In Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan, Rieko Kage explores how war-torn societies bounced back from war devastation by focusing on Japan in the wake of World War II. The book opens with an interesting story of the birth of the baseball team Hiroshima Carp (pp. xi–xii). The Carp, established in the war-devastated city of Hiroshima as a symbol of recovery and hope after the war, is quite distinct from the other Japanese professional baseball teams because it came into being through the enthusiastic support of the citizens of Hiroshima and local businesses without the backing of a major corporate sponsor. This story is the perfect beginning to this book, as it indirectly defines what Kage means by “civic engagement.”
This volume challenges what Kage calls the “victory/defeat hypothesis,” which argues that defeat should lead citizens to withdraw from public life—due to the negative impacts defeat has on citizens, including reduced incomes, interrupted educations, and psychological trauma—while victory should produce an increase in civic participation. According to Kage, this hypothesis does not explain the experiences of defeated societies such as Japan's because, as the story of the Hiroshima Carp indicates, civic engagement revived and rose rapidly in Japan across various groups such as youth, women's social service, and religious organizations. Instead of the conventional “victory/defeat hypothesis,” Kage stresses that major international wars encourage civic engagement in their immediate postwar periods, regardless of whether they ended in victory or defeat.
In examining the growth of postwar civic engagement, Kage closely looks at wartime mobilization and legacies of prewar volunteerism. According to Kage, in wartime, citizens become increasingly aware of large public responsibilities through their engagement in war-related activities. This leads them to put their wartime experiences to good use after the war and participate in voluntary activities willingly and effectively. Drawing on a vast array of archival data, Kage convincingly demonstrates that prewar legacies and wartime mobilization together contributed to the rise of civic engagement in Japan immediately after World War II.
Particularly compelling are Kage's in-depth comparative case studies. To illuminate the impact of prewar legacies and wartime mobilization on postwar civic engagement, she carefully chose two of the largest activities in Japan: the YMCA, which she chooses due to its Western origins (Ch. 6); and judo, for its more “indigenous” origins (Ch. 7). Chapter 6 presents an insightful comparison of the revival of the YMCA in the two cities of Kobe and Sapporo. The Kobe YMCA reemerged from within the local community robustly and quickly after the war because it had flourished in the prewar years and had persisted through wartime hardships. In contrast, the Sapporo YMCA's postwar recovery was so slow that it had to wait for top-down help from the National Federation of YMCAs. This was because it had started out as a relatively small association, and had remained weak in Sapporo. In a similar vein, Chapter 7 compares the revival of Kodokan judo, the most popular and well-known style of judo, in the two cities of Fukuoka and Yokohama. In Fukuoka, judo revived swiftly after the war, due to its persistent popularity at the grassroots level during the prewar and wartime periods. In Yokohama, however, the postwar revival of judo was slow, because their prewar and wartime participation in judo had remained consistently weak. These case studies serve to confirm her claim that cultural and organizational legacies from the prewar period played a major role in the growth of postwar civic engagement.
Nevertheless, Kage's case selection in Chapter 7 is less convincing than that in Chapter 6. On the one hand, in Chapter 6, it is clear why the author selected Kobe and Sapporo to trace the postwar revival of the YMCA. She correctly points out important similarities between the two cities: both were relatively new cities, with similar socioeconomic indicators, similar mobilization rates, strong Christian influence, and so on (pp. 98–101). On the other hand, Chapter 7 fails to explain the reasons behind her choice of the cities of Fukuoka and Yokohama to examine the postwar revival of participation in judo. Kage sporadically mentions that the two cities rapidly developed into major industrial centers during the Meiji period, but so did many other cities in Japan (e.g. Kobe and Kawasaki). This leaves one wondering why she didn't select another city, such as Kawasaki. Or, did she choose Fukuoka and Yokohama in order to provide a dramatic comparison in terms of postwar civic engagement?
Another minor weakness is the author's treatment of the effects of mobilization on civic engagement. Kage argues that wartime mobilization may yield “positive benefits,” because it may at times instill civic skills in the citizenry and pave the way for a postwar civic engagement boom (p.168). This claim could be interpreted as problematic, and it raises the following questions: What does the author mean by her findings and does she suggest that mobilization is “good”? To prevent the reader from asking such questions (pp. 9, 168), Kage explains that her study concerns only “the empirical issue of whether mobilization from above may lead to a more civic-minded citizenry, not the normative question of whether such mobilization is desirable” (p. 168). This note of caution is rather too brief to be satisfactory, however. The matter of the effects of mobilization needs to be discussed in much greater detail because the author, regardless of her intentions, links war/forced mobilization with “positive” social outcomes.
Despite the above concerns, Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan provides detailed theoretical analysis and empirical evidence. Kage has written a fascinating, well-researched, and original book that presents a number of intriguing explanations for the impact of war on civic engagement in postwar Japan. This book is a valuable contribution not only to the field of Japanese history but also to the areas of volunteerism, civic engagement, nation building, and to the study of the effects of war on postwar societies.
