Community and Japanese Developmental Capitalism: A Scaled and Sociological Political Economy

Abstract

Japan has a standard framework for local communities, neighborhood associations, which request all households in the same residential district to belong to one community unit that plays a local management role through closely working with authorities. By framing a concept of ‘societalization’ in Bob Jessop’s state theory using Neil Brenner’s ‘scaled’ political economy project, we decipher Japanese neighborhood associations as a scaled strategy for community-oriented societalization. This strategy formally presents itself as ‘voluntary’ but asks all households to participate, and this ‘compulsory’ community norm was strong until the 1970s and 1980s. The renaissance of neighborhood associations after World War II gave Japanese developmental capitalism – a statist but democratic capitalism – a scaled and sociological platform for generating community-based social cohesion and upscaling this effect from the local to the national. After considering a sociological debate in Japan in the ambit of Gramscian and Lefebvrian regulationism, we argue that neighborhood associations became administratively versatile as they were standardized, functionalized, and nationalized until 1945; this past helped the Japanese developmental state – an integral state project – societalize state space from a micro unit of locality and propel statist development with grassroots consent; and progressive/radical voices advanced the democratization of the associations through local activism.