 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Simon Abenal. I'm the director of the Japan Institute here in the ANU and on behalf of the Australian Japan Research Center, the Japan Institute and our generous sponsors, the Australia Japan Foundation, I would like to welcome you to the Japan Update 2014. Our theme this year is political, economic and social change in Japan. As part of our reconciliation action plan, we at the ANU begin all public events with an important acknowledgement of traditional owners, which I would like to begin proceedings with today. We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the Japan Update now in its second year is one of the flagship events for those of us working on Japan related issues here at the ANU. It's an opportunity for us to bring together leading experts on Japan from within the ANU and in fact from around the globe to offer their insights and their analysis on some of the most important issues facing Japan today. Issues, of course, which are of great relevance to us here in Australia on multiple levels. Now, of course, is a fascinating time to be observing and studying Japan. The political world has experienced some major gyrations in the past few years. There's been much discussion about an improving economy. Demographically, Japan continues to move into uncharted territory and from a northeast Asian regional perspective, the country finds itself enmeshed in a complex system of economic and political relationships and rivalries. On top of all this, of course, the Tohoku region is now in its fourth year of recovery after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. More of the Japanese nuclear officials and technicians continue to address the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. So there are great many issues to consider and our presenters and the panelists today will certainly be dealing with many of those issues. We sincerely hope that today is informative and thought provoking for you and just looking at our lineup of wonderful presenters. I'm convinced that there's going to be a great deal of food for thought and discussion and related to that, you know, I would strongly encourage you, the audience, to become actively involved in the debates and discussions that will unfold throughout the day. Related to that, we also see the Japan update as a really great opportunity for people from a variety of backgrounds to come together, people who are interested in Japan to come together to network and also to exchange ideas. So hopefully you'll be able to do so in the various opportunities between the presentations and panels that we have organized today. As the new director of the Japan Institute here at the ANU, I'm looking forward to meeting and talking with as many of you as possible today. So please do come and say hello. Okay, so before we move into the first panel, just a few organizational and housekeeping matters, please let me advise that today we are recording proceedings. So in that connection during the Q&A sessions, we'll be using microphones. So if you could wait until our mic runners reach you before you ask your question, that would be terrific. Also morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea will be served just outside in the foyer and downstairs as well. So please do join us for that if you can. And finally our keynote speech is scheduled to begin after morning tea. Our political keynote speech is scheduled to begin after morning tea at 10 30 a.m. So we'd be very appreciative if you could be back and seated just a little bit prior to that for the start of that political keynote speech. We will give you a sign outside to come back in before that. Okay, so without further ado, please let me once again offer my warmest welcome to one and all. I hope that you will leave today updated to the very brim on some of the most significant challenging, perhaps provocative and fascinating aspects of the contemporary Japan. All right, so please let me let me change hats now and become the chairperson of our first panel. So I'll change my hat. So indeed I think in terms of discussions about the challenges facing Japan of late, what more appropriate way to begin than with a panel investigating one of the greatest challenges Japan has faced, I guess, since the end of World War II. And I'm speaking of course about the aftermath of the triple disaster of March 2011. As those of you who have read Professor Samuel's absolutely outstanding book on March 311 will know, along with the heartbreak and human tragedy and the inspiring displays of resilience, the disaster also provided us with a really unique opportunity, I think, to closely observe the operations, sometimes dysfunctions of various institutions and organizations in Japan at a time of crisis. Political leaders like former Prime Minister Kanalto found themselves under the public and media microscope for their decision making. The nuclear industry and utility companies, Tepco in particular, came under greater scrutiny than ever before. And corporations like SoftBank, Yaku Japan, Mitsubishi generated a great deal of public goodwill through their financial and material support for the post-disaster recovery. Now the other important source of post-disaster response, of course, was civil society, which is the focus of our first panel this morning, which deals with Fukushima and civil society. Now, by civil society, I'm referring or we're referring to a very broad sphere of not-for-profit activity, which included activities like disaster volunteering, community level, reconstruction activities and initiatives, and of course contentious political mobilizations, for example, demanding a nuclear power phase out in the country. We witnessed all of these phenomena in the wake of the disaster, so it was a very busy time indeed for those of us who work on civil society. Needless to say, just as the disaster raised critical questions about political leadership, administrative competency, and of course nuclear safety, it also, I think, raised interesting questions about the nature of civil society in Japan. As I'm sure you know, opposition to nuclear power escalated after the disaster, beginning with a series of Friday evening gatherings outside the Prime Minister's residence in downtown Tokyo, and peaking with a number of massive demonstrations in late 2011 and stretching into 2012. The question, of course, is what happened to or what is happening to that energy after it left the streets? Moreover, what does the host Fukushima Civil Society landscape tell us about the state of civil society and, I guess, democracy more generally in Japan? We have three truly distinguished presenters to address some of these questions today. And so what we will do in the first panel is we will move through the presentations first, and afterwards we have, I think we will have a comment from a distinguished participant who will be joining us, after which we'll open the floor to questions and discussions. So our first speaker is Professor Koichi Hasegawa, who is without a doubt one of the preeminent scholars of Japanese civil society and social movements worldwide. Significantly for our discussion today, he's been studying Japanese environmental and anti-nuclear activism for many, many years. So he brings a really deeply informed perspective