Book Reviews : The Political Culture of Japan. By BRADLEY M. RICHARDSON. (Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 1974. Pp. xi, 271. $12.50.)

• Author: Ellis S. Krauss
• Published date: 01 December 1974
• Date: 01 December 1974
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/106591297402700431
• Subject Matter: Articles

763
The Political Culture of Japan. By BRADLEY M. RICHARDSON. (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1974. Pp. xi, 271. $12.50.)
The publication of Bradley Richardson’s The Political Culture of Japan
promises to place the study of Japanese politics even further in the mainstream
of contemporary comparative research and to establish Japan as a survey research
site equal to Europe and America in studying the political culture of industrial
societies. To ascertain the nature of mass political attitudes in postwar Japan,
Richardson studied almost three hundred Japanese public opinion surveys taken
over a period of several years (primarily 1958 to 1967). The core of the data he
presents is based on nearly 200 polls conducted nationally and locally by the Japan
Fair Election League (Komei Senkyo Remmei) . This large, reliable body of data
with replicative questions over a period of time at both national and local levels
provides Richardson with a valuable survey data base. This base is unmatched in
previous empirical studies of Japan (and probably of most countries of the world).
Although chiefly adopting an inductive approach to the study of political
culture, Richardson’s research is guided by some major questions raised by previous
inquiries concerning Japan. In Chapters 2-4, for example, he attempts to discover
the sources of the traditionally high levels of voter participation in Japan by analyz-
ing &dquo;involvement attitudes&dquo; (attitudes related to the relevance or awareness of
politics to individuals), &dquo;evaluative attitudes&dquo; (attitudes of political efficacy and
toward the responsiveness of the political system), and &dquo;participation attitudes&dquo;
(reasons for voting, and willingness to express oneself politically beyond the voting
act). The patterns he finds reflect the deep ambivalences of political culture in
postwar Japan. For example, voters tend to have a high appreciation for the
relevance of politics to their lives but a lower...