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Just when Japan and the United States are both caught up in a major debate over the effectiveness of their governments, this volume offers new explanations of their comparative strengths and weaknesses. Why can Japan keep building nuclear power plants while it has a hard time building an information superhighway?Why is the opposite the case in the United States?Will political reform change public policy in Japan?Would it make a difference in the United States?This volume explains why and how.This is one of the few volumes on the two countries that offers detailed studies of value to policy makers as well as scholars and students of comparative policy and foreign policy. ... Read more

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The ever-present tension between industry, which is ruled by the logic of the market, and government, which is ruled by the logic of the political process, is a subject much discussed but little investigated. These original essays draw on recent research on government-industry relations to present a comparative overview of the political economy in West Germany, France, Britain, the United States, and Japan. This work is the first volume in the series Government-Industry Relations, which will explore the relationship between government and industry in various capitalist economies. ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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Review: Comparing Asian Politics: India, China, and Japan
I am not qualified to review this book. I found it browsing a discount warehouse in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee on spring break weekend. The store was right there on the strip and we were dying for something to do so we went in and I purchased several books for less than $10. I think Comparing Asian Politics: India, China, and Japan by Sue Ellen M. Charlton was $2 and it looked brand new. I was looking for books in general but books on China in particular and considered this a steal, the India and Japan part notwithstanding.

This book is probably best read under the tutelage of Charlton herself at Colorado State University, Fort Collins where she teaches political science. For that matter, any number of professors might be helpful but I'm trying to get my pre-China trip China studies on-the-cheap. The flight to China is going to cost something like a thousand dollars all by itself.

Reading Comparing Asian Politics: India, China, and Japan without the benefit of professors or fear of exams I was sometimes baffled and often just forcing my eyes along thinking about something else. This was in the early India and Japan parts. Nevertheless I learned something. Japan is a lot smaller than I thought. It looms so large in my world-view, you know? Yet Charlton notes that "Japan is, in fact, a mountaneous archipelago, with a total land mass of about the same size as the state of Montana" and some 127 million inhabitants. "Nearly one quarter of the population lives in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area alone," Charlton notes. I found much of interest even in the India parts, especially the story of the rise and trials and 1984 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. There was also a reference to Tennessean Al Gore's electoral college loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

But it was China I came for and Charlton delivers with current information on the developing Three Gorges Dam project, which will power modern China but destroy cultural sites along the Yangtze River and displace many poor people. She also thoroughly examines Communist Party politics with its endless cadres or bureaucrats and provides insight on the Chinese constitution.

In a book this serious one is delighted to find maps and the maps in Comparing Asian Politics have immediately become personal favorites for their clarity and sharp use of black and white and shading, and because they were made at the University of Tennessee Cartographic Services Laboratory (Will Fontanez, Cartographer).

This might be the smartest two bucks I've ever spent. Comparing Asian Politics: India, China, and Japan by Sue Ellen M. Charlton would be a bargain even at retail price. - THOMAS BRENT ANDREWS / more reviews at http://chronicdiscontent.wordpress.com ## ... Read more

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The Evolution of Modern States is a significant contribution to the literatures on political economy, globalization, historical institutionalism, and social science methodology. The book begins with a simple question: Why do rich capitalist democracies respond so differently to the common pressures they face in the early twenty-first century? Drawing on insights from evolutionary theory, Sven Steinmo challenges the common equilibrium view of politics and economics and argues that modern political economies are best understood as complex adaptive systems. The book examines the political, social, and economic history of three different nations - Sweden, Japan, and the United States - and explains how and why these countries have evolved along such different trajectories over the past century. Bringing together social and economic history, institutionalism, and evolutionary theory, Steinmo thus provides a comprehensive explanation for differing responses to globalization as well as a new way of analyzing institutional and social change. ... Read more

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Important and timely
This is an ambitious and important book.To begin with, Steinmo does
something that few scholars attempt today - he writes a careful and detailed
comparison of three quite different countries (Sweden, Japan and the United
States).I can think of no book written in the past many years that even
attempts such a broad comparative overview of important countries in three
different continents.Sadly, political science has increasingly turned
toward more and more narrow and static analyses - even while we complain
about this trend. In a real sense, "The Evolution ofModern States" is
written in the grand tradition of comparative politics.

At the same time that it is ambitious, Steinmo's book is very well written
and remarkably easy to follow.

