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Reviewed by:
  • One World of Welfare: Japan in Comparative Perspective
  • Patricia L. Maclachlan (bio)
One World of Welfare: Japan in Comparative Perspective. By Gregory J. Kasza. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2006. x, 189 pages. $32.50.

It is customary in both scholarly and media circles to label modern Japan a welfare laggard. While focusing on economic growth, so the argument goes, Japan's developmental state has done far less than other advanced industrialized countries to build state-run welfare programs, relying instead on alternative welfare sites like the family and the company to help fill in the gaps. Gregory Kasza takes issue with this conventional wisdom in what may be the most comprehensive treatment of the Japanese welfare state to date—in any language.

Rejecting assumptions that Japan's welfare system is somehow unique, Kasza relies on thorough empirical descriptions and rich comparative and theoretical analyses to situate Japan in "one world of welfare." One by one he debunks the many myths and theories that have influenced our perceptions of Japanese welfare, beginning with the assumption that Japan was a relative latecomer to the welfare state. Using historical and statistical comparisons, he finds that Japan conforms quite closely to other advanced industrial countries in terms of both the timing and sequencing of the emergence of the country's first welfare programs in relation to its level of economic development. Surprisingly, he reveals that Japan was comparatively early in the introduction [End Page 137] of welfare programs such as industrial accident insurance (legislated in 1911) and health insurance for industrial workers (1922).

Kasza also contests the notion that the goals of the Japanese developmental state were fundamentally incompatible with social welfare. Measuring Japan's welfare spending per capita against its level of economic development, he shows that spending has outpaced growth in gross domestic product (GDP) for several welfare programs. These observations not only undermine the assumption that Japan was a welfare backwater but also provide new insights into the policy priorities of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The conventional wisdom is that the center-right LDP abandoned its policy of "growth at all costs" by the late 1960s, with the rise of citizen protests and local progressive governments. According to Kasza's analy-sis, the party was committed to welfare all along. Kasza concludes from these observations that developmentalism and the welfare state need not be viewed as antithetical; they are, in fact, flip sides of the same coin. His analysis also disproves one of the reigning hypotheses of the comparative welfare state literature, namely, that the primary proponents of state welfare programs tend to be left-leaning in their political orientations.

In terms of the content and effectiveness of social welfare policies, Kasza argues that Japan has been far more progressive than critics would have us believe. After meticulously comparing Japan to nine other advanced industrial countries, he finds that the similarities between Japanese health insurance and pension programs and those abroad significantly outweigh the differences. In terms of employment policies, however, Japan's overall coverage appears lower than average, but this should not imply that the country is somehow backward on this score. Kasza argues that Japan lacks a competitive unemployment insurance scheme largely because there has been little need for one, given the country's high growth rates and employment levels. Those employment levels, moreover, owe much to active government policies designed to redistribute income and to protect the vulnerable from the vicissitudes of rapid growth—policies like protective agricultural programs and the Large Scale Retail Store Law that rarely factor into comparative studies of Japanese welfare. It is in instances like these that Kasza is at his scholarly best, judging Japan on its own terms while simultaneously assessing the implications of his findings for both Japan's position in the world and reigning theories of the welfare state.

Kasza also dispels the notion that Japan now represents what might be termed an emerging Asian welfare-state model—a notion that assumes cultural and historical commonalities across countries, the supremacy of the developmental state, and the view that states in the region are mimicking one another. To make his case, he shows through comparative analysis...

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