Akihiro Ogawa

Akihiro Ogawa is the Professor of Japanese Studies and holder of the Japanese Studies Chair at the Asia Institute in the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, a position he has occupied since September 2015. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University, obtained in 2004. His academic career includes a professorship at Stockholm University in Sweden from 2007 to 2015, where he was promoted from assistant professor, as well as postdoctoral positions at Harvard University’s Program on US-Japan Relations and Department of Anthropology. Earlier, Ogawa worked for five years as a staff reporter at Kyodo News, reporting on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Bank of Japan.

Ogawa specializes in civil society, public policy, peace and security, democracy, and grassroots movements in contemporary Japan and broader Asia. He employs ethnographic methods and social science theory to examine state-society relations, lifelong learning, and anti-nuclear activism. Key publications include his award-winning book, The Failure of Civil Society?: The Third Sector and the State in Contemporary Japan (State University of New York Press, 2009), recipient of the 2010 Japan NPO Research Association Book Award; Lifelong Learning in Neoliberal Japan: Risk, Knowledge, and Community (SUNY Press, 2015); and Antinuclear Citizens: Sustainability Policy and Grassroots Activism in Post-Fukushima Japan (Stanford University Press, 2023). Among his edited volumes are Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia (Routledge, 2017), Transnational Civil Society in Asia (Routledge, 2021), Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Asia (Routledge, 2022), and Varieties of Civil Society Across Asia (Routledge, 2024). Ogawa leads the Asian Civil Society Research Network and currently holds a research professor appointment at Kyoto University’s Office of Research Acceleration (April 2025 onwards), directing “The Kyoto Roundtable for Japan, Australia & India: Trilateral Academic Dialogue.”

Professional Email: akihiro.ogawa@unimelb.edu.au