The book starts out with a simple puzzle:What happened to the 'Race to the
Bottom?' Drawing a fascinating comparison to the way different species are
adapting to Global Warming, Steinmo contends modern nation states are also
adapting in quite different ways to the pressures they face in the early
21st century.One of the first and most interesting points Steinmo makes is
that (contrary to many people's expectations), the most heavily taxed
country in the world, Sweden, is doing remarkably well in an increasingly
competitive e and 'globalizing' world.His analysis also helps us
understand why the US and Japan are struggling, despite their low taxes and
small (inequitable) welfare states. He shows how these once optimistic and
growing nations have turned away from their egalitarian traditions and how
this growing inequality breeds growing distrust.Though he does not discuss
the Tea Party movement in the US, it is obvious how his analysis can be used
to explain its rise.The analysis of Japan's political turmoil is as sad as
it is illuminating.

Steinmo's introduction to and use of evolutionary theory is fascinating and
controversial. He demonstrates convincingly that political economies can be
understood as 'complex adaptive systems' that evolve in the context of a
changing international political economy. The analysis thusbrings together
the latest advances in evolutionary theories from psychology, anthropology
and political science and offers a new way of understanding political
evolution.

This book makes an important contribution not only to political science
and comparative politics, but to our basic understanding of historical
change.
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Comparing the USA, eight European countries, and Japan, this book demonstrates significant cross-national differences in early retirement across countries and over time. The study evaluates the impact of major variations in welfare regimes, production systems, and labor relations and provides comprehensive empirical analysis and a balanced approach to studying both the pull and the push factors affecting early exit from work needed to understand the development of early retirement regimes. ... Read more

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With expert contributions from both the US and Japan, this book examines the legacies of the US Occupation on Japanese politics and society, and discusses the long-term impact of the Occupation on contemporary Japan. Focusing on two central themes – democracy and the interplay of US-initiated reforms and Japan's endogenous drive for democratization and social justice – the contributors address key questions:

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Containing five in-depth introductory essays and nearly 300 A-Z entries, the Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Japan answers the need for an accessible reference that brings together information and authoritative analysis of all aspects of Japan's politics and political system
Written by a leading academic authority and commentator on the domestic and international politics of Japan, this new work provides comprehensive coverage of:
* Prime ministers, party leaders and important politicians
* Political parties and other political bodies
* Agencies of central government, judicial and electoral systems
* Political crises, episodes and scandals
* Influential interest groups, such as those representing industry, commerce
* The professions, agriculture, consumers, women, etc
* The constitution and constitutional issues, including the peace clause
* Areas of government policy, and more
this useful dictionary is thoroughly cross-referenced and indexed, includes a fully annotated bibliography to guide the user to further reading, and provides supplementary maps, graphs and tables. ... Read more

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In this fresh and original analysis, Brian J. McVeigh argues persuasively that far from being unique, Japanese nationalism becomes demystified once _management_ and _mysticism_--the same processes and practices that operate in other national states--are taken into account. Stripping away Orientalist-inspired misconceptions, the author stresses the variety and relative intensity of nationalisms, ranging from economic, ethnic, and educational to cultural, gendered, and religious. Highlighting the legacy of _renovationism,_ pluralism, and of identity among Japanese, this book will be an invaluable corrective to recent works that glibly proclaim the emergence of _globalization,_ _internationalization,_ and _convergence._ Visit our website for sample chapters! ... Read more

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This book sheds light on the changing nature of contemporary Japan by decoding a range of political, economic and social boundaries. With a focus on the period following the inauguration of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō, the book grows out of a recognition that, with the Koizumi administration playing a more proactive role internationally and moving ahead with deregulation and the ‘structural reform’ of the economy domestically, a range of boundaries have been challenged and reinscribed. Here ‘boundaries’ refers to the ways in which contemporary Japan is shaped as a separate entity by the inscription and reinscription of political, economic and social space creating insiders and outsiders, both internationally and domestically. The central argument of the book is that, in order to achieve the twin goals of greater international proactivity and domestic reform, the government and other actors supporting Koizumi’s new direction for Japan needed to take action in order to destabilize and reformulate a range of extant boundaries. While boundaries often remain invisible, the aim of this book is to promote an understanding of their significance by uncovering their pivotal role.

Decoding Boundaries in Contemporary Japan brings together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from the UK, Japan and the United States. It will appeal to scholars and students of Japan as well as social scientists with an interest in borders and boundaries, political scientists interested in Asia.

