Iwanami Shoten Research Articles

書評論文：第一線行政現場としての児童相談所 ― 川崎二三彦著『児童虐待 ― 現場からの提言』（2006年、岩波新書）、『虐待死 ― なぜ起きるのか、 どう防ぐか』（2019年、岩波新書）を読む

書評論文：第一線行政現場としての児童相談所 ― 川崎二三彦著『児童虐待 ― 現場からの提言』（2006年、岩波新書）、『虐待死 ― なぜ起きるのか、 どう防ぐか』（2019年、岩波新書）を読む

Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925–2015 by Oguma Eiji

Reviewed by: Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925–2015 by Oguma Eiji Paul D. Barclay (bio) Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925–2015. By Oguma Eiji; translated by David Noble. International House of Japan, Tokyo, 2018. xviii, 320 pages. This attractive, beautifully written English-language edition of Ikite kaette kita otoko: aru Nihonhei no sensō to sengo (A man who lived to return home: one soldier's wartime and postwar [Iwanami Shoten, 2015]) is the product of a series of father-son interviews between protagonist Oguma Kenji (b. 1925) and author Oguma Eiji (b. 1962). Although Oguma the elder is the main character, Return from Siberia is a single-author title bearing only his son's byline. Indeed, Oguma Eiji's frequent interpositions of background information to frame block quotations from interviews with his father make it more narrative history than memoir. As the title intimates, Oguma Kenji's internment in Siberia (August 1945-August 1948) forms the book's pivot. Two of its nine chapters are dedicated to Kenji's three-year ordeal in the Soviet Union, placing this work within a growing historiography about Japanese who "lived to return home" from captivity. The Oguma family's prewar history constitutes the book's first and longest chapter. It is a tale of geographic mobility prompted by misfortune, economic hardship, and the search for opportunity. Oguma's treatment of Meiji- and Taisho-era social history, told through the lens of his father's memory, is masterful and riveting. In chapter 2, the teenaged Oguma Kenji is conscripted by a desperate Imperial Army, despite his subpar performance on the medical exam (p. 47). After Kenji arrived in Manchukuo, he never fired a shot in battle, visited a military brothel, or even interacted [End Page 204] with Chinese people. Kenji's military career consisted of violent hazing by Japanese superiors in Manchukuo, Soviet capture, and internment in the USSR (pp. 51–70). His testimony in chapters 3 and 4 regarding harsh labor, poor food, inhumane travel conditions, the perfidy of Japanese internees who participated in Soviet-inspired "democracy movements," and the postwar immiseration of Soviet citizens will be familiar to readers of Andrew Barshay's The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–56 (University of California Press, 2013) and Yoshikuni Igarashi's Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan's Lost Soldiers (Columbia University Press, 2016). It cannot be doubted that Kenji suffered mightily in Siberia. After three years of exile, Kenji's 1948 "homecoming" to Japan was a muted and awkward affair. He did not receive a ticker-tape parade. Neither did he return home to a jubilant family. Rather, Kenji showed up at the Warino village, Niigata Prefecture, house of his aged and struggling father, with whom he rarely lived as a youth. Soon after, he removed to Okayama to live with his grandparents, who also lived in straitened circumstances (pp. 134–39). Kenji's hard landing was not unusual. As Lori Watt documents, Siberian returnees faced suspicion and even social rejection in Japan in part because they were reminders of Japan's failed empire and lost war. From about 1948 onward, they were also associated with purported Soviet "brainwashing."1 Kenji himself attributed his inability to be rehired by Fuji Telecommunications to precisely this kind of discriminatory treatment (pp. 143–44). In Oguma Eiji's telling, Kenji's inability to experience a "homecoming" also stemmed from bare conditions in the countryside and from the fact that Kenji had divided his youth between parents and grandparents, and multiple geographically dispersed residences. If one were to coax another historiographical point out of Kenji's poignant yet anticlimactic return to Japan, it might be author Eiji's criticism of the notion that settled farmers were the bulwark of "traditional Japan." For Oguma Eiji, Japanese salarymen, or farmers in rural communities, are overrepresented in studies of Japan. His father Kenji, by contrast, lived in the countryside without farming and was a city dweller without salaried employment (pp. xvi, 291). Historian of China Henrietta Harrison's kindred study in the life-story genre is suggestive. As Harrison...

