Simon Avenell

Civil Society and the New Civic Movements in Contemporary Japan: Convergence, Collaboration, and Transformation

This essay traces the rise of new civic movements in Japan from the 1970s. Challenging claims that these movements are transforming the country’s civil society, the article shows how state, corporate, and civic actors have fashioned a domesticated and largely apolitical sphere of social activism. Not only have bureaucratic and corporate elites fostered cooperative and useful groups, leading civic activists have crafted a pervasive logic of “proposal” which demonizes contentious politics, espouses self-help as the solution to all social problems, and celebrates intimate engagement with the state and market. Accordingly, the article argues for a more nuanced reading of transformation in Japan’s civil society.

From the "People" to the "Citizen": Tsurumi Shunsuke and the Roots of Civic Mythology in Postwar Japan

What could be more emblematic of postwar Japanese democracy than the spontaneous birth of the “citizen” (shimin) in the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty struggle (Anpo ts) of 1960? As the story goes, it was during Anpo that thousands of ordinary citizens came out to oppose the politics of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and his supporters in the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Organizing into egalitarian, nonideological groups, these shimin protestors apparently laid the foundation for a new autonomous form of activism and, for some, represented the first real sparks of popular democratic consciousness in the postwar period. Once a signifier of everything petit bourgeois and self-interested, now the shimin reemerged as the vehicle of social change, the watchdog and enemy of the state, and the guardian of democracy. Roused by the massive outpouring of popular dissent, shimin advocates at the time declared the birth of a new “civic con-

Antinuclear Radicals: Scientific Experts and Antinuclear Activism in Japan

This article examines the role of scientific experts in the post-war Japanese antinuclear power movement. It argues that experts and their movements have influenced the development of nuclear power in Japan, albeit in an indirect, constrained and sporadic way. Experts like the nuclear chemist Takagi Jinzaburō stimulated an upsurge of antinuclear protest and public opinion, especially after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, which made power plant siting more difficult, contributed to longer construction lead times, and forced state and nuclear industry officials to devote considerable resources to atomic energy public relations (PR) campaigns and compensation for nuclearised communities. The antinuclear advocacy and activism of scientific experts arguably helped to slow down nuclear power development, resulting in a less nuclearised Japan than imagined by its advocates. Antinuclear experts and their movements, however, never became players in mainstream nuclear policymaking and had to be content with pressure tactics from the political peripheries. After the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster of March 2011 some observers pointed to this lack of direct political influence as evidence of the failure of the antinuclear movement. Rather than outright failure, however, this article presents a more ambivalent history marked by both achievements and shortcomings.

Japan and the global revival of the ‘civil society’ idea: contemporaneity and the retreat of criticality

Abstract This article examines the pioneering role of Japanese intellectuals in the contemporary (post-1945) global revival of civil society. Although often overlooked or discounted in recent scholarship, Japanese intellectuals were among the first contemporary theorists worldwide to re-conceptualize civil society as a remedy for two of the central problematics of the post-World War II era: the theoretical and practical crisis in Marxism, on the one hand, and the anomie of advanced capitalist development, on the other hand. The article argues that any comprehensive global history of contemporary civil society must consider the insights of these Japanese thinkers alongside those of their Continental and North American counterparts. More critically, the article also suggests that Japanese civil society thought merits attention because it vividly exposes the dearth of criticality and excess of celebration in the ideas recent resurgence. The result in Japan (and elsewhere) has been an ironic and troubling retreat of criticality coupled with a naïve faith in the therapeutic capacity of civil society.