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Collecting essays about the experiences of thirteen countries, including the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Japan, The Patron State presents a global overview of recent government policies in relation to the arts.Each country is analyzed in terms of the forms and levels of government support of the arts; the organizational structure of arts support programs; policy choices; patterns of financial distribution; the impact of government programs on the arts; and the impact of budget cuts that have occurred in virtually every country since the mid-1970s. ... Read more

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The three instruments employed by major industrialized countries for intervening into the market are typically some variant of antitrust or competition policy, direct regulation, and international trade policy, direct regulation, and international trade policy.But the approach and form vary considerably among the developed nations.The purpose of this book is to compare government policies towards business in Europe, Japan and the Us, to analyze their impact and effectivenes, and assess the policies and the specific circumstances under which government intervention is most successful.

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Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study which challenges the conventional view of Japanese studies in general and the Anglophone anthropological writings on Japan in particular. Sonia Ryang explores the process by which the postwar anthropology of Japan has come to be dominated by certain conceptual and methodological and exposes the extent to which this process has occluded our view of Japan. ... Read more

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The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism--the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government--Kyu Hyun Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era than is usually given.

Bringing a fresh perspective as well as drawing on seldom-studied archival materials, Kim examines how parliamentarianism came to dominate the public sphere in the 1870s and early 1880s and gave rise to the movement among local activists and urban intellectuals to establish a national assembly. At the same time, Kim contends that we should confront the public sphere of Meiji Japan without insisting on fitting it into schemes of historical progress, from premodernity to modernity, from feudalism to democracy. The Japanese state was inextricably linked, in its origins as well as its continuing growth, to the self-transformation of Japanese society. One could not change without effecting a change in the other. The Meiji state's efforts to ensure that the state and society were connected only through channels firmly controlled by itself were constantly and successfully contested by the public sphere.

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This volume brings together for the first time a significant body of Professor Barnes' scholarly writing on Japanese early state formation, brought together so that successive topics form a coherent overview of the problems and solutions of ancient Japan. The writings are, in some cases, the only studies of these topics available in English and they differ from the majority of other articles on the subject in being anthropological rather than cultural or historical in nature. ... Read more

