Japan ist ein Einwanderungsland und ein demokratischer Rechtsstaat. Integration ist daher auch ei... more Japan ist ein Einwanderungsland und ein demokratischer Rechtsstaat. Integration ist daher auch eine Frage des Zugangs zu rechtstaatlichen Institutionen. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Vertretung von migrantischen Interessen durch cause lawyering als Kanal der Integration von Migrant*innen in den japanischen Rechtsstaat einerseits und als Beitrag zu seiner Weiterentwicklung andererseits. Zwei Schwerpunkte der bestehenden Forschungsliteratur zu internationaler Migration und Integration in Japan sind die lokale Ebene und die Zivilgesellschaft im engeren Sinne, also bürgerschaftliches Engagement und NGOs. Die in diesem Feld beobachteten Organisationen und Aktivist*innen decken ein breites Spektrum an Tätigkeiten und Motivationen ab – vom Origamikurs über Gottesdienst und Japanisch-Unterricht bis hin zur gewerkschaftlichen Organisation, Rechtsbeistand und Opferschutz. Je konfliktreicher soziale Prozesse sind, desto mehr bedürfen sie einer gerechten Aushandlung. Von daher ist die Zusammenarbeit Hilfs- und Advocacyorganisationen mit Jurist*innen ein zentraler Aspekt der Interessenvertretung von Migrant*innen. Diese soll hier als cause lawyering zum ersten Mal systematisch erfasst werden. Als Beispiel dienen Fälle innerhalb des Technical Internship Training Program, Japans wichtigstem Anwerbungsprogramm für temporärer Arbeitsmigration. Ich werde zeigen, dass japanische Jurist*innen und ihre Selbstorganisation in diesem Bereich eine wichtige Schnittstelle zwischen Migrantenhilfe, Advocacy und Rechtsstaat darstellen. Nicht nur haben sie Hilfsorganisationen rechtlich beraten und Migrant*innen vor Gericht vertreten. Sie haben darüber hinaus selbst zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen ins Leben gerufen und Politikvorschläge formuliert und sich somit an der politischen Willensbildung beteiligt.
Japan Through the Lens of the Tokyo Olympics, 2020
While the Tokyo 2020 Games were initially conceptualized as one of the most compact Games ever ... more While the Tokyo 2020 Games were initially conceptualized as one of the most compact Games ever held, many sports were later relocated to distant venues. Using the examples of mountain biking in Izu and surfing in Ichinomiya this chapter discusses the process of relocation to rural areas and its impact on the host communities as well as the sports themselves. Looking beyond 2020, the chapter discusses how outdoor sports can function as drivers for rural revitalization.
Japan’s New Ruralities: Coping with Decline in the Periphery, 2020
Renewable energies have the potential to increase energy security, reduce greenhouse gas emission... more Renewable energies have the potential to increase energy security, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and provide an economic basis for the sustainable development of rural areas. Facing typical peripherality issues such as socio-economic decline, poor accessibility, limited political autonomy and tightened budgets, rural communities in Japan are pressed to venture into new institutional arrangements in order to fulfill their statutory duties. Increasing self-sufficiency has therefore emerged as a key strategy for local governments, including energy self-sufficiency. This chapter analyzes some key trends in Japan’s recent energy transformation and energy policy, in particular government policies linking renewable energy to local development, and local-level conflicts related to increases in renewable energy generation. Case studies highlight the diversity of challenges and the need for locally-specific solutions that lead to healthier communities. However, the analysis suggests that structural preconditions and current government policy rather than technology bear the responsibility for prevailing market and governance structures. Renewable energy strategies are potentially successful when technologies and scale match local economic and social needs. Success therefore requires an informed, motivated, and capable local government open for engagement with a broad actor-network including external sources of advice and funding through government subsidies or socially responsible investors.
