Dear SSJ Forum Members,

Apologies for this shameless bit of self-promotion; I would like to announce the publication of the following book.

Rieko Kage
Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society (Cambridge University Press, 2011) http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item5634768/
?site_locale=en_US

Synposis;
Despite reduced incomes, diminished opportunities for education, and the psychological trauma of defeat, Japan experienced a rapid rise in civic engagement in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Why? Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan answers this question with a new general theory of the growth in civic engagement in postwar democracies. It argues that wartime mobilization unintentionally instills civic skills in the citizenry, thus laying the groundwork for a postwar civic engagement boom. Meanwhile, legacies of prewar associational activities shape the costs of association-building and information-gathering, thus affecting the actual extent of the postwar boom.

Combining original data collection, rigorous statistical methods, and in -depth historical case analyses, this book illuminates one of the keys to making postwar democracies work.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Civic engagement: the dependent variable 3. War and civic engagement: a theoretical framework 4.
Quantitative analysis: the rise of civic engagement across forty-six Japanese prefectures 5. The long-term effects of wartime mobilization: cross-national analysis 6. Repression and revivial of the YMCA Japan 7. Wartime promotion and postwar repression of a traditional martial art 8. Civil society and reconstruction in postwar Japan 9. Conclusions