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Hiro Saito

The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Faculty Member

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Hiro Saito is Project Associate Professor of Global Faculty Development at the University of Tokyo. Given his broad interest in intersections between power and knowledge, he studies how interactions between government and citizens shape public policy by focusing on the role of experts. He is currently working on his second book project The Horizon of Democracy: Fukushima, Okinawa, and the Pandemic.

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Maywa Montenegro

University of California, Santa Cruz

Paulo Nuno Vicente

Universidade Nova de Lisboa

University of South Africa

STEPHANUS JOUBERT

University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Kartini I. Pouchous

Alexander C Chandra

Bahcesehir University

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Books by Hiro Saito

Higher Education for Pluriversal Diplomacy: Landing the 4IR on Habitable Earth

Global Initiatives and Higher Education in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2022

The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia

Papers by Hiro Saito

The Imaginary and Epistemology of Disaster Preparedness: The Case of Japan's Nuclear Safety Failure

Poetics, 2021

The Fukushima nuclear disaster was profoundly a man-made one, resulting from the organizational f... more 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 deepest layers of meaning-making constitutive of disaster preparedness. I then apply these concepts to the history of nuclear energy in postwar Japan that was centered on the developmental state pursuing industrial transformation. Specifically, I illustrate how the "pacifist imaginary" emphasized positive contributions of "the peaceful use of nuclear energy," legitimating a priori the promotion of nuclear power as a means of economic development; and how the "technocratic epistemology" invoked the superior competencies of state bureaucrats and expert advisers, legitimating post hoc their disregard for the possibility of a severe accident. The imaginary and epistemology thus enabled the developmental state to pursue pro-nuclear policy by securing acquiescence from the majority of citizens and discrediting the minority of antinuclear activistsuntil the earthquake and tsunami exposed the preparedness failure in March 2011.

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 cert... more 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 agency in September 2012, the post-Fukushima frame of nuclear safety continued to externalize off-site evacuation planning-a key component of severe accident management-until March 2015. To explain such persistence of the overflow, I borrow the concept of 'sociotechnical imaginary' from the policy-oriented strand of science and technology studies and infuse it with hermeneutical rigor of the strong program of cultural sociology. Specifically, I illustrate how the trajectory of Japan's nuclear safety was decisively shaped by the pacifist imaginary and the safety myth, organized around the binary opposition 'sacred = civilian use = safe vs. profane = military use = dangerous', without reducing this deeper cultural logic of framing and overflowing to the political economy of nuclear energy or the global isomorphism of nuclear technology.

For Cosmopolitan, Public, and Reflexive Sociology: International Symposium for Social World and Pandemic

Sociologia & Antropologia, 2020

Rearticulating the Publicness of Higher Education in a Global World

The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education: Next Generation Insights into Research, Policy, and Practice, 2018

While the internationalization of higher education has revolved mainly around economic and status... more While the internationalization of higher education has revolved mainly around economic and status competition, it has also created opportunities for policymakers, university leaders, and other stakeholders to rethink the missions and policies of universities in an increasingly global world. A promising way to take advantage of these opportunities, I suggest, is to critically respond to the negative effects of the internationalization of higher education-most notably the isomorphism promoted by world university rankings-by rearticulating the publicness of universities, both as providers of public goods and as loci of public spheres, at global, national, and local levels. Chapter Over the past two decades, globalization has prompted strategic responses from many universities around the world. To name but a few, these responses include: the establishment of overseas offices to expand pools of applicants, the development of summer programs targeting foreign students, and efforts to break into and climb up world university rankings. Today, more and more universities are intensifying these internationalization efforts in pursuit of profit and prestige, as they are increasingly subjected to economic and status competition in the emerging global field of higher education. At the same time, globalization has created opportunities for policymakers, university leaders, and other stakeholders to critically rethink the missions and policies of universities.

The transnational frontiers of Japanese education: Multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and global isomorphism

Transnational Education and Curriculum Studies: International Perspectives, 2020

The Japanese education system today faces three transnationally created challenges. The first is ... more The Japanese education system today faces three transnationally created challenges. The first is multiculturalism. Given an increasing number of students whose parents are either migrants or naturalized citizens, the government needs to rethink the nature of public schools, which have traditionally catered to ethnic majority students, and explore how to make them culturally more inclusive. The second is cosmopolitanism. Although cosmopolitanism is regarded as a desirable disposition and competency in a globalizing world, the government has difficulty incorporating it into the education system that continues to function as a central vehicle of nation-building. The third is global isomorphism. While world university rankings have facilitated the internationalization of Japanese universities, they have also suppressed important debates on the public mission of higher education institutions at the local and national levels. How the Japanese education system will respond to these challenges is both path-dependent on its historical trajectory since the Meiji period and coterminous with how the government and citizens will redefine national identity vis-à-vis the complex reality of globalization.

