Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan

Rieko Kage is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tokyo, Japan. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2005. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, Advanced Research Fellow at the Program on US-Japan Relations at Harvard, and Toyota Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan. Her writings have appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Political Psychology, and other publications.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Civic engagement: the dependent variable; 3. War and civic engagement: a theoretical framework; 4. Quantitative analysis: the rise of civic engagement across forty-six Japanese prefectures; 5. The long-term effects of wartime mobilization: cross-national analysis; 6. Repression and revival of the YMCA Japan; 7. Wartime promotion and postwar repression of a traditional martial art; 8. Civil society and reconstruction in postwar Japan; 9. Conclusions.

“This is a superb book written with nuance, creativity and as much precision as the subject of civic engagement allows. It has much to teach us about post-war societies and about the crafting of a compelling argument.” —Nancy Bermeo, University of Oxford