Making Japanese Citizens is both informative and polemical as it traces the creation of what the author calls the “shimin idea”—a malleable but enduring notion of the citizen as an autonomous agent of social change—and the rise of civil society in the latter half of the twentieth century. Following a chronological trajectory, Avenell guides his readers through a rich and, in his view, troubled history of civic movements on the changing social and political terrain of Japan's long postwar era: the independent cultural and social circles of early postwar years; the nationwide mobilization against the renewal of the security treaty between Japan and the United States in 1960; Beheiren, the unaligned Citizens Alliance for Peace in Vietnam in the late 1960s; local residents and citizens' movements addressing environmental and development issues in the 1960s and 1970s; and alternative social initiatives of the late 1970s and 1980s followed by the rise of voluntarism and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the 1990s.

Throughout the study, Avenell gives precedence to the words of movement intellectuals (organic and otherwise) who became spokesmen (spokeswomen are the exception in this study) for these movements. Drawing on the concept of “collective action frames” from social movement theory, he argues that the ideas of leaders and advocates have been instrumental in shaping postwar civic movements as well as the identities and aspirations of those who joined them. Avenell aims to explain how a core of ideas is “produced, debated, contested, and put into practice by movement participants,” or, in the words he borrows from Sheri Berman, how ideas become “durable factor(s) in political life” (6). In principle, this is a worthy enterprise, but actually making the linkage between discourse and practice is never a simple matter. Although the book sheds revealing light on the evolution of the postwar discourse on citizen engagement in a democratic society, it could do more, in my view, to illuminate the reciprocity between leaders and participants, and the dialectic between ideas and practice. This is particularly so because the ideas the author chooses to emphasize cast doubt on the progressive credentials of Japan's social movement history.

This brings me back to polemics. Avenell argues against two divergent approaches to citizen engagement and social movements in postwar Japan. The first emphasizes the predominance of the Japanese state in shaping civil society by actively limiting and selectively incentivizing voluntary associational activity. The second highlights the emergence of “new social movements” (NSM) in post-1960 Japan as part of a broader transformation toward more issue-based, autonomous, and socially heterogeneous forms of collective action in industrialized societies. In response to the strong state model, Avenell argues that Japan's powerful bureaucracy notwithstanding, movement intellectuals have exercised a great deal of agency in creating the ideas and agendas that have moved people to conviction and action. In reply to the NSM theorists, he contends first that the generic rubric risks obscuring the particularities of the Japanese case and, second, that its progressive rhetoric allows no room for the conservative proclivities he identifies in the movement culture of postwar Japan.

On the one hand, Avenell acknowledges an efflorescence of civic movements and the eventual creation of a vibrant civil society in the latter half of Japan's twentieth century. On the other, he recasts this evolution as a devolution—from resistance to collaboration, from principled opposition to compromise, and from an anti-establishment stance to an embrace of market and state. The key to this devolution, he suggests, is to be found in certain “visceral attachments” on the part of movement intellectuals—attachments to the ethnic nation, to parochial notions of place, and to the authenticity of daily life (11). Avenell identifies these attachments in the writings of activist luminaries such as Tsurumi Shunsuke, advocate of circle activism, and Oda Makoto, leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement, but also of lesser known figures such as Miyazaki Shogo, advocate of “local egoism” in an antidevelopment residents' movement, or former student activist, Fujita Kazuyoshi, founder of the natural foods network, Association to Protect the Earth.

Although the author's arguments are clear and bold, readers might wonder, as I did, whether they do full justice to the nuances of the movements he covers. One might ask, for example, whether the concern for daily life among residents' movements necessarily points to political disengagement, parochial insularity, and materialist desires. Could it be read instead as opposition to the “public interest” promoted by the bureaucratic center, a defense against the penetration of everyday life by state and capital? Nevertheless, the book poses important questions about the history of, and prospects for, social change initiated outside the sphere of institutional politics. One of the most salient of these is whether the shift in the terms of the progressive political imaginary, from class to shimin, and from a Marxist future to the ideal of “civil society,” inevitably led to the taming of collective action in post-1960 Japan.