Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. xiii, 234 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8014-5376-2.
This is an excellent book. In her study on victim movements in Japan and South Korea, Celeste Arrington searches for an answer to the question of why some victims and their supporters receive more redress and compensation from the state than others. Her well-thought-out and elaborate analysis delivers not only an innovative answer to this question, but she also contributes significantly to theory building by developing a dynamic and interactive model in her book. Her comparative study is carefully researched and is based on impressive fieldwork conducted in Japan and South Korea with over 200 interviews from 2007 to 2015, as well as written sources in both Japanese and Korean. Finally, it is well and clearly written, which makes it a pleasure to read.
Beyond the introduction and conclusion, the main part of the book is structured into five chapters. After explaining her research question and introducing her argument in the introduction, Arrington develops the theoretical framework in the first chapter by constructing a redress scale in order to capture the variation in redress outcome and she identifies different ideal types of sequence patterns in conflict expansion processes. In the second chapter, she discusses how victimhood and state accountability have been constructed over time in both Japan and South Korea. She also analyzes lawyers’ autonomy vis-à-vis the state, structures, and grassroots embeddedness of civil society, as well as the diversity of the mainstream media. In the subsequent three empirical chapters, the author traces victim redress movements related to Hansen’s disease, hepatitis C tainted blood products, and citizens abducted by North Korea in both Japan and South Korea. She discusses the interaction between these movements, mass media, and the state and shows how differences in these processes have led to great variation in the success of the movements in enacting official inquiries and institutional reforms as well as in the success of gaining an official apology and state compensation. While the Hansen’s disease movement and the hepatitis C movements achieved full redress in Japan, the Hansen’s disease movement in South Korea and the abductee movements in both countries gained only partial redress. Furthermore, the South Korean hepatitis C virus movement did not obtain any significant redress from the state. In the conclusion, the main argument is recapitulated and some further examples are introduced to demonstrate the validity of the theoretical model developed in the study.
The main contribution of this book is the new and dynamic model on the interaction between victim redress movements, which frames the victimization and politicians. This interactive model is an important step forward from the static theoretical models of state-society interaction that are still dominant in research on civil society and social movements. Arrington’s main argument is that “gaining an elite ally too early in the claims-making process can be detrimental, even if outsider groups ultimately need elite allies to affect policy. … [It] reduces incentives to mobilize fellow claimants and sympathetic citizens, leaving these allies with less leverage” (4–5). Moreover, her book is also an important contribution to our understanding of the state-society relationship in Japan and South Korea. In contrast to the state-of-the-art research on civil society in Japan and South Korea, and despite much more homogeneous mainstream media and weaker advocacy capabilities by civil society in Japan, her study shows that conditions in the public sphere for redress movements are more favourable, and that victim redress movements have achieved better outcomes in Japan than in South Korea.
Despite being an empirical and theoretically strong and compelling analysis, this reviewer also identifies some shortcomings in Arrington’s study. To begin with, despite a very clear argument, it becomes unclear regarding how early is “too early.” This is a fundamental problem of any dynamic theoretical models. Moreover, one starting point of Arrington’s argument is that the transition to democracy in South Korea, as well as the end of uninterrupted rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan, resulted from the early 1990s onwards in more favuorable political conditions for outsider groups in both countries, which gave victim movements more collective leverage. While the end of authoritarian rule and democratization in South Korea surely fundamentally changed the political climate and institutions, I am not fully convinced that the same applies to Japan. As the author herself recognizes, victim redress movements related to the burakumin (an outcast group), as well as to Minamata disease, had already in earlier decades in Japan achieved favourable redress outcomes. The long (and nearly unique) stay in power of the LDP under a democratic system may in fact have much to do with its “creative conservatism” (T.J. Pempel), i.e., its flexibility in taking up new issues that made it to the public agenda, including the claims of victim movements. This also raises the question of whether the focus on politicians in the study is really reasonable, or if the role of state bureaucracies should not also have been incorporated in both countries. This would make the theoretical model much more complicated, but there is plenty of recent empirical evidence demonstrating that Japan and South Korea in many policy fields still exemplify strong states in which bureaucrats are not simple agents of politicians as their principals. Finally, as in nearly all comparative studies, one has to question if national political system differences have been adequately taken into account. For example, South Korea’s president has, in general, more decision power and agenda-setting abilities than Japan’s prime minister. This, and other differences, might have a significant influence on the political processes, but are not included in the model and analysis.
Still, as stated at the beginning, this is, without a doubt, an excellent book. The comments in the paragraph above should not be regarded as a critique, but more as an illustration of how stimulating Arrington’s study is; one would like to immediately start a discussion with her. What more can we expect from an academic book? It can only be hoped that this book finds a large readership in the social sciences as well as in East Asian studies. The future is unwritten, but it can be assumed with high probability that this book will have a significant impact on the research on victim movements and on Japanese and South Korean politics.
David Chiavacci
University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
pp. 588-591