Japan's Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates (review)

Civil society is central to the functioning of democratic polities. The health of a democracy and its degree of democratic consolidation are often measured in part by the vibrancy of its civil society. At first appearance, Japan rates rather poorly on this measure. As Robert Pekkanen notes: "Japan is an outlier. Japan has the least professionalized civil society among its peer nations" (p. 28), with fewer employed in the civil society sector than in other industrialized democracies. Yet Japanese actively participate in civil society groups. What Pekkanen suggests is that civil society in Japan is structured differently than in many Western democracies. Japan's civil society groups tend to be small and local. There are few of the large groups with professional staff that are commonplace in the United States and Europe. Pekkanen thus characterizes Japan's civil society as having a dual structure, one with many members but few advocates. It is this structure that led to the title of his book: Japan's Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates.

Pekkanen's book is an important contribution to a still small but growing body of literature focused on an understudied aspect of Japanese society: the world of nongovernmental organizations, social movements, and public interest organizations. The book begins with a useful compilation of data related to Japan's civil society groups. Here we learn that Japan has many religious and political groups with legal status but relatively few non-profit organizations (NPOs) or think tanks that are recognized as legal persons under Japan's civil code. We also learn that employment in the civil society sector in Japan is considerably lower than in Australia, Western Europe, or the United States and that the largest Japanese NPOs pale in terms of both membership size and budgets compared to their U.S. and European counterparts. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of neighborhood associations, children's groups, elderly people's groups, and other civic groups operating without legal status. Moreover, a higher percentage of Japanese are members of organizations than are Americans.

Pekkanen's primary goal is to explain the puzzle found in these data. If Japanese culture is as group oriented as is commonly accepted and Japanese people participate as actively in local civil society groups as the data suggest, why is civil society so much less professionalized in Japan than in most Western democracies? Why are there so few large NPOs? What accounts for the dual structure of Japan's civil society? Pekkanen argues that the answers to these questions are not so much cultural as they are institutional. Japan's civil code, which dates back to the Meiji era, is relatively open to the formation of for-profit organizations but places numerous constraints on the formation of public interest legal persons. Moreover, it makes no provisions for civil society groups that are not working for the public interest.

Pekkanen shows how, prior to legal changes initiated in 1998, many civil society groups fell between the cracks and could not even apply to obtain status as public interest legal persons. Others were confronted by the government's highly ambiguous and, in practice, highly restrictive definition of what was in the public interest. The end result was that many groups never gained legal status. While this did not prevent many groups from nevertheless forming, it did limit the number and type that enjoyed the status of "legal person" under the civil code. Although the material presented here is not new, Pekkanen's presentation is clear and concise. He makes a strong case for why having legal status is critical: it gives groups the ability to enter into contracts, open bank accounts, hire employees, own property, and so forth. Without these benefits, it is extremely difficult for a group to develop into a large professional organization. This regulatory framework, he proposes, is the main reason there are so few large, professional civil society groups in Japan.

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