Unpacking Cosmopolitan Memory

Cosmopolitanism in Hard Times, 2020

The Developmental State and Public Participation: The Case of Energy Policy-making in Post-Fukushima Japan

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2020

After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy... more 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 participation itself. This trajectory of public participation, from its historic introduction to eventual collapse, can be fully explained only in reference to complex interactions between the macroinstitutions and microsituations of Japanese policy-making at the time of the nuclear disaster: the macro-institutional reassembling of the developmental state to reallocate more power from the bureaucracy to the cabinet office and the civil society vis-à

Editorial Introduction: Re-envisioning Education in a Globalizing World

by Hiro Saito and vincenzo cicchelli

Youth and Globalization, 2019

This special issue focuses on education as a crucial factor mediating the relationship between yo... more This special issue focuses on education as a crucial factor mediating the relationship between youth and globalization. Specifically, four papers collectively explore how education can be re-envisioned from the following vantage point: the use of technology to foreground the fundamentally interconnected nature of today's world; the help of mindfulness to deepen the awareness of such interconnectedness and cultivate a commitment to collective well-being; the role of activism to produce more critical knowledge and transformational solidarity for social justice on a global scale; at the same time, the necessity of reflexivity to examine one's own ontological and epistemo-logical assumptions before attempting any educational intervention. I argue that this vantage point helps re-envision the existing institutions and practices of education to encourage young people in a globalizing world to learn to live a happy life together by embracing their pluriversal coexistence.

The Cultural Pragmatics of Political Apology

In recent decades, research on 'political apology', wherein the state apologizes to victims of it... more 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 develop the 'cultural pragmatics' of political apology. To this end, I first conceptualize political apology as a social performance aimed to 're-fuse' an impaired relationship between the perpetrator state and the victim individual. This conceptual move enables systematic analysis of political apology in terms of six elements constitutive of social performance: collective representations, actors, audience, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scène, and power. To elaborate this model of the cultural pragmatics of political apology, I then examine the protracted dispute over wartime atrocities that Japan committed against South Korea.

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 ... more 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, realpolitik. Based on ethnographic and textual data on citizen– government interactions in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, we first show how citizens mobilised radiation detectors and counter-experts to force the Japanese government to admit scientific uncertainty about the permissible dose limit. We then explain why this successful mobilisation nonetheless had only a small impact on evacuation and compensation policies in terms of the pre-disaster structure of Japanese politics: the dominance of commission-based policy-making allowed the bureaucratic government to play realpolitik in the face of scientific uncertainty to expediently pursue its own interest, circumventing both democratic deliberation and technical rigour.

Cosmopolitics: towards a new articulation of politics, science and critique 1

This paper explores how Ulrich Beck's world-risk-society theory (WRST) and Bruno Latour's Actor-N... more This paper explores how Ulrich Beck's world-risk-society theory (WRST) and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can be combined to advance a theory of cosmopolitics. On the one hand, WRST helps 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, ANT sheds light on 'cosmological politics', how scientists participate in the construction of reality as a reference point for political struggles. By combining the WRST and ANT perspectives, it becomes possible to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of cosmopolitics that takes into account both political and ontological dimensions. The proposed synthesis of WRST and ANT also calls for a renewal of critical theory by making social scientists aware of their performative involvement in cosmopolitics. This renewal prompts social scientists to explore how they can pragmatically support certain ideals of cosmopolitics through continuous dialogues with their objects of study, actors who inhabit different nations and different cosmoses.

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 mut... more 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 commemorations. Specifically, I compare governmental and non-governmental projects and illustrate structural and dispositional mechanisms that facilitated the cosmopolitan logic of historiography. However, at the same time, I show that the joint projects have had only a limited impact on official and public commemorations because of the absence of any formal institutional links between historians' activities, governments and the public. Thus, while historians have the potential to act as rooted cosmopolitans and to mobilize transnational epistemic networks in East Asia, they have been unable effectively to counteract nationalist commemorations.

