Grassroots democrats and the Japanese state after Fukushima

Abstract

This article uses the case of the nuclear power industry post-Fukushima to lay bare how grassroots activism is disrupting the elite-driven model of Japanese democracy popularized in the developmental state literature. The experience of Japan's nuclear power industry after the 3/11 Triple Crisis-an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor disaster-attests to the diminished explanatory power of this elite-driven model of Japanese politics. Between the birth of the nuclear power industry and the 2011 disaster at the Fuku-shima Daiichi facility, Japan's political opportunity structures evolved to provide more people with more ways to challenge industry, bureaucrats, and politicians. Three years after the Fukushima disaster, all of Japan's nuclear reactors are offline. The inability of the nuclear power industry to resume business as usual attests to fundamental changes in state-society relations amid the dismantlement of the developmental state.