Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan [1 ed.] 9789004245921, 9789004245914

Citation preview

Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan

Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan By

Carl Cassegård

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2014

Cover illustration: The 6th meeting of the 246 Conference of Expressive Artists in Shibuya, May 2008. ©Sekine Masayuki. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cassegård, Carl. Youth movements, trauma and alternative space in contemporary Japan / by Carl Cassegård. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-24591-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Social movements--Japan--History. 2. Youth movements--Japan--History. 3. Youth--Japan--Social conditions. 4. Japan--Social conditions--19455. Japan--Civilization--1945- I. Title. HN723.5.C37 2013 303.60952--dc23 2013033813

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISBN 978-90-04-24591-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24592-1 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

To Misuzu, Dan and Lina

CONTENTS List of Illustrations xiii Prefaceix Introduction1 1. Trauma, Empowerment and Alternative Space11 Collective Trauma12 Empowerment and the Role of Alternative Space in  Social Movements21 2. Japan’s Lost Decade and Two Recoveries27 The End of the Bubble and the Arrival of Precarity27 The Sense of Closure and the Legacy of Earlier Protest 31 Lost Decade, Regained Activism?37 3. The New Cultural Movements45 The Storm of Autumn48 The League of Good-for-Nothings57 Anti-War Protests and the Prehistory of Sound-Demos67 4. The Rise of Movements Against Precarity79 The General Freeter Union and the “Precariat” 87  “Life” and “Survival” in the Precarity Movement95 5. Space, Art and Homelessness117 Public Space, Counter-Space and No-Man’s-Land117 Art Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Shinjuku Cardboard  Village126 Anti-Poverty and Viva Poverty139 “Waking up From the Dream”: Nagai Park’s Theatre of  Resistance149 Miyashita Park: Can a No-Man’s-Land be Defended?167 6. Alternative Space, Withdrawal and Empowerment181 Support Groups for Social Withdrawers and NEET 190 Freeter Unions: Narratives of Recovery200

viii

contents

7. Campus Protest215 8. The Recovery of Activism233 Three Innovations of Freeter Activism235 The Importance of Space: Contestation and Bracketing 239 Fukushima and Beyond244 Appendix 1. Chronological Table of Key Events and Major  Organisations253 Appendix 2. Interviews 257 Bibliography 259 Index285

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Photo 1. Shinjuku’s Left Eye, 1996, painting by Take Jun’ichirō,  Yoshizaki Takewo and Yamane Yasuhiro on cardboard house, Information Square, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo. Photo: Sakokawa Naoko. Photo 2. “Dispersal and disobedience” (Chōsan to fufukujū)  May Day in Kyoto, 29 April 2010. A member of Union Extasy bathes in an oil drum that says “Sacked after five years”. Photo: author. Figure 1. The dual orientation of alternative space. Figure 2. The dimensions of contestation and bracketing.

133

229 187 241

PREFACE This is a book about one of the processes that fascinates me most, the process whereby people who feel powerless learn to see society as something they can change through their efforts – or at least that they just might, if they are lucky, if they use their imagination and if they act together. The growth of what I call “freeter activism” has been one such process – a way in which an increasing number of young Japanese, often in weak or marginal positions in society and dissatisfied with their lot, have become able to see that challenging and confronting authorities can be worthwhile and that living differently than according to established norms is possible. This is a process I look upon with sympathy, but rather than judging or evaluating it, I am interested in how it has come about. What is the larger societal context in which this freeter activism has grown? How have the ways of thinking, speaking and acting come about that have accompanied this shift in the way society is perceived? The book looks not only at contemporary freeter activism, but also at its roots in the late 1980s and 1990s. Spanning two decades, it cannot do justice to the variety that exists within freeter activism or to the many individual motives and temperaments that have coloured it. Throughout the book, the reader will encounter people enthusiastically eager to live as well as people anxious about survival. There will be glimpses of lovable anarchists, pragmatic leaders, saintly hermits, stern autonomists, former social withdrawers, pranksters and agitators. What I have endeavoured to portray most of all, however, has not been individuals or even groups of individuals, but rather the larger currents of ideas, discourses, orientations to space and forms of action that characterise freeter activism. By doing so, I hope to give the reader a sense of the more important developments that have accompanied the emergence of freeter activism as a political force in Japanese society as well as the tensions and recurrent dilemmas that exist within it. This study is based on results obtained through fieldwork conducted in Japan from 2004 to 2012. First of all, I would like to thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed or allowed me to participate in activities – without you this book would not have been possible. I’m also deeply indebted to Professors Matsuda Motoji and Itō Kimio at Kyoto University and David Slater at Sophia University for their truly unending hospitality and

xii

preface

kindness, and for providing me with an institutional base during my stays. A warm thank you goes to Ms Matsui Kazuko, who has always made me feel welcome at the sociology department at Kyoto University and whose practical help has been invaluable. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support extended to the research project at various points in time by the Swedish Research Council, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Swedish School of Advanced Asia-Pacific Studies. Several of the texts that have been worked into the book have been presented in various versions at conferences, workshops and seminars from 2004 to 2012. I am grateful for all comments made on these occasions as well as for comments made by friend and colleagues in Gothenburg, Kyoto, Tokyo and elsewhere. You are so many, but let me at least mention a handful of you: Staffan Appelgren, Gunhild Borggren, Nina Cornyetz, Christian Dimmer, Fujisawa Mika, Gabi Hadl, Hamanishi Eiji, Hashiguchi Shōji, Sharon Hayashi, Chris Haug, Hex, Inoue Shun, Ishihara Shun, Itō Kimio, Love Kindstrand, Kojima Takeshi, Karatani Kōjin, Kasuga Shō, Pia Moberg, Matsuda Motoji, Danka Miscevic, Nomura Kaeko, Vinai Norassakunkit, Martin Nordeborg, Mats Norvenius, Mōri Yoshitaka, Oh Kazumi, Saeki Yū, Sakai Takashi, Sakai Takeshi, Kaz Sagrada, Sasaki Tasuku, Mark Selden, Settsu Tadashi, David Slater, Linda Soneryd, Song Kichan, Johan Söderberg, Håkan Thörn, Tuukka Toivonen, Keith Vincent, Watanabe Futoshi, Åsa Wettergren, and the anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript. I am also very grateful to Sakokawa Naoko and Sekine Masayuki for kindly letting me use their photos, and to Horiki Mizuho for making available to me all issues of Dameren’s minikomi Ningen kaihō. A text on which parts of chapter 4 is based will appear as “Let us Live! Empowerment and the Rhetoric of Life in the Japanese Precarity Movement” in positions: east asia cultures critique (forthcoming in 22:1, 2014). Portions of chapter 5 will appear as “Activism beyond the Pleasure Principle? Homelessness and Art in the Shinjuku Underground” in Third Text (forthcoming in 27:124, 2013). Portions of chapter 6 are based on “Play and Empowerment: The Role of Alternative Space in Social Movements” which was published in Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies (12:1, 2012). A previous version of chapter 7 will appear as “Lovable Anarchism: Campus Protest in Japan from the 1990s until Today” in Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research (forthcoming in November 2013). I would also like to thank Kubikubi Café which existed on Kyoto University from 2009 to 2011 and always made me and my family feel

prefacexiii welcome whenever we went there. It taught me that anarchism goes well with gentleness. Finally I would like to thank my wonderful family. I understand how trying it can be for the patience with a dad or husband who is writing a book. I still don’t have a good answer to the question posed to me one day when a young family member climbed up the chair to attack me from behind: “What are you writing? Is it important, or unimportant – or are you lying?”. Much as I would like to think that what I was writing was important, deep down I’m painfully aware that the only correct response would have been to quit writing and start playing. Throughout the book, Japanese names are written according to the East Asian custom with surnames first (with a few exceptions, such as noms de plume where the reverse order has become established). Unless otherwise stated, I am responsible for all translations of Japanese texts and interviews.

INTRODUCTION On the day of the annual entrance examinations in February 2009, an unusual performance took place at Kyoto University. Next to the big camphor tree in front of the main clock tower one of the university’s part-time librarians, Ogawa Kyōhei (1969-) grabbed a mike and started singing in a seemingly improvised way, while dancing and making movements vaguely reminiscent of a strip-tease performance. So it’s five years and then out, right? But I’ve worked here on and off for altogether seven years. Yes, seven years, here at Kyoto University. So it’s about time for this, right? [he shows how his head will be cut off] Is it really!? No, no, no, no!

Next to him an oil drum was standing, painted in big white brush strokes with the word “Kubi” – a common word for being fired which also means neck or being decapitated. The oil drum, which was filled with water that had been heated by his comrades in Union Extasy, was in fact a bath tub, in which Ogawa was soon bathing stark naked, all the time singing or shouting at the top of his voice to the high school students who were walking by on their way back from the examinations: “Let everybody pass!! Let everybody pass!! Kyoto University, let everyone enter!! And stop cutting off our heads!!” (Ogawa 2010b). Union Extasy was a union for the university’s part-time employees which had been founded in 2007 by Ogawa and another librarian, Inoue Masaya (1971-). At the time of the oil drum bath, it had just initiated a strike to protest against the part-timers’ employment conditions. In particular they turned against the university’s so-called “five year rule”, according to which part-timers would at most be able to hold on to their jobs for five years. Setting up a tent-like structure next to the camphor tree, a well-known symbol of Kyoto University, they quickly gained attention and laughter through their drastic methods, which struck some observers as charmingly clownish and others as outrageous and provocative. A big tuna head was placed in front of the tent to get the message through. In April they turned their shack into Kubikubi Café, a place for pleasant talk and cheap coffee which was in existence for over

2

introduction

two years, serving as a gathering place, as a centre for disseminating informa­tion  and, for a time, as the temporary residence of one of the union members. During my stay in Kyoto 2009–2010 I visited the café or attended events arranged by the union several times a month. Not only was it a pleasant hangout. It was also a convenient hub for getting to know activism in Kansai – the area around Kyoto and Osaka. During my visits, there would always be someone there telling me stories. Topics might range from kabuki or shōnen manga to cooking and child care. But some of the most fascinating stories were about activism. Both Ogawa and Inoue had participated in spectacular episodes. Ogawa had once been the prime mover behind Kinji House, a squat house that he and his friends had opened in an empty university building in the mid-1990s when they were students. Inoue had a background in Ishigaki Café, a café he and his friends had set up on top of the stone wall surrounding the main campus in 2005 to prevent the university from tearing it down. Together with what other guests at the café told me, these stories gave me a vivid glimpse of what I perceived to be the roots of their present-day activism – the activist scene of the 1990s and early 2000s in Kyoto with its street parties (Japan’s first socalled “sound-demos” developed here, as I will discuss later), its burgeoning homosexual and AIDS-related activism, its tradition of travelling tent theatre, and its remaining New Left “sects” – the latter being a common word for the radical student groups that had developed out of the wave of campus activism in the 1960s and 1970s. These stories fed into the curiosity I was already harbouring in how the thriving protest activism I was seeing around me among young Japanese had developed and what its origins were. The prevalence of activism today in Japan might seem surprising. Most observers of Japan in the 1990s or early 2000s would probably have been struck by the lack of political activism among young Japanese, despite the many social problems that surfaced during the 1990s and the atmosphere, thickening as the decade drew to a close, of social malaise. “Young people in Japan are, objectively speaking, in a miserable situation”, one commentator observed, “But in Japan today, nothing happens; young people do not even stage demonstrations to protest their miserable prospects” (Kotani 2004:31). This quietude was indeed surprising and offered a striking contrast to the turbulent early postwar decades when the country was rocked by strikes, mass demonstrations and campus occupations. Another striking fact was that much of the activism that did exist among young people in the 1990s was concerned less with open protest than with developing alternative lifestyles

introduction3 or reaching out to and attempting to support and empower social withdrawers, people with mental disorders and homeless people – people who had come to embody the problems faced by society during the “lost decade” of the 1990s. Protest movements among the young, however, made a conspicuous comeback a few years into the new millennium, first with the anti-war movement that peaked in 2003 and then with the growth of the precarity movement in the following years. A new wave of even more massive mobilisations was triggered by the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011, this time against nuclear power. Interestingly, with their use of art and music, loose networks and ideological diversity, these new protest movements among the young have returned in a guise that offers a remarkable contrast to older protest movements in Japan, including the established labour movement, the student movement, the so-called “citizen movements” (shimin undō) and the movements of local residents (jūmin undō). Why, I asked myself, was there so little open protest in the 1990s and early 2000s, and why, when open protest did emerge, did it take a form that appeared to have so little in common with older traditions of protest in Japan? These will be central, guiding questions throughout this book. As I hope to show, today’s activism was made possible by developments starting in the late 1980s. It grew out of the experimental activities of small groups of people, similar to those gathering at Kubikubi Café, who had often been considered marginal and seldom given any attention by massmedia or politicians, but who all shared a keen awareness of the need to develop new forms of activism more attuned to the interests and tastes of young Japanese than the New Left “sects”. Even when today’s youth activism is ostensibly about protesting against war, precarity, or nuclear power, it can only be fully understood by taking account of its roots in the pioneering activities of activists in the 1980s and 1990s and their desire to explore new ways of living. Freeters and Freeter Activism The growth of new forms of youth activism in Japan happened against the background of a drastic increase of so-called freeters (furītā), young women and men lacking regular employment, which started in the late 1980s. Freeters have often played a central role in the new forms of activism, and I will therefore use the term “freeter activism” as a convenient

