Japan's Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy

Japan's Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise of populism and decline of public confidence in many of the formal institutions of democracy. This crisis of democracy has stimulated searches for alternative ways of understanding and enacting politics. Against this background, Tessa Morris-Suzuki explores the long history of informal everyday political action in the Japanese context. Despite its seemingly inflexible and monolithic formal political system, Japan has been the site of many fascinating small-scale experiments in 'informal life politics': grassroots do-it-yourself actions which seek not to lobby governments for change, but to change reality directly, from the bottom up. She explores this neglected history by examining an interlinked series of informal life politics experiments extending from the 1910s to the present day.

Author/Editor

Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

ISBN

9781108490078

Published

2020

Specialisation

Humanities

Theme

International Relations and Politics
National politics
History

Region

East Asia
Japan