Thank you all for such a fascinating discussion to enliven our August.

Those of you who are interested in the more philosophical aspects of Japanese democracy may enjoy an article I published in Democratization last year that uses the Japanese case to introduce a new approach to democratization theory. I argue that we shouldn't be measuring contemporary democracies against an idealized form of liberal democracy that emerged from the historical and cultural experiences of the United States and Western Europe but rather should think about democratization as more of an interactive and dynamic process whereby imported values, institutions, and practices are modified to accommodate local political culture just as local political values, institutions, and practices are modified to accommodate the introduction of democracy.

Mary Alice Haddad, "The state-in-society approach to the study of democratization with examples from Japan"
Democratization. 17: 5 (Oct. 2010) pp. 997-1023.

Incidentally, since Jun Okamura brought up the age of politicians in Japan, I found that generational change has played a key role in facilitating this democratization process in Japan and helps explain the extraordinary dynamism in politics that we've seen over the last two decades. In 1990 only one quarter of Diet members had experienced all of their education in a democratic educational system but by the 2009 ninety-six percent of MPs had only democratic educational experiences. There is also a big difference in the ages of elected politicians among the parties. In the 2009 election the median age of the LDP members elected was fifty-eight compared to fifty for non-LDP candidates. Particularly striking was the differences in the number of young politicians: Of those elected, only five LDP members were less than forty years old, compared to sixty-nine members belonging to other parties.

Now for the shameless pre-publication plug... More details on all of the above can be found in my Building Democracy in Japan, which is due out from Cambridge UP in December.

Best,
Mary Alice

Mary Alice Haddad
Wesleyan University
mahaddad@wesleyan.edu