Popular Democracy in Japan: How Gender and Community Are Changing Modern Electoral Politics

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book is the product of a long and transformative journey. Along the path to its completion, I have been intellectually challenged, materially supported, and emotionally sustained by an expanding network of colleagues, friends, and family. I am most heavily indebted to the many Japanese women I interviewed for this project and the people who led me to them. I thank them for generously granting me access to their social and political worlds. I hope that they are able to recognize as their own the voices in this book that are defining Japanese democracy in new ways. If there is any misrepresentation, the fault is mine. I began my journey in the political science department at the University of Michigan. In my earlier work I analyzed mass survey data and found that Japanese women were overrepresented among independent voters, a group of voters who were cynical about national political processes and constituted nearly half of the electorate. My conversations with women in the field were the backdrop to my survey data and merited only a short chapter. My adviser, John C. Campbell, commented several times that my xii Acknowledgments focus group chapter was the most compelling. Ann Chih Lin, Ronald Inglehart , and Hiroko Akiyama suggested that someday I might think very differently about what my qualitative data were telling me. Jointly appointed to the department of government and the program in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University, I began to hear my informants in a new register. Gender studies, an interdisciplinary enterprise fueled by an activist impulse, changed the questions I was asking, the answers I was finding, and the ways in which I was arriving at my conclusions. Mary F. Katzenstein has been a tireless mentor, thoughtful reviewer, and witness to my process of transformation from a political scientist concerned with how to include “absent” women in politics into one who listens to women’s experiences with the political world to formulate a more complete picture of how politics works. Matthew Evangelista’s feedback in the latter stages was invaluable in helping me to stay true to my disciplinary roots without compromising all of the important lessons that I have learned from gender studies. Peter Katzenstein and Amy Villarejo encouraged me to get this project on track before I knew where it was headed. Both proffered practical advice for locating an editor and publisher for my book. Providence led me to Roger Haydon, whose tremendous skill as an editor surpasses his already stellar reputation. I thank all of these individuals for having confidence in my vision for this project. This work would not have been possible without the institutional support that I have received. My original fieldwork was conducted between the fall of 1999 and the spring of 2001 with the support of a fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of Education. A residence with the program on U.S.-Japan relations at Harvard University in 2007–2008 provided me with time and material support to write my book while surrounded by a community of experts. A fellowship from Cornell University’s Institute for the Social Sciences in the fall of 2008 helped me to bring this book to fruition. Members of my interdisciplinary writing group at Cornell were crucial throughout these latter stages. In 2009–2010, we were supported by the Brett de Bary Interdisciplinary Mellon Writing Group Grant at the Society for the Humanities. I thank current and former group members Durba Ghosh, Stacey Langwick, Rachel Prentice, Sara Pritchard, Marina Welker, Kathleen Vogel, Anindita Banerjee, Maria Fernandez, Sabine Haenni, and Sara Warner. Acknowledgments xiii While in Japan from 1999 to 2001, I was affiliated with the University of Tokyo, where I was hosted by Ikuo Kabashima in the Faculty of Law. Kabashima-sensei, along with Ken’ichi Ikeda—also at the University of Tokyo—and Aiji Tanaka at Waseda, provided me with survey research resources in Japan and helped me to build a network of Japanbased colleagues whose support continues to be vital to my research. While Kabashima-sensei and members of his seminar helped me to think through my quantitative data, Hiroko Akiyama and her students helped me to brainstorm and frame the questions that I took into the field. Kaori Shoji and Karen Cox stand out as colleagues, peers, and friends who accompanied me into the field. They facilitated my initial forays into my new research settings, introducing me to critical...