Simon Avenell
Biographic Data
| ID | 358811 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Avenell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Avenell |
| SIGNATURE | AVENELL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Asia and Postwar Japan
War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter w…
Waste
Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s study of waste in postwar Japan is history writing at its very best: expansive in scope, richly textured, compellingly narrated, and convincingly argued. As Siniawer explains, the ‘history of waste is at its heart a history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday in postwar Japan’ (3). While the book provides a marvellously rich narrative of how the Japanese h…
Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement
Japan
This chapter highlights the 1990s, when civil society captured the imagination of civil society, a process that developed since the early post-World War II period. It was, indeed, around the 1990s that civil society (shimin shakai) and such ideas as volunteering (borantia katsudō), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profit organizations (NPOs), community building (machizukuri), and citizens’ activities (shimin katsudō) became topics of br…
Transnational Activism and Japan’s Second Modernity
Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement
What motivates people to become involved in issues beyond national borders and how are activists changed and movements transformed by reaching out to others a world away? Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement addresses these questions through the lens of the contemporary Japanese environmental movement. Spanning from the era of industrial pollution in the 1960s to the recent rise of movements addressing global environmental pro…
Transnational Environmental Activism and Japan's Second Modernity
This article examines the new sphere of transnational activism in the Japanese environmental movement of the 1970s. What was previously a domestic phenomenon of local mobilizations against pollution and development expanded into a new array of transnational initiatives, many with a specific focus on pollution in the countries of East Asia. The article focuses on a transnational movement involving South Korean and Japanese activists to stop the re…
Antinuclear Radicals
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 si…
Transnationalism and the Evolution of Post-National Citizenship in Japan
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 cro…
Japanese Debates on Asia and Asianism
This article analyzes discussions about Asia in Japan since the mid‐1980s, offering a conceptual framework for understanding the contours of this debate. The article identifies three normative positions among participants: those advocating the replication of a Japanese model in Asia, those in favor of a genuine community of Asians, and those who see engagement with Asia as the only solution for the country's economic and social problems. The arti…
Tokyo Vernacular
What is Asia for Us and Can We Be Asians? The New Asianism in Contemporary Japan
This paper traces the development of the 'New Asianism' in Japan over the past quarter of a century. It identifies three broad trajectories or normative positions in the debate: those advocating the replication of a Japanese model in Asia, those in favour of a genuine community of equals, and those who see Asia as the only future for Japan and as a solution for the country's economic and social problems. The paper argues that the evolution and sh…
The Borderless Archipelago
This article reconsiders the contemporary history of Japanese environmentalism through the lens of transnationalism. From as early as the antipollution struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese activists looked beyond the boundaries of their archipelago in search of allies and environmental knowledge. In the process they became involved in the nascent global environmental movement and helped support victims of industrial pollution and natural de…
Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan
Reviewed by: Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society Simon Avenell (bio) Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society. By Rieko Kage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011. xv, 195 pages. $85.00, cloth; $37.50, E-book. Civil society and volunteering have been topics of intense interest for scholars of Japan for well over a decade now, especially following the massive outpouring of volunte…
From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima
On September 19, 2011, sixty thousand people gathered in Tokyo to protest against nuclear power and radiation pollution after reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Their protest evoked memories of the 1960s when Japan was among the most polluted locations on the planet with hazardous levels of air, water, and ground contamination. Observers at the time described the country as a polluters' paradise and advised tourists t…
Japan's Long Environmental Sixties and the Birth of a Green Leviathan
Is the ‘1960s' a useful concept for understanding postwar Japanese history and, if so, what kinds of changes resulted and how might we chronologize the period? This article proposes the idea of a ‘long environmental sixties’ in Japan stretching from around 1959 to 1973. The article argues that this period marked important milestones in environmental protest, public opinion, and legislation. By the early 1970s Japan had addressed many of its most …
Japan and the global revival of the ‘civil society’ idea
