Political psychology is a tricky business. Plain old psychology is difficult enough, digging down as it does in the murky depths of the psyche and trying to make sense of everything buried there. Yet all that pales beside the idea of putting an entire nation on the couch. After all, how do you probe the mind of a collective, especially one as vast and various as a country?
Still, with the right amount of caution and sufficient scope for inquiry, "political psychology" offers avenues for understanding a country. That is the spirit with which a reader should open "Political Psychology in Japan," a new collection of writings on Japanese politics.
It's a wide-ranging effort, whose contributors come from various fields: social psychology, political science, public policy, international relations, linguistics and psychology. Most of them are Japanese; virtually all live and work in Japan. The book is valuable, if only for introducing foreign readers to some excellent scholars they might not otherwise encounter.