The Failure of Civil Society? The Third Sector and the State in Contemporary Japan (review)

In The Failure of Civil Society? Akihiro Ogawa provides a fascinating account of contemporary Japanese civil society at the grass roots. His careful and illuminating ethnography of a recently incorporated nonprofit organization (NPO) reveals important insights into the changing nature of Japanese citizenship and the relationship between the nonprofit sector and the state in contemporary Japan. Told in the first person and rich with nuanced details of the challenges and joys of volunteering, Ogawa's book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of Japanese society and politics, as well as to those interested in public policy related to the nonprofit sector.

For two years Akihiro Ogawa was an unpaid staff member at an NPO he calls SLG, which provided a wide variety of continuing education courses to its local Tokyo community. Employing an "Active Research" methodology, Ogawa was not merely an observer of the organization and its people but an active participant in its mission, seeking to improve its effectiveness, facilitate its development, and achieve his own personal fulfillment.

The book opens with an introductory chapter outlining the project and key research questions. It then moves on to offer a portrait of "Kawazoe," Ogawa's field research site, an old urban district in eastern Tokyo. The overview gives brief descriptions of numerous civic organizations in the community, painting a portrait of the associational context in which SLG is set and providing readers with a nice sense of the plurality of Japanese civil society. The third chapter describes SLG, detailing the different activities of the organization, how it was funded, and why it became incorporated as an NPO. Direct quotes from documents about the incorporation process supplemented with interviews with participants reveal the key role the government played in first establishing and then persuading the organization to incorporate as an NPO.

The following three chapters get to the heart of Ogawa's argument. Chapter 4 describes and then analyzes the phenomenon of "invited volunteers." These volunteers, who formed much of the core leadership of SLG, were asked by some member of the government to participate in SLG. Their personal characteristics, roles, motivations, and relationships with the government, other volunteers, and the SLG organization are contrasted with those of "pure" volunteers who decided to volunteer at SLG for reasons unrelated to a government request. Chapter 5 provides a detailed account of a direct confrontation between the new NPO and the municipal government, offering important insights into the power dynamics at play within the organization and between the organization and the state. In 2002 the municipal government attempted to reorganize its relationship with SLG and "entrust" (essentially subcontract) all of the operations of the municipality's lifelong learning facility to SLG. After lengthy and often tense negotiations, in which SLG presented significant resistance to the government's attempt to offload the responsibilities associated with operating the building without ceding any real decision-making power or providing sufficient monetary incentive to make the new arrangement attractive, the proposal was withdrawn. The sixth chapter gives a historical overview of the concept of shimin (citizen) in Japan and discusses how NPOs are promoting a new image of an ideal citizen, one who actively volunteers to help his or her community in cooperation with the government. Ogawa offers a reflection of his active research experience in the final chapter.

Ogawa's book is a valuable addition to the growing literature on civil society in Japan.¹ He is correct in asserting that this literature "largely ignores the experiences of ordinary grassroots people as seen within their local institutional frameworks" (p. 11), and his book offers an important corrective to that oversight. Filled with specific details of how one particular Japanese NPO works, how participants feel, what they do, what they think, why they are motivated to volunteer, as well as why they quit, Ogawa's work is...