Studies of comparative civil society tell a consistent story about volunteer participation in advanced democracies: the United States is always at or near the top of the pack, Japan trails in the rear, and European countries such as Britain and France occupy the space in the middle. This is true whether the studies examine participation using survey data, such as the World Values Surveys, or whether they consider organizational size and participation levels in nonprofit organizations, such as the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. If these studies are accurate – that Americans belong to “a nation of joiners” (Schlesinger 1944) and Japanese do not – then why does Japan have more than twice as many volunteer firefighters and more than four times as many parent-teacher association (PTA) members as the United States?

This chapter argues that current studies of comparative civil society have been systematically biased in favor of the types of participation found commonly in the United States and against those commonly found in Japan. In particular, studies have not picked up participation in organizations with close, embedded relationships with the government such as PTAs or neighborhood associations that are prevalent in Japan. Because Japan is not the only country where this kind of underrepresented participation is prevalent – people in Spain and Germany volunteer in patterns similar to Japanese – new conceptualizations of civil society are necessary in order to understand participation patterns around the world.