Thrust, System And Path: An Analysis Of The Cooperation Between Japanese Government And Non - Profit Organization

The historical character and evolution path of east-Asian countries are completely different from those of western developed countries. As the first east-Asian country becoming a developed country, Japan is a focus in the research of government-NPO relationship. Japan was said to be the most restrictive of the developed countries in terms of the ease or difficulty of forming nonprofit organizations. However, nonprofit organizations in Japanese are obtaining more and more attention from the government, and the relationship between government and nonprofit organizations has fundamentally changed from governmental control to government-NPO cooperation. Based on this hypothesis, the author attempts to answer a core question:How did cooperative government-NPO relationship form in Japan?Based on the core question, the research is mainly divided into three parts. In the first part, the author analyzes the realistic and theoretical driving factors of the historical transition from governmental control to government-NPO cooperation in Japan. The second part is the analysis on the institutional construction of government-NPO relationship in Japan by investigating the laws, regulations and policies, which are formulated by Japanese central and local governments to regulate the government-NPO relationship and to support the development of nonprofit organizations. The third part is the detailed research and analysis on three practical paths, which are governmental assistance, administrative outsourcing and collaborative delivery, of building cooperative government-NPO relationship.The paper gets the conclusion that, since1990s, the impact of the New Public Theory as well as the New Public Management Theory, and the juncture of Hanshin Earthquake in1995stimulate Japanese government to build a cooperative relationship with nonprofit organizations. At the institutional level, the central and local governments offer nonprofit organizations environmental support by formulating laws and policies. At the practical level, coordinative network of government, enterprises and nonprofit organizations are formed by the interactive measures of cultivation, outsourcing and coordinative delivery. The current government-NPO relationship in Japan has accomplished the transformation from governmental monopoly to the interactive coordination of government and nonprofit organizations.