H Saito
Biographic Data
| ID | 5910 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Saito |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Saito |
| SIGNATURE | SAITO H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Singapore Management University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9065-7668 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 150 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Realities and Challenges of Residential Management in Detached Housing Areas in Japan
This study focuses on case studies in Japan where proactive efforts are being made to address residential management challenges in detached housing areas. The objective is to analyze how these initiatives should be institutionally and socially supported and promoted. In Japan, large‐scale residential development expanded significantly in the 1960s to address the housing shortage caused by rapid urban expansion during the period of high economic g…
Sociology and spirituality: Toward an immanent-transcendent critique of modernity
In this paper, I set up three thought experiments that mobilize nonmodern ontologies and epistemologies to explore the possibility of spiritual sociology. These experiments engage with Pierre Bourdieu as a Buddhist quantum physicist, Emile Durkheim as a New Age transpersonal psychologist, and Michel Foucault as a daemon-inspired revolutionary. The three experiments illustrate that, while many worlds (consisting of objective and subjective structu…
Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture
Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education
The imaginary and epistemology of disaster preparedness: The case of Japan's nuclear safety failure
The Fukushima nuclear disaster was profoundly a man-made one, resulting from the organizational failure of nuclear emergency preparedness. To fully understand the cause of this disaster, I propose to extend an organizational perspective on disasters into a macro-institutional perspective on disaster preparedness. To this end, I borrow from science and technology studies the concepts of "sociotechnical imaginary" and "civic epistemology" to probe …
The Sacred and Profane of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Myth: On the Cultural Logic of Framing and Overflowing
Any policy requires a ‘frame’ and, by the same token, entails an ‘overflow’, externalizing a certain part of the world as irrelevant. This mundane business of policy framing and overflowing became an urgent matter of concern in Japan in March 2011, as the Fukushima nuclear disaster exposed how the existing frame of nuclear safety had permitted the fatal overflow of severe accident management. In fact, despite the creation of the new regulatory ag…
The Developmental State and Public Participation: The Case of Energy Policy-making in Post–Fukushima Japan
After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy policy-making by introducing public participation. Over the course of its implementation, however, public participation came to be subordinated to expert committees as the primary mechanism of policy rationalization. The expert committees not only neutralized the results of public participation but also discounted the necessity of public participatio…
Unpacking Cosmopolitan Memory
Mitchell L Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami, Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era
The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia
This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather th…
The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia
Seventy years have passed since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, yet Japan remains embroiled in controversy with its neighbors over the war's commemoration. Among the many points of contention between Japan, China, and South Korea are interpretations of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, apologies and compensation for foreign victims of Japanese aggression, prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and the war's portrayal in textbooks. Collective…
The Realpolitik of Nuclear Risk: When Political Expediency Trumps Technical Democracy
In recent years, a growing number of researchers in science and technology studies have begun to examine the relationship between science and politics. Specifically, they focus on citizen participation in highly technical policy problems and explore the possibility of a technical democracy that avoids pitfalls of technocracy. This focus, however, downplays a possibly more serious obstacle to technical democracy than technocracy, namely, realpolit…
Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative
The Cultural Pragmatics of Political Apology
In recent decades, research on 'political apology', wherein the state apologizes to victims of its past wrongs, has multiplied, as redress movements based on human rights have proliferated around the world. Since most of this research has been conducted by political philosophers, however, analyses of political apologies tend to adopt formal and normative perspectives. To propose an alternative, empirically-grounded approach, in this paper, I deve…
Cosmopolitics: Towards a New Articulation of Politics, Science and Critique
This paper explores howUlrichBeck's world-risk-society theory (WRST) andBrunoLatour'sActor-NetworkTheory (ANT) can be combined to advance a theory of cosmopolitics. On the one hand,WRSThelps to examine 'cosmopolitan politics', how actors try to inject cosmopolitanism into existing political practices and institutions anchored in the logic of nationalism. On the other hand,ANTsheds light on 'cosmological politics', how scientists participate in th…
Disciplines, Area Studies, and Publics: Rethinking Sociology in a Global World
Historians as rooted cosmopolitans: Their Potentials and Limitations
In the 1990s, the so-called 'history problem' began to escalate in East Asia as the result of mutually reinforcing nationalist commemorations in Japan, South Korea and China. In response, historians from the three countries organized joint historical research and textbook projects. In this article, I examine the extent to which these joint projects succeeded in promoting the cosmopolitan logic of historiography that challenged nationalist commemo…
The A-bomb victims' plea for cosmopolitan commemoration: Toward reconciliation and world peace
This paper critically revisits the A-bomb victims' plea for cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. To this end, I first elaborate the nature of cosmopolitan commemoration espoused by A-bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in comparison with another form of cosmopolitan commemoration pertaining to the Holocaust victims. I then analyze limitations in these cosmopolitan commemorati…
Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification
In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, we examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, we first pro…
European Cosmopolitanism in Question
Competing Logics of Commemoration: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in East Asia’s History Problem