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,…
Genron NPO
Making Japanese CitizensCivil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan
This book is an expansive history of the activists, intellectuals, and movements that played a crucial role in shaping civil society and civic thought throughout the broad sweep of Japan's postwar period. Weaving the analysis around the concept of shimin (citizen), the book traces the development of a new vision of citizenship based on political participation, self-reliance, popular nationalism, and commitment to daily life. It traces civic activ…
Making Japanese Citizens
Making Japanese Citizens is an expansive history of the activists, intellectuals, and movements that played a crucial role in shaping civil society and civic thought throughout the broad sweep of Japan's postwar period. Weaving his analysis around the concept of shimin (citizen), Simon Avenell traces the development of a new vision of citizenship based on political participation, self-reliance, popular nationalism, and commitment to daily life. H…
Facilitating Spontaneity
This paper traces state policies for independent volunteerism in Japan from 1945 onward. It shows how official involvement resulted in extensive institutionalization of independent volunteers and helped produce an image of volunteerism as apolitical activity for service provision within the volunteer community. Of particular note is volunteer organizations' greater openness to collaboration with officials and quasi-marketized forms of paid volunt…
Civil Society and the New Civic Movements in Contemporary Japan
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 “propo…
From the “People” To the “Citizen”
Regional egoism as the public good
10.1080/09555800500498400
From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima
On September 19, 2011, sixty thousand people gathered in Tokyo to protest against nuclear power and radiation pollution after reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Their protest evoked memories of the 1960s when Japan was among the most polluted locations on the planet with hazardous levels of air, water, and ground contamination. Observers at the time described the country as a polluters' paradise and advised tourists t…
Japan's Long Environmental Sixties and the Birth of a Green Leviathan
Is the ‘1960s' a useful concept for understanding postwar Japanese history and, if so, what kinds of changes resulted and how might we chronologize the period? This article proposes the idea of a ‘long environmental sixties’ in Japan stretching from around 1959 to 1973. The article argues that this period marked important milestones in environmental protest, public opinion, and legislation. By the early 1970s Japan had addressed many of its most …
Tokyo Vernacular
Transnationalism and the Evolution of Post-National Citizenship in Japan
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 cro…
What is Asia for Us and Can We Be Asians? The New Asianism in Contemporary Japan
This paper traces the development of the 'New Asianism' in Japan over the past quarter of a century. It identifies three broad trajectories or normative positions in the debate: those advocating the replication of a Japanese model in Asia, those in favour of a genuine community of equals, and those who see Asia as the only future for Japan and as a solution for the country's economic and social problems. The paper argues that the evolution and sh…
The Borderless Archipelago
This article reconsiders the contemporary history of Japanese environmentalism through the lens of transnationalism. From as early as the antipollution struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese activists looked beyond the boundaries of their archipelago in search of allies and environmental knowledge. In the process they became involved in the nascent global environmental movement and helped support victims of industrial pollution and natural de…
From the “People” To the “Citizen”
Regional egoism as the public good
10.1080/09555800500498400
From the “People” To the “Citizen”
Civil Society and the New Civic Movements in Contemporary Japan
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 “propo…
Making Japanese CitizensCivil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan
This book is an expansive history of the activists, intellectuals, and movements that played a crucial role in shaping civil society and civic thought throughout the broad sweep of Japan's postwar period. Weaving the analysis around the concept of shimin (citizen), the book traces the development of a new vision of citizenship based on political participation, self-reliance, popular nationalism, and commitment to daily life. It traces civic activ…
Making Japanese Citizens
Making Japanese Citizens is an expansive history of the activists, intellectuals, and movements that played a crucial role in shaping civil society and civic thought throughout the broad sweep of Japan's postwar period. Weaving his analysis around the concept of shimin (citizen), Simon Avenell traces the development of a new vision of citizenship based on political participation, self-reliance, popular nationalism, and commitment to daily life. H…
Facilitating Spontaneity
This paper traces state policies for independent volunteerism in Japan from 1945 onward. It shows how official involvement resulted in extensive institutionalization of independent volunteers and helped produce an image of volunteerism as apolitical activity for service provision within the volunteer community. Of particular note is volunteer organizations' greater openness to collaboration with officials and quasi-marketized forms of paid volunt…