Transnationalism and the Evolution of Post-National Citizenship in Japan

Abstract This article argues that transnational activism has been an important factor in both the evolution of Japanese civil society and the identity formation of civil society actors over the past half century. It reconsiders the Japanese experience in light of recent theorisations on deterritorialised and transnational citizenships which challenge the monopoly of the national state in defining civic identity by proposing novel alternatives based on cross-border affiliations among non-state actors. Different from existing endogenous and institutional explanations of the emergence and development of civil society in Japan, the article highlights the transformative impact of activists’ transnational activities. Until around the late 1960s Japanese activists tended to imagine their situation within a framework of victimised citizens versus a pernicious alliance of the state and industry. The state and corporations were the aggressors and citizens were always the victims. But transnational engagements in the anti-Vietnam War and environmental movements disrupted such assumptions, forcing activists to rethink their victimisation status and consider their complicity in the actions of the Japanese state and industry abroad. The result was an enriched and more broad-minded conceptualisation of post-national citizenship in which victim consciousness was tempered by a concern for those beyond the borders of Japan. This transnational sensitivity in turn contributed to the maturation of Japanese civil society.

What is Asia for Us and Can We Be Asians? The New Asianism in Contemporary Japan

This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2013-DZZ-3103).

The Evolution of Disaster Volunteering in Japan: From Kobe to Tohoku

On the morning of January 17, 1995, the Kobe region of Japan experienced what was then the country’s most destructive earthquake in the postwar era.1 Close to 6,500 died, infrastructure was crippled, and hundreds and thousands of buildings were destroyed or damaged. Magnifying the earthquake was the woeful response from the national government, which arguably made Kobe as much a man-made disaster as a natural one. Officials quarreled over jurisdictional matters and enforced regulations that ultimately cost lives and severely dented the legitimacy of Japan’s bureaucracy. The flip side of this administrative debacle was a historically unprecedented outpouring of volunteering, which by December 1995 boasted some 1.3 million participants, including many young people who traveled hundreds of miles to help. Undoubtedly one of the milestone years of civil society in postwar Japan, 1995 was soon christened “Year One of the Volunteer Age” (borantia Gnnnen) and heralded as a “volunteer revolution” (borantia kakumei).

Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan by Carl Cassegärd (review)

from interviews or how he chose which architectural magazines from which to quote. In a work that touches on so many aspects of cultural history, it is perhaps unreasonable to expect the author to discuss the historiography of every topic, but given the centrality of World War II to the memories of his informants, more engagement with the growing body of scholarly literature on war memory would have been welcome. Despite some opacity in argumentation and methodology, however, Sand has succeeded in producing a nuanced and historicized account of preservation in Tokyo and relating preservation to the politics of creating a usable urban past. The opacity of Sand’s prose is to a certain extent the product of the admirable care he has taken to express his fi ndings judiciously, without exaggeration or overstatement. Sand explains for us how Japan’s economic growth changed the Tokyo landscape in the ways that it did. His work also provides important reminders for fellow historians that seemingly natural concepts such as Shitamachi and Tokyo’s Edo past are constructed categories, developed in particular times and places for particular purposes.

Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society (review)

every other state involved has), but under both the LDP and subsequently the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the nation’s military presence has pushed even further geographically to the Gulf of Aden with “antipiracy” operations and the construction of the fi rst JSDF overseas military base in Djibouti. The DPJ government has recently committed to sending JSDF troops to South Sudan, somewhat contrary to predictions that might spring from Midford’s analysis. Japan’s policymakers will claim, quite rightly, that these are noncombat, humanitarian, or reconstruction missions. But so were the dispatches to the Indian Ocean and Iraq, and just as in those missions, the limits of the constraints on Japanese military power and support for the United States are being slowly eroded. As we know, Japanese security policy always develops incrementally, zigzagging, or in two-steps-forwardone-step-back fashion. Public opinion can force the development to slow but rarely halts it entirely, and the recent continuing JSDF dispatch seems to challenge Midford’s contention that public opinion has reduced support in general for overseas dispatch or has been an absolute roadblock. All in all, though, Midford’s book should be read by all scholars and students of Japanese security policy. It is path breaking, if not yet defi nitive, in setting out a systematic understanding of how Japanese public opinion can affect security policy and offers up another sophisticated categorization— one that other scholars must engage—of the trajectory of Japanese security policy in the shape of “Defensive Realism.”