Shiro Sugihara, Nature, Human Beings, and Labour

Introduction by Shoichi Hashimoto Shiro Sugiharaʼs “Nature, Human Beings, and Labour,” translated here into Eng-lish, was originally published in Japanese in J. S. Miru to Gendai （J. S. Mill and the Present Day）, 1980, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, and reprinted in Volume 2, 2003, of The Works of Shiro Sugihara, 4 Volumes, 2003-, Tokyo: Fujiwara Sho-ten. Shiro Sugihara （1920-2009） began his study of the history of economic thought with a comparison of Karl Marx and J. S. Mill. While he does not ex-plicitly mention it in any of his writings, in this he may have been influenced by his mentor, Kei Shibata （1902-1986）. Shibata had been attempting to further develop Marxʼs theory of reproduction using the methods of general equilibrium theory. While carefully tracing the process of development of Marxʼs economic thought, by explicating Marxʼs crit-icism of Mill Sugihara played a major role in the post-war Japanese movement to re-evaluate Mill, who had historically received only low appraisal. Sugihara presented Millʼs stance of engaging with contemporary economic issues in a positive light, an approach that is given full expression in the essay translated here. While Japanese readers would not require any explanation regarding Sawako Ariyoshi （1931-1984）, the novelist who appears at the start of the es-say, she was a writer who raised new social issues such as synthetic pollution, food damage, issues related to the elderly, and so on, that have since become common knowledge, posing them to society in a series of works written in rapid succession that all went on to become bestsellers. As a result of the nature of her writing she was ignored by various literary awards.

Dear Kojien Dictionary: Tomorrow Girls Troop

Dear Kojien DictionaryTomorrow Girls Troop Reiko Tomii (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Tomorrow Girls Troop, Dear Kojien Dictionary (2017), ending still from music video (accessible in full on TGT's website). Courtesy of Tomorrow Girls Troop. Tomorrow Girls Troop (TGT, Ashita Shōjotai in Japanese) define themselves as a fourthwave feminist social art collective based primarily on the Internet. According to their website (https://tomorrowgirlstroop.com), TGT "focus[es] on gender inequality issues in Japan and Korea through art and social projects" with the goal to "educate" and "achieve gender equality for all men, women, and members of the LGBT community." Among their projects, the best-known is Against Forgetting, a performance event that centers on memorials for Korean comfort women and was staged in Los Angeles (2018) and Seoul (2019), in collaboration with the artist Shimada Yoshiko, and in Tokyo (2019). Some of their activist projects have brought about tangible real-life changes. A recent, albeit small, victory came with Dear Kojien Dictionary, a petition campaign that the group undertook in 2017 to urge the most authoritative Japanese dictionary to accurately reflect the goals of the feminist movement. When the publisher Iwanami Shoten issued its seventh edition, the entry "feminism" was substantially revised to include the [End Page 278] Click for larger view View full resolution Definition of "feminism" and "feminist" in the 6th edition of Kōjien. Courtesy of Tomorrow Girls Troop. Click for larger view View full resolution Definition of "feminism" and "feminist" in the 7th edition of Kōjien. Courtesy of Tomorrow Girls Troop. phrases "liberation from sexism" and "equality," two key concepts absent from the sixth edition. Yet, the revision is still lacking on two counts. Above all, TGT believes that the goal of "equality" should not be limited to "both sexes" but include "people of all sexes and sexual identities." The second point concerns the second definition under the entry "feminist": "A man who is easy on women." "Colloquially means," which prefaced this second definition, in the sixth edition was removed in the seventh definition, and the new definition thereby erroneously enhances the impression of accuracy. As a social art collective, TGT actively reaches out to engage a wider audience through easy-to-understand videos and lectures. For this project, they also created a music video, Dear Kojien Dictionary (2017) and incorporated the translation of the definitions from the sixth and seventh editions of the Kojien in their English-language presentation slides. TGT's highly effective activism blurs the boundary of what constitutes "art" and what forms an "artwork" can take. [End Page 279] Reiko Tomii Reiko Tomii is an independent art historian and curator who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts for the narration of a world art history of modernisms. Her research topic encompasses "international contemporaneity," collectivism, and conceptualism in 1960s art. She is Co-Founder/Co-Director of PoNJAGenKon, a scholarly listserv (www.ponja-genkon.net). Her recent publication Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016), which received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award, was turned into an exhibition Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s at Japan Society Gallery in New York in 2019. In 2020, she received the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese government. (rtomii.js@gmail.com) Copyright © 2021 Josai University Educational Corporation

