State Accountability and Responsiveness to Victim Redress Movements in South Korea and Japan

Established scholars depict Japan’s civil society groups as apolitical, volunteer-based, local, and ill-equipped for advocacy and Korea’s as politically charged, professionalized, nationally organized, and well-positioned for advocacy. These descriptions suggest that Korean civil society organizations should have better resources with which to influence agenda setting and policy making processes than their Japanese counterparts. My research shows, however, that victim redress organizations, an understudied subcategory of civil society, do not support this prediction. Marginalized and dispersed, victims form those pressure groups one would least expect to succeed, particularly against states historically branded as “strong states.” Victim groups lack the electoral weight of concentrated constituencies, the financial clout of business groups, and the regular access that established interest groups enjoy. And yet, during the past fifteen years in both Korea and Japan, victims of ill-conceived or harmful state policies have mobilized and elicited varying degrees of redress. Based on original qualitative research involving over 125 in-depth interviews in Korean and Japanese, this paper analyzes victim activism through the lens of the recent redress movements of victims of medically unjustifiable leprosy control policies and of improperly regulated blood products tainted with hepatitis C in both Korea and Japan. Surprisingly, the Japanese leprosy and hepatitis C victims received more extensive redress than the parallel victim groups in Korea, who suffered similar victimization as their Japanese counterparts. This paper argues that the conditions within which victim groups appeal for public support and shame the government into granting redress are more favorable in Japan than they are in Korea. For structural and historical reasons, journalists’ investigations of government negligence or wrongdoing and the victim’s personal stories of suffering are more likely to reach wider audiences in Japan than in Korea. Furthermore, non-victim activists are more likely to support victim groups and human rights lawyers are more likely to take up victims’ causes in Japan than in Korea. As victim groups seek to expand the scope of their conflicts with the government by getting the public involved, the media, the civil society sector, and the legal profession play important filtering or gate-keeping roles. This paper analyzes how, when, and why the media, activist civil society groups, and lawyers help or hinder victim redress movements, focusing particularly on victims’ lawsuits against the government. By examining the surprising felicitous effects of Japan’s activist civil society groups for victim redress movements, my project casts doubt on previous assertions that Japanese civil society organizations lack political influence because they are small, volunteer-based, and local. Since institutional responsiveness and governmental accountability are essential key characteristics of a functioning democracy, this paper advances our understanding of evolving state-society relations, human rights, and democratic governance in Korea and Japan.