and analysis to the nature of civil society in the wake of Fukushima. Professor Hasegawa's presentation today is based on a very recent paper in the journal International Sociology entitled, The Fukushima Nuclear Accident and Japan's Civil Society Context, Reactions and Policy Impacts, which I strongly recommend and there are some copies out there for those of you who are interested in picking up a copy of that, I strongly recommend it. So without further ado, please let me invite Professor Hasegawa to the podium. Please join me in welcoming Professor Hasegawa. Thank you, Simon. I'm very pleased and very honored to have a chance to present the paper today. Especially today, I'm the first speaker, so I have a strong pressure. Anyway, I'd like to talk about the Fukushima Nuclear Accident and changing civil society in Japan. I think Japan's civil society has three turning points, starting of Hasegawa era and 1995 Hanshin earthquake and much terrible disaster. Did you know such sign in a Chinese restaurant? Chinese character Fukushima originally means happy land or beautiful area, but beautiful, happy area suddenly turned to the tragic left by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident. And even now, more than 80,000 people are forced to evacuate by government orders or by their own will. And they can't see their way clear. Very little hope. This summer, 2014, we had the first summer with no nuclear power operating since 1966. I have today three research questions. How can we grasp the relationship between state and civil society in Japan? And after the Fukushima disaster, how has the anti-nuclear citizen activism changed and shifted? How is anti-nuclear activism facing the barrier? Generally speaking, until the end of the 1960s, Japanese social movements were guided by socialist ideals. But in Hasegawa era, 1989, the Berlin Wall had followed also in Japan. And the new goal for Japan's social movements became the building of a liberal, vibrant, civil society. In 1995, the Kobe earthquake, thousands of people from all over Japan rushed to Kobe to help the victim. This incident triggered to legalize the 1998 nonprofit organization law. So this is my hypothesis, general relationship between state and civil society. So when a strong state is capable and can solve social problems, citizens' activities are relatively weak and social support for such activities is relatively weak. This is Showa era's situation. And simply speaking, when a strong state decreases in ability to solve social problems, citizens' activities are required to solve with stronger social support for such activities. This is Hasegawa era's situation. So these are basic assumptions in Showa era, stable economic growth, and under stable political power by MVP, centralized bureaucracy, the safest society with little crime and good public security, and state-coordinated society. How about in Hasegawa era? Longer-year recession, declining economic power called loss to decades are stable and frequently changing political leader. We have 18 prime ministers in Hasegawa era in these 12, 6 years, including double counting of current prime minister, and the reform for decentralization. And we are realizing in the risk society. So this is a very simple contrast, the Showa era and the Hase era. So recently, currently, a problem is found. NPO is found. So Japanese society has 50,000 NPO. So constructing a more vibrant civil society has been just on the way under the 1998 NPO law. And this is my analytical scheme based on social movement theory. So I'd like to focusing on cultural planning, mobilizing resources, and structure of political opportunity. So in Japanese standard, for long years, 10,000 gathering is a very political standard. The anti-Japan U.S. security treaty campaign in June 1960, at the time, 330,000 citizens gathered. This was a peak. So after then, beyond 10,000 gathering was very few. In case of nuclear energy, after the Chernobyl accident, April 1988, 20,000 protesters gathered. And in many cases, such large demonstrations are called assigned mobilization. So like 100 from teachers union, 150 from postal workers, et cetera, and each union provided bus service, daily pay, and even lunchbox. So I'd like to articulate these five stages. The stage and the three Chernobyl stage, fourth Chernobyl stage is the anti-Pudu stage and the fourth Fukushima stage. And before the Fukushima nuclear accident, Japanese government policy to promote nuclear energy has been too stable and too coherent under the centralized political system. And electrical utilities maintain a monopoly control over the energy market and relatively weak anti-nuclear groups. And the extremely dependent upon external energy supplies, strong facing technology, and using different Japanese rules of atomic or commercial use and nuclear only for weapons. So after the Fukushima disaster, Japanese society are facing too real this of exposing radiation and many reaction and new activism occurred from society. So very interesting from mid-April, such a protestor started to gather more than, and June 11, Shinjuku, 20,000 protesters gathered and also other 140 places nationwide, many expectations such a mobilization will be decreasing after 2012. But in fact, especially 2012, June and July, especially more than 200,000 protesters gathered. This is very tremendous number, especially in context of Japan. So Simon already referred cold Kante demonstration every Friday evening from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. from the end of March 12, 2012 So many people gathered and especially June and July at the time, the nodal cabinet started to be opening two nuclear reactors in Kansai area to meet the summer peak. This is the number of participants of Akai nuclear demons and mass running in Tokyo. So this is a line, 10,000. This 10,000 line is very critical. So I already described only before the Fukushima accident, only two times more than 10,000 people gathered for anti-nuclear issues. But 2012, June and July, two times 200,000 people gathered and we can find new style of activities like sound demo and stressing self-expressiveness. And there are so many varieties of participants. Interesting, these are new participants are less organized individuals, families and friends, small tentative groups, ordinary citizens and a very low political orientation, motivated by just a strong distrust, anxiety and hunger for prime ministers. So these characters are sharing with the protest that Arab Spring and Occupy a movement in the United States and one of my research colleagues artifacts three types of typical three types of groups. First, 50s and more men and women of leftist backgrounds. They are very concerned about peace and article nine of the constitution Japanese baby boomers born in 1947 and 1950. So the second groups are 30s and 40s female and warring mothers. They are concerned about energy safety and renewable energy. And 20s and early 30s, they are also concerning about anti-poverty and freedom issues. So some stressing media activists don't trust mainstream media, don't accuse mainstream media, yourselves should be alternative media. You should be alternative media reporter. Very interesting. And the leader of the first demonstration in April 2011, he said revolt from ordinary people. But the problem is what