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I am not a japanologist but a European comparativist with a strong interest in Japan, and as such I follow the discussions here with great interest. What strikes me, however, is a sort of systematic bias for a comparative perspective that is limited to Japan on the one hand, the US on the other. I am afraid in methodological terms this amounts quite often to a "most different systems design" in the sense of Teune/Przeworski which, however, is not systematically recognized. Broader systematic comparisons might often be useful for a theoretical interpretation of the observations thus obtained.

As far as shingikai are concerned, there is quite a lot of literature on advisory committees and the like that might be helpful to better locate the Japanese case. Are they more comparable to the American counterparts (see. inter alia, Mark Petracca, Federal advisory committees, interest groups, and the administrative state, in: Congress and the Presidency 13, 1986, 83-114), or to the type of advisory committees found in the corporatist countries of Scandinavia, in Austria or Switzerland? How does the Industrial Strucuture Council compare the the former French Commissions de Modernisation or the former British NEDC and "little neddies"? The best theoretically oriented systematic study I know is Johan Olsen's chapter "Organized participation in government" in his book "Organized demnocracy" (Universitetsforlaget, Bergen 1983). But as far as I remember it covers mainly European countries. It would be a challenging task to include the US and Japan in such a systematic cross-national approach.

Also I think one should not simply confound the phenomenon of advisory committees with the much broader concept of "policy communities", a term significantly preferred by British and American authors. In continental Europe at last one should better distinguish these two concepts. I wonder whether they can really be equated in the case of Japan (or the US).

Gerhard Lehmbruch