Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ix, 236 pp. (B&W photos, maps.) US$99.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-108-49007-8.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s 2020 book, Japan’s Living Politics, takes its readers on a remarkable and ambitious intellectual journey. Against the backdrop of a perceived global crisis of democracy, the book traces a number of different, but nevertheless intertwined local initiatives from rural Nagano through time and space, thereby asking how these “informal life politics” may inform alternative visions of democracy in contemporary Japan and beyond. What unites these informal life politics is not their cause, their organizational shape, or a particular ideological configuration—rather, they are united by the general idea that the “key problems humans face […] cannot be solved at the level of formal state politics,” but have to be addressed by creating spaces of autonomy in which people can practice politics as an everyday search for a “physically sustaining and morally virtuous ‘good life’” (13). Such instances of informal life politics exist not only in Japan—and in fact, as Morris-Suzuki argues, they are often connected through time and space by what the author captures as “resonance,” i.e., the “intermingling of ideas and actions” in nonlinear and not necessarily comprehensive ways (24). Based on these two concepts, the book achieves the unlikely task of weaving a seemingly disparate set of groups and initiatives centred mostly in rural Nagano into a compelling narrative of a transnational search for “another politics” that spans more than a century from the 1910s to post-3/11 Japan.
Morris-Suzuki skillfully constructs this narrative along the biographical lines of various protagonists. Early in the book, for example, we meet Kobayashi Tatsue, son of a farm household in a village in Nagano that now belongs to Saku City. Inspired by the philosophy of the White Birch Group—a collective of Japanese artists and novelists in pursue of a social vision resonating with the ideas of “Western” thinkers including Tolstoy and William Blake—Kobayashi was among the founders of the White Birch Teachers, a Nagano-based group which engaged in a series of local experiments in “social education” in the 1910s and 1920s (chapter 3). “Radically at odds with the Japanese state’s notion of schooling” (47), most of these experiments were short-lived; yet, they did not vanish without a trace. Through the lives and activities of Kobayashi and other White Birch Teachers, Morris-Suzuki links them to alternative community projects (“new villages”), which emerged in the 1920s not only in Japan, but also (and along personal and ideational connections) in India, England, and China. Decades later, we meet Kobayashi again, when he, now aged 97, talks about his lifelong pursuit for social learning in the Shinshū Miyamoto School in Saku City. The group was founded in 1992 to promote a new vision of endogenous local development against the backdrop of the adverse effects of developmental state policies on rural economies and ecologies. In the decades between the founding of the Shinshū Miyamoto School and his early educational activities, Kobayashi had acted as the head of the local kōminkan, a type of community centre that flourished in the postwar era especially in Nagano. Through the activities of the kōminkan and other social education initiatives contesting the postwar modernization paradigm, Kobayashi’s life was intertwined with the life of Wakatsuki Toshikazu, the head of the General Hospital in Saku. Wakatsuki had pursued his vision of a cooperative rural medicine since coming to Saku in the mid-1940s. Decades later, both he and Kobayashi were involved in the founding of the Miyamoto Shinshū School as a different, but nevertheless related attempt at an alternative politics.
With each chapter, Morris-Suzuki spins an increasingly dense web of connections between people, art, education, political ideas, institutions, and initiatives across different historical and political contexts. The analysis invites readers to reexamine the relevance of these informal life politics beyond their at times limited immediate impact. Moreover, the book raises interesting points about the ambiguous relationship between informal life politics and formal politics. In their efforts to create spaces of autonomy to address social issues, the world of the “informal life politics actors” in Morris-Suzuki’s book remained “strangely removed” from the centres of political and administrative power in Tokyo (200). At the local level, however, the boundaries are less clear— here, informal life politics have not only been arenas for protest and resistance, but also for partnership with the local state. Moreover, informal life politics also unfolded within the context of formal, state-sponsored institutions, including cooperatives and the kōminkan system. Morris-Suzuki captures these institutions as vessels that can be filled with different meanings by the people and groups involved. Cooperatives in Japan, for example, are often seen as inherently conservative instruments mobilized by the state to “govern through community”—a notion that in the postwar period was embodied by the alliance between the agricultural cooperative organization Nōkyō and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Illustrating a different potential, the cooperative hospital in Saku provided the basis for Wakatsuki Toshikazu to realize his vision of a cooperative rural medicine to address the health and social issues of impoverished peasants. Similarly, Morris-Suzuki captures the nationwide network of kōminkan as “ambivalent sites of grassroots political action,” which can be instrumentalized to “harness community self-help to the agendas of governments,” but also—under the leadership of actors such as Kobayashi Tatsue—may turn into “focuses of quiet resistance and alternative politics” (144). The transformative potential that Morris-Suzuki assigns to everyday grassroots agency in shaping these institutions (and everyday life more generally) connects informal life politics to the broader issue of the contemporary crisis of democracy, in that they embody the “realization that a so-called good society must have its roots in the bottom-up, small-scale self-creation of individuals and communities: otherwise it has no roots at all” (200).
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, where especially depopulating rural areas are confronted with decreasing turnout and competition in local-level elections, while also facing rising expectations to solve local issues through civic engagement.
Hanno Jentzsch
University of Vienna, Vienna