are strategies, tactics and effective political route to really change the government energy policy? I think these are not clear. So what are strategies and tactics? Who are effective political partners? Some are collecting signatures and already more than eight million signatures were collected. But they were they effective? And in two elections, general election 2012 and in the upper house election, July 2013, both are repeating wrong. So anti-nuclear activism failed to find their effective political partners. Democratic party of Japan, DPJ's position was very ambiguous on nuclear issues. In contrast with Japan, as you know, in Germany, Merkel decided to shut down all 17 nuclear reactors by the end of 2012. So in Germany, triggered by the Fukushima accident, political and social consensus on nuclear energy was finally reached after Romeo's battle between Puru and Hong size of the nuclear energy division. So I'd like to contrast Japanese situation and Germany. So in Japan, weak political leadership and centralized effective regulation and authority system and weak and small NGOs, no green party, weak boys from civil society and strong boys from economic sector, K-dan-ren and cross-relationship between everybody and economic sector. So after the Fukushima accident, very few policy change happened. Only new law to promote renewable energy and new strict and independent regulations system started. But recently, Airbnb and pro-nuclear side are currently giving strong political pressure to admit the reopening. So Japanese nuclear energy policy, we have three possibilities, shut down all nuclear reactors immediately and reopening the nuclear plants. And DPJ cabinet's policy, admitting 40-year operations strictly and finally by the end of 2030s, denuclearization will be processing or reopening and constructing new plants. This is our cabinet scenarios. So conclusion, after the 311 situation, we are facing real nuclear risks and radiation exposure and people got strongly angry at distrust and disappointed. And civil society in Japan is changing into one where anyone can easily participate in the demonstration. But protesters do not yet succeed to find the effective political route to change the government to nuclear policy, to a post-nuclear state. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, Mr. Hasegawa. Our second speaker is Dr. Shoko Yoneyama. She is a sociologist based at the University of Adelaide. Dr. Yoneyama has published extensively in the sociology of education, as well as in the areas of alternative agriculture and the organic movement in Japan. Professionally, Dr. Yoneyama has been a leading figure in building Japanese studies in Australia, apart from serving as social sciences editor on the flagship journal Japanese Studies. Dr. Yoneyama was coordinator or co-coordinator of the Gateway Japan Study Tour, the largest project funded by the Australian government's new Colombo Plan project in 2014. Dr. Yoneyama's presentation today is based on a recent paper entitled Life World Beyond Fukushima and Minamata, which asks whether we have the language and the concepts in the social sciences to really understand Minamata and Fukushima, a fascinating connection there. And also ask the question about whether we have the capacity in the social sciences to prevent such or the language to prevent such catastrophes happening again. This is a really wonderful paper, which I highly recommend and actually it's available online. I think you can download this one, so please do read it. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Professor Yoneyama. Thank you, Simon, for a very kind introduction and good morning, everybody. It's my pleasure and my honor to be here today as part of Japan Update 2014. So thank you. Well, I have a very lengthy and greedy title here, similar society discourses on life, soul and nature, rethinking the social sciences for the post-Fukushima era. This is the excerpt from the preface of the book 311 by Professor Richard Samuels, who is sitting right here today. Although the scale may differ, the triple disaster would have caused a similar sense in each of us, researchers of Japan, in relation to our own work. My disciplinary background is sociology and what struck me most about 311 are these words by German sociologist Ulrich Beck. He said Japan plunged into the world risk society as a result of the nuclear accident in Fukushima. As you know very well, the exorcist is that world risk society characterized by such things as nuclear accident and global warming is an unfortunate byproduct of modernity and that in order to minimize the risk, it is essential to transform the system. The question is what to change and how to change. The world risk society occurs in what sociologists call second rate or liquid modernity. The main characteristic of it is individualization. There, the connection between the individual and social institutions weakens and the moral and ethical foundation of society also weakens. The question becomes what moral and ethical foundation can protect modern societies from the self destructive tendency of modernity. As you know, Germany decided to decommission all existing nuclear plants in 10 years time immediately after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Underlined this decision was a report by ethics committee for a safe energy supply of which Ulrich Beck was also a member. The report reads a special human duty towards nature has resulted from Christian tradition and European culture. This begs an immediate question of what might be an Asian principle of environmental ethics. When I think about the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, with these questions in mind, what puzzled me most is this? The Minamata program was studied by a group of the best and the most critical social scientists in Japan to the extent that it established what is now called Minamata studies. My question is why with the very best of social scientists, we couldn't prevent Fukushima. The question is not just about power and political economy, but also about epistemology. Have we not missed something really important that's here to understand Minamata and the issues. This graph shows Japan's economic growth by GDP. The red line indicates the growth rate and the histogram, the size of GDP. It shows that this phase of Japan's economic growth began with Minamata and finished with Fukushima. Minamata disease was officially recognized in 1956 exactly at the time the Japan's economic high growth period began. The nuclear accident of Fukushima occurred only days after China officially displaced Japan as the world's second largest economy. Minamata and Fukushima symbolizes the beginning and the end of Japan's economic success. Between 1956 and 2011, social science research has contributed enormously to understanding the structural problems associated with modernity. In the context of Japan we found that even though 55 years apart Fukushima and Minamata have many fundamental commonalities. From the perspective of political economy, the commonalities include that both were driven by relentless pursuit of profit, collusive relationships between industry, governments, bureaucracy and the media, marginalization of critical scientists including social scientists. Looking from a different perspective, the catastrophes of