Recent studies in collective memory point to the emergence of cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. But these studies have yet to specify how cosmopolitan commemoration emerges and articulates with existing nationalist commemoration. To solve this problem, we examine the 'history problem' between Japan and South Korea by focusing on how relevant political and civic actors negotia…
Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative
Journal Article Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative Get access Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative, edited by David Blake Willis Jeremy Rappleye. Oxford: Symposium Books, 2011, 287 pp., $48.00 (ISBN 978-1-873927-51-9) Hiro SAITO Hiro SAITO University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social…
Cosmopolitan Nation-Building: The Institutional Contradiction and Politics of Postwar Japanese Education
The education system has been a quintessential state apparatus of nation-building since the emergence of the modern nation-state; however, recent comparative studies demonstrate the growing presence of cosmopolitanism in education policies and school curricula around the world. This trend indicates that the education system now operates according to two different institutional logics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To understand how the educati…
An Actor-Network Theory of Cosmopolitanism
A major problem with the emerging sociological literature on cosmopolitanism is that it has not adequately theorized mechanisms that mediate the presumed causal relationship between globalization and the development of cosmopolitan orientations. To solve this problem, I draw on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT) to theorize the development of three key elements of cosmopolitanism: cultural omnivorousness, ethnic tolerance, and cosmopolitic…
Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma
This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of tr…
Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification
In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, we examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, we first pro…
Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma
This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of tr…
An Actor-Network Theory of Cosmopolitanism
A major problem with the emerging sociological literature on cosmopolitanism is that it has not adequately theorized mechanisms that mediate the presumed causal relationship between globalization and the development of cosmopolitan orientations. To solve this problem, I draw on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT) to theorize the development of three key elements of cosmopolitanism: cultural omnivorousness, ethnic tolerance, and cosmopolitic…
Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative
Competing Logics of Commemoration: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in East Asia’s History Problem
Recent studies in collective memory point to the emergence of cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. But these studies have yet to specify how cosmopolitan commemoration emerges and articulates with existing nationalist commemoration. To solve this problem, we examine the 'history problem' between Japan and South Korea by focusing on how relevant political and civic actors negotia…
The Cultural Pragmatics of Political Apology
In recent decades, research on 'political apology', wherein the state apologizes to victims of its past wrongs, has multiplied, as redress movements based on human rights have proliferated around the world. Since most of this research has been conducted by political philosophers, however, analyses of political apologies tend to adopt formal and normative perspectives. To propose an alternative, empirically-grounded approach, in this paper, I deve…
The Developmental State and Public Participation: The Case of Energy Policy-making in Post–Fukushima Japan
After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy policy-making by introducing public participation. Over the course of its implementation, however, public participation came to be subordinated to expert committees as the primary mechanism of policy rationalization. The expert committees not only neutralized the results of public participation but also discounted the necessity of public participatio…
Historians as rooted cosmopolitans: Their Potentials and Limitations
In the 1990s, the so-called 'history problem' began to escalate in East Asia as the result of mutually reinforcing nationalist commemorations in Japan, South Korea and China. In response, historians from the three countries organized joint historical research and textbook projects. In this article, I examine the extent to which these joint projects succeeded in promoting the cosmopolitan logic of historiography that challenged nationalist commemo…
Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education
The A-bomb victims' plea for cosmopolitan commemoration: Toward reconciliation and world peace
This paper critically revisits the A-bomb victims' plea for cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. To this end, I first elaborate the nature of cosmopolitan commemoration espoused by A-bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in comparison with another form of cosmopolitan commemoration pertaining to the Holocaust victims. I then analyze limitations in these cosmopolitan commemorati…
Kachigumi: A Collective Delusion among the Japanese and Their Descendants in Brazil
In August 1945 the Second World War ended. The end of the war precipitated a sharp division of the 300,000 Japanese community in Brazil over its outcome, and a large majority believed that Japan had won the war and they came into conflict with the minority who acknowledged the defeat of Japan. The ensuing bitter conflict within the Japanese community in Brazil continued over several years and eventually led to the assassination of more than fifte…
Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma
This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of tr…
Cosmopolitan Nation-Building: The Institutional Contradiction and Politics of Postwar Japanese Education
The education system has been a quintessential state apparatus of nation-building since the emergence of the modern nation-state; however, recent comparative studies demonstrate the growing presence of cosmopolitanism in education policies and school curricula around the world. This trend indicates that the education system now operates according to two different institutional logics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To understand how the educati…
An Actor-Network Theory of Cosmopolitanism
A major problem with the emerging sociological literature on cosmopolitanism is that it has not adequately theorized mechanisms that mediate the presumed causal relationship between globalization and the development of cosmopolitan orientations. To solve this problem, I draw on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT) to theorize the development of three key elements of cosmopolitanism: cultural omnivorousness, ethnic tolerance, and cosmopolitic…
Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative
Journal Article Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative Get access Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative, edited by David Blake Willis Jeremy Rappleye. Oxford: Symposium Books, 2011, 287 pp., $48.00 (ISBN 978-1-873927-51-9) Hiro SAITO Hiro SAITO University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social…
Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification
In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, we examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, we first pro…
European Cosmopolitanism in Question
Competing Logics of Commemoration: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in East Asia’s History Problem
Recent studies in collective memory point to the emergence of cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. But these studies have yet to specify how cosmopolitan commemoration emerges and articulates with existing nationalist commemoration. To solve this problem, we examine the 'history problem' between Japan and South Korea by focusing on how relevant political and civic actors negotia…
Cosmopolitics: Towards a New Articulation of Politics, Science and Critique
This paper explores howUlrichBeck's world-risk-society theory (WRST) andBrunoLatour'sActor-NetworkTheory (ANT) can be combined to advance a theory of cosmopolitics. On the one hand,WRSThelps to examine 'cosmopolitan politics', how actors try to inject cosmopolitanism into existing political practices and institutions anchored in the logic of nationalism. On the other hand,ANTsheds light on 'cosmological politics', how scientists participate in th…
Disciplines, Area Studies, and Publics: Rethinking Sociology in a Global World
Historians as rooted cosmopolitans: Their Potentials and Limitations
In the 1990s, the so-called 'history problem' began to escalate in East Asia as the result of mutually reinforcing nationalist commemorations in Japan, South Korea and China. In response, historians from the three countries organized joint historical research and textbook projects. In this article, I examine the extent to which these joint projects succeeded in promoting the cosmopolitan logic of historiography that challenged nationalist commemo…
The A-bomb victims' plea for cosmopolitan commemoration: Toward reconciliation and world peace
This paper critically revisits the A-bomb victims' plea for cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. To this end, I first elaborate the nature of cosmopolitan commemoration espoused by A-bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in comparison with another form of cosmopolitan commemoration pertaining to the Holocaust victims. I then analyze limitations in these cosmopolitan commemorati…
The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia
Seventy years have passed since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, yet Japan remains embroiled in controversy with its neighbors over the war's commemoration. Among the many points of contention between Japan, China, and South Korea are interpretations of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, apologies and compensation for foreign victims of Japanese aggression, prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and the war's portrayal in textbooks. Collective…
The Realpolitik of Nuclear Risk: When Political Expediency Trumps Technical Democracy
In recent years, a growing number of researchers in science and technology studies have begun to examine the relationship between science and politics. Specifically, they focus on citizen participation in highly technical policy problems and explore the possibility of a technical democracy that avoids pitfalls of technocracy. This focus, however, downplays a possibly more serious obstacle to technical democracy than technocracy, namely, realpolit…
Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative
The Cultural Pragmatics of Political Apology
In recent decades, research on 'political apology', wherein the state apologizes to victims of its past wrongs, has multiplied, as redress movements based on human rights have proliferated around the world. Since most of this research has been conducted by political philosophers, however, analyses of political apologies tend to adopt formal and normative perspectives. To propose an alternative, empirically-grounded approach, in this paper, I deve…
The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia
This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather th…
Unpacking Cosmopolitan Memory
Mitchell L Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami, Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era
The Sacred and Profane of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Myth: On the Cultural Logic of Framing and Overflowing
Any policy requires a ‘frame’ and, by the same token, entails an ‘overflow’, externalizing a certain part of the world as irrelevant. This mundane business of policy framing and overflowing became an urgent matter of concern in Japan in March 2011, as the Fukushima nuclear disaster exposed how the existing frame of nuclear safety had permitted the fatal overflow of severe accident management. In fact, despite the creation of the new regulatory ag…
The Developmental State and Public Participation: The Case of Energy Policy-making in Post–Fukushima Japan
After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy policy-making by introducing public participation. Over the course of its implementation, however, public participation came to be subordinated to expert committees as the primary mechanism of policy rationalization. The expert committees not only neutralized the results of public participation but also discounted the necessity of public participatio…
The imaginary and epistemology of disaster preparedness: The case of Japan's nuclear safety failure
The Fukushima nuclear disaster was profoundly a man-made one, resulting from the organizational failure of nuclear emergency preparedness. To fully understand the cause of this disaster, I propose to extend an organizational perspective on disasters into a macro-institutional perspective on disaster preparedness. To this end, I borrow from science and technology studies the concepts of "sociotechnical imaginary" and "civic epistemology" to probe …
Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education
Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture
Sociology and spirituality: Toward an immanent-transcendent critique of modernity
In this paper, I set up three thought experiments that mobilize nonmodern ontologies and epistemologies to explore the possibility of spiritual sociology. These experiments engage with Pierre Bourdieu as a Buddhist quantum physicist, Emile Durkheim as a New Age transpersonal psychologist, and Michel Foucault as a daemon-inspired revolutionary. The three experiments illustrate that, while many worlds (consisting of objective and subjective structu…
Sociology (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Politics (15 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Cosmopolitanism (6 works) · History (6 works) · Japanese History and Culture (6 works)