abstract

It has been often said that the rise of the civil society in the 1990s in Japan is one of the few valuable changes of the "Lost Decade." Another important aspect of Japanese civil society in the 1990s is the government effort to channel and mobilize citizen activity in the course of government policy-making. Japanese civil society in the 1990s must be viewed as a site of intersecting directions : the growing autonomy of citizen activity and the increasing government mobilization of it. This paper analyzes these two faces of civil society in contemporary Japan.