Japan's Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy by Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Abstract

Reviewed by: Japan's Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy by Tessa Morris-Suzuki Mary Alice Haddad Japan's Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy. By Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 246 pages. ISBN: 9781108490078 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Japan's Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy is a lovely book that takes a deep and long look at the evolution of Japanese democracy through the lens of local, grassroots, everyday political activity. Tessa Morris-Suzuki's historical and anthropological investigation of a wide range of local prodemocratic community engagement turns the usual narrative of top-down, state-centered Japanese politics on its head. Through the intimate stories of Japanese who struggle to imagine [End Page 374] and create an inclusive and progressive society, Morris-Suzuki offers us new perspectives on the development of our own democracies. The book's first chapter elaborates the concept of informal life politics. This notion understands the process of living everyday life as both a key political concern and a mode through which politics is expressed: "Central to the practice of informal life politics is the idea that many of the key problems humans face (not simply as individuals but also as communities) cannot be solved at the level of formal state politics" (p. 13). In this way of thinking, state power has only a limited capacity to solve human problems, so the most productive location for political action is at the grassroots level, in one's own community. In contrast to much of the literature on social movements and political activism, the grassroots action in Japan's Living Politics is not focused on lobbying politicians or seeking to establish new laws. Instead, these activists are making change directly by living a different way themselves and, perhaps, eventually, creating broader changes as their ideas and practices spread to other communities across Japan and throughout the world. Although the stories highlighted in Japan's Living Politics are often hyperlocal—relating to just one school, one small town, one art exhibit—the activists in them are not operating in isolation from broader national and international conversations and political movements. Morris-Suzuki takes great pains to draw these national and transnational connections to the reader's attention, showing how local movements in Japan are inspired and informed by activities abroad. She furthermore shows how these local movements, in turn, feed back into the activities of grassroots actors in communities located very far—geographically, socially, and politically—from their Japanese examples. These transnational connections are theorized more fully in the second chapter, in which Morris-Suzuki argues that Japan's living politics typically represents a "resonance" with rather than a "borrowing" or "adapting" of political ideals that cross time and space (p. 24). The bulk of Japan's Living Politics is concerned with specific examples of a wide geographic and temporal diversity. The oldest group discussed is the White Birch Society, profiled in chapter 3. The organization began in the late 1800s, soon after trade links with the rest of the world opened during the Meiji Restoration. The movement began in a handful of schools and universities that experimented with liberal education models promoting humanist and idealistic visions of society. Teachers and leaders sought to create communities that would nurture the "creative potential of each human being" (p. 44). Viewed as subversive, White Birch schools and thinkers were repressed during the fascist Shōwa period and were revived during the Allied Occupation. In many ways, White Birch thinkers, ideas, and modes of political engagement formed the foundation for the everyday life politics discussed in the rest of the book. The New Village Movement, discussed in chapter 4, explores the formation of intentional (and sometimes utopian) communities in Japan beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing through the movement's heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s until today. Although each was necessarily unique, the communities [End Page 375] generally emphasized communal ownership and collective living. In these villages, "inhabitants would live as brothers and sisters, combining farm labour with spiritual and artistic creativity, sharing wealth in common and determining their future...