4

introduction

shorthand that allows me to speak of today’s various youth movements as part of a single, more or less coherent phenomenon. Looking at how freeter activism has emerged as the major form of social protest among young Japanese from the late 1980s until today will be the main subject of this book. The word “freeter” is commonly used for young people working in the service industry, supermarkets, chain stores, fast food restaurants and increasingly also in factories and construction. The word is derived from the English “free” and the German “Arbeiter” and appeared for the first time in 1987 in Furomu A (From A), a job-recruitment magazine published by Recruit (Genda 2005a; Kosugi 2005b, 2008:1f). During the years of the so-called economic “bubble” in the late 1980s, when the sense of affluence was widespread, freeters tended to be looked upon as independentminded and perhaps spoiled young people valuing free time more than the drudgery of salaried regular employment. However, in tandem with the rapid increase of freeters in the Japanese workforce during the 1990s, the term increasingly came to connote cheap, flexible and insecure labour lacking the security and benefits of regular work.1 In this book I will use the term freeter in a wide sense, to refer to young people characterised by precarity, i.e. a lack of secure employment resulting in a precarious existence.2 To be a freeter is not to have a particular type of employment, but to belong to a stratum of people who may drift in and out of studies, unemployment, dispatch work or other forms of irregular work or states of withdrawal. Students, young academics, artists, and young homeless people can all be part of this stratum, as well as dispatch workers, part-time working housewives and social withdrawers. What I call freeters is thus close to what the sociologist Mōri Yoshitaka refers to as “freeter-like” people (Mōri 2009a:138). How should freeter activism be characterised and how does it differ from older forms of activism in Japan? To begin with, freeter activism stands out by its composition. Whereas the radical youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s was largely a student movement, the carriers of today’s 1 On this shift in meaning, see Higuchi 2006:50, Kosugi 2005b:60f, Oguma 2009:841, Sugita 2005:22f, 42f. 2 It should be pointed out that scholars and official surveys usually employ the term in a more narrow sense. Kosugi (2008:3) defines freeters as “young people who are not students and are not employed as regular employees” excluding housewives. A common way to define freeters is as “15–34 year olds, excluding students and housewives, who are either employed as part-timers or unemployed but seeking such forms of employment”, a definition that accords with that of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

introduction5 youth movements instead tend to be freeters. This is a clear departure from previous movements in Japan, whose carriers have typically been classified as students, regularly employed workers, “citizens” or local residents. Another distinguishing trait of freeter activism is its unmistakable style. With its use of performances, art, music and dancing, freeter activism is typical of what Mōri calls “new cultural movements”. In contrast to the widespread image of the New Left factions of the 1960s and 1970s as being overly dogmatic, ideological, hierarchical and closed, the new cultural movements are said to be characterised by an open and loose networkstructure, ideological diversity, more egalitarian and individualist forms of organisation, and a predilection for art, performances and fun (Mōri 2003, 2005a; Hayashi & McKnight 2006). Making use of music, dancing and a festive mood to mobilise and attract participants, they differ in style from older or more established forms of activism that have been common during the postwar era, such as the established labour movement, the citizen movements, the student movement, or the movements of local residents. “Instead of whether something is correct or not”, Mōri writes, what matters in these movements “is whether it is fun or not” (Mōri 2007:47). A third trait is that participants in freeter activism often share a common communicational infrastructure. Centrally placed freeter activists tend to be connected to the same networks, regardless of what movement they happen to be engaged in at the time. It is not rare to find the same activists participating in several different movements. A loose but wellfunctioning infrastructure of social media and contacts enables them to mobilize quickly in a variety of issues, for instance engaging in the precarity movement and anti-nuclear movement at the same time or shifting quickly between the two. Freeter activism, I will argue, has played a crucial energising role in the resurgence of social movement activism in Japan today. The development and growth of new forms of activism and political commitment among freeters is a startling trend in a country where overt protest among young people has remained scarce ever since the defeat and failure of student radicalism during the 1970s. It provides a channel for publicly expressing grievances and for the empowerment and social participation of groups that have borne the brunt of many negative side effects of globalisation in Japan, and is an important new force altering the political landscape in Japan by raising issues, putting pressure on companies, contacting politicians receptive to social movements and providing models for alternative life-styles and experiments in alternative economic behaviour and

6

introduction

organisation. Without the infrastructure of protest created by freeter activism, it would have been hard to imagine the rapid mobilisation against nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. A major argument of this book is that the role played by freeter activism today can only be understood by looking at the roots of the activism in earlier decades. Above all I will show that the 1990s must not be viewed as a decade of inactivity or calm, but as a decade when much was forming beneath the surface that later emerged in public. These processes included style, ideas and forms of action, and happened not only in response to the worsening economic conditions during this decade, but had roots already in the preceding “bubble” period and in the way activists of that period related to the perceived defeat of Japanese radical protest movements in the 1970s. To trace the vicissitudes of the development of freeter activism, I will use three theoretical vantage points – those of collective trauma, alternative space and empowerment. These vantage points will also bring out three distinctive contributions of freeter activism to renewing activism in Japan. Firstly, the concept of trauma offers a way to understand how social movements can be active in important ways even when they are not very publicly visible, namely by working through – intellectually, emotionally and practically – the legacy of previous defeats. Such working through can include the fashioning of new styles, ways of speaking and ways of organising that are perceived to be untainted by the discredited legacy. One of the most startling ways in which freeter activism has contributed to a renewal of activism in Japan is precisely by providing activists with new discourses and often visually spectacular means of expression that do not appear discredited by the past. Secondly, in the case of freeter activism, essential parts of this working through took place in alternative spaces not readily visible to the general public, a fact which brings out that social movements cannot be understood solely by focusing on their participation in mainstream public arenas. That freeter activism has been much keener on consciously exploring the possibilities for activism offered by various forms of alternative space than earlier movements marks its second great contribution to renewing activism. Thirdly, freeter activism has pioneered new ways of reaching out to and empowering social withdrawers and other groups seen as lacking public voice. This too is a process which has often required access to less public arenas which can easily disappear from view if attention is given only to overt acts of protest. In fact, as I will show in the course of this book, the

introduction7 emergence of open protest after the turn to the new millennium depended on a long period of preparation, much of which took place in publicly less visible areas – a fact which helps explain why protest movements appeared to be weak and inactive in the 1990s. Temporally I focus on the roughly two decades from around 1990 to 2012. The period of the bubble economy around 1990 was when freeter activism first began to sprout and the year 2012 forms a convenient end point of my account where we see freeter activism connecting up with the wave of protests triggered by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In between are two decades, each of which possesses a distinct character. During the 1990s freeter activism developed in a relatively submerged fashion with little open protest but with much experimentation in style, ideology and in the use of alternative space. The anti-war movement in the early years of the new millennium marked an important point of transition that catalysed a turn to open protest in freeter activism. During the 2000s, these open protests have continued, usually targeting precarity or poverty but also a host of other issues. Two decades is a long period and to help the reader gain some orientation I have provided a chronological table of key events and campaigns and major organisations at the end of the book. A primary focus for the approach I have adopted is the ideas prevalent in movements and in the social and cultural milieus of their participants. Putting the spotlight on the “cognitive” function of movements also means locating them in relation to the major cultural, social and economic context in response to which they arise (Eyerman & Jamison 1991). Looking at the movement’s connections to popular culture, literature, philosophy, and wider cultural and intellectual currents is important since they ­furnish activists with their ideas, identities, ideals, fantasies, jargon and e­ nemies. Looking beyond movements towards seemingly non-political phenomena is also important to gain a fuller understanding of the spectrum covered by the cultural dynamics in Japan. Often social movements represent only part of the possible responses to a social problem, and in order to capture the significance of this problem and the cultural dynamics which it gives rise to, it is important to look also at other responses to the problem than those manifested in the form of activism. The book is based on results obtained through fieldwork conducted in Japan from 2004 to 2012. The investigation was conducted through qualitative interviews, participant observation and analyses of texts. Texts ­produced by activists – including books, articles, pamphlets, leaflets, homepages, discussion forums, newsletters and blogs – have been central to mapping the principal ideas and forms of action of freeter activism.

8

introduction

Interviews with activists have been essential to capture how participants have interpreted ideas and experienced events and activities, and to obtain information on strategic choices made by the movement groups during crucial formative moments.3 The interviews have been supplemented by participant observation at demonstrations, meetings and other events and by visits to encampments and other spaces used by the movements that have allowed me to study activities and everyday interaction at first hand. Structure of the Book Chapters in the book largely stand on their own, so readers are free to read them in the order they prefer. In chapter 1, which is mostly theoretical, I argue for the fruitfulness of applying concepts like trauma and recovery to larger cultural processes such as the disintegration of radical activism in the wake of the defeat of the Japanese New Left and the return of radical protest in a new guise in freeter activism. I also discuss briefly how processes of recovery from trauma relate to alternative space. The second chapter provides a brief historical background on two ­specific collective traumas that have been important in shaping freeter activism – that of the “lost decade” following the burst of the economic bubble in the early 1990s and that of the perceived failure of radical protest in the 1970s. In the third chapter I turn to the seeds of freeter activism, focusing on pioneering groups established in the late 1980s and early 1990s which helped develop the distinctive cultural style, the experimentation with alternatives spaces and the attempts to reach out to withdrawn youth that became characteristic of later freeter activism. I also discuss the development of so-called “sound-demos” and how freeter activism turned to open protest with the anti-war movement in the early 2000s. Chapter 4 treats the contemporary precarity movement, well known for its colourful street parties and its many freeter labour unions. I examine 3 All in all, 59 semi-structured interviews were conducted with activists face-to-face and an additional three were interviewed using e-mail. Many valuable, informal interviews were also conducted during the fieldwork. Informants include participants in most of the groups discussed in the book, from early pioneering ones to groups active today. Details are provided in the sections where the groups are discussed and an appendix in which the interviews quoted in the book are listed. Throughout the book, interviewees will be anonymous except in the case of leaders, founders or representatives making statements on behalf of their organisation or when the interviewee is also a writer or artist discussing his or her work.

introduction9 its rhetoric of “life”, which is evident in the celebration of fun and the sensual or bodily experience of being “alive”. This rhetoric shows, I argue, that the precarity movement is not concerned solely with material deprivation, but is rather characterised by a distinctive balance between material and cultural concerns. In chapter 5, I look at the participation of freeters in various struggles in the homeless movement since the mid-1990s. By examining their use of art and culture, I bring out that important therapeutical aspects exist in this activism, next to instrumental and prefigurative ones, and show how the use of various forms of space, such as “counter-spaces” and “no-man’s-lands”, have been central to it. Chapter 6 examines the role of alternative spaces in social movements that attempt to empower social withdrawers and so-called NEET (people “not in employment, education or training”). I show that organizers of alternative spaces face a variety of tasks that can easily enter into conflict with each other and compare how these difficulties have been handled in support organisations and freeter unions. I suggest that freeter unions, unlike most support organisations, offer a more radical approach that involves contesting and rearticulating the very construction of “social problems”. Chapter 7 looks at how campus activism has been transformed since the 1990s. I focus on the emergence of protests among students and parttime university staff against the neoliberalization of universities and on the shift of action repertoire towards an increasing use of direct action. In the final chapter, I tie together the threads of the previous chapters, discuss the extent to which radical social movement activism has recovered in Japan and conclude with a discussion of the recent surge of antinuclear power protest.

CHAPTER ONE

TRAUMA, EMPOWERMENT AND ALTERNATIVE SPACE Freeter activism has often revolved around empowerment, i.e. how best to bring about a strengthening of people’s self-confidence as political actors. Especially in its early years, freeter activism was unable to rely on existing political organisations or a large existing pool of activists, and often had to try to reach out to a constituency with no experience of and little enthusiasm for political struggle. To understand the rise of freeter activism is to understand how the idea of a collective movement “subject” could be forged in which students, young irregular workers and many others could recognize themselves – a process that is traceable through the various labels used by activists to designate themselves, from “freeters” and “young workers” to “good-for-nothings” and “precariat”. It is also to trace the process through which activists have engaged in a work of cultural innovation and expanding existing means of expression in order to struggle with socially dominant values and yardsticks. Finally, it is also to look at how this discursive work has gone hand in hand with praxis, and how the experience of participating in movement activities has furthered people’s trust in their ability to make a difference in the world. Two concepts of particular importance for understanding these processes are those of collective trauma and alternative space. In this chapter I will try to clarify these concepts and to indicate how they can be brought together in a way that furthers an understanding of how freeter activism has developed in Japan. Both concepts are related to the issue of empowerment. As I will show in the book, empowerment in freeter activism has happened through a trial-and-error process through which activists have tried out ways of positioning themselves in relation to past historical traumas – in particular the perceived failure of the New Left in the 1970s. Empowerment has also involved negotiating distance to the mainstream public sphere, sometimes participating in it and sometimes orienting itself to alternative arenas outside it. I start by clarifying the concept of collective trauma before briefly discussing the relationship between empowerment and alternative spaces.

