The Effects of Japanese Civil Society on Policy-Making :: Government Political Science Japan Papers

The Effects of japanese polished Society on Policy-Making I. IntroductionMy touch on in this see began after studying japan for four years as an undergraduate and realizing I knew relatively little of the countrys policy-making atmosphere. I assumed after reading Western political scholars views on the subject, that it was a relatively homogonous nation and only after the Occupational Authority entered Japan had the country emerged with democratic ideals and a aline notion of spacious rights. It is true that citizens movements are a comparatively recent modern phenomenon in a country filled with millennia of rich cultural and political history. Still today, until now numbers of Westerners, including approximately scholars, see Japan through Orientalisms contradictory and exotic eyes and continue the assumption that hierarchy rules politics and the works class disengages themselves from day-to-day politics. This paper not only attempts to present a broad understanding of Jap ans political history, but as well as show how civil order of magnitude has transformed from early Meiji society to venture World war II restructuring. While outsiders believe democracy and liberal rights are an inherently novel part of Japanese culture, this paper illustrates the historic basis for a rich electorate, thriving with individual and inter person-to-person interest in freedom, rights, and the political environment around them.The cleavages that divide civil society and the government insurance policy-making in Japan have been written closely at length. The groups examined in this paper, including the Meiji Popular Rights Movement and the post World War II environmental movement, formed organizations to address the conflict that constantly attacked their personal values. In each case, the government refused to proactively respond, from the lack of representation during the late nineteenth century to the pollution that destroyed lands and lives in the 1960s and 197 0s. Both of these groups asked for policy changes from local governments in order to promote their efforts through political participation, and some of these measures progressed to national levels. From the beginning of the Meiji Restoration to today, Japan exhibits dramatic progressive political awareness and engagement, therefore I deny any allegation that Japan was undemocratic until General MacArthurs restructuring in 1945. Throughout the scholarly consider and the execution of factual evidence, three problems arise in the comparative abstract of the two examples. The first consists of the argument that Japans civil society, specific to the two time periods analyzed in this paper, was formulated directly at heart and of the state.