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Election Campaigning, Japanese Style. By Gerald L. Curtis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 276 pp. $26.95 (paper).
Between 1969 and 1971 two books were published that fundamentally contributed to and shaped our understanding of Japan's prereform electoral and party politics. One was Nathaniel Thayer 's How the Conservatives Rule Japan (1969) and the other was Curtis's volume. No alternative view of Japanese politics was to appear until the mid-1990s, with Ramseyer and Rosenbluth's creative but sometimes flawed Japan's Political Marketplace. Whereas Ramseyer and Rosenbluth's take on Japanese politics was more deductive than empirical, the two earlier books were almost purely and more solidly empirical. Curtis's view of electoral politics came from the grassroots, following the campaign of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politician Sato Bunsei. It remains the "classic" description and analysis of how and why Japanese politicians campaigned the way they did prior to the electoral reform of 1994. Among its other contributions, it was mainly responsible for demonstrating to political scientists the importance of the koenkai, the Japanese candidate support organization that uniquely defined electoral politics in Japan and that remains, even after the electoral reform, a part of Japan's political landscape.
Columbia University Press reissued the seminal Curtis volume as a paperback in 2009 with a new preface written by the author in 2008. In it he reflects upon the context in which the book first appeared and how the political process he previously described has fared after electoral reform. He rightly says, "Comparing how politicians go about getting elected today with the way Sato Bunsei did it so long ago has much to teach us about political change and the factors that propel it"...