Introduction - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 30

of democracy itself, even suggesting that ' there is an eerie continuity between

pre-war and post-war eras ' where today ' s younger generation show no ' incli-

nation towards a social order based on individual autonomy ' (Abe et al.

1994: 210). McVeigh (1998: 293) suggests that Japan ' teaches us about how a

state can rationalize civil society out of existence ' and about how ' modernity

bureaucratises subjectivity (McVeigh 1998: 190). While the anthropology of

Japan has noticed areas where individuals are working for social change
(Bestor 2002; Maclachlan 2003), Japan

'

s civil society has been seen as weak
relative to that of other advanced industrial democracies primarily because of
the state

'

s ability to bring volunteer organisations under its control (Garon
2003; Pekkanen 2003; Suzuki 2003). Indeed, while civil society has been
excluded from the

'

of the LDP government, the bureaucracy
and business during the developmental era of rapid economic growth, we see
anewin

' iron triangle '

uence of NGOs in the 1990s (Hirata 2002), caused by globalisation.
The simultaneous erosion of the developmental state and the apparent rise of
civil society may therefore indicate that horizontal relations between the state
and civil society in Japan are forming (Hirata 2002).
Yet we have few studies of what is happening at the grassroots level of
political activities. During my fieldwork, a picture began to emerge of Soka

Gakkai as an organisation that fosters a political culture where many young
people become interested in issues of wider societal concern which are mostly
independent of promoting a particular religious denomination. Nakane

'

s

' '

famous portrayal of new religions as mirroring Japan s former military

' ' …

system ,the astonishing success [of which ] seems to be attributable mainly

to their system of vertical organisation (Nakane 1970: 61) appears anachro-

nistic. It is time to move on from the representation of Japan as a pre-modern
society, functioning best within village-like or patron-client political-social-
cultural hierarchical dynamics, which does not transcend its group-cohesiveness
or support democracy very well.
Increasing research in the 1990s indeed focused on a more diverse socio-
cultural life where the functionalist image of an overpowering conscience
collective was becoming less persuasive (Martinez 1998; Ikegami 1995; Bestor
2002; Liddle and Nakajima 2000; O

'

Brien and Ohkoshi 1996; Feldman 2000;
Mackie 2002; Mathews and White 2004; Robertson 2005). We could also say
that more recent literature on the state of civil society (e.g. Feldman 2000;
Ikegami 1995; Garon 2003) argues that democratic or civil rights movements
were not foreign to Japanese people, as farmers

'

s move-
ments and Burakumin 10 movements already existed in the Tokugawa and
Meiji eras. We could even ask if Soka Gakkai was not an example of such an
emerging civil society group in which educators initially came together in the
1920s and 1930s to oppose an education system controlled by the Imperial
Rescript (discussed in Chapter 1 ).

' movements, women '

movements may have been
squelched in the rise of militarism and the implementation of tougher laws in
the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, but their resistance has been left out of the more
homogenising discourses of the

' Human rights '

' '

Japanese subject and nation (Garon 2003).