Welfare through Work: Conservative Ideas, Partisan Dynamics, and Social Protection in Japan by Mari Miura (review)

The subject of this book is the Japanese government’s practice of promoting and protecting employment in lieu of offering generous programs of unemployment insurance and social assistance for the poor. The abiding principle has been that it is better for the government to pay to keep people on the job than it is to subsidize the livelihoods of people who have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Accordingly, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Japan boasted the lowest unemployment rates in the industrialized world, but its policies to support the poor and the unemployed and its redistribution of wealth through the tax system were comparatively limited. Mari Miura uses the apt phrase “welfare through work” to characterize this system.

Miura’s book argues that a “gendered dual system” in the labor market has been one of the pillars upholding welfare through work. Irregular workers who labor at part-time or temporary jobs and lack job security and fringe benefits give employers the “external fl exibility” they need to downsize in times of recession. A disproportionate share of those irregular workers have been women, and their plight has reflected the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s “fundamental abhorrence of gender equality” (p. 5). Thanks to this fl exibility, employers have been able to protect the job security of a core of regular employees, who are predominantly men.

A central argument of the book is that the “values of governing parties determine the dominant characteristics of the social protection system” (p. 160). This is roughly congruent with the “power resources” theory of welfare policymaking, which emphasizes the relative influence of class-based political parties in shaping welfare regimes. However, Miura asserts that power resources theory has paid too little attention to the specific values that have driven the welfare policies of conservative political forces, often simplistically attributing those policies to nothing more than conservatives’ class position in the economy. This is a fault that Welfare through Work seeks to correct.

The analysis offers a four-part typology of the conservative values that have moved welfare policymaking in postwar Japan: statism, cooperatism, productivism, and neoliberalism. Statism signifies that social protection should be formulated in terms of the state’s overall conception of the public good. Cooperatism reflects the ideal that employers and workers should cooperate rather than engage in class struggle. Productivism justifies measures of social protection for their contribution to economic growth. Neoliberalism prioritizes the individual’s ability to make a profit over issues of workers’ rights and safety. The author sees Japan’s policies of social protection in the early postwar period as an amalgam of statist, cooperatist, and productivist values, whereas a combination of statism and neoliberalism has become more prominent since the 1980s. These values are not merely described in the abstract but elaborated as they have informed party competition, thus linking the ideological dimension of the study to practical politics.

In addition to the useful treatment of conservative welfare values, another strength of this work is its richly detailed discussion of the various types of irregular workers in Japan and the policies that have been adopted to regulate their working conditions. The substantial increase of irregular workers is one of the most salient changes in Japanese society over the last two decades, and this book does an excellent job of tracking this change. The author also offers a systematic and concise treatment of the policymaking process that has undergirded laws related to matters such as working hours, temporary work agencies, dismissal rules, and overtime pay.

One shortcoming of the book is that it says little about value or policy precedents in the prewar, wartime, and Allied Occupation periods. Some might contend that the adjectives statist, cooperatist, and productivist would be a good fit for wartime labor policy, and to the extent that the war’s legacy may have put these values into place...