中等国語教材史研究 : 岩波『国語』を中心に(国語科授業研究の方法)

中等国語教材史研究 : 岩波『国語』を中心に(国語科授業研究の方法)

Review of Amerika to Chūgoku - America and China by MATSUO Fumio. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, January 2017

Review of Amerika to Chūgoku - America and China by MATSUO Fumio. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, January 2017

Generic absoluteness and boolean names for elements of a Polish space

It is common knowledge in the set theory community that there exists a duality relating the commutative \(C^*\)-algebras with the family of \(\mathsf {B}\)-names for complex numbers in a boolean valued model for set theory \(V^{\mathsf {B}}\). Several aspects of this correlation have been considered in works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example by Takeuti (Two Applications of Logic to Mathematics. Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo; Princeton University Press, Princeton, Kano Memorial Lectures, vol 3. Publications of the Mathematical Society of Japan, No. 13, 1978) and Fourman et al. (eds.) (Applications of sheaves. In: Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol 753. Springer, Berlin, 1979), and by Jech (Trans Am Math Soc 289(1):133–162, 1985). Generalizing Jech’s results, we extend this duality so as to be able to describe the family of boolean names for elements of any given Polish space Y (such as the complex numbers) in a boolean valued model for set theory \(V^\mathsf {B}\) as a space \(C^+(X,Y)\) consisting of functions f whose domain X is the Stone space of \(\mathsf {B}\), and whose range is contained in Y modulo a meager set. We also outline how this duality can be combined with generic absoluteness results in order to analyze, by means of forcing arguments, the theory of \(C^+(X,Y)\).

Editors' Introduction: Sōseki Great and Small

Editors' Introduction:Sōseki Great and Small Reiko Abe Auestad (bio), Alan Tansman (bio), and J. Keith Vincent (bio) The work of Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) is a deep pool of ramifying literary, philosophical, and intellectual currents. The characters and plots of his novels belong to the cultural lingua franca of modern Japan: the cat with no name who catches no mice; Botchan, who jumps out of a second-floor window; Sanshirō and the woman on the train; Sensei and his younger friend strolling past tombstones in Zōshigaya. These literary moments, as well as episodes from Sōseki's own life story—the maid whispering in his ear as a boy the secret of his true parentage, or the glimpse of his own diminutive figure staring back at him in a London shop window—have acquired the resonance of so many primal scenes. Sōseki's very body, his pockmarked face and chronically bleeding stomach, has come to bear the stigmata of Japan's transition into modernity. He has proven inimitable among Japanese novelists, a towering figure whose genius chanced to flourish at a time of extraordinary cultural and political transformation. To read and to study Sōseki has meant many things over the decades. In his own lifetime he was known as a poet, a theorist, a scholar of British literature, a generous mentor to younger writers, and a writer of wildly popular serialized fiction. In the interwar decades following his death in 1916, his disciples set about promoting his legacy as consummate stylist and a paragon of liberal humanist values. In the postwar period, to study Sōseki was to study what the first major Sōseki critic and biographer Etō Jun called "man's isolation in the egoistic modern world" and "the dark shadow that underlies Japan's seemingly rapid and successful modernization."1 Since the 1980s, writers on Sōseki in Japan and elsewhere have amassed a remarkable body of critical scholarship, bringing to bear a range of methodologies, from narratology to new historicism, to show how Sōseki's works and his iconic figure have been mobilized to serve a discourse of national exceptionalism, used as a smoke screen for colonial violence, and abetted an unexamined androcentrism.2 From our vantage point now, the full reception history of [End Page 1] any one of Sōseki's novels can read like a compendium in miniature of a century of literary, historical, and political debates in Japan.3 The essays in this issue began at a conference held at the University of Michigan in 2014, when we attempted to take stock of this century of reading Sōseki and to begin to envision where the next century might take us. "Sōseki's Diversity" spanned three days, coming to a close on the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first installment of Sōseki's most canonical novel, Kokoro, in the Asahi newspaper, on April 20, 1914. As far as we know, it was the largest conference on a single Japanese author ever held outside of Japan. Seen in retrospect, it coincided with the beginning of a period of intense public and scholarly engagement with Sōseki's work. The Asahi newspaper re-serialized five of his major novels in their original format, beginning with the opening installment of Kokoro on the final day of our conference.4 The centenary of Sōseki's death in 2016 and the sesquicentenary of his birth in the following year brought more conferences and many more publications in Japanese,5 including a new edition of his collected works from Iwanami Shoten and a hefty one-volume encyclopedia of Sōseki studies.6 In the same year, roboticist Ishiguro Hiroshi unveiled an uncannily lifelike Sōseki android who is currently touring Japan performing lectures and readings of Sōseki's works. The publication since 2008 of no fewer than nine new or revised English translations of Sōseki's novels and a volume of his theoretical writings has brought Sōseki new readers in English as well.7 For Japanese readers, and for those of us who teach and write about Japanese literature outside of Japan...

