Japan's Living Politics

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Emeritus Professor in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University, Canberra.

• 1. Japan and the crisis of democracy; 2. Living politics: Japan and the world; 3. The white birch and the Earth: giving life to the self in interwar Japan and beyond; 4. Rethinking the village; 5. Peasant art, free drawing and the free university; 6. The body politic: Saku Hospital and the Japanese cooperative movement; 7. Seeds of democracy: rural spaces of autonomy in postwar Japan; 8. Development from within: environment, region and autonomous action from the 1980's onwards; 9. Disaster and aftermath: informal life politics after 2011; Conclusion. Towards another democracy.

'Tessa Morris-Suzuki incisively explains why democracy is so difficult. For two centuries, many Japanese individuals have produced an impressive array of visionary, cosmopolitan, compassionate, and useful institutions that improve the lives of their neighbors - both body and soul - at the local level - surely the beginning of the answer, she argues.' Laura Hein, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History, Northwestern University