Local Action on Climate Change - Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research, 2018
Japan is currently supplying its energy demand mostly by importing fossil fuels, especially lique... more Japan is currently supplying its energy demand mostly by importing fossil fuels, especially liquefied natural gas (LNG). This is costly and emits a huge amount of green house gases (GHG). While the central government in Tokyo aims at reducing Japan’s dependence on imported fuels by restarting nuclear power plants and promoting renewable energies, local communities struggle with depopulation, political and economic dependence, as well as a lack in financial resources. Two case studies from different parts of Japan highlight the high degree in the country’s regional diversity, as well as the debilitating effects previous policies had on the ability of local community to address local and global transformations. Our case studies show striking differences. While one local community has followed the trend of municipal mergers, turning it into a remote part of a rural “city” with over a 100,000 inhabitants, the other has retained its municipal autonomy and was even able to counter act depopulation keeping its population at ca. 14,000. While climate protection in the first case is still in the stage of bureaucratic planning with little or no implementation, the second case displays a high degree of circular resource management that has resulted in a significant reduction in waste production, GHG-emissions and public sending. Looking at local communities more closely can provide us with insights on the political and socio-economic challenges related to successful climate mitigation and sustainable local economic development. Our cases show, that local problems seem to be much more eminent in the perception and motivation for taking action and that climate protection sometimes comes as a side effect. We also point out that while there is a huge natural, economic and social potential for renewable energies in Japan, committed politician, entrepreneurs and citizen activists face serious political and economic challenges.
The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for o... more The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for old phenomena and attributing new phenomena to old words. In this commented translation from a Japanese source text, this historical process is demonstrated for the term civil society and the languages German, French, Italian and Japanese. In his 1989 article “On Gramsci’s notion of civil society”, Japanese Marxist Kiyoaki Hirata compared the use of the term by Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, while translating it to Japanese as shimin shakai 市民社会, today a highly popular term in Japan. After having published a translation of the first part of Hirata’s article, in which he endeavors on the connections and differences between Hegel and Marx, we have now translated the second part, in which Hirata reconstructs how Gramsci relied on Hegel and Marx in redefining the concept of civil society (società civile). We have pointed out why the global resurgence of the term civil society during the 1990s was accompanied by the invention of the neologism Zivilgesellschaft, while the classic term bürgerliche Gesellschaft almost fell into disuse in the German language. As both the English and the Japanese discourse on civil society (shimin shakai) continued unaffected by this translative-turn however, we have decided to translate shimin shakai in this pre-1990 text as bürgerliche Gesellschaft. This way we are able underline the fact that Hegel, Marx and Gramsci were writing on and further developing the same concept and that just because they have highlighted different aspects and attributed different functions to it, we do not necessarily need different words for each concept in order to properly understand these continuities and differences. More so we argue that neologisms like Zivilgesellschaft and Bürgergesellschaft have in the German discourse obscured continuities in the history of ideas on civil society. Hiratas text – despite of its weaknesses, such as a neglect of scientific documentation standards and a highly metaphoric and speculative language – is therefore a valuable contribution to highlighting such continuities and worth to be made accessible to a non-Japanese speaking readership. By pointing out the dialectic heritage in Gramsci’s writings, Hirata – much differently from many post-1990 authors – shows that Gramsci’s civil society is not constituted by a set of more or less organized so-called “non-state” actors that enclose and limit government authority, but rather forms an integral part of the state in which a government’s political force is bolstered by an ethical hegemony. It is in civil society that leading groups stabilize their authority over the whole society by educating and persuading the subaltern groups to an active consent to social and economic rules that benefit the interests of the leading group, while on the other hand no subaltern group can ever become politically leading before having established ethical hegemony in civil society.
A large part of civil society in Japan, and migrant support groups in particular, has been descri... more A large part of civil society in Japan, and migrant support groups in particular, has been described as apolitical and service oriented, being strong in generating social capital but weak in advocacy or lobbying politics. Developments preceding the 2009 reform of immigration policies in Japan call for qualifying this assessment. While the majority of migrant support groups are active on the local level, some have formed a national umbrella organization that has formulated policy proposals, acted as an external advisor in the policy-making process and built networks with foreign governments, international organizations and NGOs. They have engaged in agenda setting and influenced the way in which migration and NGOs themselves are framed in the Japanese mass media. This I will show in a case study on advocacy organizations involved in the recent reform of Japan's Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) for foreigners. By focusing on a political process rather than a set of organizations, this paper not only observes transnational advocacy networks in the making, but also gives an accurate evaluation of their political impact. Migrant advocacy organizations informed an international public and were able to change the attitude of other political actors and interest groups and as a result tipped the scales in the policy-making process.