Front Matter

Editors' Introduction:Sōseki Great and Small Reiko Abe Auestad (bio), Alan Tansman (bio), and J. Keith Vincent (bio) The work of Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) is a deep pool of ramifying literary, philosophical, and intellectual currents. The characters and plots of his novels belong to the cultural lingua franca of modern Japan: the cat with no name who catches no mice; Botchan, who jumps out of a second-floor window; Sanshirō and the woman on the train; Sensei and his younger friend strolling past tombstones in Zōshigaya. These literary moments, as well as episodes from Sōseki's own life story—the maid whispering in his ear as a boy the secret of his true parentage, or the glimpse of his own diminutive figure staring back at him in a London shop window—have acquired the resonance of so many primal scenes. Sōseki's very body, his pockmarked face and chronically bleeding stomach, has come to bear the stigmata of Japan's transition into modernity. He has proven inimitable among Japanese novelists, a towering figure whose genius chanced to flourish at a time of extraordinary cultural and political transformation. To read and to study Sōseki has meant many things over the decades. In his own lifetime he was known as a poet, a theorist, a scholar of British literature, a generous mentor to younger writers, and a writer of wildly popular serialized fiction. In the interwar decades following his death in 1916, his disciples set about promoting his legacy as consummate stylist and a paragon of liberal humanist values. In the postwar period, to study Sōseki was to study what the first major Sōseki critic and biographer Etō Jun called "man's isolation in the egoistic modern world" and "the dark shadow that underlies Japan's seemingly rapid and successful modernization."1 Since the 1980s, writers on Sōseki in Japan and elsewhere have amassed a remarkable body of critical scholarship, bringing to bear a range of methodologies, from narratology to new historicism, to show how Sōseki's works and his iconic figure have been mobilized to serve a discourse of national exceptionalism, used as a smoke screen for colonial violence, and abetted an unexamined androcentrism.2 From our vantage point now, the full reception history of [End Page 1] any one of Sōseki's novels can read like a compendium in miniature of a century of literary, historical, and political debates in Japan.3 The essays in this issue began at a conference held at the University of Michigan in 2014, when we attempted to take stock of this century of reading Sōseki and to begin to envision where the next century might take us. "Sōseki's Diversity" spanned three days, coming to a close on the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first installment of Sōseki's most canonical novel, Kokoro, in the Asahi newspaper, on April 20, 1914. As far as we know, it was the largest conference on a single Japanese author ever held outside of Japan. Seen in retrospect, it coincided with the beginning of a period of intense public and scholarly engagement with Sōseki's work. The Asahi newspaper re-serialized five of his major novels in their original format, beginning with the opening installment of Kokoro on the final day of our conference.4 The centenary of Sōseki's death in 2016 and the sesquicentenary of his birth in the following year brought more conferences and many more publications in Japanese,5 including a new edition of his collected works from Iwanami Shoten and a hefty one-volume encyclopedia of Sōseki studies.6 In the same year, roboticist Ishiguro Hiroshi unveiled an uncannily lifelike Sōseki android who is currently touring Japan performing lectures and readings of Sōseki's works. The publication since 2008 of no fewer than nine new or revised English translations of Sōseki's novels and a volume of his theoretical writings has brought Sōseki new readers in English as well.7 For Japanese readers, and for those of us who teach and write about Japanese literature outside of Japan...

