Political development, or progress in the achievement of fundamental political
values such as liberty (personal rights) and equality (broad participation in public affairs),
is an important measure of improvement in societal welfare, as important perhaps as the
more commonly tracked measures of income growth and human development. The
Japanese local government system has engendered, or at least accommodated, a significant
amount of political development in the above-noted sense of the word (see Macdougall,
2001).
This growth in political inclusiveness has come about largely as a result of a
process in which local governments, responding to citizen concerns and pressure, took
policy initiatives which often went beyond (and were sometimes in conflict with) national
guidelines and practices but in which they nevertheless prevailed. Indeed, in some cases,
the national government eventually adopted the local initiative as national policy, thereby
showing that it was not immune to the power of rising citizen concerns, validated and
projected by local government actions. Through this process, Japanese citizens have
managed to forge new implicit “contracts” with local and national authorities which give
them greater participation in the decision-making process and provide greater
opportunities for their preferences to be reflected in public policy.
The most important and certainly the best known mechanism for greater citizen
participation in Japanese political life is the “citizens movement”. As already mentioned,
such movements emerged spontaneously in the 1960s and 1970s as a way for citizens to
make themselves heard on matters related to the quality of life. The most prominent ones
focused on urban and industrial pollution control.