Akihiro Ogawa is

---

Akihiro Ogawa is Professor of Japanese Studies, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia 

since September 2015. Akihiro Ogawa is an internationally active scholar with a successful, multi-

disciplinary approach to the social sciences.  

 

Ogawa is currently leading the scholarship on Japanese civil society and producing impactful, 

distinguished work with a unique, interdisciplinary focus emphasizing innovative and empirically 

grounded concepts, such as ethnography. He is the author of The Failure of Civil Society?: The Third 

Sector and the State in Contemporary Japan (SUNY, 2009), which won the Japan NPO Research 

Association Book Award in 2010, and Lifelong Learning in Neoliberal Japan: Risk, Knowledge, and 

Community (SUNY, 2015). 

 

Ogawa’s research interests include Japanese civil society, social movements, politics, peace 

strategies, security, as well as issues facing education and energy. His research is international in 

scope and comparative in focus. 

Following the receipt of a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University and subsequent two years 

of post-doctoral work at Harvard University’s Program on US-Japan Relations and Department of 

Anthropology, he taught at Stockholm University, Sweden, between 2007 and 2015, where he was 

promoted from an assistant professor to a professor. In September 2015, Ogawa moved to Australia 

to assume the Japanese Studies Chair at the University of Melbourne, where he is now establishing 

new research networks and pursuing new collaborations. 

Ogawa has also held affiliations with King’s College London, the University of Tokyo, National 

Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (Japan), University of Aarhus (Denmark), University of 

Duisburg-Essen (Germany), Stockholm School of Economics, and Columbia University (USA). 

Before beginning his academic career, Ogawa was a staff reporter for five years at Kyodo News, a 

Japanese wire service, where he covered the Tokyo financial markets. 

Ogawa keeps abreast of the latest developments in social science theory, choosing projects that will 

demonstrate a deep understanding of how society functions within contemporary theoretical contexts. 

He has also contributed to many top-tier international journals and edited volumes on Japanese 

society, culture, and politics.