Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism

In Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan, Patricia Maclachlan traces the development of consumer advocacy through the decades since the end of World War II. Through a lucid history and detailed case studies, she discusses the extent to which the growing consumer movement was able to have an influence on the evolution of consumer protection policy from the regulation of unfair and unsafe trade practices in the immediate postwar era to the passage of a product liability law in the mid-1990s. She pays especially careful attention to the complicated ways in which the institutional features of Japanese politics shaped the landscape on which consumer advocates waged their battles, and she handily sets the entire story within a comparative framework, explaining how Japanese consumer politics have compared to (and sometimes been influenced by) those in the United States and Britain. Maclachlan finds that consumer advocates do play a significant role in keeping consumer protection on the policy agenda, but they win their specific policy preferences only in bits and only occasionally. Institutional factors such as jurisdictional competition within a powerful bureaucracy and the long, single-party dominance of the business-oriented Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) usually combine to lock consumer advocates out of important policymaking arenas. In her study, Maclachlan has achieved the enviable combination of an elegant argument firmly grounded in a wealth of complex data.

Maclachlan's work fits into a growing group of studies, such as Tiana Norgren's Abortion Before Birth Control and studies by Steven Vogel, Robert Pekkanen, and Sheila Smith,¹ all of which demonstrate how much we have to learn from a sustained focus on the role various "private" or citizen interests play in the Japanese policymaking process. Like these recent studies, Maclachlan's book eschews the traditional Japanologists' argument about the competing merits of viewing the political system from the vantage point of either the bureaucracy or elected officials. She is driven as much by her desire to understand the origins of complicated policy regimes as she is by any abstract theoretical notion of the political process, and she will examine any institution or organization that may be important to it. She is similarly ecumenical about the sort of data she gathers, conducting interviews with representatives of every part of the political and advocacy structures, poring through government documents, old newspapers, and the publications of citizen organizations. Maclachlan's subject matter is also undeniably timely. In the last few years, controversies over the level of dioxin in Japanese vegetables, the use of illegal fertilizers, and the marking of domestic beef as imported have led to prolonged media attention to issues of consumer protection which the governing LDP and relevant bureaucracies have been forced to address. Because her prose is crisp, her research exacting, and her comparative sense illuminating, Maclachlan's Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan is likely to prove a classic study of Japanese policymaking.

Maclachlan begins her work by pointing out that although consumers "are the bedrock of the modern capitalist system" (p. 13), they are difficult to mobilize for political purposes. In brief but cogent treatments of the rise of consumer advocacy organizations and the development of consumer protection policy regimes in the United States and Britain, she demonstrates how movements that grew up at nearly the same time and sharing similar goals came to take on very different structures as they sought access to the policymaking process in distinct political systems. Maclachlan's discussion of these leaders in the development of pro-consumer policy foreshadows her conclusions about the peculiar shape and constrained success of the Japanese consumer movement.

Many Japanese consumer advocacy groups have grown up where policies-such as the direction in the 1968 Consumer Protection Basic Law that local governments provide consumer consultation services-have encouraged them to do so. But at the national government level, the absence of a real electoral challenge to the ruling, pro-business LDP meant there were few incentives for politicians of the governing party to espouse consumer causes unless they could be made into media events. Agencies with some jurisdiction over consumer protection were spread across the bureaucracy, with the result that, given their paucity of friends in the government, consumer causes often lost out to other policy missions such as spurring economic growth that were prized within ministries or used as a means of wielding power over competing ministries. The Japanese court system-expensive, overworked, and, at any rate, little prone to push citizen interests against those of the bureaucracy-provided consumer advocates with no real options. Possessing neither the sort of institutionalized voice consumer advocates were given in corporatist Britain, nor the weapon afforded Americans in the U.S. court system, Japanese consumer organizations have been forced to concentrate their greatest efforts on changing policy in the least efficient way, by mobilizing a consensus in public opinion.

