CIVIL WAR NON-ONSETS THE CASE OF JAPAN

Öz

In earlier work, we argued that the pattern of cross-national correlates of civil war onset can be best explained by interpreting several influential variables as indicators of state weakness. This argument was speculative, however, in that partial correlations from a statistical model using country-year data cannot rule out multiple possible mechanisms linking the explanatory variables to civil war onset. To explore mechanisms, we turned to narrative, and justified a procedure for case selection called “random narratives” as having advantages compared to the reliance on convenience samples. This paper, juxtaposing statistical expectations with historical narrative, illustrates what we can learn more generally about the causes of civil war even from Japan, a country that has not experienced a civil war in our period of study, and one of our randomly selected country cases. The narrative reveals that there have been deep grievances in the post WWII era resulting in several uprisings. These were efficiently cauterized and prevented from developing into insurgencies by a security state that had high information and great discipline in its non-use of violence. The narrative evidence is consistent with our interpretation of state weakness as an important variable for explaining cross-sectional and over-time variation in civil war onset. From this case study we cannot rule out that societal grievances are lower on average in Japan than in civil war-afflicted states, but we can rule out that there were no intensely held grievances capable of motivating violent rebellion in post-war Japan, particularly in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• anahtarkelime

Kaynakça

1. Apter, David E. and Nagayo Sawa. 1984. Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
2. Berger, Thomas U. 1993. “From Sword to Chrysanthemum: Japan’s Culture of Anti-Militarism” International Security 174: 119-50
3. Cederman, Lars-Erik, D.S. Gleditsch, and H. Buhaug. forthcoming. Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Conde, David. 1947. “The Korean Minority in Japan” Far Eastern Survey, 16, 4: 41-45
5. Eckstein, Harry. 1966. Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of NorwaY. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
6. Fearon, James D. and David D. Laitin. 1996. “Explaining Interethnic Co-operation” American Political Science Review, 90 4.: 715-35
7. Fearon, James D. and David D. Laitin. 2008. “Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods”. In Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology, eds. Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and David Collier Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8. Ferejohn, John and Frances Rosenbluth. n.d.. “War and the Shape of the Modern State: Medieval Japan in Comparative Context” unpublished manuscript.

9. Haring, Douglas Gilbert ed. 1946. Japan’s Prospect. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [authors include Merle Fainsod, Carl Friedrich, and Talcott Parsons]
10. Hechter, Michael and Satoshi Kanazawa. 1993. “Group Solidarity and Social Order in Japan”. Journal of Theoretical Politics 54.: 455-493
11. Lee, Hwasoo. 1975. “A Comparative Study of Economic, Social and Political Conditions for Political Violence from the Perspectives of Revolution: China, Japan and Korea” Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon.
12. Katzenstein, Peter J. 1996. Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan. Cornell Studies in Political Economy.
13. Laitin, David D. 2002. “Comparative Politics: The State of the Subdiscipline”. In Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner Political Science: State of the Discipline New York: W. W. Norton.
14. Laitin, David D. 2009. "Immigrant Communities and Civil War" International Migration Review, 43:1 35-59.
15. Lee, Young-ho. 1975. “Chapter 1: The Politics of Democratic Experiment: 1948-1974.” In Korean Politics in Transition, ed. Edward Reynolds Wright, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
16. Lieberman, Evan. 2005. “Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research” American Political Science Review, 99: 3: 435-52.
17. Lijphart, Arend. 1971. “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method” American Political Science Review, 65, 3: 682-69
18. Napier, J. P. 1952. A Survey of the Japan Communist Party. Tokyo: The Nippon Times.
19. Packard, George R. III. 1966. Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
20. Parsons, Talcott. 1946. “Population and Social Structure”. In Haring, Douglas Gilbert ed. Japan’s Prospect. Cambridge: Harvard University Press., pp. 87-114.
21. Passin, Herbert. June 1962. “The Sources of Protest in Japan” The American Political Science Review, 56 2: 391-403
22. Reader, Ian. 2000. Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyö. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
23. Roehner, Bertrand. 2009. “Allied Forces and the Population of Japan, ” http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~roehner/ocj.pdf [downloaded July 1, 2013].
24. Sims, Richard. 2001. Japanese Political History since the Meiji Renovation 1868-2000. New York: Palgrave.
25. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26. Toshio, Nishi. 1982. Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan 1945-1952. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
27. Wildes, Harry Emerson Dec. 1948. “IV. Underground Politics in Post-War Japan” in Post-War Politics in Japan, II., American Political Science Review, 426.: 1149-1162.