12

chapter one Collective Trauma

It has become customary to describe the 1990s in Japan as a lost decade plagued by widespread social malaise and an oppressive feeling of deadlock. Alarming reports of a declining economy, rising unemployment, corruption, rising suicide rates, violent crimes by teenagers, earthquakes and doomsday sects followed in quick succession during the decade, while Japanese polls showed a precipitous fall in the levels of confidence felt for politicians. Starting in the wake of the post-bubble recession, the spread of neoliberal reforms accelerated the pace of destruction of established systems and provoked a sense of frustration and grievance. There was no shortage of intellectuals and critics who framed post-bubble Japan through concepts of “trauma” or “defeat”. The famous critic Yoshimoto Takaaki, for instance, referred to the collapse of the bubble economy as a defeat for the “national project” of the Japanese state and as a repetition of the defeat in the Second World War (Yoshimoto 1992:37f, 41). To many, the lost decade signalled the failure of the country’s once so celebrated model of economic development – characterised by tight cooperation between bureaucratic, political and corporate elites, by paternalistic employment relations and by the mobilisation of broad popular support for the national goal of high growth. However, while the 1990s proved to be a traumatic period of excruciating self-reevaluations for many Japanese, to understand the dynamics of protest we need to take account also of a second trauma, namely the experience of the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. The process of working-through their perceived negative legacy has, I argue, been essential to the development of freeter protest. By this, I do not mean to suggest that economic factors are unimportant. Freeter activism today is impossible to understand except by paying attention to both economic and cultural factors. Thus the magnitude of the perceived failure of the New Left in Japan is hardly a matter of culture alone, but needs to be understood in the light of economic factors, such as the country’s economic “miracle” and spectacular success in catching up with the West during the 1960s, which resulted in a sense of affluence that increasingly made the New Left appear out of touch with the general populace. The dynamics of change in contemporary Japan is to a considerable extent shaped through, and complicated by, the lingering and interlocking effects of these and other traumas in recent Japanese history. All traumas have not been national in the sense of affecting the entire population equally and in the same manner, but some have clearly been national in



trauma, empowerment and alternative space13

the sense of involving a threat to national self-images. The lost decade, for example, dealt a fatal blow to national pride taken in Japan as an economic success story and role model. Collective traumas, however, need not be national. Some are better described as movement traumas. This is the case with the New Left radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s, which reached its apogee with the campus struggles of 1968–69 before fizzling out in violence and infighting during the 1970s, a development for which the end of the United Red Army (Rengō sekigun) in the Asama Sansō incident 1972 has become indelibly imprinted as a symbol in public consciousness. The way activists responded to the changes of the 1990s can only be understood, I suggest, by looking at the interplay of the effects of these collective traumas. Thus the rise of protests against precarity among freeters today was not only a reaction to the deterioration of economic conditions during the lost decade but also a kind of come-back of radicalism in a new guise. In this book I will show how a lengthy process of preparation was necessary, through which forms of action, organisation, style and “thought” could be tried out that were no longer felt to be tainted by the negative legacy of the New Left, and which matched the needs and desires of the quickly growing freeter stratum. Especially the early phase of freeter activism around 1990 was a fertile period of experimentation when many of the seeds of today’s protest movements were planted. Radicalisation among freeters was thus not merely a reaction against deregulation or global capitalism, but also an attempt to overcome the scars of the New Left. This is why the first stirrings of freeter activism occurred already during the heyday of the economic bubble, before the economic downturn of the 1990s, and why a long period of working through and trying out was needed before it could turn forcefully to open protest. One merit of using the concept of trauma is that it helps illustrate the so-called autonomy of culture by showing how cultural factors can have a considerable persistence over time and affect social development. This autonomy, however, is never absolute and my intention is not to overly downplay the importance of economic or other social factors. As mentioned, the defeat of radical protest in the 1970s cannot be understood in isolation from Japan’s economic “miracle”, just as little as the trauma of the lost decade of the 1990s can be understood apart from the perceived failure of the country’s previously so successful economic “model”. Once a trauma comes into being, however, it achieves a certain inertia which makes it possible to regard it as a factor in its own right. By using the concept of trauma it becomes easier to understand what freeter

14

chapter one

activists were doing in the 1990s – for instance, why they felt it necessary to develop a new movement style, experiment with alternative space, or attempt to reach out to young people who had been disillusioned in politics. The concept of trauma thus brings out that the emergence of freeter activism is not wholly a new beginning, a creation ex nihilo, but also a resuscitation of radical energies and of challenges to the system that were once thought to be discredited. Below, I will start by explaining what I mean by collective trauma and how it is related to individual trauma. In the latter part of the chapter I extend the discussion to the concepts of empowerment and alternative space, and to how they might be applied to the study of social movements. The Concept of Collective Trauma In psychoanalytic literature it is common to portray trauma as an experience so painful or damaging to the sense of self that the self is unable to register it fully at the time it occurs and that keeps the ego in its thrall as long as it remains unverbalised (Freud 1991; Caruth 1995, 1996; Berger 1999). As Freud points out, ordinary shocks, crises or panics typically bring about a heightened awareness of the present, which serves as a “protective shield” through which the ego attempts to avert or master them. In a trauma, by contrast, the protective shield has already been broken through and no longer functions (Freud 1991:301). The inability to master the trauma is also an inability to verbalize it fully. The result, as Cathy Caruth points out, is that the traumatic event “is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly” (Caruth 1995:4). Lived events become traumatic if language does not provide the terms and symbolic resources needed to express them and integrate them into existing meaning schemes. A person caught in a trauma thus lives in what Ernst van Alphen calls a “narrative vacuum” in which the interconnectedness of discourse and experience is disrupted. The trauma is a “failed experience” that, being unassimilated into consciousness, latently exerts force over the ego, making itself felt in nightmares and repetitive actions (Van Alphen 1997:42–45; 1999:25ff, 36). Let me now turn to collective trauma. A collective trauma is not simply a trauma that is shared among a number of people. I define it as damage sustained by discursive systems that hold collectives together. Borrowing a metaphor from Ron Eyerman, a collective trauma is a “tear” in the discursive web that gives a social group cohesion, provides it with orientation­



trauma, empowerment and alternative space15

and a framework for the collective identity of its members (cf. Eyerman 2001:2; 2004:61). It arises when the language used by a collective for asserting its identity and gaining recognition for its concerns is felt to be discredited. Like an individual trauma, a collective trauma thus renders certain things unsayable, or sayable only at great expense. It differs from individuals traumas, since this unsayability can remain an enduring feature of a discursive field over long periods of time and exert important effects even on people who never took part in the original experience. How do collective traumas differ from more ordinary setbacks or from the continuous changes that discourses undergo, for instance as forms of legitimation, identities or symbols go out of use or are no longer felt to be needed? One distinguishing mark is that a collective trauma is felt to have caused an irreparable damage to a group’s identity or self-image. In the wake of a trauma, the group can no longer remain “itself” but has to relinquish things once treasured as central to its identity. This in turn usually brings about a weakening or disintegration of the social ties that hold the group together. As Kai Erikson puts it, a collective trauma is “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality” (Erikson 1976:153f). Although the group can still survive if it finds a new base for its identity, often the group will disappear, and the needs or functions it fulfilled will have to be taken over by other groups. This, I suggest, captures much of what happened to the New Left in Japan after the defeat of the radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. Its widely perceived failure or defeat made it impossible for the movement to publicly uphold its self-image as a force with justice and the future on its side. Discursive Construction or Damaged Discourse? Research employing the concept of trauma in relation to social movements tends to fall into two groups. On the one hand there is a large body of research which deals with the “post-traumatic” cultural state after the defeat of a great social movement. Many studies of the decade following the upsurge of protest in many countries in 1968 are of this kind (Berger 1999; Cassegård 2007a; Hirschman 1985; Ross 2002). While these studies are useful, they tend to focus primarily on the experiences of disillusionment or powerlessness, the turn to privatisation or on how traumatic scars can be discerned in the seemingly apolitical life following such defeats, rather than on how new social movements can form in such a milieu. My interest in this book, by contrast, lies in how steps towards

16

chapter one

the renewal of social movement activism in Japan were taken in the seemingly apolitical years of the 1980s and early 1990s when few acts of visible protest were seen. Another body of research is social constructivist in orientation. The representative work here is that of the cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander (2004), for whom “cultural trauma” is a publicly constructed memory that founds or strengthens collective identity. Traumas, according to this conception, do not exist naturally, but only by being endowed with meaning through compelling narratives and frameworks. This process of meaning-endowment in turn gives birth to shared identities and collective memories and thus strengthens in-group solidarities (Alexander 2004:22; Alexander & Butler Breese 2011; also see Eyerman 2001, 2004, 2013). This social constructivist approach at first sight appears useful since it focuses on how collective traumas can function as the basis of collective action. It is, however, of little help when we are dealing with traumas that remain unverbalised. It is also hard to apply to situations where the traumas shatter and discredit established solidarities, as was the case to a large extent in Japan in the wake of the defeat of the radical New Left. Whereas Alexander and his colleagues focus on how traumas are retrospectively endowed with meaning by “carrier groups”, a less overt, but more pernicious effect of a trauma can be that it leads to the weakening and dissolution of collective identity and solidarity. As Sztompka points out, trauma is not necessarily a constructive, identity-generating factor, but can also initiate a “self-amplifying vicious spiral” that leads to the destruction of cultural identity (Sztompka 2004:194). While I follow Alexander in seeing collective trauma as a discursive event or process, I differ in not regarding trauma as an identity position formulated in discourse. Rather it is something that happens to discourse, a damage that renders certain things hard to verbalize and express. A problem with the constructivist approach is that it tends to obliterate the specificity of trauma as a cultural process. If collective trauma had merely been a discursive construct that founds or strengthens identity, very little would distinguish it from other forms of discursively constructed collective identities. What gets lost is that trauma can also be the inability to endow a defeat with meaning. If it is true that discourse “constructs” the subject, it does not do so only by providing words. In the case of a collective trauma, a torn subject is shaped by being delivered up to a situation in which discourse itself is crippled and torn. The discursive phenomena that the concept of collective trauma refers to do not consist only in the process whereby victims arrive at a clearly



trauma, empowerment and alternative space17

defined “we”, but also in the complex processes whereby collective identities­and solidarities disintegrate – the mixture of accusations, soulsearching and repair work engaged in by those who still identify with the defeated cause, the often futile attempts to defend or revive a discredited legacy, or the ways in which this legacy is disavowed through the creation of “clean breaks” and “new starts”. The outcome of these processes can be the establishment of a “we”, but it is too restrictive to limit the notion of collective trauma to such cases. Trauma and Power What is the relation between collective trauma and power? We can approach this question by contrasting a “naturalistic” position that assumes the traumatic event to be an objective event to a “constructivist” one that sees it as nothing but a retrospective construction. The position I choose will be in between: I will assume that certain things do occur historically which may have traumatic effects – but whether or not they do so will largely depend on the power relations between discourses. The New Left’s collective trauma, for instance, did not follow directly from events such as the 1972 Asama Sansō incident, but depended on the ability of major newspapers and government spokesmen to discredit and marginalize the New Left and on the inability of its adherents to publicly defend and legitimate themselves. The “tearing” of a discourse is thus not a natural occurrence, but often part of the same process whereby another discourse comes to establish hegemony over acceptable and legitimate speech (Laclau & Mouffe 2001). The result is that people are victimised not only by being deprived of words but also by being subjected to a hegemonic discourse that forces them to adopt the language of the “victors” at least in public.1 As Gaventa points out, feelings of powerlessness are not 1 The dimension of struggle is also stressed by Eyerman, who points out that “cultural trauma can be understood as a meaning struggle, where individual and collective actors attempt to define a situation by imposing a particular interpretation on it” (Eyerman 2011:455f). However, while Eyerman focuses on how these actors produce cultural trauma by articulating it as an identity position, I focus on how collective traumas result when groups are prevented from articulating certain identities. While the former process requires actors highly capable of verbalization, the latter process deprives actors of words. Trauma may thus function as a process generating what Bourdieu terms ‘symbolic violence’, defined as when the “dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to the relations of domination, thus making them appear as natural” (Bourdieu 2001: 35). Gaventa similarly focuses on cases where the defeat is so severe that the oppressed do not even have access to an oppositional language of their own, a ‘hidden transcript’ to use James Scott’s (1990) term. I would, however, argue that while all collective traumas prevent certain transcripts from functioning as legitimate public languages,

18

chapter one

simply the direct product of an actual defeat or failure, but also of a second, discursive defeat which deprives losers of a language to justify their struggle (Gaventa 1980:16). This is the experience expressed by the radical music critic Hirai Gen, when he writes that after the Asama Sansō incident “there was only one narrative left” (Hirai 2005:20). The loss of words experienced by victims of a collective trauma is thus not so much an “inner” phenomenon as the result of a discursive closure that renders their experiences non grata in public. When we speak of collective trauma, the collectives affected by the trauma are not limited to the primary collective, which consists of those who strongly identify with the identities that the trauma discredits. Effects extend also to people who may not have experienced the traumatic events first-hand, but who have grown up in or been socialised into a culture marked by the trauma. Many young Japanese in the 1990s were still affected by the Asama Sansō incident – even if they had never heard about it – since they had been socialised into a discourse in which the very word “activist” (katsudōka) had acquired a bad image and in which political radicalism would evoke unappealing images of factional strife and ­helmet-wearing students shouting anti-imperialistic slogans (Ueno 1997; Yuasa 2009a:77, 2009c:26). A consequence of this discrediting of activism was that the hurdles to expressing discontent or resentment became higher. As the sociologist Miyadai Shinji writes, this was the background of many of today’s youth problems. Today, when political as well as religious organisations have lost people’s confidence, there are no longer any systematic channels for individuals to express the resentment towards society they carry in their hearts. Their restless gloom is instead exploding in a desocialised way everywhere. (Miyadai 2002:40)

Linking collective trauma to power and struggle points to its relevance for the study of social movements – not only because a collective trauma has direct effects on the movements on which it is inflicted, but also because it shapes the conditions of possibility for further activism. If the strength of social movements depends on their capacity to mobilize powerful ­symbols and points of reference, then, conversely, their inability to do so in certain historical contexts is also important. Here historical traumas come into play: previous defeats can have lasting effects by devastating­ not all are so severe that they shatter even hidden transcripts. For instance, while the defeat in the Second World War was certainly a trauma for nationalists in Japan, it tended to drive discredited discourses underground rather than incapacitating them completely.