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Review of "State Formation in Japan" by Gina L. Barnes
Barnes (p. 9) states that: "One of the more infamous examples of manipulating the periodization scheme is Egami Namio's conflation of the Middle and Late periods into one single Late period in order to associate horse-riding equipment and the very large early 5th-century keyhole tombs built on the Osaka Plains. This sleight of hand has never been accepted by the Japanese archeological community, and Edwards carefully analyzed the appearance of horse-riding equipment in Yamato tombs to reject this fanciful theory once and for all in English."
In 1983, Walter Edwards, then a Cornell University graduate student, has contended that the changes in the contents of the tombs can be explained in terms of "process" rather than as the product of a discrete "event" of a conquest; the early 5th century Middle period tombs of Ôjin and Nintoku precede the presence of "horserider materials" because their influx into the Japanese Islands occurred "no earlier than the middle of the fifth century;" and therefore "the political power they represent cannot be seen as deriving from it."[1]
Edwards (p. 283) has classified both "equestrian goods and sueki [stoneware]" as "precisely those items which are closely linked with the continent." In the Table (1.1) showing the tripartite division of the Kofun period, Barnes specifies that the Middle Kofun period [400-475] "coincides with the Ôjin line of kings (p. 10)," and then tabulates (pp. 10, 17) to let sue stoneware appear simultaneously together with the horse trappings in her Middle Kofun period. Allowing a little bit of inconsistency between the table and the text, however, Barnes declares that "tombs begin to yield horse trappings" by "the mid-5th century (p. 18)," providing at the same time (p. 22) the "adjusted reign dates" for Ôjin (346-95) and his son Nintoku (395-427).
Allowing a lapse of exactly 20 years after 1983, we may now return to Edwards himself as of 2003, an academically mellowed professor at the Tenri University. Edwards states that: "In the fifth century, the keyhole tombs reached their greatest size in the 425m long mound regarded as the mausoleum of the legendary Emperor Ôjin, and the even longer mound attributed to his son, Nintoku. ... This process began with the appearance of Korean style stoneware [sueki] in the late fourth or early fifth century, followed by continental style weaponry and equestrian goods..."[2] Barnes' (p. 232) reference to Edwards' writings has, unfortunately, not gone beyond the year 2000.
According to Barnes (pp. 9, 103), the assumptions that (1) Himiko's country Yama-tai [Yama-ichi] was one and the same as the later documented Yama-to; (2) Himiko [Pimihu] mentioned in the Dongyi-zhuan can be identified as a personage connected to the Sujin line of sovereigns as portrayed in the Kojiki and Nihongi; and (3) Himiko's tomb can be equated with one of the monumental keyhole tombs in the southeastern Nara Basin "reflect the currently held judgment of most Japanese archeologists. ... If these assumptions are ever found wanting, then the interpretations developed herein will have to be thoroughly rethought (p. 195)."
As of 2005, Edwards calls our attention to the fact that the Imperial Household Agency denies access to "the sites designated as imperial tombs" which "include the largest and most important tombs of the Kofun period" that is "vital to the study of Japan's ancient history," and also to the fact that the "contemporary Japanese archeology" is not "free of political constraints in its investigation of the past," and consequently "many Japanese archeologists' presentations and interpretations of data are influenced by their a priori assumptions of the uniqueness and homogeneity of Japanese culture."[3]
The Japanese archeological community has been ardently pushing back the beginning of Early Tomb period by discovering "new dating evidence" in order to close the "temporal hiatus between mention of Himiko's tomb and the beginning of mounded-tomb construction in Nara (p. 103)." Apparently reflecting the dominant sentiment of the Japanese archeological community, Barnes (p. 9) states that the beginning of Early Kofun period "has already been pushed back from its post-war standard of 300 CE to 250 CE to coincide with Himiko's ostensible death date, and it is likely to be soon pushed back again in recognition of keyhole-shaped mound building in the early 3rd century." The Early Kofun period would then include the entire reign of Jingû (201-69 CE) as recorded in the Nohongi. With a little bit of more efforts by the Japanese archeological community, almost the entire post-war standard of Late Yayoi period (100-300 CE), covering the entire life time of Jingû (170-269 CE) as recorded in the Nihongi, may well be included in the Early Kofun period in the near future.
One may recall the incident of the Mainichi newspaper breaking the news on Sunday morning, November 5, 2000, saying that: "an archeologist, Fujimura Shin'ichi, had been caught on video planting stone artifacts at the Kami-Takamori site." Fujimura's findings had appeared to push back the earliest human habitation of Japan from 30,000 to 600,000 years ago. Books on archaeology and Japanese history came to include descriptions of the Early/Middle Paleolithic period based on Fujimura's discoveries.[4] Keally states: "Fujimura is the one taking all of the blame for planting artifacts on the site, but I feel all of Japanese society, especially academia, and most particularly archaeology, is ultimately responsible. Japanese academia is famous for its closed system. Students cannot pass teachers. Lower ranking teachers and students must agree with the ideas of the higher ranking teachers and the leader, or be expelled from the group. It is this system that has a lot of the responsibility for both Fujimura's acts and for the fact that no one caught it earlier. Fujimura deserves criticism for his actions. But he also deserves our sympathy, for he is ultimately a product of a system."[5] Keally questions whether "the Japanese archaeological community or the Japanese historians community is up to the task." What Keally says may have be taken as a serious warning to the modern Western exegesis that often endorses blindly the claustrophobic narrowness of the Japanese academic tradition.

Wontack Hong, Professor Emeritus, Seoul National University

References
[1] Walter Edwards, "Events and Process in the Founding of Japan: the Horserider Theory in Archeological Perspective," Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 9, No. 2, 1983, pp. 265-295. Since 1988, I have taken various evidences to show why the "evolutionary" thesis of Edwards is inadequate, and also to show that the tombs of Ôjin and Nintoku cannot precede the continental influx (of such grave goods as sue stoneware and horse trappings). See Wontack Hong, Korea and Japan in East Asian History (Seoul: Kudara, 2006), pp. 204-5; and "Yayoi Wave, Kofun Wave and Timing: the Formation of Japanese People and Japanese Language," Korean Studies, U. of Hawaii, Volume 29, 2005, pp. 1-29. (www.HongWontack.pe.kr)
[2] Walter Edwards, "Monuments to an Unbroken Line: The Imperial Tombs and the Emergence of Modern Japanese Nationalism," The Politics of Archeology and Identity in a Global Context, edited by Susan Kane, Boston: Archeological Institute of America, 2003, pp. 13-14.
[3] Walter Edwards, "Japanese Archeology and Cultural Properties Management: Prewar Ideology and Postwar Legacies, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, edited by Jennifer Robertson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 46-47.
[4] Howard French, "Meet a stone age man so original, he's a hoax," The New York Times, December 7, 2000.
[5] Charles T. Keally, "Japanese Scandals - This Time It's Archaeology," on the Ancient East Asia Website, November 17, 2000. (www.ancienteastasia.org/special/japanarchscandal.htm)

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