The art of the gut: Manhood, power, and ethics in Japanese politics

The Art of the Gut: Manhood, Power, and Ethics in Japanese Politics

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages

  LeBlanc, Robin M ^a  

^a WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84863993062     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (77)

1. Laura Miller translates derogatory references to oyaji as "old fart" in Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 157.
2. Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), 23-96, 28, emphasis in original.
3. See, for example, Amy Waldman, "Bhopal Seethes, Pained and Poor 18 Years Later: Aftermath of Lethal Leak at Union Carbide Plant in 1984, India," New York Times, 21 September 2002, A3.
4. Information available on the City of Oak Ridge website, http://www.cortn.org/visitors/about-oak-ridge, accessed 14 April 2008.
5. Eliot Marshall, "The 'Lost' Mercury at Oak Ridge," Science 221, no. 4606 (1983): 130-132.
6. "Shirakawa" is a pseudonym, as are the names used here for all individuals from my Shirakawa fieldwork.
7. Frances Rosenbluth, "The Political Economy of Low Fertility," in The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility, ed. Frances Rosenbluth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 3.
8. For examples of this claim, see Tajima Yoshisuke, ed., Chiho bunken koto hajime (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996)
9. Kikuchi Tetsuya and Fukuoka Masayuki, eds., Kore kara nihon o dosuru (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1998).
10. A classic treatment of the "pipe" role played by local politicians is Haruhiro Fukui and Shigeko N. Fukai, "Pork Barrel Politics, Networks, and Local Economic Development in Contemporary Japan," Asian Survey 36, no. 3 (1996): 268-286.
11. Information from the websites of the City of Oak Ridge and the City of Oklahoma City: http://www.cortn.org/government/CityCouncil, accessed on 17 April 2008
12. http://www.okc.gov/council/index.html, accessed on 17 April 2008.
13. I have changed the name of the company.
14. The sort of public works corruption that took place in Takeno is a familiar feature of Japanese politics treated in detail in Brian Woodall, Japan under Construction: Corruption, Politics, and Public Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
15. Unfortunately I cannot share the citation information for these numbers without revealing the real name of Takeno-machi, and that would endanger the privacy of my informants.
16. The political scientist Aurelia George Mulgan found that beer coupons were used in a similar way in an electoral district in southwestern Japan. See Aurelia George Mulgan, Power and Pork: A Japanese Political Life (Canberra: ANU E Press and Asia Pacific Press, 2006), 29.
17. For examples, see Schoppa, Race for the Exits; Steven R. Reed, ed., Japanese Electoral Politics: Creating a New Party System (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003)
18. Ethan Scheiner, Democracy without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
19. Yusaku Horiuchi, Institutions, Incentives and Electoral Participation in Japan: Cross-Level and Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005).
20. Robin M. LeBlanc, Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
21. I have written a small one. See Robin M. LeBlanc, "Why Women Are Representing Men in a Japanese Town Assembly: A Little Tale about Gender Politics," Kokusai jenda gakkai shi 2 (2004): 35-70.
22. Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
23. Robert A. Dahl, "The Concept of Power," Behavioral Science 2 (July 1957): 201-215, especially 202.
24. Clarissa Rile Hayward, De-Facing Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
25. The Foucauldian turn toward structure in the study of power is beautifully traced in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner's introduction to Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
26. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," trans. Leslie Sawyer, in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 417-432. See 428.
27. Hayward, De-Facing Power, 30.
28. Sugita Atsushi, Kenryoku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000). Sugita describes his intellectual heritage in detail in a bibliographical guide toward the end of his book, 103-107.
29. LeBlanc, Bicycle Citizens, 24-25.
30. See also the work by the American theorist Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), especially 192-225.
31. Dirks, et al., introduction, 14.
32. Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 105.
33. Sugita, Kenryoku, 86. Translations are mine.
34. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 35.
35. For example, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 70.
36. Robin LeBlanc, Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
37. Robin LeBlanc, "What Every Political Scientist Should Know about Housewives: Notes from the Japanese Case," Journal of Pacific Asia 5 (1999): 23-57.
38. "Josei shigi hyakunin toppa," Asahi shinbun.
39. "Josei genki: Shigi sennindai," Niigata nippo, 26 April 1999.