In some senses, Maclachlan's story of the Japanese consumer movement conforms to the claims of political opportunity structure theory: the movement was forced to take its cues from the nature of the political system already in place. However, Maclachlan reminds her readers that "institutions condition the menu of strategic choices available to advocates but do not necessarily determine it, nor do they tell us how advocates will choose from among those strategies" (p. 25). Like Lee Ann Banaszak, whose study of the woman suffrage movements in Switzerland and the United States led her to reach beyond the standard set of social movement theories to cultural values and group identity for a better understanding of how movement activists chose their strategies,² Maclachlan finds that group identity and cultural predispositions are important to the ease or difficulty with which consumers can be organized. Her most interesting discussion of this comes in her case study of the deregulation of food additives where she explains how cultural assumptions about purity made food safety an area in which consumer advocates have traditionally won the most from the conservative policy establishment.

Maclachlan also provides an interesting discussion of how and why the Japanese consumer came to be identified by advocates more as a "citizen" (shimin) or "lifestyle person" (seikatsusha) than a "consumer" (shōhisha) (especially pp. 78-83). From time to time in the case studies, she points to the operation of these identities on the strategic choices of the movement advocates. These discussions enrich her picture of the complicated process of mobilizing and sustaining a citizens' movement in a less-than-hospitable political environment. Nonetheless, it is in the area of treating the consumer's identity that I think Maclachlan could have done more than she has, especially in terms of examining the relationship between the movement's identity formation and the fact that movement activists were primarily female. The study's greatest weakness is that it does not make explicit the operation of the gender politics that seemingly runs throughout the process of building the consumer movement and forwarding its agenda. Maclachlan explains that consumer advocacy groups struggled to make headway in the policy process because they were underfunded, insufficiently supplied with expertise, and often excluded from or ignored in the bureaucracy's advisory committee system. How many of these movement problems stem from the fact that a significant portion of its leaders came to consumer consciousness through their roles as housewives, and that much of the membership of the movement also consisted of housewives who are, as housewives, excluded from political and economic power in other ways as well? To what degree was the persistence of strong sympathy for the "producer" position in the LDP influenced by the fact that the party is overwhelmingly male and attached to a conservative family ideology in which men are breadwinners outside the home and women, as homemakers, are largely responsible for the family's consumption practices?

In Maclachlan's case study of the passage of the product liability law, she mentions a conversation with a young businessman who explained to her how his company was reacting to the imminent passage of the bill. He went on to say "Personally, I support strict liability, and so does my wife, who reads about it a lot in the newspapers. . . .Trouble is, I can't make my opinions known to my superiors because they'll only question my loyalty to the company" (p. 214). Tidbits such as this quote provide some of the richness that takes Maclachlan's book beyond a treatment of the institutional constraints on policymaking to show what, exactly, is at stake in the policy process. But I wish she had gone just one step further. What happens to the consumer preference in a political system as gendered as Japan's? When this man is silenced at work, is his wife able to represent his interests fully in his stead?

While it is true that I wish for stronger treatment of the perplexing questions about men's political "power" such examples provoke, I must say that, overall, I find Maclachlan's work excellent. It is rigorous and systematic in the tradition of the best social science without doing unnecessary violence to the complexity of political reality. And yet it remains focused, economical, and accessible in its argument. Because this book offers compelling evidence of the effects of one-party dominance and draws a detailed picture of the ways in which social movements develop in response to particular institutional contexts, it will be useful to many sorts of comparative political scientists. Given that consumer protection in a global marketplace is likely only to grow in stature as a concern in the politics of advanced industrial democracies, the focus of this study promises to be apt for some time to come. The book has added bonuses as well, providing insight into both how intra-bureaucracy rivalries affect the Japanese political economy and how local governments use their own institutional opportunities to expand their activism. Specialists will find Maclachlan's book useful, but students at most levels will also be able to read it. I plan to assign it to mine.