trauma, empowerment and alternative space19

or discrediting the symbols, images, styles, arguments and identities sustaining social movements. Scholars who have studied how social movements are affected by loss or defeat on social movements have emphasized that the way a loss is framed plays a crucial role for the prospects of future mobilization (Beckwith 2008; Polletta 1998; Voss 1996). In her study of the Knights of Labor, Kim Voss points out that an important factor in their demise was their lack of a “fortifying myth” – similar to the socialist belief in the historical inevitability of the triumph of the working class – that could make defeats understandable in a larger context and sustain faith in the movement (Voss 1996:253f). As Polletta (1998) points out, Voss’ account points to the importance of narratives in sustaining activism and helping it rebound after setbacks. Clearly, an effect of a defeat is that it may become harder for participants to narrate the event and that some may seek to disengage from the movement altogether, thus endangering the possibility of a common “movement narrative” that can be used to sustain the movement as a whole (Benford 2002). Another possibility is that dissention or dispersal in the wake of the defeat prevents the various “participant narratives” that exist on an individual level from being forged into a group narrative on the movement level. I would like to suggest that this inability to weave individual accounts into a “movement narrative” that is generally embraced among participants is one of the ways in which a collective trauma becomes concretely visible. While not all defeats have traumatic effects – sometimes it is clearly possible for movements to rebound through fortifying frames that portray setbacks as “victories in disguise”, as “heroic” or as merely temporary – the likelihood that persuasive “movement narratives” will be difficult to create is increased when defeats are felt to be shameful, accompanied by inner conflicts in the movement or where the defeat brings about a dispersal of participants. What needs to be emphasized here is that the success or failure to come up with persuasive movement narratives is a function not only of a movement’s inner qualities, but also depends on the broader social and cultural context. What matters, in other words, is not merely the ability of activists to produce a fortifying frame, but also the extent to which this frame resonates with and is capable of attracting recognition from significant others outside the movement. As Karen Beckwith points out: A social movement whose activists and supporters learn that they will be pilloried, shunned, and attacked by peers and neighbors in their own communities as the result of their social movement campaign activities are

20

chapter one unlikely to make the efforts to try again. Those whose community celebrates their valiant efforts, even in failure, learn that their actions were vindicated and valued, and come away, even in loss […] with the belief that they could possibly try again. (Beckwith 2008:33)

As I will discuss in the next chapter, the frames of the Japanese New Left increasingly ceased to resonate with students, intellectuals and the general public from the 1970s onwards. The discredited image of protest movements became a burden, which new movements aspiring to renew the spirit of protest had to address. Freeter activism inherited this burden, not because freeter activists were still identifying with the New Left, but because they had to struggle with its discredited legacy and devote much time and effort to fashion themselves with a new language by reworking the very idea of activism. Recovery To understand how freeter activism comes into being it is important to pay attention to the slow process whereby new discursive threads are woven around or across the “tear” opened up by earlier defeats and a new language thereby becomes fashioned. This process of discursive healing is what I will refer to as recovery. Recovery is when a torn discourse is repaired, allowing needs, desires and sufferings stymied by previous defeats to be expressed through the emergence of discursive connections and social ties that no longer appear discredited by the past. To use a simile, recovery can be seen as the reconstruction of the ruined infrastructure of a city after a war or natural disaster. What matters is not that the old roads and railway lines are rebuilt as they once were, but that people are again able to use the area, move through it and communicate again. Recovery is not necessarily the return of the old, but can come about through the new – although the new can be the occasion for realising old wishes and desires. Recoveries are therefore neither simply a return of the same thing nor its complete overcoming. They often refer to a utopian spark that in retrospect is felt to be given a second chance, but which must for precisely this reason be made to appear in a guise untainted by the earlier failure. Processes of recovery need to tread a fine line and can easily be disturbed. In the case of freeter activism, care needed to be taken not to let the recovery of radical activism appear like a mere repetition of past mistakes. Time was also needed to build and consolidate social ties. Social movement researches have often underlined the important role for



trauma, empowerment and alternative space21

mobilisations­of pre-existing networks and organisational experiences (Melucci 1996:115f, 295ff; McAdam 2003). The freeter activism that started to emerge in Japan in the late 1980s to a large extent lacked such networks and experiences. They had to start by creating the networks first, partly by reaching out to new constituencies and partly by reconnecting to selected networks of older generations that had been marginal enough to escape being discredited together with the New Left, such as non-sect student groups or local community unions. While researchers like Alexander (2004) or Eyerman (2001, 2004) have focused on how shared traumas can strengthen collective identities, I wish to open up the possibility that the new identities that emerge in the process of working through a trauma may be quite different from the old (discredited) collective identities, formed around quite different projects and with different group boundaries. An example was Aki no arashi (The storm of autumn), a pioneering freeter activist group that emerged in the late 1980s among students at Waseda University. Reacting against the New Left factions on the campus, they moved the scene of their activities to the streets of Harajuku where they performed punk concerts and tried to reach out to runaway youth. Gradually, activities of groups like this that helped change the image of radical activism in Japan. Through this process, the discursive tear was gradually repaired and the road paved for new forms of radical critique to develop. The repair work, however, produced a social constituency markedly different from that of the New Left students. What needs to be studied is therefore not only the role of preexisting networks or identities in the emergence of movements, but also how networks are assembled in sometimes radically new patterns in the wake of a trauma, and together with them new discourses and new identities. Empowerment and the Role of Alternative Space in Social Movements That Aki no arashi’s renewal of activism went hand in hand with a spatial movement from the campus to the “street” is significant. If trauma is not simply something “inner” but rather a tear in discourse that is upheld by power relations, then recovery too is not a purely “inner” process but rather something that happens when new discourses take form in places and situations where power relations are different. Alternative spaces often play an important role in recovery. By venturing into new places, people can experience for themselves that the dominance of reigning

22

chapter one

discourses is not total and that room exists for the development of oppositional languages through which the grip of traumas is lessened. In this section I will make some preliminary clarifications about what I mean by alternative spaces and about how movements may use them for the purposes of empowerment.2 By alternative space I mean spaces that are felt by participants to offer relief from the oppressive features of mainstream arenas. Negative value judgments on people and activities subject to sanctions in mainstream life are suspended or playfully inverted and efforts are made to ensure an environment that is responsive to the needs and wishes of participants. Although often associated with particular physical places – such as campus facilities used by radical students, the tent villages of homeless people, or various “free spaces” or “independent cafés” – it should be pointed out that alternative spaces are primarily a social milieu, defined by the form of social relationships existing in these places. The importance of alternative spaces stems not only from the fact that they help nurture and shelter alternative discourses, but also from their ability – when they work well – to actually provide arenas for social interaction where participants do not feel powerless to influence their environment. It has often been pointed out by scholars studying alternative spaces that access to such spaces help repressed or subordinated people develop or preserve oppositional discourses (Couto 1993; Evans & Boyte 1992; Gamson 1996; Polletta 1999). Richard Couto, for example, shows how black churches functioned as free spaces that helped preserve narratives among the black that nurtured resistance by sustaining “belief in the virtue of the oppressed” and supporting a “better understanding of the group’s social condition” (Couto 1993:60f). However, rather than focusing on the role of space in preserving already existing traditions, I want to emphasize how alternative spaces can help new narratives develop in situations in which older narratives are felt to be discredited, as was the case among activists in Japan who no longer wanted to identify with the New Left. To fully understand the role of alternative spaces to social movements, it will be useful to introduce a distinction between recovery and empowerment. While recovery from a collective trauma is a discursive process – the fashioning of a language suited to needs and desires that were once 2 Further elaborations of the concepts of alternative space and empowerment, on varieties of alternative space and on how they relate to the public sphere will follow in chapters 5, 6 and 8.



trauma, empowerment and alternative space23

expressed in now defeated or discredited discourses – empowerment is a subjective process, the feeling of being able to influence society. These processes should be kept conceptually apart, but they often go hand in hand, and both are often found in alternative space. If recovery consists in finding words, empowerment is the experience of the liberation from powerlessness. Empowerment occurs when people regain the sense that their actions and opinions matter and that they have the power to influence things in society which they deem to be important. It thus implies what Drury & Reicher (2005:35) describe as the “confidence in one’s ability to challenge existing relations of domination”. As I will show, freeter activism stands out by its skill in utilising and moving between different kinds of space. The factor that explains this movement is often the need for empowerment and for spaces where alternative discourses can be articulated. Dissatisfaction with the spatial order of the mainstream public sphere is sometimes expressed directly in open protest, but it can also lead people to orient themselves to other places or to create such other places. Having access to alternative arenas can be crucial in helping people “denaturalize” their world and transform it into one of history, possibility and action. Social Movements and Therapeutical Activism That a large part of the activities of social movements takes place in alternative arenas easily gets lost in social movement studies, which have often emphasised that the function of social movements consists in addressing the political system or mainstream society, bringing up issues on the agenda. Typical of this perspective is Jürgen Habermas, who considers the public sphere as a functional supplement to the political system, describing it as a “sounding board” or “warning system” that alerts the state about problems that need to be solved (Habermas 1996:359). These alerts often come from social movements. As Michael Warner writes, “the publicsphere environment Habermas describes can be seen as the context of modern social movements” (Warner 2002:50). In contrast to this perspective, I follow Alberto Melucci, who points out that next to the demonstrations and campaigns that constitute the visible surface of most movements, many movement activities unfold in the “invisible” networks of the everyday. He refers to them as “cultural laboratories” (Melucci 1989). To capture this, it is necessary to shift focus from the participation of movements in the public sphere to a perspective where we can grasp how participation as well as non-participation are

24

chapter one

parts of their strategies. While public protests are the outwardly most visible aspect of social movement activism, a usually less visible but fully as important function of movements that attempt to reach out to discriminated, marginal or subaltern groups is to provide alternative spaces where the first steps towards counteracting the sense of powerlessness may be taken. Such therapeutical elements are seldom highlighted in conventional definitions of social movements, which tend to emphasise public confrontation, internal solidarity within the movement and a challenge to the given social order (e.g. Melucci 1989; McAdam et al. 2001:5). However, people do not protest automatically or naturally in response to discontents or grievances in society. They first need to be empowered enough to be ready for action and able to recognise themselves in available movement languages. Assembling such a “subject” is a form of discursive work that cannot be adequately captured by concepts such as “discursive opportunity” (Gamson 2007:249; Koopman & Olzak 2004). Opportunities exist for subjects who are ready for action when opportunities arise. Especially in the wake of a collective trauma, however, what needs to be given attention are the discursive processes whereby the social ties and identities needed to maintain such subjects are assembled and reconstructed. As I will show, the “cultural” repertoire and the way space is talked about and used in freeter activism can be understood as means to further such processes. To capture this work of recovery and empowerment, I use the term therapeutical politics. I envision it as a supplement to the more well known conceptual pair of instrumental and prefigurative politics (see Boggs 1977–78; Breines 1982, 1989; Epstein 1993:16, 83ff, 108–117, 122f). Street demonstrations, petitions, boycotts and lobbying – the traditional repertoire of social movements – are usually seen as a primarily instrumental form of politics, as means towards achieving a certain result by appealing to or pressuring authorities or public opinion. By contrast, street parties, concerts and alternative spaces have often been described as putting a greater emphasis on prefigurative activism, in which the desired change is directly realised in the activity itself. Rather than relying on authorities to implement changes, in prefigurative activities people themselves realize the kind of society they wish to see. The action becomes what Melucci refers to as a “living utopia” which may function as a model for a better society. “Fun”, “play”, “pleasure” or “enjoyment” are therefore not seen as signs of lack of serious political commitment but as a crucial ingredient in prefigurative activities.



trauma, empowerment and alternative space25

Alternative spaces have often been grasped as spaces for practising prefigurative politics. I would argue that this is too narrow since they are also spaces for therapeutical activism. A problem with understanding social movements as engaging solely in instrumental or prefigurative activism is that both perspectives tend to presuppose subjects sufficiently intact to choose the most efficient instrumental action or freely project a desired utopian outcome. Much activism is not, and cannot be, wholly instrumental or prefigurative, since it is rooted in present emotional needs. That emotions too are always caught up in the present is also why “fun” is not always the relevant emotion to produce. Kevin McDonald provides a mundane example of therapeutical politics. He quotes an interviewee who for a period of months had been engaged in constructing puppets for a protest event: To be able to set up tables, chairs, have enough plates for everyone to be able to sit around and have a food ritual every day and cup of tea morning and afternoon rituals, they were just essential… people really felt empowered that they were actually able to contribute. They were able to vent some of their frustrations and angst about the situation—not [just] the global economic situation but the whole community lack of dispirited ailments of society that most people have no means of being able to address because they feel so individual and so unable to participate in some sense of change or some sense of contributing to change whatever… [What was important was] the physical—actual making and doing. (quoted in McDonald 2002:123)

McDonald describes this as “an experience of recovery of interiority, one built up through a process that is physical, not abstract” (ibid.). This is a particular form of empowerment that comes about through doing and working, rather than through verbalisation or intellectual mastery. The crucial factor is that people regain a sense of themselves as agents or active subjects rather than passive victims or onlookers. We can also note that it takes place in the less visible everyday activities of the movement, in the alternative spaces used by activists in daily life. Paying attention to therapeutical aspects of activism is necessary for an understanding of the development of freeter activism in Japan since it helps us see why the activities of early freeter groups were politically important even when activists largely withdrew from open political protest. The recurrent debates about whether the cultural activities engaged in by movements such as what McDonald (2006) calls “experience movements” or what Mōri (2005a) refers to as “new cultural movements” qualify as political may well stem from the fact that such activities often

26

chapter one

revolve around empowerment, i.e. on activities that often lack the element of visible protest. To be sure, activities devoted to empowerment are hardly instrumental in the usual sense of the word. Neither are they prefigurative, since they are still marked by the effort to come to terms with or overcome the past. Despite this, they are an important part of social movements. Therapeutical activism is politically important since it helps producing actors experiencing themselves as capable of political action. They thus often serve as a precondition of other forms of activism.

