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)

9781108748018, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 June 2022

250 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

'Japan's Living Politics takes its readers on a remarkable and ambitious intellectual journey. … Apart from contributing to a transnational and historical understanding of grassroots political action, Morris-Suzuki's book also speaks to readers interested in local democracy and self-governance in contemporary Japan …' Hanno Jentzsch, Pacific Affairs

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]