ABSTRACT
Why do some countries have far more NGOs than others? Although NGOs first appeared in the West, the postwar emergence of NGOs has not been uniform. As the last chapter showed, Japan has tended to lag behind not only in terms of the number but in membership levels, budget size and overall capacity of its NGOs. This chapter examines the pattern of divergence and the political conditions under which NGOs first formed and grew in the democratic industrialized world, using the case of Japan in the comparative context.