CHAPTER TWO

JAPAN’S LOST DECADE AND TWO RECOVERIES “This country has everything. The only thing missing is hope” (Murakami 2002:314). This line in Murakami Ryū’s 2000 novel Kibō no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus to the land of hope) is emblematic of the mood of impasse and deadlock (heisokukan) that is often said to have been produced by Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s. The mood was widely shared. “The prolonged recession has given rise to a stifling feeling of being locked inside a box with no exit in sight, and has cast a dark shadow on the national psyche”, an economist stated (Yoshikawa 2001:2). Expressive of this mood was also a survey from 2006 among 25–34 year olds that showed that 64 percent felt that Japan was not a society in which they could feel hope for the future (Asahi Shimbun “Rosuto jenerēshon” reporter team 2007:185). The central argument I will make in this chapter is that much of what we associate with the late 1990s, such as the sense of deadlock, must be understood not only as a result of the economic recession but also against the backdrop of previous traumas – especially the trauma of the New Left’s defeat in the 1970s. Below I will provide a brief background on developments following the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s before moving to a discussion of how these interacted with the legacy of the New Left to set the stage for the development of freeter activism. The End of the Bubble and the Arrival of Precarity The changes brought on Japanese society with the onset of the post-­ bubble recession in the early 1990s and the ensuing neoliberal reforms and deregulations that gained force from the mid-1990s onwards have been important factors shaping freeter activism. The sense of affluence during previous decades had played an important role in pacifying social unrest. Trademark elements of the “Japanese model” of employment and management such as the seniority system and lifetime employment, although never available to all employees, had helped secure a large measure of legitimacy for the system. When this model came under pressure in the 1990s, the crisis of work sent repercussion through the entire social

28

chapter two

fabric. The previously commonly held idea of Japan as a “middle-class society” (sōchūryū shakai) started to give way in public awareness to the  idea of an “income-gap society” (kakusa shakai) (Chiavacci 2008; Tachibanaki 2006). Towards the end of the decade, indicators of social malaise became increasingly evident. The number of suicides jumped to above 30,000 per year, a level where it has stayed since. Poverty rates increased to become one of the highest in OECD countries. Unemployment reached over 5 percent in 2002 (compared to slightly more than 2 percent in 1991), while the rate of irregular workers climbed to over 35 percent of the workforce in 2011 (up from slightly above 18 percent in 1990). Young Japanese were hard hit by the changes. To many of those who entered the labour market during the years following the burst of the economic bubble – the so-called “ice age of employment” – regular jobs were simply not available. Being known as the “lost generation”, this was the first postwar generation in Japan to experience a decline in living standards (Asahi Shimbun “Rosuto jenerēsyon” reporter team 2007). It has been argued that this generation, having grown up during decades of unprecedented affluence, probably experienced more frustration and feelings of “betrayal” than later generations, who had few hopes to begin with (Honda 2007:40). During the 1990s, unemployment among those aged 20–24 more or less doubled, reaching nearly 10 percent by the early twenty-first century. Since the 1990s an increasing number of workers, especially younger workers, have been forced to accept badly paid temporary jobs, becoming freeters in a wide sense. The rate of young people (aged 20–24) working as irregular workers almost quadrupled between the early 1980s and 2007 (Brinton 2010:123, 2011:19–28; Hommerich 2012:209f; Tarōmaru & Kameyama 2006:4f). To understand the deprivation experienced by freeters, it is important to recall that they earn far less than regular employees. According to a 2004 estimate, the average earnings of regular employees are 3.7 times those of non-regular employees. These lower wages in turn mean that male freeters are often unable to marry, since Japanese society still looks to men as the family’s breadwinner (Ishiguro 2008). Freeters also suffer the insecurity of being easily dismissed, having few acquaintances at the workplace, and lacking prospects for upward mobility. Due to the lingering seniority system in Japanese companies, employers prefer fresh graduates from university as regular employees, meaning that once a person becomes a freeter the hurdles to gaining a regular employment are extremely high (Honda & Hirai 2007:14–18; Tarōmaru 2006). In contrast to the popular image of “lazy” or “spoilt” freeters, statistics from the Labour Ministry from



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries29

1999 show that freeters on average work longer than the average, but for much lower wages (Ikuta 2001a, see also Ishiguro 2008). This increasing precarisation of the young workers was not simply a consequence of the immediate post-bubble recession, but was also actively promoted by neoliberal policies that gained force in Japan from the mid-1990s and contributed to a renewed recession in 1998–1999. As Mōri (2005b, 2009a:151–154) points out, the real shock to the Japanese system, and the real turning point in the 1990s, was not the burst of the asset bubble in 1992. Many of the social problems associated with Japan’s “lost decade” – the unemployment, the precarisation of labour and the concomitant spread of a sense of economic and social insecurity and anxiety – were rather the product of deliberate neoliberal reforms implemented from the mid-1990s and onwards.1 These were reforms that had been strongly championed by employer organisations which could now be implemented due to the economic crisis and the loss of political power of labour unions and the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) (Watanabe Hiroaki 2012:28f).2 Shinjidai no “Nihonteki keiei” (“‘Japanese-style management’ for the new era”), a 1995 document published by Nikkeiren (Japan Federation of Employers’ Associations), is symbolic of this push for labour market deregulation. The document advocates an end to Japan’s lifetime employment and seniority system, and recommends a more flexible labour market, dividing future employees into three types: long-term “core” employees, specialists to be hired on short-time basis, and dispensable flexible labour (Ishiguro 2008; Hashiguchi 2011:60). The precarisation of labour was in part a reaction to particular Japanese experiences such as the bubble, but it was also part of a wider, global 1 Nitta (2009) also points to the contrast between the early post-bubble years and the period after 1997, stating that adjustments were moderate in the former period but drastic and with severe consequences for workers in the latter. 2 For an overview of legislative changes related to the deregulation of employment, see Assman & Maslow (2010), Ishiguro (2008). The roots of Japan’s turn to neoliberalism can be traced to the premiership of Nakasone Yasuhiro in the 1980s. An important early reform was the 1985 Worker Dispatch Law (Rōdōsha haken jigyō-hō) which legalized the dispatch of workers – until then a criminal activity handled by the yakuza – for a number of specialist professions. Successive revisions of the law in 1999 and 2003 removed most remaining restrictions. The result was a rapid expansion of temporary labour in the labour market, with dispatch workers increasing almost sixfold from 654,000 in 1992 to 3,84 million in 2007 (Ikuta 2007:203, Shinoda 2009, Watanabe Hiroaki 2012). Only in 2012 was the Dispatch Law partially amended to remedy the worst abuses. Together with deregulation went the state’s virtual abandonment of progressive income taxation. As Tachibanaki points out: “The steep progressive income tax [of the 1970s and the 1980s] was significantly weakened over time, leading to the complete demise of income redistribution policy in the present day” (2006:42).

30

chapter two

transformation, often theorised as a shift from Fordist to post-Fordist economic models (see Amin 1994). The background to this shift, as Harvey (2006) points out, was the increasing difficulties to maintain profit levels that capitalism faced within the old core of the world-system in the 1970s. To restore profit levels, the mobility of capital flows and production sites was increased, enabling employers to press labour costs and to force a flexibilisation of labour. These measures were also adopted by Japanese capitalism, although belatedly, since the momentum of Japan’s postwar economic miracle and the “bubble” era of the late 1980s kept it from having to confront this crisis of profitability until the 1990s (Schoppa 2006). Once the flexibilisation process started in Japan, it stood out by its speed and radicalness and by the relatively high rate of irregular workers that it produced (Honda & Hirai 2007:14–18). While it makes sense to see precarisation in Japan as part of a process accompanying globalisation all over the world, it is necessary to recall two points. The first is that precarity is not a new phenomenon. As Gill & Pratt point out, “capitalist labour has always been characterised by intermittency for lower-paid and lower-skilled workers”, the recent departure merely being “the addition of well-paid and high-status workers in to this groups of ‘precarious workers’” (2008:1). In Japan, lowly-paid, insecure work has long been carried out by women and people with a lower class background and, to them, precarity is certainly not new. Slater observes that the moral panic about freeters in Japan only started when middleclass youth started taking these jobs, which the working classes had always been expected to do (Slater 2010:162f). The elevation of precarity and poverty to a major social problem today may thus be a reaction above all to the deterioration of the employment status of male middle-class workers (Brinton 2010, 2011:30; Hashiguchi 2011:71; Murakami 2006; Satō 2010). Secondly, precarity has a geography. Terms like post-Fordism or globalisation are sometimes used in a way that tends to suggest a smooth, linear shift with few regional variations, while in fact capitalism usually develops through geographically specific bouts of creative destruction (Harootunian 2000:xi-xx). Fordist compromises and a relatively high degree of employment security were more pronounced in areas such as Europe and Japan than in other parts of the capitalist core. As Neilson & Rossiter (2008) suggest, this may explain why precarity movements emerged strongly in these geographical areas. They were areas in which, to quote Offe & Heinze, the gap between “the imagined normality of employment and a steady job” and “the experienced reality of unemployment, underemployment and precarious or irregular employment” was most painfully



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries31

felt (Offe & Heinze 1992:2). Factors related to gender, class and geography thus help explain why the gap between the felt normalcy of regular work and the experienced failure to attain such work was felt so strongly in Japan. The Sense of Closure and the Legacy of Earlier Protest That the developments during the 1990s produced a widespread sense of deadlock and impasse is not surprising. To understand this feeling of deadlock, however, it is necessary to consider the following two facts, which contradict the simplistic view that the burst of the economic bubble in the early 1990s was nothing but a catastrophe that plunged the country into despair. Firstly, many writers, thinkers and artists greeted the collapse of the “Japanese model” in the 1990s with glee or relief. Comparing the bubble economy to a maniacal feeling of having conquered the world, the Neopop artist Murakami Takashi writes that “when that mirage vanished, we felt relief, as if to say: ‘That’s right, this is what reality looks like’” (Murakami Takashi 2005:135). This sentiment was shared by the philosopher and critic Karatani Kōjin, for whom the collapse was a breath of fresh air. Looking back in 1997, he writes that he had “felt almost suffocated in Japan during the 1980s”, when people were euphoric and Japanese capitalism seemed triumphant (Karatani 1997). To people like Murakami and Karatani, then, the end of the bubble-economy was not only a trauma, but also had a vitalising effect. Secondly, the sense of deadlock and closure was prominent already among writers and intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s. These were the decades when writers and critics like Murakami Haruki or Karatani became famous for fiction or literary criticism that reacted to the extinction of political alternatives through a lament of the lack of “exits” in Japan or of “exteriority” in the Japanese discursive space (see Cassegård 2007b). The difficulty of finding an external standpoint from which to criticize the system is well captured in Murakami’s 1985 novel Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando), in which the narrator is warned by his alter ego, the “shadow”, that the “Town” in which he is living is “sealed”. “That’s why the longer you stay in here, the more you get to thinking that things are normal” (Murakami 1993:247f). When the narrator in another story gazes out at Tokyo from a train, the city seems to induce the hallucination that it is all that exists.

32

chapter two

“We can go anywhere, and yet we’re locked up”, he thinks, “There’s no exit anywhere” (ibid. 1986:49ff). In order to see the significance of these passages, we may recall how for Walter Benjamin shock was not only something painful but also a liberating rupture that helped bring about an “awakening from the 19th century” and an increased attention to the real problems of the present. When Karatani in the 1980s criticised the discursive space of contemporary Japan as “filled with complacency and almost totally lacking in exteriority” (Karatani 1989:272), it was this absence of shocks that he had in mind. Exteriority, in other words, is something that destabilizes the encompassing whole of the sealed worlds described by Murakami. It is in this light that we should understand Karatani’s valorisation of the collapse of the “Japanese model” and the chances it seemed to offer for the liberation of buried traditions. But why does the experience of closure occupy such a central role already here, in texts from the 1980s? A hint is offered by Karatani, who links the issue of exteriority to the problems of trauma and recovery. In Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (1980, published in English in 1993 as The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature) Karatani points out that the emergence of “landscapes” in writers of the late Meiji period was the result of the disappearance of exteriority. Significantly, he links this emergence to the internalisation of libido that followed on the trauma of the suppression of the People’s Rights movement in the 1880s. To speak in Freudian terms, the libido which was once directed toward the People’s Rights movement and the writing of political novels lost its object and was redirected inward, at which point “landscape” and “the inner life” appeared. (ibid. 1993:39)

The exclusion of exteriority is seen here as a corollary of political disillusionment, a withdrawal or retracting of energies that had once sought an outlet through political imagination and action. Most of Murakami’s stories are set in the decades following the defeat of the radical political movements of the 1960s. Although his stories offer us very little of glorification of rebellion, he clearly shares many of the underlying values of the activists of the 1960s. His distrust, however, is directed not only against the system but against many of the variants of active confrontation as well. Throughout his writings one encounters the vision of the system as an encompassing whole in which all opposition is recuperated and co-opted. “I didn’t think so then, but the world was still simple in 1969. In some cases, it was enough to throw stones at the riot police for



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries33

people to achieve self-expression. In its own way, it was a good time”, one of his protagonists say. In today’s “advanced capitalist society”, by contrast, even opposition is recuperated into the system: “A net has been stretched from one corner of society to the other. Outside the net there is another net. We can’t go anywhere. If we throw a stone it’s deflected and bounces back” (Murakami 1991:114). Matthew Strecher has observed that this system is “a manifestation of the postmodern State: hidden, elusive, and unaccountable”. Indeed Murakami portrays it as the very “adversary State against which his generation battled in the 1960s” which “is now more powerful, and, indeed, more deadly, than ever” (Strecher 1998:356, 358). Murakami’s fiction helps bring into view a more nuanced picture of the triumphalist 1980s as a traumatised state, brought about through a paralysis of protest. In this world, externally applied criticism has become powerless, since the protagonists are enmeshed in and part of the decay and fallenness of the world. To be sure, passivity and feelings of guilt are not the only possible responses to the sensed inability to change the status quo. In Murakami Ryū’s 1980 novel Koinrokkā bēbīs (Coinlocker Babies) one of the protagonists hallucinates in his hotel room that Tokyo extends endlessly in all directions – an enormous, dead city. But instead of resigning himself, he is gripped by an urge to level it with the ground. “Kill them all! Smash everything! Wipe this cesspool off the face of the earth!” (Murakami 1998:85). The passage illustrates the relation between the feeling of claustrophobic closure and the longing for a purifying apocalypse. It is easy to find similarities between this dead city and Murakami Haruki’s city without “exits”. Both portray feelings of suffocation in the face of the ever-same. The apparently resigned conformism of Murakami Haruki’s heroes may seem diametrically opposed to the destructive outbursts of Murakami Ryū’s, but what they have in common is that they have given up hope in protest as a means to change society. In that sense, they are sides of the same coin. Both portray a world in which what has disappeared is not resistance per se, but rather the possibility of expressing it in realistic channels of action, in political acts where possibilities are opened for people to influence and change society. The Trauma of the New Left These facts suggest that apart from the defeat of the “Japanese model” in the early 1990s, we also need to focus on the effects of an earlier defeat, that of the protest movements of the 1960s, and ask why this defeat produced so strong feelings of closure and deadlock.

