Monitoring Administrative Procedure: Defining "Community Involvement" in Japanese Administrative System.

Based on one year of fieldwork in western Japan, this paper explores how citizens' expectations of civic involvement in administrative procedure are made manifest in the process of drafting new preservation by-laws to meet with UNESCO's World Heritage Program. Since January 2007, when the Japanese national government announced the lists of new tentative World Heritage sites, groups of citizens and municipal government officials have expressed frustration over the paucity of information regarding the national selection process and the expected administrative procedure to officially nominate sites to UNESCO. In Nagasaki, the site of the Catholic churches and surrounding landscape nominated for World Heritage, local residents expect reasonable administrative transparency; municipal government officials at the same time are struggling to decide how they should inform the public of current administrative procedures for World Heritage nomination. The drafting process of World Heritage preservation is more than simply translating international preservation policy to the level of citizens' everyday practice; it is a process which shows how layers of government (municipal, regional, national, and international) diversely define and encourage citizens' involvement in administrative procedure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]