Civic engagement in postwar Japan : the revival of a defeated society

Bibliographic Information

Civic engagement in postwar Japan : the revival of a defeated society

Rieko Kage

Cambridge University Press, 2011

  • : hardback

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Note

"This book grew out of a Ph.D. dissertation ..."--Acknowledgments, p. xiii

Bibliography: p. 171-192

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Despite reduced incomes, diminished opportunities for education, and the psychological trauma of defeat, Japan experienced a rapid rise in civic engagement in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Why? Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan answers this question with a new general theory of the growth in civic engagement in postwar democracies. It argues that wartime mobilization unintentionally instills civic skills in the citizenry, thus laying the groundwork for a postwar civic engagement boom. Meanwhile, legacies of prewar associational activities shape the costs of association-building and information-gathering, thus affecting the actual extent of the postwar boom. Combining original data collection, rigorous statistical methods, and in-depth historical case analyses, this book illuminates one of the keys to making postwar democracies work.

Table of Contents

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Civic engagement: the dependent variable
  • 3. War and civic engagement: a theoretical framework
  • 4. Quantitative analysis: the rise of civic engagement across forty-six Japanese prefectures
  • 5. The long-term effects of wartime mobilization: cross-national analysis
  • 6. Repression and revival of the YMCA Japan
  • 7. Wartime promotion and postwar repression of a traditional martial art
  • 8. Civil society and reconstruction in postwar Japan
  • 9. Conclusions.

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