Japan and the global revival of the ‘civil society’ idea
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,…
Genron NPO
Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan
Reviewed by: Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society Simon Avenell (bio) Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society. By Rieko Kage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011. xv, 195 pages. $85.00, cloth; $37.50, E-book. Civil society and volunteering have been topics of intense interest for scholars of Japan for well over a decade now, especially following the massive outpouring of volunte…
From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima
On September 19, 2011, sixty thousand people gathered in Tokyo to protest against nuclear power and radiation pollution after reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Their protest evoked memories of the 1960s when Japan was among the most polluted locations on the planet with hazardous levels of air, water, and ground contamination. Observers at the time described the country as a polluters' paradise and advised tourists t…
Japan's Long Environmental Sixties and the Birth of a Green Leviathan
Is the ‘1960s' a useful concept for understanding postwar Japanese history and, if so, what kinds of changes resulted and how might we chronologize the period? This article proposes the idea of a ‘long environmental sixties’ in Japan stretching from around 1959 to 1973. The article argues that this period marked important milestones in environmental protest, public opinion, and legislation. By the early 1970s Japan had addressed many of its most …
The Borderless Archipelago
This article reconsiders the contemporary history of Japanese environmentalism through the lens of transnationalism. From as early as the antipollution struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese activists looked beyond the boundaries of their archipelago in search of allies and environmental knowledge. In the process they became involved in the nascent global environmental movement and helped support victims of industrial pollution and natural de…
Japanese Debates on Asia and Asianism
This article analyzes discussions about Asia in Japan since the mid‐1980s, offering a conceptual framework for understanding the contours of this debate. The article identifies three normative positions among participants: those advocating the replication of a Japanese model in Asia, those in favor of a genuine community of Asians, and those who see engagement with Asia as the only solution for the country's economic and social problems. The arti…
Tokyo Vernacular
What is Asia for Us and Can We Be Asians? The New Asianism in Contemporary Japan
This paper traces the development of the 'New Asianism' in Japan over the past quarter of a century. It identifies three broad trajectories or normative positions in the debate: those advocating the replication of a Japanese model in Asia, those in favour of a genuine community of equals, and those who see Asia as the only future for Japan and as a solution for the country's economic and social problems. The paper argues that the evolution and sh…
Transnationalism and the Evolution of Post-National Citizenship in Japan
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 cro…
Antinuclear Radicals
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 si…
Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement
Japan
This chapter highlights the 1990s, when civil society captured the imagination of civil society, a process that developed since the early post-World War II period. It was, indeed, around the 1990s that civil society (shimin shakai) and such ideas as volunteering (borantia katsudō), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profit organizations (NPOs), community building (machizukuri), and citizens’ activities (shimin katsudō) became topics of br…
Transnational Activism and Japan’s Second Modernity
Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement
What motivates people to become involved in issues beyond national borders and how are activists changed and movements transformed by reaching out to others a world away? Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement addresses these questions through the lens of the contemporary Japanese environmental movement. Spanning from the era of industrial pollution in the 1960s to the recent rise of movements addressing global environmental pro…
Transnational Environmental Activism and Japan's Second Modernity
This article examines the new sphere of transnational activism in the Japanese environmental movement of the 1970s. What was previously a domestic phenomenon of local mobilizations against pollution and development expanded into a new array of transnational initiatives, many with a specific focus on pollution in the countries of East Asia. The article focuses on a transnational movement involving South Korean and Japanese activists to stop the re…
Waste
Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s study of waste in postwar Japan is history writing at its very best: expansive in scope, richly textured, compellingly narrated, and convincingly argued. As Siniawer explains, the ‘history of waste is at its heart a history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday in postwar Japan’ (3). While the book provides a marvellously rich narrative of how the Japanese h…
Asia and Postwar Japan
War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter w…
Japanese History and Culture (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (7 works) · Civil society (7 works) · Geography (7 works) · History (7 works)