The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for o... more The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for old phenomena and attributing new phenomena to old words. In this commented translation from a Japanese source text, this historical process is demonstrated for the term civil society and the languages German, French, Italian and Japanese. In his 1989 article “On Gramsci’s notion of civil society”, Japanese Marxist Kiyoaki Hirata compared the use of the term by Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, while translating it to Japanese as shimin shakai 市民社会, today a highly popular term in Japan. We have translated the first part of Hirata’s article, in which he endeavors on the connections and differences between Hegel and Marx. His major finding is that Karl Marx in Misère de la philosophie (1847) has taken Hegel’s concept of civil society or civic community (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), splitting it in two and so differentiating between civil society (société civile) and bourgeois society (société bourgeoise). However, as Hirata noticed, when Misère de la philosophie was translated to German as Das Elend der Philosophie in 1888 this differentiation was lost. The German version, just like Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts only spoke of bürgerliche Gesellschaft. When Hirata translated the text to Japanese, however, he opted for using the French original as source text, thus distinguishing between shimin shakai and burujoa shakai. What Hirata does not mention though, is that by translating the French société bourgeoise to German as bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Friedrich Engels have cut off the German discussion on bürgerliche Gesellschaft from the global discussion of civil society for more than a century. Only in the late 1980s, German speaking Marxist intellectuals engaging with the works of Antonio Gramsci began to realize that there is more to bürgerliche Gesellschaft than being a translation for société bourgeoise. This inspired them even to invent the new word Zivilgesellschaft as a translation for the Gramscian società civile – a linguistic trick that is peculiar to the German language, and became necessary because the German language had lacked a marker for the difference between bourgeois and citoyen. In the following years however, Zivilgesellschaft became such a popular term that has by now replaced Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft as a translation for civil society in many contexts and has been attributed many contested meanings – way beyond the realm of Marxist theory. These processes of translations and transformation are usually invisible in our daily use of language, and become only apparent when we actively compare and interpret sources from different epochs and languages.
Japan ist ein Einwanderungsland und ein demokratischer Rechtsstaat. Integration ist daher auch ei... more Japan ist ein Einwanderungsland und ein demokratischer Rechtsstaat. Integration ist daher auch eine Frage des Zugangs zu rechtstaatlichen Institutionen. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Vertretung von migrantischen Interessen durch cause lawyering als Kanal der Integration von Migrant*innen in den japanischen Rechtsstaat einerseits und als Beitrag zu seiner Weiterentwicklung andererseits. Zwei Schwerpunkte der bestehenden Forschungsliteratur zu internationaler Migration und Integration in Japan sind die lokale Ebene und die Zivilgesellschaft im engeren Sinne, also bürgerschaftliches Engagement und NGOs. Die in diesem Feld beobachteten Organisationen und Aktivist*innen decken ein breites Spektrum an Tätigkeiten und Motivationen ab – vom Origamikurs über Gottesdienst und Japanisch-Unterricht bis hin zur gewerkschaftlichen Organisation, Rechtsbeistand und Opferschutz. Je konfliktreicher soziale Prozesse sind, desto mehr bedürfen sie einer gerechten Aushandlung. Von daher ist die Zusammenarbeit Hilfs- und Advocacyorganisationen mit Jurist*innen ein zentraler Aspekt der Interessenvertretung von Migrant*innen. Diese soll hier als cause lawyering zum ersten Mal systematisch erfasst werden. Als Beispiel dienen Fälle innerhalb des Technical Internship Training Program, Japans wichtigstem Anwerbungsprogramm für temporärer Arbeitsmigration. Ich werde zeigen, dass japanische Jurist*innen und ihre Selbstorganisation in diesem Bereich eine wichtige Schnittstelle zwischen Migrantenhilfe, Advocacy und Rechtsstaat darstellen. Nicht nur haben sie Hilfsorganisationen rechtlich beraten und Migrant*innen vor Gericht vertreten. Sie haben darüber hinaus selbst zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen ins Leben gerufen und Politikvorschläge formuliert und sich somit an der politischen Willensbildung beteiligt.
Japan Through the Lens of the Tokyo Olympics, 2020
While the Tokyo 2020 Games were initially conceptualized as one of the most compact Games ever ... more While the Tokyo 2020 Games were initially conceptualized as one of the most compact Games ever held, many sports were later relocated to distant venues. Using the examples of mountain biking in Izu and surfing in Ichinomiya this chapter discusses the process of relocation to rural areas and its impact on the host communities as well as the sports themselves. Looking beyond 2020, the chapter discusses how outdoor sports can function as drivers for rural revitalization.