Minamata and Fukushima present cases where breakdown of connectedness occurred at many levels. There was breakdown in communities and families in our relationship with nature in the way food is produced and perceived in a way of life and it affected people's connectedness with the past and the future. What is most important is that the breakdown of connectedness occurred not only in sociological spheres but also in biological dimensions. In the case of Minamata disease, the connectedness in the nervous system in the brain was severed. The recent study by the University of Calgary showed how mercury, the cause of Minamata disease, destructed the growth of neurons in the brain. How it severs the connectedness of the nervous system itself. Radiation, on the other hand, destroys the DNA itself and severs the connectedness among cells. These are the photos of heart and other muscles of Oji Hirishan who died being involved in the criticality incident at Tokaiura in 1999. Heart muscles were not affected much because heart cells do not regenerate much but cells in other parts of his body lost connectedness and turned into a mash. If one of the characteristics of modernity is the weakening connectedness, Minamata and Fukushima epitomizes it to its extreme. They show how relentless pursuit of profit can destroy the very basis of life itself. Is it any wonder then that words which mean connectedness emerged as a legacy of both Minamata and Fukushima? In the case of Minamata, Moyai meaning tie in both together, Kizuna meaning bonds on the other hand has become the legacy of the triple disaster. It is clear that people in Japan felt the need for more connectedness with society after Fukushima. This has been captured by official statistics as well. The public opinion survey conducted in 2012 by the cabinet office showed that some 80 percent of over 6,000 respondents indicated that after the 2011 disaster they came to realize the importance of the connectedness with society to the greater extent that they did earlier. The feeling a sense of connectedness with everything else around us that is spirituality in the broadest sense. In this sense the legacy of Minamata and Fukushima namely Moyai tying both together and Kizuna meaning bonds or the civil society discourse of Minamata and Fukushima can be considered as the discourse of spirituality. I now would like to introduce Obata Masato, a fisherman and philosopher from Minamata. He is the person who said that Moyai tying both together is the legacy of Minamata. About Minamata he reflects this way. The Minamata disease incident has left a question that cannot be dealt with as a political issue. It is the biggest and the most fundamental question. A question that cannot be transformed into a question of policies or institutions. That is a question of the soul or more appropriately in Japanese tamashii. He says that we need to express what soul or tamashii is more substantially and that soul is the basis for the connectedness among people between humans and other creatures and between humans and inanimate things in nature like rivers, the sea, mountains and so on. Now what he's talking about here can be understood as animism. Animism is the notion that everything around us has a kami or spirit and animism connects us with nature. In Obata's philosophy life or inochi in Japanese equals to soul or tamashii in Japanese that is equals to nature. He calls this entity the life world. Animism is a topic that has gained considerably attention in anthropology recently. A new interpretation of animism is that it is a relational concept and not just an ancient belief that there are spirits in nature. It represents a new but old ways of relating to nature and everything else around us with care. Obata's notion of the life world includes not only present day common things, present day living things, but the vast continuum of life millions of years in the past as well as in future. It refers to the totality of life in nature that developed from a common genome of which humans are just a part. Obata says was not the crux of the Minamata struggle, a call from the spiritual world of Minamata fishermen and victims. The heart of the Minamata question lies in the accord to live together in a world where life is lived and connected. In the field of social science, the question of spirituality constitutes a big acuna. This is because social science itself is a product of modernity and secularism has been its most fundamental premise. Matters of spirituality therefore has been epistemologically strange in the social sciences. Animism has been treated as if it were magic and its elimination was considered key to modernity. At the same time, the notions of nature and life have been quite limited in the social science it's so far. Is it possible for the discourse of Minamata and Fukushima to fill this acuna and provide a new but old kind of principle of environmental ethics? So here's my conclusion. Every philosophy and every social theory is culturally and historically specific. While the impact of the increasing economic power of Asia is felt all over the world, no ethical framework to support its sustainable development has emerged. Ogata's philosophy may provide a first step for us to start imagining a new way of perceiving everyday life for different kinds of modernity. To do this may demand an epistemological change in the social sciences. But perhaps there is nothing new in this. After all, sociology didn't exist before Durkheim established the existence of the social phenomena, sui generis, that are independent of the actions and intentions of individuals. Would it be going too far to say that recognition of the existence, sui generis, of the life world might be the precondition for new kind of modernity where sustainable development is possible? Thank you very much, Dr Yoneama. Our third speaker is Professor Tessa Moro Suzuki of the ANU. Of course, Professor Moro Suzuki really needs no introduction, being one of the most influential scholars of East Asia and Japan working today. I must say a constant source of inspiration for her colleagues like myself. In relation to Fukushima, some of Professor Moro Suzuki's recent work has focused on citizen radiation testing, rebuilding initiatives among rural communities near Fukushima and a much broader project on the phenomenon of daily life politics in Japan. Today, Professor Moro Suzuki will be talking about grassroots movements in Fukushima prefecture, but situating these within a wider analysis of recent developments in civil society and democracy more generally in Japan. Please join me in welcoming Professor Moro Suzuki. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. As Simon mentioned, I've taken the liberty of interpreting the topic of this panel fairly broadly, and I want to try and look at some general trends in civil society in Japan and post Fukushima, and also maybe raise a few questions about how we understand the notion of civil society itself. Very soon after the 311 triple disaster, I participated with some other ANU academics in a forum at the Australian Institute of International Affairs on the implications for Japan of the March 2011 tsunami. At that time, events were still unfolding and it was really very difficult to predict anything, but what I tried to do being a historian was to look back at earlier disasters and think what effects such a massive disaster might produce. I could think of two possible developments. One, looking back to the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, a possible reaction would be a defensive sense of nationalism, not in the form of the murderous xenophobia of 1923, but in the form of an intensified inward-turning attitude and a heightened fear of the outside world. Another possible trend, looking back to the 1995 Kobe earthquake, could be a rise in the forms of civil society activism that flourished after that earthquake. Three and a half years on, looking back, I think it's possible to see both of those phenomena having occurred since March 2011, but really not in ways that I could possibly have predicted at the time. In a way, a rise in certain sorts of nationalism and a rise in certain sorts of civil society activism have not only occurred side by side, but have been intertwined in complicated and sometimes rather troubling ways. Much of the early literature on civil society as a phenomenon, a lot of it coming from Europe, took it as a given that civil society organisations were democratic and progressive in outlook, and some scholars define civil society as being democratic and progressive. But events that followed the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s led to the emergence of a more mystic view, and some scholars started writing about uncivil society, so grassroots, non-governmental movements that were nationalistic, anti-democratic, sometimes openly racist. And some scholars of Eastern Europe pointed out that it's actually risky to draw a very sharp line between civil and uncivil society, because certainly in the Eastern European case, sometimes, you know, one kind of morphed into the other. I think since 311 in Japan, we've seen the rise of a really wide spectrum of grassroots action, ranging from the diverse anti-nuclear movements that Professor Hazegawa spoke about through a whole range of other really interesting developments, I'll say a little bit more about, to some far-right grassroots activism that's having quite a profound influence in Japanese society today. And I think it's really important to try to think about that whole range of grassroots action and try and understand how it's connected. So I want to try and make some very brief comments about that, although of course there are only very preliminary comments to open up discussion. The recent proliferation of right-wing grassroots groups in Japan obviously is not directly connected to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and some of these groups existed before the disaster. But I think there are some indirect connections that I'd like to talk about. And in the months following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as Professor Hazegawa explained, we saw this upsurge in anti-nuclear activism in Japan. And as the scale of the disaster became apparent, the protest demonstrations began to attract not only seasoned members of environmental groups, but a mass of people who'd never been engaged in political protests before. And interestingly, just a very few people from the far right joined the anti-nuclear demonstrations. One of them is this person, Hazegawa Daisuke, who has become a quite a vocal anti-nuclear protester. Very much the exception though, of course, and I'll say more about that in a moment. So this tide of anti-nuclear activism peaked really as we saw in the middle of 2012, and had those really interesting characteristics of being quite carnival-esque, bringing in a lot of young people with music and arts and dance in a way that we hadn't really seen before. And also as Professor Hazegawa mentioned, there was talk even of a hydrangea revolution at Aji Sai Kakume, paralleling the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia in 2004. But this loose and largely disorganized confluence of forces lacked the cohesion to become a sustainable movement and also faced very strong opposition from sections of politics, business, and the media. And so although majority public opinion, I believe, still remains in favor of phasing out nuclear power, and obviously a number of determined anti-nuclear groups go on protesting, the mass protest movement, I think we can say, had really collapsed by the second half of 2013. Since then, the most notable wave of non-governmental action in Japan has been the very vocal actions of a growing number of far-right groups, attracting much smaller membership than took part in these anti-nuclear demonstrations, but still being very visible. And their targets, as you probably know, particularly been Koreans in Japan, and recently the Asahi Shinbun, and I'm not going to go into the story of the Asahi Asahi Vasheng phenomenon, but I hope some of you were aware of it. It's very much an important ongoing issue. And these often internet-generated right-wing movements, I think, having a serious stifling impact on free debate in Japan. So you see on top some very kind of aggressive statements from far-right groups. The phenomenon of grassroots right-wing groups obviously is not directly a result of the Fukushima disaster, but I think it's indirectly connected in at least three ways. I think that the expanding appeal of these groups is partly attributable to the fact that they provide an outlet for an amorphous but profound sense of social anxiety that was triggered by the 311 disaster, and that is still there. Partly, of course, because many people in Japan, very understandably, are concerned that there may be another disaster, that the earthquake may be part of a series of seismic movements that may affect Japan again in the future. Secondly, the upsurge of the mass anti-nuclear movement in 2012 posed a direct challenge to some of the far-right groups that had already emerged before 2011, particularly the prominent one, which is called the Zeitokkai. This group had a real sense of crisis that their support base was being eured away to the anti-nuclear movement, and they responded by becoming very aggressive anti-nuclear protesters, pro-nuclear protesters, but also, I think, by intensifying their basically xenophobic message. I also would like to put out what I know is going to be a very controversial suggestion, and one that I really can't prove at all, but I do think that some sections of the media in Japan and some politicians, particularly on the far end of the right-wing spectrum, did probably raise nationalist issues deliberately at the time when the anti-nuclear campaign was at its peak to distract attention away from the nuclear issue. The one case that I'd like to suggest, open to debate, is that in 2012, when these anti-nuclear demonstrations were very active, the then Governor of Tokyo, suddenly proposed that Tokyo was going to buy the Senkaku Islands, and this caused an effect. I can't prove that, but it's a thought. I think the presence of some sort of connection, at a kind of psychological level at least, between the Fukushima disaster and the rise of grassroots xenophobic nationalism, can be seen in this recent upsurge of Asahi bashing this intense campaign of hostility by the internet right-wing and some sections of the mainstream media against the moderately liberal Asahi newspaper, which has focused on two mistakes in