한ㆍ중ㆍ일 성경의 성서 히브리어 ‘베라크’ 이해

The purpose of this article is to suggest that the Korean expression of ‘축복(祝福)하다’(to bless) used in Bible translations has both meanings of (1) ‘to confer happiness, as God’ and (2) ‘to pronounce a wish of happiness to someone’. There are two reasons to support this suggestion. First of all, most Korean Christians usually ask for blessings in prayer with the expression, ‘축복하소서’ which would mean “O God, bless us!” or the like. Second, modern Chinese and Japanese Bibles use the expression of ‘축복’(祝福) for both meanings mentioned above.<BR> Korean versions of the Bible such as the Old Version (1911), the Revised Version (1938), and the Common Translation (1977) have traditionally differentiated ‘축복하다’, which literally means ‘to pray a blessing for someone’, from ‘복을 베풀다’, ‘to be given a blessing by God’. In contrast, modern Japanese and Chinese Translations of the Bible have not differentiated one from the other. By modern Japanese Bibles, I am referring to the Colloquial Translation (1955), the New Interconfessional Translation (1987), and the Iwanami Shoten Translation (2004). Modern Chinese Translations of the Bible include the Lu Chen-Chung Version (1970) and the Catholic Studium Biblicum Version (1968). Somewhat different from these Bibles, the Old Chinese Delegates’ Version (1854) and the Japanese Meiji Translation (1888) take the Hebrew verb b?rak(* ??? ) literally as both ‘(God) to grant a blessing to someone’ and ‘(human) to pray to give a blessing to someone’. Interestingly enough, the English-Chinese Dictionary (1866-1869) by W. Lobscheid lists both meanings of ‘祝福’ to the entry of ‘to bless’.<BR> Korean language belongs to Chinese character culture so we Koreans can follow both usage of ‘祝福’ in the Chinese and Japanese Bible translations. Nowadays Koreans use the expression of ‘축복’(祝福) to imply both meanings. Indeed, the language itself has been changing over the time.

The Origin of Sociology of Occupation and the Historical Development of Social Stratification and Mobility Research in Japan, Shokugyou syakaigaku (Sociology of Occupation), by KunioOdaka. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1941, pp. 497

The Origin of Sociology of Occupation and the Historical Development of Social Stratification and Mobility Research in Japan, Shokugyou syakaigaku (Sociology of Occupation), by KunioOdaka. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1941, pp. 497

