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Drawing on interviews with one hundred young Japanese women engaged in a spectrum of voluntary political groups, Susan J. Pharr explores how politically active women overcome the constraints that bar or limit the political participation of the average woman. The book treats political volunteers as agents of social change in a process of role redefinition by which prevailing concepts of women's roles gradually adjust to accommodate political behavior. Tracing developments that led to the grant of suffrage and other political rights to women during the Allied occupation, Pharr sets the stage for an analysis of that process as it unfolds in the experience of individual women. She uses women's images of self and society and issues of political and gender role socialization, career and life expectations, and political role and participation to develop a three-fold typology for looking at political women in Japan. She examines both the satisfactions of political volunteerism--from the exhilaration of addressing a crowd from a sound truck to the pleasure of speaking "men's language"--and the psychological and social costs associated with it. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

The connection between public trust & corruption in Japan & South Korea is investigated, offering two explanations: periods of economic hardship decrease the public's trust in officials & lack of adequate social capital reduces people's trust in government. It is asserted that neither explanation properly accounts for corruption levels in Japan or South Korea. Conversely, it is claimed that corruption itself functions as a major source of public distrust. Government policy performance & official character can influence public trust. Whereas economic policy performance is deemed a poor measure of public trust levels, officials' character, defined as public officials' behavior while performing their duties, significantly influenced the Japanese public's willingness to trust. Several factors that account for the great effect officials' reported corruption has on public trust are disclosed; eg, reports of official unaccountability affect large groups of citizens. 2 Tables, 1 Figure, 77 References. J. W. Parker

This article investigates whether women are, as many claim, "moralists"—that is, moral and ethical standard‐setters who seek clean politics and have strict standards for public officials. An analysis of data from the 1996 Japanese Elections and Democracy Study survey and from 18 focus groups conducted in 1996 indicates that women in Japan are not moralists. As elsewhere, there is a gender gap in Japan on "issue preference sets," with women favoring a "care" agenda, but women assign political ethics less importance than do men, even though women are more likely to see adverse effects from political corruption. Studying people's judgments of four ethics scenarios reveals minimal gender gaps; controlling for education and age, women's judgments overall are less, not more, strict than men's. Among women, age is a better predictor of moralism than education; older women are stricter than younger women on political ethics. This is attributed to gender‐based differences in moral reasoning: Japanese women and men both rely heavily on a "relation‐based" frame (which is situation‐specific and requires extensive social information), but gender stratification patterns create information inequalities. Younger women lack social information necessary for judging political misconduct, whereas older women overcome the information deficit through life experience.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- Foreword -- CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: What's Troubling the Trilateral Democracies? -- PART I . Declining Performance of Democratic Institutions -- CHAPTER TWO: The Public Trust -- CHAPTER THREE: Confidence in Public Institutions: Faith, Culture, or Performance? -- CHAPTER FOUR: Distrust of Government: Explaining American Exceptionalism -- PART II . Sources of the Problem: Declining Capacity -- CHAPTER FIVE: Interdependence and Democratic Legitimation -- CHAPTER SIX: Confidence, Trust, International Relations, and Lessons from Smaller Democracies -- CHAPTER SEVEN: The Economics of Civic Trust -- PART III . Sources of the Problem: Erosion of Fidelity -- CHAPTER EIGHT: Officials' Misconduct and Public Distrust: Japan and the Trilateral Democracies -- CHAPTER NINE: Social Capital, Beliefs in Government, and Political Corruption -- PART IV . Sources of the Problem: Changes in Information and Criteria of Evaluation -- CHAPTER TEN: The Impact of Television on Civic Malaise -- CHAPTER ELEVEN: Value Change and Democracy -- CHAPTER TWELVE: Mad Cows and Social Activists: Contentious Politics in the Trilateral Democracies -- CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Political Mistrust and Party Dealignment in Japan -- Afterword -- Appendix: The Major Cross-National Opinion Surveys -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index

Japan is one of the most media-saturated societies in the world. The circulations of its "big five" national newspapers dwarf those of any major American newspaper. NHK, its public service broadcasting agency, is second only to the BBC in size. And it has a full range of commercial television stations, high-brow and low-brow magazines (from widely read intellectual journals to the ubiquitous manga, or adult comic books), and a large antimainstream media and mini-media. Japanese elites, surveys show, rate the mass media as the most influential group in Japanese society. But what role do they play in political life? Whose interests do the media serve? As Japan's critics often hold, are they mainly servants of the state? Or are they watchdogs on behalf of the public, as the media themselves claim and as suggested by their role in uncovering late eighties and early nineties political scandals and in triggering political change in the summer of 1993? And what effects do the media have on the political beliefs and behavior of ordinary Japanese people? These questions, central for interpreting the media's role in any industrial society, are the focus of this collection of essays by leading political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, and journalists. Japan's unique kisha (press) club system, its powerful media business organizations, the uses of the media by Japan's wily bureaucrats, and the role of the media in everything from political scandals to shaping public opinion, are among the many subjects of this insightful and provocative book