Contested Governance In Japan: Sites and Issues
Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/RoutledgeCurzon Series, Abingdon,2005, 288 pages, 978-0-415-36419-5
Review by Roger Buckley
Getting rid of the nation-state never actually happens. The authors of this collection of papers prepared for a 2001 Anglo-Japanese meeting have their misgivings over state sovereignty but several admit that the beast keeps reappearing in different guises. The state may indeed be diminished by global forces, yet paradoxically it pops up again as the hidden funder, the quiet organizer and the sometime friend of institutions that wish to challenge traditional power centres at home and abroad.
The thorny methodological issues are tackled first by Professors Hook and Dobson in the expectation that this will provide the context for the more specific chapters on Japanese approaches to gabanansu [ガバナンス]. Both authors wish to discover what might be the specifically Japanese characteristics of the phenomenon, examining governance at the international, national, regional and small-group levels.
Different authors in this most useful collection of essays take different approaches. Hook suggests that governance in Japan can be viewed as a process where state power frequently overrides that of the individual, though he notes that the market and society may well be offering greater challenges to the conventional view of an all-dominate central authority. Dobson acknowledges the “definitional fuzziness” of both governance and globalization and goes on to caution against “the
lingering importance of traditional sovereign state actors and we need to regard the appearance
of new actors with suspicion.”
Challenging the Japanese state through widening policy debates and the decision-making process is shown to be no easy matter. The obstacles are high and frequent for those outside the iron triangle hoping to penetrate the bureaucratic arena.
We are told by Philip Cerny that major exporters have “grown steadily more independent” of officialdom because firms can raise their own capital, yet Japanese corporations and the financial sector still look instinctively to the state when times get hard. An approach too that Europeans and North American banks and car manufacturers have most certainly been following during the present global recession, leading commentators to suggest that the West is reverting to its own versions of Japan’s industrial policy. Neo-liberalism and globalization are hardly the flavours of the month in the summer of 2009 as the G-8 and G-20 club members attempt to hold back protectionism and beggar-my-neighbour competitive devaluations.
Most essays in this collection refer to events of the late 1990s with a few touching on the early days of the Koizumi administration. The result of course is a slight datedness with prime ministers and, perhaps more importantly, officials coming and going in the interim but anyone interested in how Japan has been tackling its homeless issue or requiring data on corruption or family policy is in for a feast. Recommended for those searching for both information and insights.