Japan’s New Ruralities: Coping with Decline in the Periphery, 2020
Renewable energies have the potential to increase energy security, reduce greenhouse gas emission... more Renewable energies have the potential to increase energy security, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and provide an economic basis for the sustainable development of rural areas. Facing typical peripherality issues such as socio-economic decline, poor accessibility, limited political autonomy and tightened budgets, rural communities in Japan are pressed to venture into new institutional arrangements in order to fulfill their statutory duties. Increasing self-sufficiency has therefore emerged as a key strategy for local governments, including energy self-sufficiency. This chapter analyzes some key trends in Japan’s recent energy transformation and energy policy, in particular government policies linking renewable energy to local development, and local-level conflicts related to increases in renewable energy generation. Case studies highlight the diversity of challenges and the need for locally-specific solutions that lead to healthier communities. However, the analysis suggests that structural preconditions and current government policy rather than technology bear the responsibility for prevailing market and governance structures. Renewable energy strategies are potentially successful when technologies and scale match local economic and social needs. Success therefore requires an informed, motivated, and capable local government open for engagement with a broad actor-network including external sources of advice and funding through government subsidies or socially responsible investors.
Local Action on Climate Change - Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research, 2018
Japan is currently supplying its energy demand mostly by importing fossil fuels, especially lique... more Japan is currently supplying its energy demand mostly by importing fossil fuels, especially liquefied natural gas (LNG). This is costly and emits a huge amount of green house gases (GHG). While the central government in Tokyo aims at reducing Japan’s dependence on imported fuels by restarting nuclear power plants and promoting renewable energies, local communities struggle with depopulation, political and economic dependence, as well as a lack in financial resources. Two case studies from different parts of Japan highlight the high degree in the country’s regional diversity, as well as the debilitating effects previous policies had on the ability of local community to address local and global transformations. Our case studies show striking differences. While one local community has followed the trend of municipal mergers, turning it into a remote part of a rural “city” with over a 100,000 inhabitants, the other has retained its municipal autonomy and was even able to counter act depopulation keeping its population at ca. 14,000. While climate protection in the first case is still in the stage of bureaucratic planning with little or no implementation, the second case displays a high degree of circular resource management that has resulted in a significant reduction in waste production, GHG-emissions and public sending. Looking at local communities more closely can provide us with insights on the political and socio-economic challenges related to successful climate mitigation and sustainable local economic development. Our cases show, that local problems seem to be much more eminent in the perception and motivation for taking action and that climate protection sometimes comes as a side effect. We also point out that while there is a huge natural, economic and social potential for renewable energies in Japan, committed politician, entrepreneurs and citizen activists face serious political and economic challenges.
The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for o... more The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for old phenomena and attributing new phenomena to old words. In this commented translation from a Japanese source text, this historical process is demonstrated for the term civil society and the languages German, French, Italian and Japanese. In his 1989 article “On Gramsci’s notion of civil society”, Japanese Marxist Kiyoaki Hirata compared the use of the term by Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, while translating it to Japanese as shimin shakai 市民社会, today a highly popular term in Japan. After having published a translation of the first part of Hirata’s article, in which he endeavors on the connections and differences between Hegel and Marx, we have now translated the second part, in which Hirata reconstructs how Gramsci relied on Hegel and Marx in redefining the concept of civil society (società civile). We have pointed out why the global resurgence of the term civil society during the 1990s was accompanied by the invention of the neologism Zivilgesellschaft, while the classic term bürgerliche Gesellschaft almost fell into disuse in the German language. As both the English and the Japanese discourse on civil society (shimin shakai) continued unaffected by this translative-turn however, we have decided to translate shimin shakai in this pre-1990 text as bürgerliche Gesellschaft. This way we are able underline the fact that Hegel, Marx and Gramsci were writing on and further developing the same concept and that just because they have highlighted different aspects and attributed different functions to it, we do not necessarily need different words for each concept in order to properly understand these continuities and differences. More so we argue that neologisms like Zivilgesellschaft and Bürgergesellschaft have in the German discourse obscured continuities in the history of ideas on civil society. Hiratas text – despite of its weaknesses, such as a neglect of scientific documentation standards and a highly metaphoric and speculative language – is therefore a valuable contribution to highlighting such continuities and worth to be made accessible to a non-Japanese speaking readership. By pointing out the dialectic heritage in Gramsci’s writings, Hirata – much differently from many post-1990 authors – shows that Gramsci’s civil society is not constituted by a set of more or less organized so-called “non-state” actors that enclose and limit government authority, but rather forms an integral part of the state in which a government’s political force is bolstered by an ethical hegemony. It is in civil society that leading groups stabilize their authority over the whole society by educating and persuading the subaltern groups to an active consent to social and economic rules that benefit the interests of the leading group, while on the other hand no subaltern group can ever become politically leading before having established ethical hegemony in civil society.