34

chapter two

The New Left in Japan, closely associated with the radical student movement in the 1960s and 1970s, made its first great public appearance around the time of the Ampo-protests in 1960 against the security treaty with the US, when its central organisation was the national student organisation Zengakuren.3 Like in many other parts of the world, the rise of the Japanese New Left was a reaction to the orthodoxy of the established Left, in particular the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). The confrontation with orthodoxy was catalysed by the onset of destalinisation in the Soviet Union and the Hungarian revolt in 1956. After the Ampo-protests, Zengakuren disintegrated into sectarian rivalry, but student radicalism reached a new climax during the years 1967–69, when it coincided with the global revolt of “1968”. During the struggles a new national network, Zenkyōtō emerged.4 The radical groups occupied university campuses all over the country, violently confronting the police in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the security treaty or the US military bases hosted by Japan. The style adopted by the students, with helmets in different colours and wooden rods (gebabō), has become classical and is still today a well-known emblem of radical militancy. That the experience of the radical protest movements in Japan left traumatic scars on many participants is evident.5 What makes it a collective trauma is that it seemed to discredit an entire discourse – a way of speaking, acting and identifying oneself associated with the New Left – and thereby for a long time dampened activism in Japan and gave a bad image to words like “activist” (katsudōka) (Ueno 1997; Yuasa 2009a:77, 2009c:26). Why, then, did this defeat turn into a trauma? Kotani Satoshi suggests that  the student revolt failed in Japan to a larger degree than in other countries. In Europe and North America, the activists could point to the alleviation of discrimination, the widespread legitimacy for tackling war responsibility, the growing public support for environmental protection, the increasing participation of women in public affairs and greater sexual equality as examples of how their values had successfully affected society. None of this, he points out, came about in Japan (Kotani 2004:36). 3 On the Ampo Struggle, see e.g. Avenell (2010:62–105), Hasegawa (2003), Igarashi (2000:131–163), Ōtake (2007), Packard (1966); Sasaki-Uemura (2001). 4 Zenkyōtō or Zenkoku Kyōtō Kaigi (All-Student Joint Struggle Conference) was a nationwide radical student network that evolved out of the struggles of 1968–69. Unlike Zengakuren, Zenkyōtō was not a formal organisation with fixed membership, but a network to which students responded on an individual basis (see Ando 2013 for a convenient summary). 5 See for example the autobiographical sections in Kosaka (2006:7–9, 130, 134ff, 143ff, 206).



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries35

Still, to explain the traumatic outcome of the defeat of radical protest movements in Japan, it is not enough to point to the magnitude of their failure. A crucial further factor was that it came to be seen as self-inflicted. Strecher suggests that the defeat of radical protest may have been particularly traumatic in Japan, where the movements not only failed to achieve any substantial goals – such as ending the Vietnam War, stopping the security treaty with the US or bringing down the government – but also lost public support through its unappealing behaviour. [O]ne could not even point to the moral righteousness of the movement, for the majority of its membership joined the Establishment en masse after 1970, while remnants turned either to the largely ineffectual New Left, or to terrorist squads such as the Japanese Red Army. (Strecher 1998:371f)

Severely damaging the reputation of New Left activists was their tendency to get embroiled in violent sectarian infighting (uchigeba) which often involved “lynchings” and over the years led to the death of over a hundred people (Konishi 2000; Kosaka 2006:95, 115ff, 230f; Suga 2006a:263). Such infighting, as Chan points out, “left a permanently tarnished image of the Left in the eyes of the general public” (2008:22). The development of terrorist groups like the United Red Army (Rengō sekigun) may have even more devastating to the New Left’s image. This was a small militant grouping that had emerged from the Zenkyōtō and whose hideout at Mt Asama was surrounded by the police in 1972. After their capitulation it was discovered that the members had murdered 14 of their own for their alleged lack of revolutionary zeal. Among many radical activists in Japan, this so-called Asama Sansō incident achieved iconic status as a powerful symbol of the New Left’s failure (Suga 2003a:272f; Oguma 2009:500, 792). In the minds of many who had participated in or sympathized with the New Left activism, the shock of learning about the United Red Army’s crimes was inseparably linked with their decision to distance themselves from their own movements. The gruesomeness of the crimes appeared to have illuminated the depth of loss felt at the time—the loss of revolutionary hopes in Japanese society. (Igarashi 2007:120)

The trauma of the New Left, then, was not simply defeat at the hands of the state, but also seemingly self-inflicted through a self-destructive development that left little or nothing to be proud of. It is important to point out that events like the Asama Sansō incident or the failure of radical activists to attain their aims were not naturally traumatogenic, but only become so in a certain context. The growing sense of

36

chapter two

affluence brought about by the economic “miracle” and the continued strong economic growth during the 1970s and 1980s help explain why the establishment was so strong and why the radical movements were so particularly unsuccessful in Japan compared to in other advanced economies, where talk of crisis or stagnation was rampant in the 1970s. In the light of the country’s economic successes, the United Red Army and its insistence on revolutionary fervour appeared not just gruesome, but also out of touch with its time. High economic growth strengthened public trust in capitalism as well as in the country’s conservative political and bureaucratic establishment. It also helped strengthen traditional gender roles since men were earning enough income to let their wives remain housewives (Kotani 2004). The conformist lifestyle of the middle-class “salaryman”, with his wife staying at home taking care of the family, thus became the norm in a society in which social unrest seemed largely pacified. In the 1970s radical student activism weakened and lost popular appeal. Although surviving on university campuses, radical student organisations had negligible influence on the wider society. Feelings of defeat and political disillusionment spread in society, and the decade became known as an “age of apathy” (shirake no jidai). To be sure, large protest manifestations were conspicuous in Okinawa, where the US military bases fuelled local resentment. Movements of local residents protesting against problems like pollution or large-scale construction projects also remained strong in many places. However, a general decline in overall activism was unmistakable, a decline which was most obvious in the case of youth movements but which also included the so-called “citizen movements” that had emerged around the same time as the New Left, triggered by the Ampo-protests. Here a brief comparison with the situation outside Japan might be appropriate. That the experience of “1968” left traumatic scars in many countries is undeniable (Berger 1999). Despite this, the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by the rise of the so-called “new social movements” focusing on issues such as the environment, peace, gender or minority rights in many countries in the West. Several reasons can be advanced to explain why such movements were weaker in Japan. One factor may have been the diversity of the radical student counter-culture in the West, which included elements such as the hippie culture in which many new social movements had important roots. A reasonable assumption is that diversity in a counter-culture will give it greater flexibility to adapt to new issues and greater resilience to withstand setbacks, since it will be less likely that the counter-culture as a whole will be affected by a single



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries37

setback. A second reason may have been the division of labour among Japanese movements, which meant that environmental and peace issues were regarded as the territory of local residents’ movements or citizen movements rather than youth movements. Here one might of course ask why Japanese youth was not more inclined to take up these issues, as young people did in many other countries. The answer, I would suggest, is that their disillusionment with the New Left translated into a general disillusionment with activism as such. By disarming social criticism, Japan’s very success in catching up with the West may thus have prevented the country from dealing adequately with problems such as gender inequality or war responsibility which are still unresolved today. This then is the historical context behind the heyday of the golden age of conservative complacency in the 1980s, the “closure” of which Karatani speaks. Lost Decade, Regained Activism? During the 1970s and 1980s, the discourse of the New Left was marginalised by the sense of affluence generated by Japanese capitalism and the setback suffered by the radical students. This helps explain the mood of impasse, exitlessness or closure that figures so prominently in literature and thought in the 1980s. What happens to this feeling of impasse during the lost decade of the 1990s? With harshening global competition, deregulation and precarity, the sense of affluence and security suffered drastically. Since this removed an important cause of the marginalisation of protest, the stage may appear to have been set for a re-awakening of movement activism. Despite this, protests against the deterioration of economic conditions were hardly noticeable until well into the 2000s. The reason, I suggest, is the lingering bad image of New Left radical activism, which had by now acquired its own inertia. To many young Japanese who were repulsed by the legacy of the New Left, there were simply no attractive organisational vehicles available for protest and no attractive language in which to express them. By the early 1990s the institutional bastions of the “old” Left in Japan were also crumbling and hardly capable of attracting the young. The left-leaning union confederation Sōhyō had dissolved and merged with the less radical Rengō in 1989 while the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), which had served as the main oppositional party during most of the postwar era, collapsed and transformed into the much smaller Social Democratic Party in 1996.

38

chapter two

Other factors also existed that may have contributed to the weakness of protest during the 1990s. Steinhoff (2006) suggests that the intrusive style of policing of street demonstrations contributed to the dwindling of protest from the 1970s to the 1990s by stigmatising radical groups and gradually narrowing the “limit of permissible dissent”. Avenell (2009) points out that new civic movements advocating self-help and proactive engagement with state and market played an active role in demonizing the “accusatory” style of older, more radical movements. While these factors were important, they are hardly sufficient in themselves to explain the weakening of radical activism. They make best sense in a situation in which the radical movements targeted by the police or by rival civic movements were already stagnant. After all, neither policing nor demonisation prevented new vigorous protest movements from arising after the turn to the new millennium. The fact that many high-profile members of the early civic movements were themselves disillusioned former radical students, as Avenell (ibid.) points out, indicates that the disillusionment very likely played a more fundamental role in the overall weakening of protest. To understand how the trauma of the New Left contributed to a weakening of protest, it is helpful to recall that trauma implies the incapacitation of a certain discourse. It meant that, when the pain of neoliberal reforms began to be felt in the late 1990s, there was no Leftist discourse there to articulate or frame it in a generally persuasive way. With the Left in shambles, the hardships suffered by the young were instead often expressed in a language of self-responsibility (jiko-sekinin) that blamed the precarious situation of the young on their own lack of effort or willingness to work. That the neoliberal reforms were introduced in the wake of the post-­bubble recession helped protect them from criticism, since the effects of the reforms could be blamed on the recession. The result was that many saw the hardships of the lost decade as the result, not of the reforms, but of the shortcomings of the once so celebrated Japanese model – in particular the vested interests or “privileges” (kitokuken) of regular employees (e.g. Murakami & Sawa 2002:48; cf. Yoda 2000:654f). The structural reforms touted by neoliberals like Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō were thus popular since they were widely understood as a criticism of vested interests. Many critics saw a political danger in the apparent support of many young people for more thoroughgoing reforms (e.g. Miura 2005:186ff). The sociologist and social critic Oguma Eiji pointed out that “the young people who voted for Thatcher or Koizumi put the noose around their own necks” (Amamiya & Oguma 2007:37). Others claimed that young people acted as



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries39

their own “gravediggers” (Takahara 2007:44). Even more drastically, the sociologist Ōsawa Masachi (2002) suggested that those who supported Koizumi with his unspecified promise of sweeping “structural reforms”, were repeating in grander scale what the sect members of the doomsday sect Aum Shinrikyō had done a decade earlier – they were attracted by the message of an unspecified “salvation through Armageddon”, by the idea that only a total destruction of the existing order offered any hope. In this apprehension of Japanese youth as ideologically unreliable, there is something of the same moral panic that makes Guy Standing warn that the precariat is a “dangerous class” that can easily turn to xenophobia and authoritarian leaders (Standing 2011). Sometimes young freeters themselves seemed to relish displaying this ideological volatility. In 2007, a temp worker stated: “There’s no solution but fascism or revolution. Is there anyone in Japan who’s really giving a thought about labour, someone like Marx? If not, give us a clever politician like Hitler. He’ll do fine as well” (Donkey Kōgu Jr 2007:134). In 2007, Akagi Tomohiro, a freeter working night shifts in a convenience store, achieved notoriety for an article in Ronza where he claimed that war was the only hope for his generation, which he called the”post-bubble generation”. Only a war, he explained, would give him the chance to get back on members of the social elite – like when the young Tokyo University scholar Maruyama Masao had been drafted during the war and forced to endure slappings by superiors who had not even attended middle school (Akagi 2007). The article was a bitter accusation against the privileges of the older generations and triggered a heated debate. The well-known precarity activist Amamiya Karin was emphatic that Akagi was giving voice to how desperate many freeters were feeling. As a young freeter, when she herself had been active in a right extremist organisation and a vocalist in a rightist punk band, she too had longed for a war that would free her from her lowly social position. What she desired was a “reset”, a “big bang” (Amamiya 2009a:112–123). The psychologist Saitō Tamaki reports similar feelings among social withdrawers, who had told him that they would gladly join the army if there were a recruitment call. The reason, he believes, is that many social withdrawers want to “contribute” to society but feel unable to do so in everyday life. A similar wish, he believes, explains why many of them volunteered at the time of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake (Saitō 2005:174f). One of those volunteers, the former social withdrawer Ueyama Kazuki, explains that going to work as a volunteer in the disaster area had brought him a sense of relief since “the invisible ‘everyday’ had collapsed, which had oppressed and plagued me until that day. To me, it felt as if I was breathing for the

