num_pages: 256
description: This book examines quantitatively the 5,569 members of all parties in the Japanese House of Representatives from the time of its inception in 1890 through the election of 1990. A study of recruitment in national politics, it measures continuity and change through statistical analysis of the occupational background, education, length of service, age, party membership, apprenticeship, and sex of each Diet member. A special feature is a chapter on women in Japanese politics. Each major section concludes with a set of capsule biographies of representative assembly members. These biographical sketches provide the "human face" to the statistics.Tables contain collective data on each of the thirty-nine general elections to the House of Representatives. There are also statistical profiles of the entire membership, showing those attributes most likely to insure success on the Japanese electoral scene. Correlations are made for three prewar (3,537 individuals elected from 1890 to 1942), postwar (2,032 persons elected from 1946 to 1990), and the 210 who were elected to the Diet in both the prewar and postwar eras.The book is set within the historical context of a Japan moving from "peripheral" to "core" status in the modern world economy. It shows that changes were incremental, except for the extraordinary 1940s and 1950s, during wartime and Occupation. After the Occupation with its attendant purges, prewar trends resumed by 1952. The book's central conclusion is that, as Japan has become one of the world's economic giants, recruitment in electoral politics has been remarkably uniform, accommodating whatever domestic and international changes have occurred in the world of Japanese politics.
language: English
title: The Japanese Diet
titlecomplete: The Japanese Diet
publisher: University Press of America