"State Shinto" in Recent Japanese Scholarship

"State Shinto" in Recent Japanese Scholarship Okuyama Michiaki (bio) Murakami Shigeyoshi's 村上重良 Kokka Shintō 国家神道, published in 1970 by Iwanami Shoten, has had a tremendous impact on subsequent understandings of its subject: the current widely held view that a discrete ideology called Kokka Shinto (State Shinto) actually existed in Japan until the conclusion of World War II was quite likely shaped by Murakami's work, an inexpensive, popular paperback (shinsho) that has been continuously reprinted over the years. As most readers are aware, the term "State Shinto" was drawn mainly from the language of the so-called Shinto Directive, 1 but we must recognize at the outset that it signifies not so much a firmly established historical entity as a cluster of phenomena perceived from the perspectives of various scholars and defined according to their particular purposes. In order to provide a framework for this discussion and deepen the debate on State Shinto, our task is, at a minimum, to specify the historical phenomena to which the term refers and clearly articulate Shinto's relationship to the state. [End Page 123] In 2010, forty years after the publication of Murakami's book, several retrospective studies were published that critically evaluate his work, signaling that it is time to reassess the literature on this controversial topic. This article focuses on the studies that have appeared in Japanese over the past few years. Following a brief review of representative definitions and general descriptions of State Shinto in standard reference works, I turn to an examination of recent retrospective studies on Murakami's theory of State Shinto and of several other key works. Some of the research of several scholars considered below—Isomae Jun'ichi 磯前順一, Hayashi Makoto 林淳, and Shimazono Susumu 島薗進—has already been published in English. I will omit discussion of these works here since they are already accessible to a wider audience. 2 I will concentrate instead on reviewing recent publications in Japanese and, hopefully, offer readers a clearer picture of where this field of research stands today. 3 Basic Definitions and Historical Perspectives Any discussion of State Shinto needs to bear in mind the distinction between "narrow" and "broad" definitions of the term. Nitta Hitoshi 新田均 is known for clarifying this distinction. 4 The "broad" understanding—which, in addition to Shrine Shinto, includes such dimensions as imperial household rituals and propagation through schools and media—can be traced back to the prewar period. In his genealogical analysis of the origins of these very different perspectives on State Shinto, Nitta explains that this approach "began in the prewar period with the work of Katō Genchi 加藤玄智 and D. C. Holtom. It entered the mainstream through the Shinto Directive, and it was further expanded by Fujitani Toshio 藤谷俊雄 to apply to a greater number of time periods and range of phenomena. Murakami Shigeyoshi consolidated Fujitani's wide-ranging views into a theory that became the basis for the way State Shinto came to be generally perceived. Murakami's theory, however, subsequently became the focus of much criticism, which made it difficult to sustain as it was originally framed. In this context, Miyachi Masato 宮地正人 advanced some revisions, Nakajima Michio 中島 三千男 offered his own reframing, and Yasumaru Yoshio 安丸良夫 attempted to take apart and reconstruct the broad perspective on State Shinto" (p. 6). The "narrow" view, which limits the notion of State Shinto to the situation when Shrine Shinto was under the state's control and administration, can be seen in the prewar government's position and in the work of Shinto scholars such as Ashizu Uzuhiko 葦津珍彦, Nishida Hiroyoshi 西田 廣義, and Sakamoto Koremaru 阪本是丸. Those who adopt this perspective maintain that State Shinto does not refer to the larger religious system of modern Japan or to phenomena beyond the state administration of Shrine Shinto. "Given that the proponents [of the narrow view] are often [End Page 124] viewed as only having offered partial criticisms of the broad definition," Nitta writes, "their position has been unable to achieve dominance in this field" (p. 6). 5 An examination of Nitta's interpretations of each of these scholars is beyond the scope of this review. Most notable among his contributions to contemporary discussions of State Shinto are his observation that both the "narrow" and "broad" definitions...

Language in migration: multilingualism and exophonic writing in the new poetics

The limit: music needs no translation. Lyric poetry: closest to music and posing the greatest difficulties for translation. –Walter Benjamin, ‘Translation For and Against’1 With the Warsaw Express,...

Joseph L. Sax, translated by Shigeto Tsuru etc. Playing Darts with a Rembrandt-Public and Private Rights in Cultural Treasures, Iwanami Shoten, 2001

Joseph L. Sax, translated by Shigeto Tsuru etc. Playing Darts with a Rembrandt-Public and Private Rights in Cultural Treasures, Iwanami Shoten, 2001

Japan's hollywood boycott movement of 1924

On July 1, 1924, major movie exhibitors in Japan initiated a boycott of Hollywood films. This boycott was one of the manifestations of the anti-American movement, triggered in response to the 1924 ...

