This provocative book provides a historically grounded, densely documented, and analytically shrewd account of the ‘mythology of the citizen’ in postwar Japan. Avenell chronicles a history of cooptation, revealing that the citizen myth was susceptible to ethnic-nationalist sentiment, and later to the appeal of ‘spontaneous’ social service that could promote convergence with state and corporate interest. Nevertheless, as Avenell clearly shows, the mythology of the citizen remains attractive and retains its potential as an instrument of critique-for the essential act of negation that is the final protector of any democratic collectivity from supervening authority. Andrew Barshay, author of The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions