 3 (2004), pp. 363-88.
40. In addition to the comments, already noted, of Mason, see Yoshida Shin'ichi's telling account of Ministry of Construction involvement in the creation of a water park, "Rethinking the Public Interest in Japan: Civil Society in the Making," in Yamamoto Tadashi, ed., Deciding the Public Good: Governance and Civil Society in Japan (Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, 1999).
41. Among them, Margaret McKean, Hasegawa Kōichi and Ui Jun.
42. Deguchi Masayuki, "The Distinction between Institutionalized and Noninstitutionalized NPOs: New Policy Initiatives and Non-Profit Organizations in Japan," in Helmut K. Anheier and Jeremy Kendall, eds., Third Sector Policy at the Crossroads: An International Non-profit Analysis (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 153-67.
43. Robert Pekkanen, "Molding Japanese Civil Society: State-Structured Incentives and the Patterning of Civil Society," in Schwartz and Pharr, eds., The State and Civil Society in Japan, pp. 118 and 133.
44. Stephen P. Osborne, "The Voluntary and Non-profit sector in Centemporary Japan: Emerging Roles and Organizational Challenges in a Changing Society," in Osborne, ed, The Voluntary and Non-Profit Sector in Japan, p. 9.
45. The classic case of a charismatic leader is that of the late Hiromatsu Den, an official of the Yanagawa City Government in Kyushu, who single-handedly and against all odds masterminded a plan to "save" the city's canals and who has been regarded as a sort of father figure by Japan's river campaigners.
46. The concept of soft control is discussed by Susan Pharr, Losing Face: Status Politics in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
47. The case-study work that is outlined below is based on fieldwork conducted on a number of visits to Japan, principally in August and September 1995, October to December 1996, July 2000 and December 2003.
48. Okuma Takashi, Kōzui to chisui no kawa shi: suigai no seiatsu karh juyō e [A River History of Flooding and Water Control: From Suppression to Absorption of Flood Damage] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1988), p. 246.
49. I am indebted to Inuyama Kiyoshi for this information.
50. For a discussion of this theme, see my chapter "What's a River Without Fish? Symbol, Space and Ecosystem in the Waterways of Japan," in Chris Philo and Chris Wisbert, eds., Animal Places, Beastly Spaces: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 161-82.
51. Paul Waley, "Following the Flow of Japan's River Culture," Japan Forum vol. 12, no. 2 (2000), p. 211.
52. Seki Masakazu, Daichi no kawa: yomigaere, Nihon no furusato no kawa (Rivers of the Earth: Revive, Rivers of Japan's Countryside) (Tokyo: Sōshisba, 1994).
53. For more details on both projects, see Paul Waley and Martin Purvis, "Sustaining the Flow: Japanese Waterways and New Paradigms of Development," in Martin Purvis and Alan Grainger, eds., Exploring Sustainable Development: Geographical Perspectives (London: Earthscan Publications, 2004), pp. 207-29.
54. This text is based on an interview with Takehara and three members of citizens' environmental groups held in Okayama on 26 July 2000, as well as subsequent communications. The interpretation here is mine.
55. The lack of large central NPOs is an issue dwelt on by a number of commentators, including Pekkanen in his paper, "After the Developmental State."
56. Vosse, "The Domestic Environmental Movement in Contemporary Japan," p. 82.
57. Amano is the author of a number of books on dam-related issues, including Damu to Nihon [Japan and Dams] published by Iwanami Shoten (Tokyo, 2001) in their authoritative Iwanami Shinsho series (no. 716).
58. Hasegawa Hiroshi, "Ebb and Flow of Isahaya Project," Asahi Evening News, Saturday 12 July 1997, p. 5.
59. McCormack, "Breaking the Iron Triangle," p. 19.
60. Asahi shinbun, "Yoshinogawa kadō seki, futatabi sōten ni" [The Yoshinogawa Weir: Back to Dispute], 23 June 2004, accessed from the Asahi Website on 26 June 2004, available at.
61. Pekkanen, "After the Developmental State."
62. Robert O. Bothwell, "The Challenges of Growing the NPO and Voluntary Sector in Japan," in Osborne, ed., The Voluntary and Non-Profit Sector in Japan.
63. Quoted by Gerard Clarke in his The Politics of NGOs in South-East Asia: Participation and Protest in the Philippines (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 69.