Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West (review)

The number of books and articles on Japanese state-society relations has increased steadily over the last decade. Some of these studies portray the relationship as skewed in the state’s favor, much to the detriment of Japan’s long-term democratic development. Others optimistically highlight the proliferation of informal citizen groups and nonprofit organizations as indicative of both societal empowerment and a fundamental deepening of social and political democracy. I suspect I am not alone in questioning how these two alternative visions of state-society relations can coexist.

Daniel Aldrich’s Site Fights helps resolve some of these lingering contradictions in the literature by exploring the specific circumstances in which civil society can influence the state’s behavior. In his exploration of state-society conflicts over the siting and construction of dams, airports, and nuclear power plants in Japan and France, Aldrich crafts a two-pronged argument about the patterns of siting and the responses of state agencies to rebellious civil society actors. First, he posits that state actors deliberately select locations for new facilities in areas where organized resistance from civil society is likely to be low. Second, he argues that the type of state response to civil society pressures will vary greatly depending on the quality of societal organizations. In cases where social opposition to the state is local, small in scale, and short lived, state agencies will apply coercive tools to obtain what they want, including land expropriation and the use of police force. Where resistance is more national in scope, well organized, and sustained over long periods, state representatives will offer monetary incentives to concerned groups and implement “soft” measures of social control, namely, educational and propaganda programs designed to persuade publics to accept a controversial facility in their midst. In sum, when societies act with restraint, state responses will appear decidedly authoritarian; but when push comes to shove, the state will adopt some of the trappings of democratic behavior.

To illustrate his argument, Aldrich conducts three in-depth case studies and compares his Japanese findings to insights from the French experience. In the case of airport siting, we learn that since opposition from Japanese citizen groups has by and large been localized and sporadic, the Ministry of Transportation has remained committed to land expropriation and other coercive strategies. Only in the Narita Airport case—in which protest has been more persistent, violent, and national in scope—did the ministry buckle and implement some soft social control measures to convince the public of the project’s legitimacy and necessity. In France, by contrast, relevant state representatives have relied on incentives and soft measures of social control precisely because their civil society proponents enjoy what Japan’s opposition groups lack: a regional and national focus to their protest and the ability to sustain that protest over extended periods.

The chapter on dam siting nicely illustrates how states respond to changes in societal protest over siting procedures. For most of the postwar era, Japanese protest toward the construction of new dams was ad hoc, local, and small in scale, thus enabling the Ministry of Construction to focus almost exclusively on coercive measures as it proceeded with its siting plans. But over the last few years, as the antidam movement has intensified in conjunction with Japan’s deepening environmental consciousness and growing media attention to such issues, the ministry has added a number of persuasive measures to its “tool kit.” In France, by contrast, antidam movements were broader in scope from the start and better organized; relevant state agencies, consequently, were far less prone to resort to coercive or repressive policies to push their dam projects forward.

Aldrich’s third and most illuminating case study explores state-society conflict surrounding the siting of nuclear power plants. Thanks to the Japanese public’s deeply ingrained fear of nuclear power plants, the organization of civil society in this case has...