reporting that the Asahi made about two issues, one is the comfort women issue and the other is the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In both cases, the Asahi made a mistake in its reporting. Not really, I think, the sort of mistakes that in normal cases would produce this kind of bureau, but it's produced this huge reaction against the Asahi. I think there's something deeper going on here, and I'd open it to debate as to what that is. So I think the very rapid rise and equally rapid collapse of mass-level anti-nuclear protests and the subsequent increase in the salience of grassroots far-right groups is a really important recent development in Japan that needs further examination. But I also wanted to go on to say just a very little about quite different sort of grassroots action that's emerged recently, and it's much more directly related to the Fukushima disaster. And this takes the form of a mass of small grassroots groups responding on the ground to the after-effects of the nuclear disaster in ways that are not very visible and not really overtly political. And again, perhaps this doesn't fit in very well with our conventional image of civil society, but I think it's a really important development. And you can find these grassroots actions, community actions all over Fukushima Prefecture and elsewhere, but I'll just talk about one that I'm particularly familiar with. It's a case study I've been studying for about more than a year now. This is a community movement based in a town called Toa, which is part of Nihonmatsu City in Fukushima Prefecture. Toa is not far from part of the exclusion zone, but it was protected from the worst of the disaster by a range of hills nearby. But it was very badly affected because the town had already decided that it was going to move into organic agriculture and ecotourism to try to revive its local economy. And of course those were absolutely devastated by the effects of the Fukushima disaster. But the Toa community's response to the disaster I think has been really remarkable and in many ways really inspiring. Using their existing organic farming NPO as a hub for their activities, they've developed their own schemes to measure and map radiation in their area. And they've developed collaborative programs with a group of academic scientists from Japan's Organic Farming Research Association to explore ways to reduce the level of radiation in their crops to zero if possible, close to zero. Now some of the members of this community have been very active in the anti-nuclear power movement. Others have not. Others are more cautious about at least the idea of immediately closing nuclear power stations. So there's a range of political views, there's a range of views on nuclear power within the group, but that doesn't really matter because what they're doing on the ground is not to do with ideologies, to do with how do we survive, how do we grow crops that we can sell and that we can eat, and how do we measure our own health and monitor our own health. So in retrospect I think that the years following the Fukushima disaster will come to be seen as an era of profound change in Japanese civil society, but because those changes are still ongoing it's very difficult to reach any firm conclusions about them. And I think that one of the key problems that emerges from the very diverse forms of non-governmental action that I've talked about is the notion of community that Shoko Yoneama referred to in her paper particularly. So the disastrous impact of the Fukushima explosions and meltdowns on the surrounding area encouraged significant and inspiring efforts to rebuild effective communities from the ground up. And as Professor Yoneama mentioned, one of the key terms has been kizuna, bonds. And this is a very ambiguous term so it can be very much about local community bonds, but it can also have a national element to it that in some ways ties in with more right wing sort of rhetoric. And I thought these two images of kizuna were interesting ones, the one on the right very much a local environmental sort of image, the one on the left a more national focused image. So these rather random reflections on civil society in post Fukushima Japan lead not really to any clear conclusions at all, but to a series of questions that I'd like to put forward for our discussion in the session of maybe in the course of the day. For example, is the recent upsurge of right wing groups in Japan a temporary wave that's going to pass as quickly as the upsurge of mass anti-nuclear protests pass or is it part of a longer term trend? And how deep is its long term impact on civil society in the public sphere in Japan going to be? Can the crucial question of the future of nuclear power in Japan be put back at the centre of the public debate agenda because I think it's been somewhat sidelined in the past year? And can grassroots rebuilding of communities damaged by the disaster be developed into a movement that expands the power of an open and tolerant and pluralistic civil society at the national as well as the local members? Thank you very much Tessa. Today we're extremely fortunate to have with us Mr Mari McLean, currently chairman of the Australia Japan Foundation, a generous supporter of today's Japan update. Mr McLean has a long and distinguished career in the Australian Foreign Service and in fact he was serving as Australian Ambassador to Japan at the time of the triple disaster in 2011. Mr McLean has kindly agreed to offer some comments on his experiences and impressions of that moment. So please join me in welcoming Mr McLean. Well thank you very much Simon. It's a great pleasure also to be on behalf of the Australia Japan Foundation to assist in hosting this event which is a very valuable annual one and we certainly look forward to doing that in the future. Simon's asked me to talk about my impressions at that time. I don't want to give you some stale impressions. I wanted also having heard the three very interesting presentations also to offer a few comments relating to those as well. Clearly on 311 it was a drastic situation but it unlike I think anything else that Japan had faced in the post-war period it was quite unanticipated that it would be a an unfolding disaster over a period of not just a few hours as it was initially with the earthquake followed by the tsunamis three or four big waves not just the one and then of course the unfolding nature of the Fukushima disaster which really the public in Japan was kept heavily ignorant of I'd have to say a really shameless it was a shameful performance of Tecco in hiding it from its own employees let alone the government of the day one can understand the need to avoid panic or causing panic but the abiding impression that we in Tokyo at that particular time had was nonetheless and this is also if I can make a comparison with my rather longer period including through disasters like the 1976 Tongchang earthquake in Beijing that the response from the China the Japanese public was really rather different from that that I experienced in China in the early days and that was of a community of people who were extraordinarily controlled and very calm in the sense that he was this huge disaster nobody really knew what the implications were and the resilience I think that one saw and the patience that