I am grateful to Alexander Cooley for his insightful comments and questions.
In his review, Cooley points out that the very category of “public bads” is dynamic and subject to contestation. I completely agree, and indeed much of Site Fights focuses on ways in which the Japanese government has used a variety of policy instruments when competing with civil society to set the agenda for unwanted facilities. For example, in the field of nuclear power plants, the Japanese state uses middle-school curricula, visits to host communities, and even children's comic books to control the frames around these issues. The state recognizes children as potential opponents or supporters and targets them with pronuclear information even from an early age. Antinuclear groups, on the other hand, have sought to recruit women—especially mothers—and has encouraged them to involve their children in antinuclear mobilization. Hence, civil society has sought to recast various controversial facilities as unacceptable, countering state decision makers' efforts to win over “hearts and minds” to the pronuclear position.
Cooley points out that recent technical innovations, such as the Internet and cell phones, have allowed for more rapid and cross-national responses, so that even small organizations can, in theory, mount effective advocacy campaigns against state projects. His point is well taken, and these new shifts have lowered transactions costs for nongovernmental organizations with few financial and administrative resources. While transnational contacts may be leveraged into stronger pushes from small groups, such as networked antimilitary base movements in South Korea, my research has found that bringing in foreign allies can actually backfire on opposition movements. For example, when handling the French antinuclear movement, French authorities pointed to the presence of German, Belgian, and Spanish protesters as signs of weakness in the native movement. Similarly, Japanese bureaucrats often told me that antinuclear groups at the local level seeking high visibility allies abroad—such as Greenpeace—in fact demonstrated the local group's inability to mobilize local residents.
Cooley argues that while the Japanese government may be able to target siting communities with laser-like precision, more decentralized and uncoordinated states like South Korea may not have the same capacity. However, even in the United States we have seen authorities adopting more focused tactics in dealing with contentious social movements, ranging from broad surveillance to undercover operatives. Indeed, rather than being a function of national state structure, the development of extensive policy toolkits varies even within the same nation. For example, although the Japanese agencies handling dams and airports had access to the same financial, administrative, and personnel resources as the bureau that manages nuclear power plants, these three bureaus developed very different tools because they faced very different opponents in civil society. While the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy (ANRE) encountered long-term civil society opposition to nuclear power, dams, and airports have not created such backlashes. The agencies within the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism responsible for dams and airports remained wedded to standard coercive tools, such as land expropriation and the blocking of access points. On the basis of this evidence, I argue that toolkits are more a function of the strength of opposition from civil society than a result of national bureaucratic culture or degree of state centralization.
Japan and France, with their comparatively homogenous resident populations, may not be the most instructive cases for testing the theories about environmental racism, as Cooley points out. Here I tend to agree with him, primarily because of the technical requirements for these facilities under study (see fn. 1 on p. 28). That is, nuclear power plants, airports, and dams cannot be located in the large urban centers in which many of Japan's resident minorities, such as burakumin and Koreans, dwell. On the other hand, while Hokkaido has the largest concentration of the indigenous people known as the Ainu, and Okinawa holds the vast majority of the ethnically distinct Okinawan peoples, neither prefecture has a larger-than-average number of these projects. To further confirm that the strength of civil society, more than the presence of minority groups, influences site selection, the spatial analysis in Site Fights should be supplemented with studies of smaller-scale facilities like incinerators, which can be placed in urban neighborhoods with larger concentrations of minorities.
Beyond the obvious similarities that cut across our studies—as both develop midlevel, dynamic theories based on evidence drawn from various nations—Cooley's book shares two additional characteristics with mine. He and I both categorize military bases as controversial, if not often unwanted, projects, and we both are sensitive to the ways in which nation-states use policy instruments in ways not often explored by standard social science. Future work on contentious politics and civil society—state relations should critically examine the role of such tools as land expropriation, the closing of access points to political challengers, the provision of incentives, and public relations campaigns.
I very much appreciate Cooley's review, which has raised important issues for future research and allowed me to further explain the findings of my study.