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... more 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 commemorations and explore how they can be transcended. In light of my critical analysis, I argue that genuinely cosmopolitan commemoration, a prerequisite for reconciliation and world peace, will appear on the horizon if the commemorations of the two events are synthesized with the help of 'historians' debate' that continuously subjects the logic of nationalism to critical reflections. This synthesis has the potential to help people envision cosmopolitan politics – cosmopolitics – where they can engage in peaceful but agonistic struggles, not as enemies but as fellow humans, in collectively governing their lives in today's war-torn world. In May 1976, Kurihara Sadako, a poet who survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, published 'When We Say ''Hiroshima''' (1994: 226–7). The poem asked atomic-bomb

Disciplines, Area Studies, and Publics: Rethinking Sociology in a Global World

Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification

by Hiro Saito and Hiroki Igarashi

In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to... more 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 probe how education systems legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable disposition at the global level, while simultaneously distributing it unequally among different groups of actors according to their geographical locations and volumes of economic, cultural, and social capital their families possess. We then explore how education systems undergird profitability of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital by linking academic qualifications that signal cosmopolitan dispositions with the growing number of positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities. Over the past decade, sociologists have begun to examine how people acquire and express cosmopolitanism – an orientation of openness to foreign others and cultures.

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 tak... more 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 negotiated cosmopolitanism and nationalism in commemorating Japan's past colonial rule and wartime atrocities. In light of our historical analysis, we argue that a synthesis of theories of institutional logics and social movements is useful in illuminating how the emergence of cosmopolitan commemoration is embedded in specific networks of political and civic actors as mobilizing structures, and how the content and trajectory of its articulation with nationalist commemoration depends on political opportunities available to competing networks aligned differently with the two logics of commemoration.

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 emerg... more 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 education system negotiates the potential contradiction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in this paper, I analyze the case of postwar Japanese education. Theoretically, I synthesize studies of institutional logics and social movements: while the former shed light on a contradiction between different institutional logics as a source of political contestation, the latter help to explain how political actors select solutions to the contradiction. Empirically, I show how a series of education reforms modified the original solution that had prioritized cosmopolitanism over nationalism, culminating in the new Fundamental Law of Education that redefined the two institutional logics as symbiotic. My analysis thus suggests that the Japanese education system is evolving into a state apparatus of cosmopolitan nation-building in an increasingly global world.

Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bomb... more 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 transnational commemoration of “Hiroshima.” I also show that nationalization of trauma of “Hiroshima” involved a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other.

Higher Education for Pluriversal Diplomacy: Landing the 4IR on Habitable Earth

Global Initiatives and Higher Education in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2022

The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia

The Imaginary and Epistemology of Disaster Preparedness: The Case of Japan's Nuclear Safety Failure

Poetics, 2021

The Fukushima nuclear disaster was profoundly a man-made one, resulting from the organizational f... more 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 deepest layers of meaning-making constitutive of disaster preparedness. I then apply these concepts to the history of nuclear energy in postwar Japan that was centered on the developmental state pursuing industrial transformation. Specifically, I illustrate how the "pacifist imaginary" emphasized positive contributions of "the peaceful use of nuclear energy," legitimating a priori the promotion of nuclear power as a means of economic development; and how the "technocratic epistemology" invoked the superior competencies of state bureaucrats and expert advisers, legitimating post hoc their disregard for the possibility of a severe accident. The imaginary and epistemology thus enabled the developmental state to pursue pro-nuclear policy by securing acquiescence from the majority of citizens and discrediting the minority of antinuclear activistsuntil the earthquake and tsunami exposed the preparedness failure in March 2011.

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 cert... more 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 agency in September 2012, the post-Fukushima frame of nuclear safety continued to externalize off-site evacuation planning-a key component of severe accident management-until March 2015. To explain such persistence of the overflow, I borrow the concept of 'sociotechnical imaginary' from the policy-oriented strand of science and technology studies and infuse it with hermeneutical rigor of the strong program of cultural sociology. Specifically, I illustrate how the trajectory of Japan's nuclear safety was decisively shaped by the pacifist imaginary and the safety myth, organized around the binary opposition 'sacred = civilian use = safe vs. profane = military use = dangerous', without reducing this deeper cultural logic of framing and overflowing to the political economy of nuclear energy or the global isomorphism of nuclear technology.

