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  • The Art of the Gut: Manhood, Power, and Ethics in Japanese Politics
  • David Leheny (bio)
The Art of the Gut: Manhood, Power, and Ethics in Japanese Politics. By Robin M. LeBlanc. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2009. xix, 229 pages. $60.00, cloth; $24.95, paper.

Robin LeBlanc is one of the most talented wordsmiths writing in English about politics, and her new book showcases her enviable skills. In weaving together the stories of two figures in Japanese local politics to make broader points about masculinity and agency, The Art of the Gut never fails to be eminently readable and compelling, building toward an affecting series of reflections on the qualities that drive a person to do good.

Taking aim at conventional political science accounts, LeBlanc argues that causal accounts drawn from social scientific epistemology fail to show how structures, including gender, provide resources for actors to make choices that may simultaneously subvert and reinforce those structures. The book is more than a striking account of a year spent with a young politician and an older referendum organizer, as LeBlanc works explicitly to undermine the cynicism that purely structural accounts can produce. After all, if only structural factors matter, why take a courageous stance? In exploring masculinity's capacity to support resistance, LeBlanc emphatically points to the role of agency.

In 1999-2000, LeBlanc worked with "Takada-san," a young and deeply conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politician in "Shirakawa Ward" in Tokyo, and "Baba-san," an older organizer of a referendum against a nuclear power plant in "Takeno Machi," an effort that surely now seems prescient given the March 11, 2011, disaster. Drawing insights from writers as diverse as Vaclav Havel, Robert Dahl, and Michel Foucault, she shows how discourses of masculinity shape the willingness of both men to engage in a certain kind of hara gei: the "art of the gut." LeBlanc describes this as a manly silence surrounding agreements and understandings that need not be spoken out loud, though YouTube makes a persuasive case that it also refers to a chubby man painting a face on his torso and using it for a drunken monologue. In the book, hara gei reinforces masculine power, even as notions [End Page 488] of male goodness and responsibility permit one man in particular to confront the local powers that be.

Because her informants insisted that Baba-san himself had made a profound difference in local politics, LeBlanc emphasizes that she had been forced to change track in her own research plans. Before entering her field sites to investigate how political change took place in one town but not another, she had been "confident that the data I should seek in answering my question were the [statistical, institutional] kind social scientists would expect" (p. 17). This announcement will surprise fans, like me, of her earlier book Bicycle Citizens (University of California Press, 1999), in which she also prioritized participant-observation methods in analyzing the discursive construction of gender as an enabling and constraining force in Japanese politics. It does, however, usefully foreground the intellectual tensions she tackles throughout the book.

From her introductory chapter about the "power remainder"—that arena of social action, marked by individual agency, that structural power theories cannot explain—through her later chapters on Takada-san and Baba-san, LeBlanc skillfully draws the reader into the worlds of urban and rural politics, providing arresting insights along the way. Among them is her point that demands placed on Japanese men to be breadwinners for their families put them at a serious disadvantage in pursuing political action unless politics is already a family business, making women much more viable candidates for reform platforms. Along these lines, men may decry the constraints associated with masculine hierarchies even as, in their own efforts to do good, they reproduce those constraints for others.

The character portraits should delight most readers. Takada-san, for example, is the scion of a local political family seeking to claim his father's seat in the ward assembly. Although he seems to be a sure bet for the seat, he himself repeatedly tells LeBlanc of his cynical take toward the political life, averring that he is...

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