Making Japanese CitizensCivil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan

Avenell, Simon

doi:10.1525/california/9780520262706.001.0001

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The movement provided ordinary people in Japan with a platform to practice and exercise their rights as citizens. For example, Avenell (2010) argued that ordinary people's practical experiences with the Beheiren movement culminated in citizen activism in the 1980s in which pragmatic approaches (rather than street protests) were used to negotiate with the government and the market.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Meanwhile, ordinary people in Japan found the Beheiren movement, independent from leftist politics, an attractive venue to address “socio‐political issues unique to Japan” (Rosenbaum 2018:136). In this way, the Beheiren movement had an impact on the development of Japan's civil society (Ando 2013; Avenell 2010; Rosenbaum 2018). The movement provided ordinary people in Japan with a platform to practice and exercise their rights as citizens.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Beheiren movement also attracted ordinary people in Japan because it developed or fostered an ethnoracial consciousness based on their perceptions of a common victimization among fellow Asians by U.S. imperialism. Avenell (2010) was initially skeptical of Beheiren's Pan‐Asianism because he viewed it as self‐serving. Nonetheless, the scholar's latest work (2022) has argued the rise of an Asian consciousness in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics, including within the Beheiren movement.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This showed that intellectual leaders of the Beheiren movement viewed Japan as part of an Asian struggle against white-dominated U.S. aggression. Ordinary Japanese people were drawn to the movement because they saw a mirror image of themselves in their Vietnamese counterparts as war victims of U.S. air raids and bombings, and they developed an "ethnoracial consciousness" (Avenell 2010) as Asians who suffer from "Asian death," which Ken Kaiko 2 , a novelist and one of the early intellectual contributors to the Beheiren movement, discusses in his book, Into a Black Sun (Kaiko 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Confronting Japan's Anti‐Asian Racism: The Transformation of the Beheiren Movement's Identity during the Vietnam War

Matsuzawa

2024

Sociological Inquiry

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This study explores the Beheiren movement (also known as The Citizens' Alliance for Peace in Vietnam), Japan's first transnational anti‐war movement (1965–1974). It focuses on the transcultural formation and transformation of its movement identity during the Vietnam war. Initially, movement participants developed an ethnoracial consciousness toward the Vietnamese based on their perceptions of a common victimization by U.S. imperialism. Yet, Beheiren leaders' transcultural interactions with both Korean detainees in the Omura Detention Facility in Japan and members of the Black Power movement in the United States helped them to develop an antiracist consciousness toward fellow Asians beyond the context of the Vietnam war. While their interactions with Korean detainees forced them to examine Japan's internal structural oppressions against fellow Asians (e.g., Korean residents in Japan) and fellow Japanese (e.g., the Okinawans), their interactions with the Black Power movement raised their awareness of antiracism and Third‐Worldism. These interactions were necessary to transforming the movement's identity, resulting in a confrontation with its own anti‐Asian racism in the local cultural context of Japanese society as well as in the form of economic imperialism in Asia.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Confronting Japan's Anti‐Asian Racism: The Transformation of the Beheiren Movement's Identity during the Vietnam War

Matsuzawa

2024

Sociological Inquiry

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“…This definition and those like it are products of liberal thinking where 'civil society' describes a space beyond the control of the state carved out by organised groups of citizens anxious to both monitor and limit the exercise of state authority. 5 Conceptualising the relationship between 'state' and 'civil society' in this way is the norm amongst scholars of Japanese society (Schwartz and Pharr 2003;Pekkanen 2006;Avenell 2010;Hasegawa 2014), as is the view that civil society has been 'weak' in Japan relative to the bureaucracy and big business. 6 Discussions of the 'nuclear village' -defined by Kingston (2013, 201) as 'pro-nuclear advocates, including utilities, bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, and experts' -tend to be less explicit in their claims but suggest, nevertheless, that there is a border or separation between policy makers and policy takers on nuclear and (by extension) other issues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The social origins of Japanese nuclear power: a Gramscian analysis

Kelly

2017

Int Polit

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In this paper I seek to contribute to the post-Fukushima literature on Japan, much of which accepts uncritically the orthodox narrative locating Japan's nuclear origins in the politics of the Cold War and in the passivity of Japanese civil society vis-à-vis a 'strong' state. In contrast, I draw upon Gramsci's work in order to locate these origins within wider processes of global structural transformation associated with the shift from feudalism to capitalism, and the attendant imperialism of the nineteenth century. I treat Japan's Meiji Restoration as an instance of passive revolution within this context, one outcome of which was the adoption of a specific form of state (the 'developmental state') and a specific form of nationalism (techno-nationalism). I further argue that the US Occupation of Japan can be viewed as another instance of passive revolution. In both cases I examine the economic, political and social channels through which state goals were communicated to the Japanese populace and either embraced or resisted in turn. I suggest that Japan's techno-nationalism survived into the post-war era, but was stripped of its overt military trappings and portrayed instead as a unique combination of 'pacifism' and 'economic developmentalism'. In this way, despite being victims of nuclear weapons, ordinary Japanese people were persuaded to embrace nuclear power.

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Questioning Growth, Interrogating Pollution: South Korea’s Political Economic Approaches to the Environment in the Early 1970s

Kim

2023

Int J Korean Hist

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There is a growing interest among historians in South Korean society’s engagement with the environment. Yet, many studies tend to accept a narrative based on a type of ‘post-materialist value’ thesis: Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the South Korean public, preoccupied with basic economic sustenance, showed minimal interest in the escalating environmental degradation. Environmental issues gained prominence only after the 1990s, it is presumed, as South Korea’s economic growth reached a certain threshold, accompanied by the rise of a substantial middle class that showed interest in quality-of-life and supported the expansion of the new environmental movement. Recent historical studies have challenged this narrative, revealing that ‘pollution’ problems had already surfaced as routine societal concerns in the 1970s. However, there remains a need for a critical examination of how the meanings and nature of environmental issues, including pollution, were understood and contested prior to the 1990s. Moreover, the assumption that environmental awareness naturally arose in response to a given trajectory of ‘development’ needs to be interrogated. This study addresses these limitations in previous studies. It investigates the intertwining concerns and discussions about pollution with those regarding the negative consequences of ‘high growth’ in South Korea from the late 1960s to the early-to-mid 1970s. Specifically, the study focuses on the emergence of radical political-economic perspectives on the environment, later embraced by the anti-pollution movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. The paper also explores the transnational influence and connections within these discussions regarding the problematic relationships between ‘growth’ and ‘pollution.’

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Making Japanese CitizensCivil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Confronting Japan's Anti‐Asian Racism: The Transformation of the Beheiren Movement's Identity during the Vietnam War

Confronting Japan's Anti‐Asian Racism: The Transformation of the Beheiren Movement's Identity during the Vietnam War

The social origins of Japanese nuclear power: a Gramscian analysis

Questioning Growth, Interrogating Pollution: South Korea’s Political Economic Approaches to the Environment in the Early 1970s

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