For Cosmopolitan, Public, and Reflexive Sociology: International Symposium for Social World and Pandemic

Sociologia & Antropologia, 2020

Rearticulating the Publicness of Higher Education in a Global World

The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education: Next Generation Insights into Research, Policy, and Practice, 2018

While the internationalization of higher education has revolved mainly around economic and status... more While the internationalization of higher education has revolved mainly around economic and status competition, it has also created opportunities for policymakers, university leaders, and other stakeholders to rethink the missions and policies of universities in an increasingly global world. A promising way to take advantage of these opportunities, I suggest, is to critically respond to the negative effects of the internationalization of higher education-most notably the isomorphism promoted by world university rankings-by rearticulating the publicness of universities, both as providers of public goods and as loci of public spheres, at global, national, and local levels. Chapter Over the past two decades, globalization has prompted strategic responses from many universities around the world. To name but a few, these responses include: the establishment of overseas offices to expand pools of applicants, the development of summer programs targeting foreign students, and efforts to break into and climb up world university rankings. Today, more and more universities are intensifying these internationalization efforts in pursuit of profit and prestige, as they are increasingly subjected to economic and status competition in the emerging global field of higher education. At the same time, globalization has created opportunities for policymakers, university leaders, and other stakeholders to critically rethink the missions and policies of universities.

The transnational frontiers of Japanese education: Multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and global isomorphism

Transnational Education and Curriculum Studies: International Perspectives, 2020

The Japanese education system today faces three transnationally created challenges. The first is ... more The Japanese education system today faces three transnationally created challenges. The first is multiculturalism. Given an increasing number of students whose parents are either migrants or naturalized citizens, the government needs to rethink the nature of public schools, which have traditionally catered to ethnic majority students, and explore how to make them culturally more inclusive. The second is cosmopolitanism. Although cosmopolitanism is regarded as a desirable disposition and competency in a globalizing world, the government has difficulty incorporating it into the education system that continues to function as a central vehicle of nation-building. The third is global isomorphism. While world university rankings have facilitated the internationalization of Japanese universities, they have also suppressed important debates on the public mission of higher education institutions at the local and national levels. How the Japanese education system will respond to these challenges is both path-dependent on its historical trajectory since the Meiji period and coterminous with how the government and citizens will redefine national identity vis-à-vis the complex reality of globalization.

Unpacking Cosmopolitan Memory

Cosmopolitanism in Hard Times, 2020

The Developmental State and Public Participation: The Case of Energy Policy-making in Post-Fukushima Japan

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2020

After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy... more 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 participation itself. This trajectory of public participation, from its historic introduction to eventual collapse, can be fully explained only in reference to complex interactions between the macroinstitutions and microsituations of Japanese policy-making at the time of the nuclear disaster: the macro-institutional reassembling of the developmental state to reallocate more power from the bureaucracy to the cabinet office and the civil society vis-à

Editorial Introduction: Re-envisioning Education in a Globalizing World

by Hiro Saito and vincenzo cicchelli

Youth and Globalization, 2019

This special issue focuses on education as a crucial factor mediating the relationship between yo... more This special issue focuses on education as a crucial factor mediating the relationship between youth and globalization. Specifically, four papers collectively explore how education can be re-envisioned from the following vantage point: the use of technology to foreground the fundamentally interconnected nature of today's world; the help of mindfulness to deepen the awareness of such interconnectedness and cultivate a commitment to collective well-being; the role of activism to produce more critical knowledge and transformational solidarity for social justice on a global scale; at the same time, the necessity of reflexivity to examine one's own ontological and epistemo-logical assumptions before attempting any educational intervention. I argue that this vantage point helps re-envision the existing institutions and practices of education to encourage young people in a globalizing world to learn to live a happy life together by embracing their pluriversal coexistence.

The Cultural Pragmatics of Political Apology

In recent decades, research on 'political apology', wherein the state apologizes to victims of it... more 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 develop the 'cultural pragmatics' of political apology. To this end, I first conceptualize political apology as a social performance aimed to 're-fuse' an impaired relationship between the perpetrator state and the victim individual. This conceptual move enables systematic analysis of political apology in terms of six elements constitutive of social performance: collective representations, actors, audience, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scène, and power. To elaborate this model of the cultural pragmatics of political apology, I then examine the protracted dispute over wartime atrocities that Japan committed against South Korea.

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 ... more 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, realpolitik. Based on ethnographic and textual data on citizen– government interactions in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, we first show how citizens mobilised radiation detectors and counter-experts to force the Japanese government to admit scientific uncertainty about the permissible dose limit. We then explain why this successful mobilisation nonetheless had only a small impact on evacuation and compensation policies in terms of the pre-disaster structure of Japanese politics: the dominance of commission-based policy-making allowed the bureaucratic government to play realpolitik in the face of scientific uncertainty to expediently pursue its own interest, circumventing both democratic deliberation and technical rigour.