Gendai Keizaigaku no Sugakuteki Hoho (Mathematical Methods in Contemporary Economics), by Hukukane Nikaido published in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, Japan, 1960; vi+337 pp., ¥980.

Gendai Keizaigaku no Sugakuteki Hoho (Mathematical Methods in Contemporary Economics), by Hukukane Nikaido published in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, Japan, 1960; vi+337 pp., ¥980.

The Changing Japanese Political System: The Liberal Democratic Party and the Minstry of Finance (review)

Reviewed by: The Changing Japanese Political System: The Liberal Democratic Party and the Ministry of Finance William W. Grimes (bio) The Changing Japanese Political System: The Liberal Democratic Party and the Ministry of Finance. By Harumi Hori. Nissan Institute/Routledge, London, 2005. xiii, 192 pages. £65.00. The Changing Japanese Political System offers a concise analysis from a historical institutionalist perspective of changes in the role of the central bureaucracy in Japan since 1993. Hori argues that the advent of coalition governments after 1993 fundamentally disrupted a stable and efficient issue-settling system based on a clear-cut and complementary division of labor [End Page 565] between ministries (especially the Ministry of Finance, or MOF) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). With new patterns of policymaking and party-bureaucracy relations still unsettled at the time of the book's writing, she concludes that policymaking works far less efficiently than in the past. The crux of the book is a conception of the LDP-MOF issue-settling system, which Hori sees as epitomizing relations between politicians and bureaucrats in the era of LDP dominance. The system consisted of a division of labor between MOF (policymaking and planning) and the LDP (microlevel intervention in budgeting in order to perpetuate electoral strength). Both institutional actors were characterized by a high degree of internal cohesion and discipline, and by tacit agreement the LDP did not seek to attack MOF's institutional integrity. As it developed over the years, this system was remarkably stable, but all that changed in 1993. After 1993, the LDP was no longer able to monopolize the introduction of substantive legislation, MOF had to respond to multiple masters, and challenges to received ways of doing business by coalition partners and "policy-oriented" junior LDP members led to greater uncertainty and thus variability in the policymaking process. Empirically, the book relies on a comparison of the policymaking process in three modern case studies—the introduction of the consumption tax in 1989 (chapter five), financial turmoil in 1994–98 (chapter six), and the reform of the Ministry of Finance from 1996 to 1999 (chapter seven). Two additional chapters provide overviews of relations between bureaucrats and politicians from the time of the establishment of Japan's modern bureaucratic system in the Meiji period until the early 1990s (chapter three) and political shifts since 1993 (chapter four). I address the book's argumentation and evidence below, but before doing so, it is worth noting that there is relatively little that is original in the overall analysis. This appears at least partly because Hori has not made use of a number of standard works that address identical or nearly identical questions, including John Campbell, Contemporary Japanese Budget-Making (University of California Press, 1977); Yamaguchi Jirō, ōkura kanryō shihai no shūen (Iwanami Shoten, 1987); Masaru Kohno, Japan's Postwar Party Politics (Princeton University Press, 1997); Takaaki Suzuki, Japan's Budget Politics: Balancing Domestic and International Interests (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000); and my own Unmaking the Japanese Miracle (Cornell University Press, 2001). The reason for at least some of the omissions appears to be that the book is based on a dissertation that was completed sometime around 2000 or 2001. But given the book's publication date of 2005, there should have been enough time for updating basic sources. Her account of the development of MOF-LDP relations is particularly similar to that of my book, which addresses the 1985–2000 period, MOF relations with party politicians and the Bank of Japan, and several of the same substantive issues. [End Page 566] Not surprisingly, I find myself in agreement with much of the analysis in this book, although I see some deficits in argumentation and presentation. On the other hand, the book also makes some positive contributions to our understanding of these phenomena. I see three main contributions of this book. First is the detailed description of some of the episodes it analyzes. I learned a great deal about coalition policymaking. The book is also very informative about internal politics of the LDP in the post-1993 cases, particularly clashes between junior and senior politicians and contestation between the mainstream and antimainstream groups (awkwardly...