one experienced of people who walked sometimes 12 hours back to their homes many long kilometers away or stood in queues for ever dwindling supplies of absolutely basic necessities like water and milk was something that frankly you don't see in China it would have been all hell breaking loose and going forward so that was an impression that I think was quite abiding for me and one that impressed me very deeply about how the Japanese as a nation were going to cope with this disaster the fact that some of the communities in Fukushima were just completely destroyed effectively in terms of they're having to evacuate without really any notice was one of the reasons why the Australia Japan Foundation decided to devote approximately 20 to 25 percent of its budget to helping the recovery of the communities not only in Fukushima but also in Amisariko and on the coastal areas where the Australian search and rescue team had gone in the immediate days following the disaster and we continue to do that now for four years after the disaster we have we invite grants as you would be aware from many associations including this university and we've in our small way I think helped to rekindle the community spirit that I think is very important and it's an essential part of the fabric of Japan's society in these areas the dislocated communities of around Itate which was 45 kilometers from Fukushima but by a freak of atmospheric and weather conditions received a huge dump of radiation on it raising the levels of radiation there's some hundred times what they should have been um were one of the reasons why the Australia Japan Foundation decided to support in several ways giving playground equipment to the children of the kindergarten who were of the displaced families and also to set up a mobile library service for the Kurangis so there are some of the things we did I would also just like thirdly to comment on something that hasn't really come out but has been implicit in the comments of the three speakers today and that is that clearly there's a huge upsurge of worry and concern amongst a lot of the population in Japan about the implications of having nuclear energy as part of the energy mix and as you'd be all aware at the time of the Fukushima disaster it was something like 28 percent of the energy mix it's now zero and that is of course not without its impact on Japan's economy in fact it's got it's one of the biggest factors that is going to potentially impact and is impacting I guess on the ability of the Japanese economy to pull out of the morass that it has been in over the last couple of decades the price of imported fuels to provide the energy of Japanese industry and community needs is clearly one that hits the budget very hard and that's one of the reasons I suppose why the administration is as it were committed to restoring at least some part of the nuclear energy contribution to the energy mix I'm just commenting on this I'm not making a value judgment one way or the other that while there's more than 50 percent I think of the population who is anti-nuclear it doesn't translate into 50 percent voting against the ABE or the LDP so it's not as it were an issue that is necessarily going to determine how the government works and I'd also comment that a lot of the a lot of the demonstrations in 2012 and 2013 were also I suspect stirred by a general community disappointment with the democratic party not being able to deliver as well as it might have been able to or they hoped people people hoped it would have been able to deliver following the nuclear disaster and the reconstruction effort it was really very difficult for any government to approach that with with and to have succeeded but they unfortunately were the ones in government at the time that happened and actually got the backlash a lot from it so I think a lot of those demonstrations but not only about anti-nuclear sentiment but also probably about the administration's perceived failure of the time to cope with it all anyway I think that's a few comments thank you very much mr. McClane so can I invite our speakers to uh okay so please let me open up the floor to uh questions and uh comments uh Lee Gonson from a you uh thank you very much for the uh the very interesting and informative and update discussion on these are one of the important issues my uh my question just to uh professor Agawasan and uh your key hypothesis of your speech is that the state when state is strong and civil society is awake when the state is awakened and civil society are rising so uh you you seem to suggest that there's some kind of a substitute relationship and I will argue that hope actually lies at uh you know the compliments and uh in the society whether the rising civil society in responding to the crisis can can make the you know the state be stronger in confronting those challenges and the crisis rather than being further awakened by the rising one so that that also related to my second question you uh when you review the uh the regulations in comparison between Japan and Germany I was noticed that is uh the in Japan is centralized but ineffective but in Germany it's a decentralized regulation so uh in terms of regulation probably centralized maybe more effective in terms of enforcement so uh the the reason why the Japan's uh the system become ineffective perhaps that's due to something else so that's my second question thanks uh thank you uh uh questions for me uh yeah uh the relationship between a state and civil society yeah how can I think about uh both relationship uh for example uh in the U.S. relatively weak uh uh government and strong civil society I'm not sure here in Australia maybe strong civil society uh but uh in in japanese context uh balancing between the power of central government and the power of civil society uh unfortunately a uh traditional or maybe in South Korea and maybe in mainland China and in Taiwan uh in east asian context we are facing uh strong state and relatively weak civil society and uh getting more uh strong civil society will includes uh more uh democratic society this is one of my basic uh hypothesis and especially in KC era uh Japan has lots of social problems to uh to be tackling uh for example uh very low fertility rate and uh a lot of uh uh risk society situation described uh professor Yoneama today yeah so uh the uh best the most priority things to do in Japanese society is uh how we should promote vibrant uh voluntary civil society yeah this is my basic hypothesis and uh second your question uh sorry I'm not clear your point regulation the the slides we're seeing in Japan is a centralized system uh effective in Germany is a decentralized system but of course it might be uh effective so what is the reason for that what is the cause as well oh yeah it was very historical uh because uh uh very interesting in even Edo era uh and uh pretty Edo era Japan has very a centralized system uh like Kyoto do you know the word uh Nobori Kudari in railway every railway station go to Tokyo called Nobori and uh uh in pretty modern era go to Kyoto called Nobori I cannot find any society which have such a Nobori Kudari a word so it is so uh Japan has very a centralized system because based on very homogeneous society I think Carol Lawson from Nagoya University my questions for Tessa Morris Suzuki and