Download or read book Japanese New Left Movements and Their Legacy for Civil Society written by Takemasa Ando and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis explores the legacy for the civil society ofJapanese new left movements, which consisted mainly of anti-Vietnam War groups, radical student groups, young workers' groups. When the poverty problem was disappearing for the Japanese middle class during the economic boom in the 1960s, the movements reflected on the problems experienced by traditional progressive movements and did not limit themselves to changing political regimes or policies. First of all, this thesis argues that, against the backdrop of increasing control over workers in offices and factories due to the mass production system, and intensifying competition between young people for academic qualifications, Japanese new leftists aimed to transform their conservative and depoliticized consciousness called "everydayness". Second, this thesis discusses how Japanese new left movements resorted to violence and lost their popular support. The activists regarded direct action, such as confrontation with the police, as a benchmark of how far they had achieved transformation of their conservative consciousness. Whereas confrontational direct action gave a sense of liberation to the activists and promoted greater mobilization of the movements, some community residents suffered physical injury or damage to their property from armed conflicts between protesters and police officers. From around 1970, I argue, the police successfully contained the movements by initlalliy arresting a number of activists and then working with people in the community, who were concerned about new leftists' violent protests against outsiders or within their own groups. In particular the police focused on improving public relations to gain support from the media. This made it possible for the police to successfully stigmatize Japanese new left movements as "extremists" and identify themselves as guardians of citizens from the movements' violence. In this difficult situation many activists were disappointed with the violence and left the movements. Finally, this thesis discusses the legacy of Japanese new left movements for civil society in the 1970s. Against the backdrop of demobilization of the movements, some activists sought to organize urban consumers in order to support organic farming in rural areas while others tried to build fairer relations with people living in other Asian countries who suffered from poverty and political oppression. These activists had in common their clearer understanding of problems caused by the economic boom, such as environmental deterioration or exploitation of developing countries. I also explore the negative legacy of the movements. "New Politics" theories, which were modelled by political change in European industrialized countries after the 1970s, show that new left movements were transformed into "new social movements", which worked on issues like ecology, anti-nuclear power, gender equity, and rights for ethnic minorities, and influenced bureaucracy and political parties. However, widespread disappointment with Japanese new left movements in civil society, which derived from the failure of their violent protests, prevented the movements from playing a role in networking between each protest against rapid modernization in different local communities, and prevented them from "New Politics" agendas to the attention of political institutions.

Download or read book Japan s New Left Movements written by Takemasa Ando and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that followed the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan shocked the world. In the wake the of the disaster, questions were asked as to why Japanese antinuclear movements were not able to prevent those with vested interests, such as businesses, bureaucrats, the media and academics, from facilitating nuclear energy policies? Taking this question as its starting point, this book looks more widely at the development and powerlessness of Japanese civil society, and seeks to untangle this intersection between social movements and civil society in postwar Japan. Central to this book are the Japanese New Left movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and the impact they have had on civil society and politics. By focusing on a key idea that a wide range of new leftists shared – the self-revolution in ‘everydayness’ – Takemasa Ando shows how these groups did not seek immediate change in the realms of politics and legislation, but rather, it was believed that personal transformation would lead to broader social and political change. By reconsidering the relationship between Japanese New Left movements of the 1960s and later social movements, this book crucially connects the constructive and disruptive legacies of the movements, and in doing so provides valuable insights into the powerlessness that plagues Japanese civil society today. Presenting a comprehensive picture of the New Left movements and their legacies in Japan, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Japanese politics, Japanese history, and Japanese culture and society.

Download or read book Social Movements and Political Activism in Contemporary Japan written by David Chiavacci and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores social movements and political activism in contemporary Japan, arguing that the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident marks a decisive moment, which has led to an unprecedented resurgence in social and protest movements and inaugurated a new era of civic engagement. Offering fresh perspectives on both older and more current forms of activism in Japan, together with studies of specific movements that developed after Fukushima, this volume tackles questions of emerging and persistent structural challenges that activists face in contemporary Japan. With attention to the question of where the new sense of contention in Japan has emerged from and how the newly developing movements have been shaped by the neo-conservative policies of the Japanese government, the authors ask how the Japanese experience adds to our understanding of how social movements work, and whether it might challenge prevailing theoretical frameworks.

