Schoolgirls with loose socks and dyed hair that have become icons of Japanese pop culture; North Korean spy boats and test-fired missiles; 1990s post-bubble Japan caught in a state of anxiety over its future – these are at the core of Think Global Fear Local: Sex, Violence and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan. However, the two words in the title most likely to catch the attention of the reader, “sex” and “violence,” are somewhat misleading. After reading the volume, I would rather expect “prostitution” and “terrorism” to appear on the book’s cover.

David Leheny explores two seemingly unrelated cases – the practice of compensated dating taken up by Japanese teenage girls and the North Korean threat – and analyzes them through Japan’s legislation on child pornography and prostitution and its policies against terrorism. He demonstrates how, as self-sexualized schoolgirls and vaguely defined foreign threats became symptoms of a major internal and external threat to national identity, political actors in Japan used widespread anxiety to justify enhanced powers for the state. His main argument is that international norms dealing with transnational crime and security, as adopted by the Japanese government, served as legitimating tools for assigning local scapegoats to global problems.

David Leheny is an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both this and his previous book, The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure, explore the link between Japan’s governmental policies and its long-term discourse on national identity. His research for this book built on his experience as an official in the US Department of State’s Office of the Coordinator of Counterterrorism; the research itself was conducted during the years 2003-2004 in Japan, mostly in the Tokyo area. The data comes from a number of diverse sources, including interviews, transcripts of Diet sessions, popular Japanese books, opinion magazines, films, and novels. The abundance of sources undeniably contributes to a wider perspective on the phenomena under discussion.

Think Global Fear Local has an interesting perspective on the relationship between international norms, national politics, and local fears. The book also contributes a lot to the understanding of the “unintended consequences” of international norms.
But although I found The Rules of Play to be insightful and inspiring, the present book is somewhat disappointing. Some of the assumptions are overstretched; the author’s political position turns into bias when he resorts to personal judgments; and the writing, though dynamic and colorful, is frequently repetitive. In some ways this contributes to clarity, but it also creates the sense that the discussion is moving in circles.

The first chapter introduces the cases of compensated dating (enjo kosai) and international terrorism. This part raises certain reservations for this reader, some of which remain unresolved in the course of the reading. The author asserts that the fuss surrounding these cases considerably exceeded the actual scope of the phenomena. His assumption is that neither the sexual practices of schoolgirls nor the hostile acts of North Korea should have been defined as problems in the first place, at least not at the national level. Leheny claims that the number of young girls engaged in compensated dating was smaller than the Japanese media indicated, and that North Korea’s illegal activities (including abducting Japanese citizens, test-firing missiles into Japanese airspace, and infiltrating Japanese waters with unidentified vessels), do not fit the conceptual category of terrorism, which he later defines as a “symbolic act of violence aimed at attracting (and terrorizing) an audience” (p.151). Both claims contain a fair amount of speculation, something that does not disappear in the following chapters.

The second chapter describes the post-bubble state of anxiety in Japan. An array of unfortunate events in the 1990s (the collapse of the financial infrastructure, the Kobe earthquake, and the infamous Aum Shinrikyo attack in the Tokyo subway) generated both a profound sense of crisis and a distrust of governmental institutions. These sentiments constituted the background against which the process of constructing a public villain took place.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus the discussion of anxiety on the compensated dating phenomena and trace the development of the legal and moral conception of Japanese youngsters’ sexual behavior, expressed primarily through anti-prostitution legislation and the criminalization of various sex-markets. Leheny shows how at the end of the decade the international norm against sexual abuse of children was turned into a political tool used to crack down on enjo kosai. Schoolgirls with an easily recognizable gaudy appearance (so-called kogals) became widely associated with the deterioration of Japanese morals in general and with the practice of compensated dating in particular, an association which made them an easy target for the conservative cleansing campaign. Leheny builds his case on the apparent contrast between the presumably small numbers of teenagers engaged in enjo kosai and the (again, presumably) enormous amount of attention the Japanese press dedicated to the phenomenon. However, records of the number of these girls look rather inconsistent; moreover, no statistics on enjo kosai are provided, which leaves the reader completely dependent on the author’s estimation and judgment.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine Japan’s political environment and attitudes towards foreign terrorist threats before and after the 9/11 attack on the United States. While in the pre-9/11 era, international terrorism was viewed merely as a minor diplomatic issue and domestic acts of terror as matters of criminal justice, the post-9/11 years brought a general revision of the stance on counterterrorism, resulting in a recognition of the need to embrace full international responsibility. In this case, North Korea was turned into an enemy by being constructed as a terrorist threat. (It might be worth noting that although in the introduction the author mentions Chinese criminals along with North Korea [p.3, 20], they are never discussed.) As in the case of enjo kosai, the national debates were shaped by constant confrontation between conservatives and liberals. Leheny argues that the conservatives, inclined to expand Japan’s military capacity of Japan, used local concerns about North Korea to make it part of the global struggle. This argument stands only if we accept that North Korea was not regarded as an international threat in the first place; however, in the course of the last decade (and especially in light of the recent test-firing incidents and the nuclear issue), North Korea has been repeatedly branded, whether rightly or not, as a terrorist state and targeted as such.

In the concluding chapter, the outcomes of the process of attaching global solutions to local problems are seen to be “unintended consequences” of international norms. At this point Leheny chooses to state his personal biases, such as a tendency to see Japanese reality through an American lens and his own political leanings (p.185). My feeling is that for the sake of the book’s integrity these should have been clearly pointed out in the opening chapter
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There is little doubt that the construction of public scapegoats takes place in every society, some of which make use of international factors to justify their choice of targets. While the argument presented by David Leheny might be correct, he fails to provide valid evidence to support it. However, the book has a lot to contribute to the field of policy research. If we understand the nature of local fears, we may be able to predict how the meanings of global norms shift and how these norms are implemented on the national level. An ability to anticipate the “unintended consequences” of international regulations can prove crucial both on the theoretical and the practical level.