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Yet, even if we allow for greater heterogeneity amongst the Japanese,
allowing us to see them as individuals rather than as groups, will it explain
the political involvement of at least 1 million young people in what looks, to
the casual outsider, like a static political arena characterised by pork-barrel
politics? Abeles (1992, in Gledhill 2000: 21) argues that the
of the
political in modern societies is an illusion. To move beyond seeing democracy
as equalling the political system, to start including more of the processes by
which people participate is important. While a more macro-level view of
politics in Japan is necessary, it will not help cast light on the political parti-
cipation of youths in this study. This is not because young people in this topic
do not agree or are aware of how politics is seen to work in Japan, but rather
because it cannot explain why these young people do not withdraw like so
many other young people. As we shall see, it is not possible to explain this as
a system of
'
autonomy
'
'
(Stockwin 1999, 2006; Scheiner 2006), or yet again as a wish to adhere to
group consensus. In light of my example of politically active young people,
how might we view the Japanese case di
'
inclusivism
'
(van Wolferen 1989; cf. Otake 2000), or
'
clientelism
erently?
I would like to turn to the work of political anthropologists, theorists and
others, who might not have written about Japan, but who have discussed the
nature of ideology, the relationship between governance and the individual in
such a way that their theories help to build a better picture of the Japanese
case. In much of the literature on Japan, there is an implicit understanding of
the concept of ideology in the straightforward Marxist sense, as being a pre-
existent body of beliefs imposed on or inculcated in an unsuspecting and
innocent mass of people. Asad (2002a: 79) argues in his analysis of Barth
'
s
(1959) seminal assessment of indigenous ideology that
'
there is no a priori
reason to assume
'
that di
erent classes
'
or groups of people
'
s
'
modes of con-
sciousness are identical or even congruent with
'
the dominant ideologies,
'
since the acceptance of common authority does not exclude the presence of
di
erent modes of perceiving, evaluating and constructing the social world
'
.
How much can we learn from taking a category like
'
to be particularly accepting of established norms of authority? Representing
popular religious groups in ways that lead us to believe that they attract
overly naïve subjects, who trust religious leaders motivated by the desire to
further their own hegemonic power could be saying more about the observer
'
Japan
'
or
'
new religion
s
a priori notions than of those observed. The way Benedict (1946) prescribed
the ideology of one class for the culture of a people is the classic example of
ideology de
'
ned as if at work on people who lack superior notions of agency
and citizenship proper.
Feeling addressed according to a collective or abstract identity may cer-
tainly appeal to our socially constructed emotional, inner subconscious. Yet
the dominance of constructing the social and the political in Japan in this
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