Download or read book Japan s New Left Movements written by Takemasa Ando and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that followed the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan shocked the world. In the wake the of the disaster, questions were asked as to why Japanese antinuclear movements were not able to prevent those with vested interests, such as businesses, bureaucrats, the media and academics, from facilitating nuclear energy policies? Taking this question as its starting point, this book looks more widely at the development and powerlessness of Japanese civil society, and seeks to untangle this intersection between social movements and civil society in postwar Japan. Central to this book are the Japanese New Left movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and the impact they have had on civil society and politics. By focusing on a key idea that a wide range of new leftists shared – the self-revolution in ‘everydayness’ – Takemasa Ando shows how these groups did not seek immediate change in the realms of politics and legislation, but rather, it was believed that personal transformation would lead to broader social and political change. By reconsidering the relationship between Japanese New Left movements of the 1960s and later social movements, this book crucially connects the constructive and disruptive legacies of the movements, and in doing so provides valuable insights into the powerlessness that plagues Japanese civil society today. Presenting a comprehensive picture of the New Left movements and their legacies in Japan, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Japanese politics, Japanese history, and Japanese culture and society.

Download or read book Civil Society in Japan written by K. Hirata and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-08-16 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil Society and Japan's Foreign Aid examines the changing relations between the Japanese state and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in promoting effective aid policies and analyzes the changing nature of policy making and governance in Japan. It is based on extensive research in Southeast Asia and Japan, investigating the role of Japanese aid in fields such as education, health care, environmental protection, and economic development. It analyzes the key players in aid policymaking, including donor governments, multinational organizations, international and local NGOs, the business community, and aid recipients.

Download or read book The Imagination of the New Left written by George N. Katsiaficas and published by South End Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Imagination of the New Left" brings to life the social movements and events of the 1960s that made it a period of world-historical importance: the Prague Spring; the student movements in Mexico, Japan, Sri Lanka, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Spain; the Test Offensive in Vietnam and guerilla movements in Latin America; the Democratic Convention in Chicago; the assassination of Martin Luther King; the near-revolution in France of May 1968; and the May 1970 student strike in the United States. Despite its apparent failure, the New Left represented a global transition to a newly defined cultural and political epoch, and its impact continues to be felt today.

Download or read book Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan written by David H. Slater and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern social movements frequently serve as a space to voice concerns in a supportive and collective context and thus are an important venue for individuals to learn how to speak up for themselves. With the rise of new generations and advancement of technology such as digital networks, contemporary Japanese social movements and activism have transformed significantly in recent years, now with more flexibility and less reliance on ideology and institutional foundations. The new patterns provide individuals different spaces and ways to get involved in “politics,” which have shed the traditional settings and expectations. This transformation carries both advantages and risks. In Alternative Politics twelve original ethnographic studies illustrate how social movements are creating new alternatives for Japan in the current century. The term “alternative” has a double meaning. First, it refers to forms of political engagement that are outside the standard politics of political parties and institutional forums. Second, it engages with contemporary movements seeking an alternative politics that is culturally specific and historically embedded, an alternative to past periods of activism in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s often characterized as tainted, and causing the decline of social movement activity for nearly two decades. The introduction written by Slater and Steinhoff places the volume in historical, social, and methodological context and analyzes the main characteristics of the new social movements. Each chapter provides a rich description of a particular movement active between 1990 and 2020, showing what the participants wanted to achieve, how they tried to distance themselves from earlier movements, and how they used new social media and other innovations to do so. The accounts preserve the immediacy of the period when the fieldwork was conducted, but each end with a postscript bringing the movement up to date. Engagingly written by an international community of Japan specialists committed to doing extended fieldwork with small social movement groups, Alternative Politics will appeal to social scientists interested in activism and Japan specialists in various disciplines, as well as undergraduates in a wide range of courses.