thank you for three fascinating presentations can you fit the apparent um subversion or misdirection of the Japanese population away from deep concern over nuclear power into Roger Goodman's narrative of crisis social panic apparent government intervention followed by a modification thank you yes um I hadn't I hadn't thought of that particular framework but I think that it does probably fit very well um um I think it's it's a complicated issue because I think the the sense of social anxiety in Japan at the moment is a really complex one so it is partly directly about nuclear power it's partly about the fact that we still really don't know what the human and environmental effects of the Fukushima disaster are going to be but of course it's also more broadly about the natural disaster issue um but I do think that um there have been some deliberate attempts at the political level and not you know meaning not only politicians but also sections of the media and so on to try to um yeah channel that anxiety in directions that will make it manageable from the point of view from the political point of view yes we have a question down the front yeah thank you uh Nobu Akiyan for Hitotsubashi University thank you very much for our fascinating uh uh three presentations I have uh uh sort of a bit different view on the the worries and the radiation effect uh I think it's a bit too uh much if I we said society Japanese society is whole uh concern about radiation I think the uh you know radiation impact uh may give some different uh impacts on the different parts of society so uh you know in even within civil society there are kind of a discourse whether we should help Fukushima by consuming the products from Fukushima or we shouldn't really eat anything from Fukushima and uh so I think that's kind of social divide is also the facts of the life and secondly um um in Fukushima the more uh serious uh matter is that Fukushima people have a sense that they are more sort of uh anguished about uh it's how do you how do you call it kyohan kanke or I say complicity whether the Tokyo the typical and the government in creating a myth of safety I mean the before the accident uh you know the typical and government said that the nuclear power plants are really safe but uh in fact this discourse was partly uh created by this kind of relationship between local people who we want to have some economic uh you know uh the nuclear power plants for their economic reasons and they try to close eyes and they actually partly asked the government and the typical to say not much about the risks so after the crisis and I think the Fukushima people are so much uh kind of a you know feel they sense so bad about what they have done before Fukushima so I think that is also something that we have to think about as a kind of a part of civil society uh you know the discourse and thirdly on the question of Asahi it's not about the I don't think it should be uh grabs in the context of anti-nuclear pro-nuclear but it's more about anti-orthotative discourse provided by the establishment and of course the uh the Asahi bashing people are from mostly from Blackbeam and uh I don't think that's really appropriate way for them to do it in particular they are also part of media which communities kind of appropriate you know the coverage on a couple of things but mostly Asahi is seen as kind of a symbolic of the authoritative way of you know authority of creating public opinion in Japan and the many people are not so happy with that change that's why you know when they found the mistakes by Asahi then you know people try to bash and so that's why the Shukanshi Shukanbunshun weekly magazines are sort of very much leading this kind of campaign against Asahi any comments from our panel just if I could just quickly respond yes I mean I think you've the first point about that sense of guilt in way is a really powerful one and it's so sad but that many people in Fukushima accepted the establishment of the nuclear power plant because they were desperate for jobs and and they were not very well informed about the risks they were not at all well informed about the risk and then on top of that with for example the community that I'm looking at they then face the problem of when they try to sell their goods in other parts of Japan sometimes they're almost treated as though they're aggressors or wrongdoers because they're trying to sell goods from Fukushima to other people so I think this this is a really really sad and difficult problem that that people in Fukushima face and then they need sort of understanding and support to to deal with that and on us he yes I mean I agree with you it's certainly an anti-authoritarian issue in a way but it's interesting I mean we get this in other places that it always tends to be the authority or the establishment or the elite on the left side that gets the relatively left side that gets the bashing so a lot of the bashing is being done by relatively large mainstream equally elite newspapers that are on the other side I would like to add my opinion question from professor in many opinion survey showed after Fukushima nuclear accident and many people tend to show their distrust to mainstream broadcasting and major newspapers so in case of anti-asahi campaign it's extreme but it's one of the the distrust of ordinary citizens yeah many people supported from extra right wing people but in fact general citizens have some kind of distrust for mainstream Japanese newspapers it's a wonderful example in case of asahi just quickly the complicit relationship between typical and government I think I have no problem with that but I think it's very difficult to say anything about Fukushima people as a kind of unit or whole because the the nature of the issue I think is the the disconnectedness among the people in in Fukushima itself so somehow benefited enormously from typical but others didn't some received you know compensation others didn't some have children young children others don't you know even within the family there is a dispute that there can be a dispute between whether the vegetable grown by the grandpa should be eaten by the you know grandson or something like that so I think it's when we talk about people in Fukushima we have to be very careful to understand this divisiveness within the community thank you okay um oh you're begging me okay is it a quick question okay one maybe you have time for one more quick question right here in the middle thanks again for the lectures I have one question did the idea of the German government to close down the nuclear facilities has any influence on the first anti-nuclear movement and on the government in Japan okay I think unfortunately a Germany's decision by a cancer america right after Fukushima accident in 2011 this decision did not affect Japanese government democratic party of japan and following recent a repeat and komei cabinet because the uh government said uh japan is a island so we don't have uh uh parking electricity like Germany Germany has uh french and surrounding area can produce uh can provide uh electricity yeah this is a one of uh physical difficulty in case of japan okay so uh it's time now for a break for morning tea um I would like to once again thank our panelists and also our commentator mr marie mclean please join me in the show