Cosmopolitics: towards a new articulation of politics, science and critique 1

This paper explores how Ulrich Beck's world-risk-society theory (WRST) and Bruno Latour's Actor-N... more This paper explores how Ulrich Beck's world-risk-society theory (WRST) and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can be combined to advance a theory of cosmopolitics. On the one hand, WRST helps 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, ANT sheds light on 'cosmological politics', how scientists participate in the construction of reality as a reference point for political struggles. By combining the WRST and ANT perspectives, it becomes possible to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of cosmopolitics that takes into account both political and ontological dimensions. The proposed synthesis of WRST and ANT also calls for a renewal of critical theory by making social scientists aware of their performative involvement in cosmopolitics. This renewal prompts social scientists to explore how they can pragmatically support certain ideals of cosmopolitics through continuous dialogues with their objects of study, actors who inhabit different nations and different cosmoses.

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 mut... more 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 commemorations. Specifically, I compare governmental and non-governmental projects and illustrate structural and dispositional mechanisms that facilitated the cosmopolitan logic of historiography. However, at the same time, I show that the joint projects have had only a limited impact on official and public commemorations because of the absence of any formal institutional links between historians' activities, governments and the public. Thus, while historians have the potential to act as rooted cosmopolitans and to mobilize transnational epistemic networks in East Asia, they have been unable effectively to counteract nationalist commemorations.

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... more 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 commemorations and explore how they can be transcended. In light of my critical analysis, I argue that genuinely cosmopolitan commemoration, a prerequisite for reconciliation and world peace, will appear on the horizon if the commemorations of the two events are synthesized with the help of 'historians' debate' that continuously subjects the logic of nationalism to critical reflections. This synthesis has the potential to help people envision cosmopolitan politics – cosmopolitics – where they can engage in peaceful but agonistic struggles, not as enemies but as fellow humans, in collectively governing their lives in today's war-torn world. In May 1976, Kurihara Sadako, a poet who survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, published 'When We Say ''Hiroshima''' (1994: 226–7). The poem asked atomic-bomb

Disciplines, Area Studies, and Publics: Rethinking Sociology in a Global World

Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification

by Hiro Saito and Hiroki Igarashi

In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to... more 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 probe how education systems legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable disposition at the global level, while simultaneously distributing it unequally among different groups of actors according to their geographical locations and volumes of economic, cultural, and social capital their families possess. We then explore how education systems undergird profitability of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital by linking academic qualifications that signal cosmopolitan dispositions with the growing number of positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities. Over the past decade, sociologists have begun to examine how people acquire and express cosmopolitanism – an orientation of openness to foreign others and cultures.

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 tak... more 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 negotiated cosmopolitanism and nationalism in commemorating Japan's past colonial rule and wartime atrocities. In light of our historical analysis, we argue that a synthesis of theories of institutional logics and social movements is useful in illuminating how the emergence of cosmopolitan commemoration is embedded in specific networks of political and civic actors as mobilizing structures, and how the content and trajectory of its articulation with nationalist commemoration depends on political opportunities available to competing networks aligned differently with the two logics of commemoration.

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 emerg... more 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 education system negotiates the potential contradiction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in this paper, I analyze the case of postwar Japanese education. Theoretically, I synthesize studies of institutional logics and social movements: while the former shed light on a contradiction between different institutional logics as a source of political contestation, the latter help to explain how political actors select solutions to the contradiction. Empirically, I show how a series of education reforms modified the original solution that had prioritized cosmopolitanism over nationalism, culminating in the new Fundamental Law of Education that redefined the two institutional logics as symbiotic. My analysis thus suggests that the Japanese education system is evolving into a state apparatus of cosmopolitan nation-building in an increasingly global world.

Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bomb... more 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 transnational commemoration of “Hiroshima.” I also show that nationalization of trauma of “Hiroshima” involved a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other.

Education as the Weakest Institutional Link in Japans Nuclear Regulation.pdf

Debates over the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster pointed to a set of institutional and organiz... more Debates over the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster pointed to a set of institutional and organizational failures in Japan’s nuclear regulation as a primary cause of the disaster. While the Japanese government has implemented reforms to strengthen nuclear regulation, I argue that these reforms have largely left out the education system as a key institution that produces and distributes expertise necessary for nuclear regulation. First, the Japanese education system has traditionally produced only a small number of experts in the fields related to nuclear regulation, aligned top-ranked experts with the pro-nuclear government, and weakened the civil society’s capacity to mobilize counter-experts. Second, the education system has downplayed social-scientific perspectives in energy and environmental education capable of critically examining institutional and organizational dimensions of nuclear regulation. These problems, however, fell outside the purview of post-Fukushima regulatory reforms and, as the result, the education system remains the weakest institutional link in Japan’s nuclear regulation.

East Asia and Cosmopolitan Memory