Download or read book 1968 written by Gassert Phillipp Gassert and published by Black Rose Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a year of seismic social and political change. With the wildfire of uprisings and revolutions that shook governments and halted economies in 1968, the world would never be the same again. Restless students, workers, women, and national liberation movements arose as a fierce global community with radically democratic instincts that challenged war, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy with unprecedented audacity. Fast forward fifty years and 1968 has become a powerful myth that lingers in our memory. Released for the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous year, this second edition of Philipp Gassert's and Martin Klimke's seminal 1968 presents an extremely wide ranging survey across the world. Short chapters, written by local eye-witnesses and historical experts, cover the tectonic events in thirty-nine countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East to give a truly global view. Included are forty photographs throughout the book that illustrate the drama of events described in each chapter. This edition also has the transcript of a panel discussion organized for the fortieth anniversary of 1968 with eyewitnesses Norman Birnbaum, Patty Lee Parmalee, and Tom Hayden and moderated by the book's editors. Visually engaging and comprehensive, this new edition is an extremely accessible introduction to a vital moment of global activism in humanity's history, perfect for a high school or early university textbook, a resource for the general reader, or a starting point for researchers.

Download or read book The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major essay on the thought of the great Italian Marxist Perry Anderson’s essay “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” first published in New Left Review in 1976, was an explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in the thought of the great Italian Marxist. Since then it has been the subject of book-length attacks across four decades for its disentangling of the hesitations and contradictions in Gramsci’s highly original usage of such key dichotomies as East and West, domination and direction, hegemony and dictatorship, state and civil society, and war of position and war of movement. In a critical tribute to the international richness of Gramsci’s work, the essay shows how deeply embedded these notions were in the revolutionary debates in Tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany. Here arguments crisscrossed between Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lukács and Trotsky, with later echoes in Brecht and Benjamin. A new preface considers the objections the essay provoked and the reasons for them. This edition also includes the first English translation of Athos Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s lectures in prison.

Download or read book Anti nuclear Protest in Post Fukushima Tokyo written by Alexander Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the politics of anti-nuclear activism in Tokyo after the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. Analyzing the protests in the context of a longer history of citizen activism in Tokyo, it also situates the movement within the framework of a global struggle for democracy, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. By examining the anti-nuclear movement at both urban and transnational scales, the book also reveals the complex geography of today’s globally connected social movements. It emphasizes the contestation of urban space by anti-nuclear activists in Tokyo and the weaving together of urban and cyber space in their praxis. By focusing on the cultural life of the movement—from its characteristic demonstration style to its blogs, zines and pamphlets—this book communicates activists’ voices in their own words. Based on excellent ethnographic research, it concludes that the anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo after the Fukushima disaster have redefined social movement politics for a new era. Providing an analysis of a unique period in Japan’s contemporary urban history from the perspective of eyewitness observations, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Sociology and Japanese Studies in general.

Download or read book Transpacific Antiracism written by Yuichiro Onishi and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this exhaustively-researched and beautifully-written book, Onishi uncovers a hidden history of Afro-Asian radicalism and internationalism. He presents bold and generative arguments about the ways in which the affiliation of kindred spirits across the Pacific enabled anti-racist intellectuals and activists from Japan and the U.S. to forge a new philosophy of world history and formulate practical programs for liberation.” —George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place “This fascinating and ground-breaking book offers a new window into the vital history of Afro-Asian solidarity against empire and white supremacy. Meticulously researched, it recovers the epistemological breakthroughs that emerged at the intersection of radical struggle and geographical reorientation. Through his sharp analysis of cross-cultural and transnational collectivity, Onishi provides a guidepost for all those interested in the study of utopian, boundary-crossing projects of the past, as well as the creation of future ones.” — Scott Kurashige, author of The Shifting Grounds of Race and co-author of The Next American Revolution Transpacific Antiracism introduces the dynamic process out of which social movements in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa formed Afro-Asian solidarities against the practice of white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yuichiro Onishi argues that in the context of forging Afro-Asian solidarities, race emerged as a political category of struggle with a distinct moral quality and vitality. This book explores the work of Black intellectual-activists of the first half of the twentieth century, including Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois, that took a pro-Japan stance to articulate the connection between local and global dimensions of antiracism. Turning to two places rarely seen as a part of the Black experience, Japan and Okinawa, the book also presents the accounts of a group of Japanese scholars shaping the Black studies movement in post-surrender Japan and multiracial coalition-building in U.S.-occupied Okinawa during the height of the Vietnam War which brought together local activists, peace activists, and antiracist and antiwar GIs. Together these cases of Afro-Asian solidarity make known political discourses and projects that reworked the concept of race to become a wellspring of aspiration for a new society. Yuichiro Onishi is Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Download or read book America Divided written by Maurice Isserman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive account of the turbulent 1960s, "America Divided" presents the most sophisticated understanding to date of all sides of the decade's many political, social, and cultural conflicts. 45 photos.

