ABSTRACT
In Japan for the past decade or so we have witnessed a lively academic interest among social scientists, philosophers and historians in the concept of publicness, of public philosophy or of the public sphere. This was partly ignited by their academic concern for democratic citizens’ participation and was influenced by works by diverse theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Sheldon S. Wolin, J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Robert N. Bellah, Michael Sullivan, Michael Sonnet, Robert Putnam and Michael J. Sandel. But it was also caused by the Japanese theorists’ practical intent to recover both the active and responsible citizenry and the authentic public sphere in civil society from the monopoly position on publicness held by the state and its bureaucracy, which had thus far controlled at will the public sphere, its concerns and functions. However, in current Japanese discussions of publicness there are significantly different ways of understanding it. To be sure, there should be diverse ways and understandings of publicness or of public philosophy. For these concepts are bound to be controversial and richly
ambiguous. So this diversifying trend and the resultant discussion of publicness and of public philosophy in Japan is more than welcome at present. An influential approach to the discussion of public philosophy has been proffered by various proponents, such as Kim Tae-Chang, Naoshi Yamawaki and Masaya Kobayashi. These writers insert significant doubt into the traditional structure of the public-private relationship – the state vs. the individual – that is prevalent in Japanese society. They have instead emphasised the common publicness of ordinary citizens, and have thus formulated a tripartite structure:
1 the public, 2 common publicness, and 3 the private (Kim, 2001: iv-xii, 267-74; Kim, 2002: i-iii, 293-9; Yamawaki,
2002: 1-23; Yamawaki, 2004: 28-37; Kobayashi, 2005: 243-79).