40

chapter two

first time in my life out of my own power and with my own lungs” (Ueyama 2001:76f, 86). What is striking with these statements is the underlying whole-sweeping radicalism – the call for an apocalyptic clean slate or “big bang”, removing all remaining privileges or vested interests and allowing everyone to participate on an equal footing. Japan’s Two “Recoveries” Despite the prevalence of statements about closure or deadlock, the mood of decline and stagnation in the 1990s was far from compact. The ideological volatility discussed above coexisted with a trend among young Japanese to become more politically active (Kitada 2005:20f). Studies of how young people in Japan reacted to the economic downturn through political action have often focused on the upsurge of nationalism or conservatism (e.g. Kayama 2002; Kitada 2005). Against this, I hope to show that what happened was a polarisation and tendency towards increased pluralism. While there has certainly been a comeback for a nationalistic discourse yearning for a restoration of national pride and economic as well as military might, there has also been a budding growth of a stronger civil society and social movement activism as manifested in the quickly increasing number of NPO’s (Non-Profit Organisations) in the areas of the environment, peace, human rights and welfare (for discussions of the latter trend, see Avenell 2009; Bouissou 2002; Chan ed. 2008; Chanin 1998; Garon 2003; Hasegawa 2002; Kingston 2004; Kingston ed. 2012; Kuroda 2003; Schwartz & Pharr eds 2003) as well as in the emergence of radical protest movements after the turn of the new millennium. Looking at the broader context of intellectual and cultural currents, the late 1990s and early 2000s also witnessed a trend towards a radicalisation of intellectuals and writers.6 Both Karatani and the art critic Sawaragi Noi illustrate this radicalisation. Starting from similar points of departure, in broadly poststructuralist-inspired thought and a similar view of present-day Japan as “closed” or lacking “exteriority”, they both took the initiative to forming social movement groups in the early years of the new millennium. Karatani’s growing political engagement culminated in his establishment in 2000 of the New Associationist Movement (NAM), one of the first groups in Japan to explicitly criticize “globalisation” (Cassegård 2007b, 6 This phenomenon has been described as a ‘post-1995’ phenomenon, since the year 1995 – a year marked by the Great Hanshin earthquake, the Sarin Gas attack, and the rape of an Okinawan girl by US soldiers – was a significant point of transition (cf. Kitada 2005:191, 211ff; Kurakazu 2005:74; Ōtomo 2006).



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries41

2008). Sawaragi threw himself into the burgeoning anti-war movement in 2003 by forming a group, Korosuna, that spearheaded the “sound-demos” or street parties that quickly became the preferred form of freeter street demonstration. The changes since the early 1990s thus had the effect both of strengthening nationalistic discourse and of resuscitating a political imagination challenging this discourse. Corresponding to the traumatic legacies of the lost decade and the defeat of radical protest, I believe it is possible to discern two competing ideas of recovery in contemporary Japan. On the one hand there are many who are attracted by the idea of a recovery of national self-esteem and economic and political might, and on the other there is a rivalling idea of recovery that centred on the increasing strength of civil society and a return of protest movements. Both conceptions of recovery are often articulated in a way which makes it clear that they are linked to a fundamental sense of discontent or frustration with the “postwar system” of Japan as such – the system forged by the occupation authorities in the wake of the defeat in the Pacific War in 1945 – and we should therefore add that a third trauma, that of “1945”, is directly or indirectly at issue in both of these ideas of recovery. Rather than being based on pride in Japan’s economic achievements, as the nationalist discourse in the 1980s often was, today nationalism is often nurtured by a longing for healing and a search for new things to be proud about – things like sports or popular culture (e.g. Oguma & Ueno 2003; Yanagisawa 2002:243). Implicitly or explicitly, this nationalism seems to refer simultaneously to two traumas – that of the lost decade as well as that of the lost war. Typically it does so with the argument that the proper response to the setbacks of the lost decade would be to restore Japan as a “normal country” and put its “twisted” postwar order behind it (Ivy 2005; for a blunt example see Fukuda 1994:37–70). Thinkers on the left similarly seized on the lost decade to question the postwar order with its single-minded pursuit of economic growth and political subservience to the US (e.g. Karatani 1997; Sawaragi 1998). The street parties and mass-protests against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003 invited comparisons with earlier struggles against the postwar system such as the Ampo-struggle and the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In this way, the emerging new forms of activism also reactivated prior traumas that involved the consequences of war and militarism, and the occupation by and subordination to the United States. The picture that emerges is therefore that of a layer of interacting traumas which are addressed and confronted in varying degrees by nationalists as

42

chapter two

well as by radical activists. This suggests the need to grasp developments during the lost decade not only as a reaction to the trauma of the failure of the Japanese model, but as the result of several interlocking traumas and their respective processes of recovery. Popular culture was one arena for these two competing ideas of recovery. On the one hand, there was the phenomenon that the critic Asada Akira (2000) referred to as “The return of ‘J’” (‘J’ as in J-Pop) – a nationalism nourished by popular culture rather than traditional culture. As the official endorsement of popular culture as a tool for “soft power” and the popularity of propagandists like Kobayashi Yoshinori suggest, popular culture has indeed come to serve both as an icon of national pride and sometimes as a medium for spreading nationalistic messages. On the other hand, there are also tendencies in popular culture that counter-balance nationalism, such as rave culture (Ueno 1999; Ueno & Lovink 2004). Just as manga and popular music were part of the culture of the Zenkyōtō generation, rave and anime became part of the culture of freeter activism in the 1990s. A popular pastime at the gatherings of the anti-nuclear power group Hokke no kai, according to the group’s leader Miyazawa Naoto, was to watch anime – a favourite being Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, which illustrated what the world would look like if no-one stopped nuclear power (Miyazawa, interview 26 December 2009). Today, it is not unusual to use cosplay in street demonstrations. A group called Kakumeiteki himote dōmei (The Revolutionary Alliance of Unpopular Guys) arranged the first “demonstration by the otaku for the otaku” in Akihabara in June 2007, calling out to anime fans, ero-gamers, cosplayers, “maids” and others, and then demonstrated dressed as Star Wars storm troopers, Super Marios, Songokūs, Lolitas and bunny girls (see Amamiya 2009b:30ff). Where is freeter activism located in relation to these two processes of recovery? On a very obvious level, it contributes to framing the hardships of young freeters in a way that challenges the dominant “self-responsibility” discourse and offers a Leftist alternative to the conservative or nationalist calls for restoring national pride. Its success so far, I suggest, is derived from its ability to further a recover from both traumas – both the defeat of  previous activism and the sense of betrayal experienced by the lost ­generation – by providing a language that helps people verbalise their present experiences of economic hardship without appearing to repeat the mistakes of the past. Although critical of neoliberalism, it refuses to slip back into nostalgia for the traditional Japanese style of corporate or family-based welfare and it also refuses to channel discontent into calls for cleansing storms of war or apocalyptic destruction. Instead, it is driven



japan’s lost decade and two recoveries43

by the hope that political struggle or disputes with employers will offer tangible returns and an experience of actually having the power to influence society. However, if freeter activism has meant a recovery of radical protest, then an interesting question to pose is how freeter activists have positioned themselves in relation to the legacy of the New Left and other previous struggles in Japan. With what predecessors have they identified, and how has their choice of predecessors been related to the issues in which they have been engaged? If the New Left is rejected, where have activists turned instead in their search for predecessors or sources of inspiration – to other parts of the past, or to foreign models? As will become evident in the following chapters, freeter activism may have arisen in opposition to the legacy of the New Left, but its attempt to overcome this legacy has not meant a rejection of the entire history of previous struggles. The re-innovation of activism has taken place hand in hand with politics of choosing predecessors, which are held up as positive models for today’s movement.

CHAPTER THREE

THE NEW CULTURAL MOVEMENTS Retrospectively, we can see that the so-called “bubble-years” of the late eighties and early nineties were a fertile period of experimentation, in which new forms of protest and organisation were tried out among young people outside the established Leftist groups. In this chapter, I will go back to these years, focusing attention on two pioneering groups, Aki no arashi (The storm of autumn, formed in 1987) and Dameren (The league of good-for-nothings, formed in 1992), before briefly discussing how freeter activism turns to open protest on a large scale with the anti-war movement after the turn to the new millennium. To start with these early groups is important since it shows that the emergence of freeter activism cannot be understood solely as a response to the transformations of Japanese society in the 1990s. While the shift on a mass-scale to flexible, disposable labour was an important backdrop to the formation of the precarity movement in the early years of the twentyfirst century, the emergence of freeter activism in the form “new cultural movements” antedated this shift, appearing already in the late 1980s. To understand why these movements emerged, and why they did so at the particular time they did, it is necessary to pay attention to two factors. The first is related to the legacy of the New Left. An important role in the process of renewing activism was played by radical-minded “non-sect” students who were disillusioned with the various New Left factions that were still a forceful presence on university campuses, and eager to delineate themselves from those factions. Many of them turned away from the campus, shifting to what they called the “street” as the scene of their activities. The new cultural activism thus gradually emerged in a process of a working-through of and creative break with the legacy of the New Left – a break which was spatially mediated and which brought activists in contact with a social environment that was markedly different from the university. Importantly, then, the decisive confrontation with older forms of Leftism and the development of new forms of activism was already well on its way in experimental non-sect circles before the burst of the “bubbleeconomy” and the onset of drastic neoliberal reforms in the 1990s (Kohso 2006; Kyūkyoku 2006 Toyama 2008).

46

chapter three

But why did this begin to happen in the late 1980s? This question points to another factor, namely the mood of consumerism and affluence in Japan during the “bubbly” years of the late 1980s. Although affluence contributed to pacifying social unrest in much of the 1970s and 1980s, it began to have opposite effects on young people in the late 1980s. As Kaminaga Kōichi – one of the founders of Dameren – explains: “Fellows who discover how tremendously fun life can be in capitalist consumer society won’t put up with chaining themselves to work” (Kaminaga 2001). In the end, this desire for fun would be subversive of capitalism itself, since people were bound to discover that “the amusements offered by consumer society are boring” and “start to create a more fun culture by themselves” (ibid. 2008:39). This emphasis on fun became one of the distinctive traits of Dameren. Like in what Boltanski & Chiapello refer to as “artistic critique”, the criticism this group directed at mainstream society was fuelled by exasperation at its lack of fun and its oppression of life rather than by moral outrage at poverty or injustice. This implied a break with the moralistic and ascetic style of older movements. To quote Kaminaga again: “If you want to resist the growth of capitalism moral resistance may be important, but I personally prefer to resist by demonstrating that there are more delicious ways of life than capitalism” (Hasegawa & Kaminaga 2000:23f). In conjunction with the aversion to the New Left sects, this desire for fun meant that dissatisfaction with society was brewing among freeters that could not be channelled through existing organisations or expressed in existing movement languages. It was this dissatisfaction, I suggest, that drove the development of the new cultural movements. As I will discuss later, the relationship of freeter activism to older radical Leftist movements in Japan is hardly clear-cut, but ambiguous. Although freeter activism was initially shaped by the perceived contrast with the New Left, a rigid dichotomy counterposing the radical movements of the 1960s with more recent cultural movements is simplistic. Cultural activism as such is not new – it was a conspicuous trait of the surging activism of the 1960s, where there were many elements of fun, play, art and music (e.g. Suga 2006a:68f; Kosaka 2006:110; Sawaragi 2005:216–244). Conversely, as I will show, not all freeter activism is characterised by fun. What the new cultural movements tried to break with was not so much the radicalism of the 1960s as the stagnant movement scene that followed it, when violence, dogmatism and hierarchical tendencies took the upper hand in the New Left sects. It should also be emphasised that the very real ways in which freeter activism did innovate in relation to older movements did not take place



the new cultural movements47

through any one single break. Despite the efforts made by the early freeter groups to set themselves off from the New Left, in some respects they replicated practices of the New Left sects which in turn became the target of criticism both from their own members and from outsiders – as I will discuss later in relation to Aki no arashi. That the break in some respects came only late and through a gradual process is especially evident in the role of women. Not only were the early freeter groups dominated by men, but many activists also cultivated a “masculine” style modelled on the image of freedom fighters in the Third World which they today feel ashamed of as they look back. Since then, freeter activism has gone through what might be called a femininisation and an increasing sensitivisation to questions regarding gender and sexual minorities (Gonoi 2012b). This, however, was a gradual process, which did not come about without tensions and internal struggles, as activists criticized the discrimination within the activist milieu (e.g. Hibino 2009; also interviews with F 23 July 2011, I 27 June 2010). In early freeter groups like Aki no arashi and Dameren, some activists took an interest in gender but the groups were still maledominated. In this sense they offer a rather sharp contrast to today’s freeter activism, where many activists are women – with well-known names including Amamiya Karin, Masuyama Rena, Shimizu Naoko, Ichimura Misako, Kurita Ryōko and Misao Redwolf, to name a few. The break that the early freeter groups achieved with older activism should thus not be over-emphasised. Despite this, I will try to show that they were seminal to the development of freeter activism since they contained the seed of the three most distinctive ways in which freeter activism has renewed movements in Japan – new means of expression, the use of alternatives space, and the attempt to empower subaltern groups. Let me start by briefly recapitulating what happened in the 1980s in regard to social movements. The early 1980s was a decade when much of the activism of the preceding decades appeared to have lost energy. However, new directions also emerged that would pave the way for the freeter activism. Interest started to gather in ideas such as “free space” and “free radio” (Ueno & Lovink 2004; Kogawa 1988, 1993). Ideas of the Italian autonomia movement were introduced by intellectuals like Kogawa Tetsuo, Ogura Toshimaru and Aso Reihiko. Kogawa also inspired new ways of thinking about space. Compared to the activists of the 1960s, for whom the axis of time, of working for progress or a future revolution, was central, he suggested that a shift was underway whereby activists would become more focused on what could be achieved in “space” here and now (Kogawa 1987:142–152). News of the German Autonomen too became an

