Organizer and Chair: Kuniko Fujita, Michigan State University Discussant: Andrew Dewit, Shimonoseki City University
Japanese cities are laboratories of democracy. Their policy initiatives often foretell a national policy trend. During the past three decades, cities have initiated welfare and environmental policies and development strategies. They are now experimenting with globalization programs and other innovative policies. Politics play a critical role in these policy initiatives. Yet city politics have not attracted sufficient attention, given the overwhelming focus on national politics in Japanese studies in the U.S.
This panel highlights critical issues facing Japanese cities today, defining urban politics as concern for the well-being and preferences of city residents. Critical issues include the aging society, a livable community, economic development with more citizen participation, a growing foreign population, and local autonomy in relation to financing innovative policies. This panel examines the role, limits and possibilities of urban politics with regard to several issues. Gilman explores the relationship between political participation and innovation in Tamanoi and other cities. Pak analyzes the informal networks and politics linked to the new international migration in cities like Kawasaki. Tsu discusses Kobe's political use of Chinatown to enhance city image and the changing character of ethnic relations in the city. In his paper, Jeffrey Broadbent applies the concepts of "citizen" and "public sphere" to the study of Japan's politics. DeWit and Jinno analyze the local property tax revolt, suggesting that, given Japan's centralized tax structure, urban politics plays only a limited role in tax policy.
Japanese Cities as Laboratories of Democracy
Ted Gilman, Union College
Japanese local governments are often seen as nothing more than extensions of the national government. Though there is some validity to this generalization, localities have a considerable history of activism and experimentation that puts them at the vanguard of Japanese democracy. I argue that Japanese cities have served as the laboratory of democracy. Cities have been more responsive to civic pressures and experimented new policy ideas more often than the national government has. The lateral and bottom-up is, therefore, the reality in intergovernmental relations despite the formal state structure that emphasizes the top-down, hierarchical nature in central and local relations.
A city serves as the laboratory of democracy through experimentation in policy innovations. Improving the flow of and access to information to citizens, local government encourages various social groups to participate in and bring new ideas to the local policy making process. As in science laboratories, many local efforts and ideas routinely fail, but a few succeed and are adopted by other localities or by the national state. This argument is supported by my case study of Tamanoi City, Okayama and a broad content analysis of Japanese urban studies.
I conclude with the fact that both politicians and bureaucrats are active participants in promoting the city as the laboratory of democracy.
Community Responses to the New International Migration in Japan
Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak, University of Chicago
The national government is too slow to respond to a growing foreign population, clinging to the status quo notion that "Japan is not a country of immigration." Cities challenge this notion, voice the new reality that "Japan has become an immigration country," and question "what are we going to do about it?" Many cities have become activist local states to accommodate foreigners as their "community members"! This pro-activism to foreign immigrants at the local level in Japan is a particularly interesting phenomenon since the opposite tends to be the case in other immigration countries.
This paper examines the politics of urban programs that favor foreign immigrants in four cities-Kawasaki, Hamamatsu, Kawaguchi, and Shinjuku where some of the largest foreign populations in Japan are observed. The paper focuses on how urban actors like city officials, politicians, and residents make, affect, and implement programs for international immigration and internationalization. I pay particular attention to the development of informal networks that generate, by bringing together city administration, various organizations and concerned private interests, a community response to a social change brought about by the growth of the foreign population. The data for the paper were collected during 16 months of my field work in Japan (February 1995 to May 1996).
The Politics of City Image and Ethnic Relations in Japan: Kobe's Use of Chinatown
Timothy Tsu, National University of Singapore
Japan has a reputation of a homogeneous and insular society. It has a history of discriminating against minorities and keeping foreigners at arm's length. The persistent failure by mainstream Japanese society to fully integrate the burakumin and the Koreans seems to bear out the impression that it is highly intolerant of ethnic and cultural diversity. But the overseas Chinese have achieved a high level of integration into urban society by capitalizing on their alien identity. The change in the image of Chinatown across Japan from ethnic ghettos in the 1970s to historic-landmarks-cum-tourist attractions in the 1990s illustrates this complex process.
This paper discusses the politics of enhancing city image endeavored by both Japanese and Chinese. Focusing on the case study of Kobe that uses Chinatown for better community making and a symbolic gesture of internationalization, the paper explores organizations and networks that bring Chinese and Japanese together for the city's common goal. It also assesses the changing character of ethnic relations from a historical perspective. The paper concludes with my finding that Japanese urban society is not so much ambivalent to nor intolerant of foreigners and minorities. In fact, urban Japan can experience both attraction and repulsion by what is considered as alien or anomalous.
The Citizen and the Public Sphere in Urban Japan: Barriers and Opportunities for
Effective Political Participation
frey Broadbentversity of Minnesota
s paper applies the concepts of "citizen" and "public sphere" to the study of Japan's urban politics. I argue that in urban Japan, the practice of the citizen role and the political "space" provided by the public sphere is relatively weak and more centrally controlled than in other advanced, capitalist, industrialized, democratic societies. The basic cause of this weakness is not cultural but structural-the elite manipulation of political institutions. Citizens resent their powerlessness, but can do little about it. The two major organized interest blocks, business and labor, enjoy a centralized corporatist organization connected to the state through peak associations. Hierarchical domination by the major political party and a career bureaucracy reinforce this weakness of the public sphere. This situation leaves relatively little political opportunity for citizens not so incorporated. The lack of local "levers" for powerful participation in politics: no popular referendum and recall, no local party primaries, inability to incorporate non-profit public interest groups with contributions eligible for tax deductions, bureaucratic control of grassroots groups, and few autonomous sources of political criticism such as concerned church groups in the West, all contribute to this weakness.
Sociology and the Roots of Japan's Property Tax Revolt
Andrew DeWit and Naohiko Jinno, Shimonoseki City University
Taxes on land have long been points of urban contention in Japanese fiscal politics, but in the 1990s a building wave of frustration has brought vigorous corporate lobbying, court challenges, and increasing taxpayer delinquency. The implosion in land values is often argued as the source of this problem. However, the fiscal sociology perspective finds deeper roots in the structure/of the Japanese tax system, especially intergovernmental competition over the asset taxes in an era of declining reliance on the highly polititicized income tax.
This paper first outlines the fiscal sociology approach pioneered by Shumpeter. The paper then sketches the background to the Japanese authorities' decision to "balance" their revenue take from among the fields of assets, consumption and income. This overall trend in taxation helps explain the Ministry of Finance (MOF) drive to secure the Land Value Tax, implemented in 1991 in spite of concerted opposition from business and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA). MOHA struggled against MOF's plan on behalf of local governments, who relied on the asset taxes for a large share of their revenue sources. Having failed to block MOF's foray, MOHA orchestrated, with the intention of preventing MOF from increasing the revenue take from its new tax, a defensive increase in the Fixed Asset Tax's Assessment Standard in 1994. Consequently, these bureaucratic fights over tax turf have led to the local property tax revolt.