40. Kuramae Katsuhisa, "Chiiki de katsudo, nakama ga 'jiban,' " Asahi shinbun, 16 July 2003.
41. "Josei shigi hyakunin toppa," Asahi shinbun.
42. Aoki, "Shufu pawa no rekishiteki tojo."
43. Imai Hajime, Jumin tohyo Q & A (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998).
44. Women referendum alliance candidates dominated in 2003 as well, but that election is outside the scope of my fieldwork.
45. Amano, Dankai sedai shinron, 40.
46. Yamazaki, "Dankai dansei no jenda ishiki," 106.
47. "Sarariiman koho fusen: 'Rikkoho kyushoku' rikai nao susumazu," Asahi Shinbun, online ed., 23 April 2007, http://www2.asahi.com/senkyo2007t/news/TKY200704230093.html, accessed 20 June 2007.
48. LeBlanc, "What Every Political Scientist Should Know about Housewives."
49. Iwane Kunio, Atarashii shakai undo no yohanseki: Seikatsu kurabudairinin undo (Tokyo: Kyodo Tosho Sabisu, 1993).
50. Natsume Soseki, Botchan, trans. J. Cohn (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005).
51. This phenomenon is thoroughly treated by Naoko Taniguchi in "Keeping It in the Family: Hereditary Politics and Democracy in Japan," in Democratic Reform in Japan: Assessing the Impact, ed. Sherry Martin and Gill Steel (New York: Lynne Reinner, 2008), 65-99.
52. Whether that claim was partly rhetoric designed to bolster the energy with which supporters worked for candidates is unclear, but the changing assembly size probably did increase incumbents' sense of electoral insecurity.
53. Fewer than 47 percent of eligible voters went to the polls in Takadasan's ward for his election, but turnout was up slightly over the previous ward assembly election turnout four years earlier.
54. In the past few years the population of Shirakawa Ward, like most other urban wards, has begun to grow again with the building of new high-rise residential developments.
55. Yamamoto Shinichiro, Wakariyasui koshoku senkyo ho: Jitsumu to kenshu no tame no (Tokyo: Gyosei, 1998).
56. The best work treating LDP campaigns remains Gerald L. Curtis, Election Campaigning Japanese Style (New York: Kodansha, 1971).
57. Ishikawa Tadashi, Koshi no tetsugaku: "Jin" to wa nani ka (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, 2003). See also Hall and Ames, Thinking through Confucius, and Ames and Rosemont, The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation.
58. This passage was quoted in Ishikawa, Koshi no tetsugaku, 14. Ishikawa treats the ordinariness of the virtue described in this passage on 12-16.
59. For a rich discussion of this sense of giri, see Yuko Ogasawara, Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 98-113.
60. Nitobe Inazo, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 10th ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907), 25-26.
61. Ames and Rosemont translation. This passage features the advice not of Confucius but of Master You, a prominent disciple of his, yet it fits seamlessly into other statements Confucius makes on filiality.
62. I find the most helpful English translation and annotation of this passage in Li, The Analects of Confucius, 4.18, notes on 50.
63. Detailed accounts of famous LDP politicians involved in huge scandals with connections to organized crimes are available in Jacob M. Schlesinger, Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Postwar Political Machine (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
64. Jisan can be thought of as related to the colloquial term oyaji, used in the Ozawa Ichiro Democratic Party campaign poster I described in the preface.
65. This view of members of Congress received its now classic presentation in David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).
66. See, for example, Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn, and Morris Fiorina, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
67. Kasaya Kazuhiko, Bushido no shiso: Nihongata soshiki to kojin no jiritsu (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyu, 2002).
68. This table arrangement, called a kotatsu, is standard in Japanese homes in the winter because most of them are not centrally heated. Baba's house certainly was not.
69. This search was performed with the Japanese characters in the search line on 7 July 2007 at 2:55 p.m. On an earlier search (March 2006) I found as many as 120,000 references.
70. See Robin LeBlanc, Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
71. Robin M. LeBlanc, "Why Women Are Representing Men in a Japanese Town Assembly: A Little Tale about Gender Politics," Kokusai jenda gakkai shi 2 (2004): 35-70. See also chapter 1 in this book.
72. For further discussions of this problem, see my treatment of this issue in an LDP woman's campaign for the House of Councillors in Bicycle Citizens, 164-193.
73. Takada-san was alluding to an American social science classic: David Riesman, Reuel Denney, and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950).
74. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference.
75. Simone de Beauvoir makes a famous version of this claim in The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1989), xv.
76. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 131.
77. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 496.