A large part of civil society in Japan, and migrant support groups in particular, has been descri... more A large part of civil society in Japan, and migrant support groups in particular, has been described as apolitical and service oriented, being strong in generating social capital but weak in advocacy or lobbying politics. Developments preceding the 2009 reform of immigration policies in Japan call for qualifying this assessment. While the majority of migrant support groups are active on the local level, some have formed a national umbrella organization that has formulated policy proposals, acted as an external advisor in the policy-making process and built networks with foreign governments, international organizations and NGOs. They have engaged in agenda setting and influenced the way in which migration and NGOs themselves are framed in the Japanese mass media. This I will show in a case study on advocacy organizations involved in the recent reform of Japan's Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) for foreigners. By focusing on a political process rather than a set of organizations, this paper not only observes transnational advocacy networks in the making, but also gives an accurate evaluation of their political impact. Migrant advocacy organizations informed an international public and were able to change the attitude of other political actors and interest groups and as a result tipped the scales in the policy-making process.
The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for o... more The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for old phenomena and attributing new phenomena to old words. In this commented translation from a Japanese source text, this historical process is demonstrated for the term civil society and the languages German, French, Italian and Japanese. In his 1989 article “On Gramsci’s notion of civil society”, Japanese Marxist Kiyoaki Hirata compared the use of the term by Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, while translating it to Japanese as shimin shakai 市民社会, today a highly popular term in Japan. We have translated the first part of Hirata’s article, in which he endeavors on the connections and differences between Hegel and Marx. His major finding is that Karl Marx in Misère de la philosophie (1847) has taken Hegel’s concept of civil society or civic community (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), splitting it in two and so differentiating between civil society (société civile) and bourgeois society (société bourgeoise). However, as Hirata noticed, when Misère de la philosophie was translated to German as Das Elend der Philosophie in 1888 this differentiation was lost. The German version, just like Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts only spoke of bürgerliche Gesellschaft. When Hirata translated the text to Japanese, however, he opted for using the French original as source text, thus distinguishing between shimin shakai and burujoa shakai. What Hirata does not mention though, is that by translating the French société bourgeoise to German as bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Friedrich Engels have cut off the German discussion on bürgerliche Gesellschaft from the global discussion of civil society for more than a century. Only in the late 1980s, German speaking Marxist intellectuals engaging with the works of Antonio Gramsci began to realize that there is more to bürgerliche Gesellschaft than being a translation for société bourgeoise. This inspired them even to invent the new word Zivilgesellschaft as a translation for the Gramscian società civile – a linguistic trick that is peculiar to the German language, and became necessary because the German language had lacked a marker for the difference between bourgeois and citoyen. In the following years however, Zivilgesellschaft became such a popular term that has by now replaced Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft as a translation for civil society in many contexts and has been attributed many contested meanings – way beyond the realm of Marxist theory. These processes of translations and transformation are usually invisible in our daily use of language, and become only apparent when we actively compare and interpret sources from different epochs and languages.
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Book Chapters by Daniel Kremers
Our case studies show striking differences. While one local community has followed the trend of municipal mergers, turning it into a remote part of a rural “city” with over a 100,000 inhabitants, the other has retained its municipal autonomy and was even able to counter act depopulation keeping its population at ca. 14,000. While climate protection in the first case is still in the stage of bureaucratic planning with little or no implementation, the second case displays a high degree of circular resource management that has resulted in a significant reduction in waste production, GHG-emissions and public sending.
Looking at local communities more closely can provide us with insights on the political and socio-economic challenges related to successful climate mitigation and sustainable local economic development. Our cases show, that local problems seem to be much more eminent in the perception and motivation for taking action and that climate protection sometimes comes as a side effect. We also point out that while there is a huge natural, economic and social potential for renewable energies in Japan, committed politician, entrepreneurs and citizen activists face serious political and economic challenges.
Papers by Daniel Kremers
Our case studies show striking differences. While one local community has followed the trend of municipal mergers, turning it into a remote part of a rural “city” with over a 100,000 inhabitants, the other has retained its municipal autonomy and was even able to counter act depopulation keeping its population at ca. 14,000. While climate protection in the first case is still in the stage of bureaucratic planning with little or no implementation, the second case displays a high degree of circular resource management that has resulted in a significant reduction in waste production, GHG-emissions and public sending.
Looking at local communities more closely can provide us with insights on the political and socio-economic challenges related to successful climate mitigation and sustainable local economic development. Our cases show, that local problems seem to be much more eminent in the perception and motivation for taking action and that climate protection sometimes comes as a side effect. We also point out that while there is a huge natural, economic and social potential for renewable energies in Japan, committed politician, entrepreneurs and citizen activists face serious political and economic challenges.