Download or read book The New Latin American Left written by Patrick S. Barrett and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2008-10-20 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.

Download or read book Civil Society Religion and the Nation written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan, Russia, and Turkey are major examples of countries with different ethnic, religious, and cultural background that embarked on the path of modernization without having been colonized by a Western country. In all three cases, national consciousness has played a significant role in this context. The project of Modernity is obviously of European origin, but is it essentially European? Does modernization imply loss of a country’s cultural or national identity? If so, what is the “fate” of the modernization process in these cases? The presence of the idea and reality of civil society can be considered a real marker of Modernity in this respect, because it presupposes the development of liberalism, individualism and human rights. But are these compatible with nationalism and with the idea of a national religion? These questions are the more pressing, as Japan is considered part of the Western world in many respects, and Russia and Turkey are defining their relation to the European Union in different ways. An investigation of these three countries, set off against more general reflections, sheds light on the possibilities or limitations of modernization n a non-European context.

Download or read book Networks and Mobilization Processes The Case of the Japanese Anti Nuclear Movement after Fukushima written by Anna Wiemann and published by IUDICIUM Verlag. This book was released on 2018-05-14 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental disasters or other large-scale disruptive events often trigger the emergence of social movements demanding social and/or political change. This study investigates mobilization processes at the meso level of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami waves on March 11, 2011. To capture such meso level movement dynamics – which so far have played only a minor role in research on social movement mobilization – the study presents an analytical model based on premises from political process theory, network theory, and relational sociology. This model is then applied to the case of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement after Fukushima by looking at the relational dynamics of two coalitional movement networks engaged in advocacy-related activities in Tōkyō. The first case study is e-shift, a network-coalition working for nuclear phase-out and the promotion of renewable energy; the other is SHSK (Shienhō Shimin Kaigi), a coalition pushing for the rights of people affected by radioactive contamination and/or evacuation from contaminated areas. The study traces the mobilization processes of these two networks by analyzing data gathered in 2013 and 2014 in the form of participant observation of movement events, semi-structured interviews with movement organization representatives, and documentary data.

Download or read book New Policies for New Residents written by Deborah J. Milly and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, many countries have experienced both a rapid increase of in-migration of foreign nationals and a large-scale devolution of governance to the local level. The result has been new government policies to promote the social inclusion of recently arrived residents. In New Policies for New Residents, Deborah J. Milly focuses on the intersection of these trends in Japan. Despite the country's history of restrictive immigration policies, some Japanese favor a more accepting approach to immigrants. Policies supportive of foreign residents could help attract immigrants as the country adjusts to labor market conditions and a looming demographic crisis. As well, local citizen engagement is producing more inclusive approaches to community. Milly compares the policy discussions and outcomes in Japan with those in South Korea and in two similarly challenged Mediterranean nations, Italy and Spain. All four are recent countries of immigration, and all undertook major policy innovations for immigrants by the 2000s. In Japan and Spain, local NGO-local government collaboration has influenced national policy through the advocacy of local governments. South Korea and Italy included NGO advocates as policy actors and partners at the national level far earlier as they responded to new immigration, producing policy changes that fueled local networks of governance and advocacy. In all these cases, Milly finds, nongovernmental advocacy groups have the power to shape local governance and affect national policy, though in different way.

Download or read book Transnational Nazism written by Ricky W. Law and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language study of German-Japanese interwar relations to employ sources in both languages.