Introduction - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 25

1993: 24). The notion of plays a crucial role in European theories

of politics and the way European thought constituted a negative Orientalist
discourse that emphasised the superiority of the

' civil society '

. Said (1978) demon-
strated in his seminal work Orientalism that the truth of a discourse depends
less on what is said than on who is saying it and when and where it is said.
The analysis of Japanese democracy and citizenship has usually been framed
within a comparison between Japan and a (imaginary) democratically well-
functioning West (usually the USA). In this light, Japanese society has been
found to be a place that does not value the individual as a bearer of rights, or
as a social group that puts much emphasis on society as a collective inde-
pendent of the state, ideas that are primary to a civil society frame of analysis.
Despite such uses of Western concepts, civil society is useful as a point of
departure because it embraces the potential to widen our understanding of
empirical civil society (Herbert 2003), both when employed in a non-Western,
as well as a religious context. Second, and at the risk of repeating the studies
that have been accused of

' West '

s Western-based political
system and constitution highlight at least one important reason for the con-
tinuing comparison that is being made popularly and academically with the
West (cf. Clammer 2001). In this context, it is worth remembering that recent
tendencies towards cultural globalisation shape

' orientalism ' , Japan '

' what underlies the prolifera-

tion of '

(Gledhill 2000: 14). Third, but most importantly, the people under study see
themselves as civil society actors in the Western understanding of the word;
the organisation itself employs a framework of Western civil society within
which to constitute its political activities. We shall see that such a frame of
analysis has a wide bearing on how young people see their political partici-
pation. Indeed, the ideas expressed by the youth in this study resonate with
much normative literature on civil society (cf. Keane 1998).
It should be clear that my intention is not to use an ideal-type in the vein of
hypothesising about a certain social phenomenon by using an evaluative
model to tick of

“ di erence ” that seem so integral to modern political processes

a list of pros and cons for placing it within a particular

category. Still, is a useful perspective from which to advance our

current understanding of what usually and more censoriously is framed as a
'

' civil society '

. Having said that, it is important to point out that I use this
term from its Western perspective; the term civil society in Japan, shimin
shakai, has distinct connotations of left-wing groups who see change as laying
in particular changes to the economic system. While the meaning of the term
is changing in Japan and is becoming more widely used to include a variety of
protest groups, such as consumer rights groups, for instance, Soka Gakkai
members do not identify themselves with shimin shakai as a protest group.
Rather, they see their political support for Komeito as an expression of civil
society participation in the Western understanding of the term. Therefore,
while I am less hesitant about applying a framework of civil society to a more
abstracted level of analysis, I would hesitate to use shimin shakai as an
equivalent translation. To reiterate, Soka Gakkai members do not see their

new religion '