Japan's Living Politics
Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy

Can the history of grassroots self-help action in modern Japan provide clues to overcoming the contemporary global crisis of democracy?

Tessa Morris-Suzuki (Author)

9781108490078, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 May 2020

246 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.6 cm, 0.52 kg

'Japan's Living Politics is likely to be of greatest interest to Japan scholars and students, and it should be widely adopted in Japan studies courses. That said, it should also be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists interested in community activism and communal living. I hope that comparative democracy scholars also take notice because Morris-Suzuki's methodology reads, to this reviewer at least, as both more authentic and more informative than much of the large-n quantitative research that has become a focus of that subfield.' Mary Alice Haddad, Monumenta Nipponica

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise of populism and decline of public confidence in many of the formal institutions of democracy. This crisis of democracy has stimulated searches for alternative ways of understanding and enacting politics. Against this background, Tessa Morris-Suzuki explores the long history of informal everyday political action in the Japanese context. Despite its seemingly inflexible and monolithic formal political system, Japan has been the site of many fascinating small-scale experiments in 'informal life politics': grassroots do-it-yourself actions which seek not to lobby governments for change, but to change reality directly, from the bottom up. She explores this neglected history by examining an interlinked series of informal life politics experiments extending from the 1910s to the present day.

1. Japan and the crisis of democracy
2. Living politics: Japan and the world
3. The white birch and the Earth: giving life to the self in interwar Japan and beyond
4. Rethinking the village
5. Peasant art, free drawing and the free university
6. The body politic: Saku Hospital and the Japanese cooperative movement
7. Seeds of democracy: rural spaces of autonomy in postwar Japan
8. Development from within: environment, region and autonomous action from the 1980's onwards
9. Disaster and aftermath: informal life politics after 2011
Conclusion. Towards another democracy.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Asian history [HBJF]