Evolution of the Economic System in Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Evolution of the Economic System in Japan Carl Mosk (bio) Evolution of the Economic System in Japan. By Juro Teranishi. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2005. xiv, 343 pages. $120.00. The political economy of Japan's high-growth period between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s has been the subject of heated debate in academic and policy circles. Was it efficient? What were its main characteristics? When and why did the system come into being? Was its long-run legacy the retardation and stagnation of the 1990s and early 2000s? In this volume, a translation of his book Nihon no keizai shisutemu (Iwanami Shoten, 2003), Teranishi provides bold answers, couching his arguments in a detailed historical account of Japan's political economy since the Meiji Restoration. The gist of his argument is that the system of the high-growth era emerged because a very different system—which he dubs the Meiji-Taisho system—deteriorated. The key institutions of the high-growth era only emerged during the period 1937–47. Like the institutions of the Meiji-Taisho system that began decaying—becoming dysfunctional in both the economic and political realms—during the 1920s, the institutions of the high-growth period have outlived their usefulness. They should be consigned to the dustbin of history. To make this argument, Teranishi constructs a model of evolutionary change for the Japanese economy. In the first section of the volume—chapters one and two—he lays out the model by arguing that the rules of a system ultimately change when three conditions are met: (1) the economic costs of maintaining it are too high, (2) the political costs of maintaining it are too high, and (3) the rules become incompatible with prevailing social mores. There are three major subsystems to political economy: the division of labor between the private sector and government, the institutions of the private sector, and the interface of governmental and private-sector institutions giving rise to policies. When the costs of keeping these subsystems functional grow, and when norms regarding the utility of the key features of the subsystems change, system atrophy sets in. A new system emerges through a gestation period potentially painful and protracted. This argument is general, applicable to any political economic system. To make it specific to Japan, Teranishi puts forward three constraining, [End Page 577] exogenous conditions. First, Japan was involved in catch-up growth until the late 1970s, borrowing technology from Western countries. Second, prior to the 1980s, Japan was the only Asian country to successfully industrialize; its geographic isolation encouraged the development of a "full set" industrial structure, with every major subsector of manufacturing appearing in the set. And third, the major economic paradigms put forward internationally for analyzing market-oriented economies shifted, from an emphasis on pure laissez-faire prior to World War I to doctrines embracing limited government intervention in economic affairs, especially working through the agency of monetary, fiscal, and welfare (income redistribution) policies. In Part II (chapters three through five) of the volume, Teranishi explains how the Meiji-Taisho system operated. He argues that it was private-market oriented and government was relegated to the shadows. It was dominated by wealthy political and economic elites in the private sector: rural landlords and merchants (the meibōka) played a major role in securing loans from small local banks for small companies; a small cadre of wealthy investors gobbled up the stocks issued by large nationwide enterprises that relied on internal accumulation of capital from profits or the equity market to fund their growth; and former samurai filled many of the managerial posts in the emerging big-business sector. The main interface between the government and the private sector was decentralized, mainly operating at the local level. The political parties emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leaned on the meibōka rural elite who were more than willing to cooperate; the meibōka lobbyied for infrastructure investment (roads, railways, harbors) in their local districts in return for their efforts in drumming up votes. Teranishi argues that structural change set off by economic development and competition between the political parties undermined the functionality of the system...

The spectre of the left: Iwanami shoten, ideology and publishing in early postwar Japan

In the 1990s neo-conservative critics of postwar intellectual discourse alleged that the progressive publishing house Iwanami Shoten and its monthly opinion journal Sekai were responsible for perpetrating leftist ideology. In this paper I examine the origins of this characterization, argue that it misrepresents the role of Iwanami Shoten and the scope of so-called ‘leftist publishing’ in the early postwar years, and present a more nuanced picture of the early postwar publishing industry.

Rethinking Religion as Part of Japan's Ongoing Encounter with the West and Itself, Iwanami Koza: Religion (10 vols.), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003-2004, @\3,400.

Rethinking Religion as Part of Japan's Ongoing Encounter with the West and Itself, Iwanami Koza: Religion (10 vols.), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003-2004, @\3,400.