Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity, 2018. 212 pp. (Map.) US$17.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5095-2545-4.
As the 2020 Summer Olympics approach, the world’s attention will turn toward the host nation, Japan. And thus, books like Jeff Kingston’s extremely readable Japan—published along with Syria as the first two installments of the new “Polity Histories” series from Polity Books—will be useful as people from the rest of the world try to catch up on recent developments in that country.
Kingston’s book aims to “zoom in on the key forces, developments, and events that have characterized Japan’s post-WWII trajectory” (5). The book is a short six chapters which give an overview of an impressive array of topics important to understanding contemporary Japan. After an introductory chapter called “Bouncing Back,” chapter 2, “Japan Inc.” dives into an overview of the structure of Japan’s postwar political economy. This chapter highlights the tremendous successes of that political economy, as well as trade friction with the United States, a variety of well-publicized political corruption scandals, and environmental disasters including the poisoning of Minanata Bay with mercury.
Chapter 3, “American Alliance,” provides a brief history of the US-Japan Alliance, beginning with the occupation and continuing on through the Abe Doctrine. This chapter does a particularly nice job highlighting the way that the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty helped sow the seeds for Japan’s current territorial disputes with Russia, South Korea, China, and Taiwan (59–64). Chapter 4, “Lost Decades and Disasters,” highlights an upsetting array of disasters that postwar Japan has faced, including the 1990 bursting of the asset bubble, the 1995 Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway, the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and the 2011 “triple disaster” of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in the Tōhoku region of Japan. This chapter also discusses a variety of challenges that are less dramatic but still extremely important for contemporary Japan, including problems associated with government regulation of and far right backlash against immigration as well as poverty and “precaritization” (96–104).
The volume’s strongest section is chapter 5, “Dissent,” which discusses an impressive array of dissent in Japan, including the protests against the treaty formalizing the US-Japan security alliance, the Vietnam War, the radicalization and violent infighting of far-left student groups in the 1970s, protests against the building of Narita Airport, as well as the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movement. This chapter begins with Kingston’s observation that “[t]o understand Japan it is essential to peer behind the façade of harmony and prevailing stereotypes of a conformist citizenry prone to groupthink and inclined to be overly deferential to authority” (116), and he does just that in this nicely-written chapter.
The book concludes with chapter 6, “Abe’s Japan,” which gives an overview of the various ways in which the administration under current Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has changed Japan, including his economic and immigration policies, his active approach to diplomacy with Southeast Asia and Taiwan, his close ties with the Trump Administration in the United States, and his approach to issues like press freedom, constitutional revision, and Japan’s official response to World War II issues such as the issue of “comfort women” and the Rape of Nanking.
As I note above, Kingston introduces chapter 5 on dissent by arguing that we must peer beyond the façade of harmony to truly understand Japan, and yet early in this book Kingston makes some statements which run the risk of reinforcing that façade, including quoting the axiom that one often sees in popular writing in Japan that “the nail that sticks up gets hammered” (2), and then going on to note the various ways in which Japanese society “hammers” difference.
Furthermore, chapter 2 on Japan Inc. perhaps overstates both the dominance and static nature of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan. Kingston notes that “voters briefly ‘threw the bums out’ in 1993 and 2009, but the LDP has re-established its dominance despite scandals and flawed politics because there does not appear to be any viable opposition that gives them an alternative” (42). Indeed, this book does not discuss how the opposition parties changed the electoral rules after briefly taking power in 1993, a change of considerable consequence. The results helped a new opposition party to form, the Democratic Party of Japan, which would eventually defeat the LDP in a landslide victory in 2009; it also contributed to major reform in the LDP’s party organization (Ellis S. Krauss, Ellis and Robert Pekkanen, The Rise and Fall of Japan’s LDP: Political Party Organizations as Historical Institutions, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Despite these relatively minor concerns, this is a book on contemporary Japan that is written in a lively, accessible way that addresses the most important political and social challenges postwar Japan has faced. I recommend this book for people looking for an overview of the political and social history of, and contemporary issues in, postwar Japan.
Michael Strausz
Texas Christian University, Fort Worth