48

chapter three

important inspiration to activists in Japan and several activists stayed at squat houses during their visits to Germany. News circulated about movements abroad and inspired new methods in the peace and environmental movements. Peaceboat was founded in 1983 by Tsujimoto Kiyomi and Yoshioka Tatsuya (Yoshioka 2008; Sakuma 2008:62). Among young people a movement burst forth against “controlled education” (han-kanri kyōiku), which became the entry-point for several activists who would later play prominent roles during the 1990s such as Yabu Shirō or Toyama Kōichi (Toyama 2008, 2010:21f). In the late 1980s a forms of protest relying on direct action became more common. A “new wave” appeared in the anti-nuclear power movement through the protests against the Ikata nuclear reactor 1988, where housewives and students, hippies and Buddhist monks, punk-rockers and even right-extremists come together, protesting through sit-ins and singing and dancing. In Hokkaido, another significant struggle developed around the Tomari nuclear plant in 1988 when a radical group of young activists called Hokke no kai (The Atka mackerel society) entered the lobby of the Hokkaido gubernatorial office and started a sit-in that lasted a week, performed protests at the prefectural assembly, and tried to enter the plant grounds on the day when the reactor started operating (Toyama 2008:114–120; ibid. 2010:21f; Miyazawa 2011a, 2011b). Activists in these groups were not isolated from each other, but would often travel and meet. Peaceboat and the anti-controlled education groups attracted activists who later formed Aki no arashi, whose members also included former members of Hokke no kai. Activists who look back on this period describe it as one of a peculiar ferment, in which young activists felt that they shared a similar orientation despite engaging in different movements (Kashima 2003). The Storm of Autumn Right now, various contradictions and angers are in the process of becoming one. Isn’t it about time there is a festival for delinquents, hooligans, scum, runaway girls, extremists, or in other words all lawless fellows? – Mitsu Takeshi

Typical of the high regard that freeter activists today hold for Aki no arashi is the admiring statement by a young Kyoto activist which I heard in 2009 that this group had already done almost everything that he himself wanted to do, and that “when Mitsu appeared, Japan’s movements were transformed” (A, interview 24 September 2009). The “Mitsu” to whom he refers



the new cultural movements49

is Mitsu Takeshi (1967–1995), a charismatic activist who played an important catalysing role in the development of freeter activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the groups which he formed was Aki no arashi, a Leftist “guerrilla” group which became notorious for holding a series of street rock concerts in Harajuku to protest against the emperor system at the time around the death of the Shōwa Emperor. Today, it is not uncommon for people to point to these “gigs” as an important predecessor to the so-called sound-demos or street parties (e.g. Nakamura Ken, interview 15 June 2005). Aki no arashi was a forerunner to today’s freeter movements in being largely composed by freeters, young punks and runaway young people who were neither students nor regularly employed. In a text written in 1991 – quoted above – Mitsu describes the participants in Aki no arashi as “delinquents, hooligans, scum, runaway girls, extremists, or in other words all lawless fellows” (Mitsu 1995:84).1 The group also pioneered freeter activism in emphasising the “street”, rather than the campus, as the arena of its activities. Street should here be understood figuratively for the world outside the campus, as a meeting ground which not only made the amalgam between student radicalism and punk-bands possible but also brought with it exciting possibilities of expression and interacting with the surrounding society. Beginning as a heterodox reaction to the dogmatism of the established New Left factions of Waseda University, the circle of activists around Mitsu first formed a group called “Period”, which held rock concerts and symposiums on the campus. In 1986, they moved the base of their activities to a flat near the university where they set up a free space. Aki no arashi was formed the following year, together with anti-establishment musicians such as Takahashi Yoshiaki of the punk band “These” to protest against the crown prince’s planned Okinawa visit (Kashima 2009; Kohso 2006:430f; Mitsu 1995268ff; Toyama 2008:80–85, 120–123). For two years Aki no arashi regularly played gigs at the Harajuku “pedestrian paradise” (hokoten) near Yoyogi Park – a popular space for youth culture where rockers and other young people used to gather to enjoy street 1 Steinhoff provides an interesting background on social heterogeneity among participants in the anti-emperor movements around 1990. As she points out, they disproportionally consisted of people with an ‘outcast’ status who were “already stigmatized as social minorities in Japanese society”, such as veterans of the New Left, ethnic and religious minority groups, physically handicapped and day labourers (2006:394f, 405f). An intriguing possibility is that the activists of Aki no arashi chose the anti-emperor issue at least partially because they wanted to identify with these outcast groups.

50

chapter three

performances, bands and dancing. They also held demonstrations in front of the nearby Meiji shrine where music was played from loudspeakers loaded on a hand-drawn cart. Unlike most sound-demos today, their performances and demonstrations were unsanctioned by the police and often faced police repression. On several occasions their gigs obstructed the traffic, as the people gathering around them spilled out into the street. One activist, Kashima Shūichi, describes how, among the hundreds of people who gathered only perhaps a third would be activists while the rest were strangers – “Much more fun”, he comments, “than doing small political things on a campus!” (Kashima & Toyama 1997:123). Why did they choose Harajuku as the location of their activities? To a large extent, it appears to have been because Harajuku was a magnet for the suburban youth, who would travel there from the northern working class suburbs. It was also a place where immigrants used to gather, such as the Iranian migrant workers who used to hold their markets in nearby Yoyogi Park (Kashima 2009). At the same time, Harajuku was well suited for attacks aimed at the emperor system. Few places are as packed to the brim as this area in terms of visible symbols of state-power, like the nearby Meiji Shrine, the Olympic Stadium, the NHK Broadcasting Centre, the Tōgo Shrine or the former military training ground Yoyogi Park. Mitsu writes that Harajuku itself was a sign, a city where “every point was political” and every name seemed to evoke the nation and emperor-worship, with Meiji Shrine in particular symbolising the birth of the modern emperor system. Harajuku, he writes in a text from 1988, was the belly of the state, a “closed box” into which the activists had entered “like sparks carried by the wind” and which they had to traverse like “rebellious molecules” in the hope that cracks would open up (Mitsu 1995:15ff). As the emperor’s death approached, the concerts were staged as a protest against the mood of “self-restraint” (jishuku mūdo) that held sway over the mass media and other official channels of cultural expression. During a demonstration near Meiji Shrine on 8 January 1989, the day after the emperor’s death, the group suffered police repression and five members were arrested. A week later, soon after starting their gig, Takahashi and two others were arrested. Over 300 young punks who were present surrounded the two police vehicles and protested angrily. Soon afterwards over thirty riot police arrived with tear gas guns and seized the group’s banner. Shortly afterwards they were attacked by right extremists who vandalised their equipment (Mitsu 1995:275; Kashima 2009; Kashima & Toyama 1997:123f). The shock of these events was great and interpersonal strains made the number of members decrease.



the new cultural movements51

Despite the strains, the years 1989–90 produced remarkable innovations in the group’s repertoire. Firstly, in 1990 several new members entered the group who were less interested in anti-emperor ideology than in exploring the possibilities of direct action. Many of these had previously belonged to a loose, anarchistic gathering called “Uma no hone”, which was itself a heterogeneous gathering of people with a background in various movements such as the anti-nuclear power movement, the feminist movement or the movement against controlled education. Under the influence of them the group almost wholly abandoned the jargon and way of speaking of the student movement (see Kashima 2009; Kashima & Toyama 1997:124; Mitsu 1995:83f). The tendency, already strong in Aki no arashi, to reach out to an indeterminate constituency of outsiders was also further strengthened. The name “Uma no hone” (Horse’s bone), which is derived from a Japanese expression used about people of doubtful origin, is significative of this tendency. They had decided on it after a particular demonstration – the one where they first encountered one of their future members, Ōta Ryō, who had joined the demonstration after they had woken him from his slumber. The reason it had been fun was that people of god knows what origin (doko no uma no hone ka wakaranai), who were neither students nor from the worker’s movement, had appeared and played the leading role. (Kashima 2003:12)

A second development, which had much influence on later movements, was the creation of Speaker’s Corner in October 1990 on the bridge where they used to have their gigs. One day in the lull after a gig, a teenage girl came up to them, grabbed the mike and started pouring her anger on all kinds of things and then left. Mitsu admits that he “was completely dumbfounded” (Mitsu 1995:279). The same night, Ōta shouted that they had “discovered a diamond” (Kashima 2009:103). Next time, they hung up a banner with the words “If you have complaints, say them here!” and handed out the mike to anyone who had anything to say. Runaway girls, high school students, guitarists, drunk day labourers, homeless people living in Yoyogi Park, immigrant workers from Bangladesh and Pakistan, exchange students from South Korea and even right extremists and salarymen were among the people who took the opportunity to grab the mike and speak their mind, talking about subjects ranging from school, family and personal problems to the emperor or the riot the same year in Kamagasaki in Osaka (Mitsu 1995:78–84). Mitsu was clearly uneasy about Speaker’s Corner. Although admitting that “it was tremendously significant that it wasn’t us [activists], but them

52

chapter three

[the passers-by] who created it”, he feels that the gap to what he originally intended was too great – what he had hoped for had been a platform for political speeches like the original speaker’s corner in London. Aki no arashi seemed to have become disconnected from the issue of the emperor system and to have lost a clear message of its own (ibid. 279). By contrast, Ōta and other activists who had entered the group through “Uma no hone” enthusiastically seized on Speaker’s Corner as a “movement for liberating the street”. In this way Speaker’s Corner contributed to a tension within the group (Mitsu 1995:279; Kashima 2009). Some activists bridged the two camps. Kashima, for instance, saw Speaker’s Corner as the fulfilment of a tendency towards street liberation which had been inherent in Aki no arashi from the start. What had driven them, he thinks, had always been the dream of a “republic of the street” rather than putting forth any political programme (Kashima 2009:102f). Space and the Ideal of the “Squarism” Let us look closer at how Aki no arashi conceived of space as a place for politics. In Mitsu’s texts, it is still not clear in what sense the anti-establishment spaces precipitated by the “rebellious molecules” could be thought of as public spaces. Soon, however, some members started to formulate an ideal which they called “squarism” (hirobashugi), which apparently was born out of the enthusiasm they had felt for the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing (Kashima 2004a:159). Kashima explains the ideal as follows: As soon as we try to express something on the street, the police come and tell us, “This is a street. Move on. You’re obstructing the traffic”. As workers and consumers we’re made to walk along predetermined roads, given no freedom but to choose between prepared alternatives. There’s nothing deserving of the word possibility in that. All we can do is to watch each other’s backs or pass by each other. There’s no encounter. When I think back on it, all my life I’ve been told “This is a street. Move on. You’re obstructing the traffic” and made to walk on. If only we could destroy this order of roads and discover a square! Then for the first time we’d be able to meet one another and encounter a possibility of living. The movement to discover a square-like space on the street is also a movement for a “square of living” that transcends the barriers of street order. If we can’t experience for real the possibility of living through such a “square of living”, then we’ll never be able to dream of political change either. To discover a square as deep and wide as possible – to achieve that there is no alternative but through the bomb of the “event” on the “street”. (ibid. 161f)



the new cultural movements53

Against the street as a place of control and surveillance, Kashima counterposes the street as a place for encounter. More clearly than in Mitsu, he provides an image of what sort of public might be awakened and liberated through Aki no arashi’s activities – a public of genuine encounters and communication with strangers. To Kashima, Speaker’s Corner represented the fullest realisation of this ideal alternative public of the “square” (ibid.). While this ideal of a true, genuine public that would afford room for dialogue between strangers echoes the classical idea of the public sphere as formulated by Habermas (1989) it is important to note that Aki no arashi consistently refused to identify this ideal public with the official, existing mainstream public of Japan. Rather, what they called a “square” was a public that had to be wrested from the official landscape and which functioned as a counter-space to the mainstream public symbolised by the nationalistic architecture and the many markers of the emperor system around Harajuku. The Anarchist Impulse and the Legacy of Past Movements As the expression “square of living” indicates, a form of vitalism – ­understood loosely as a desire to live life fully and remove all obstacles to such living – pulsated strongly within Aki no arashi. This vitalism is illustrated in a text from 1992, where Mitsu writes that it doesn’t matter if they have the future on their side or not. “Why? Because people don’t live for tomorrow – they live for today. It’s fine if our struggle is lonely and futile. We struggle in order to live today!” (Mitsu 1995:90). This desire to live fully in the present also fuelled the group members’ rejection of the New Left. Kohso points out that one of the most conspicuous ways in which they differed from the New Left was that they avoided big slogans and leftist jargon and instead dove into action. “Basically, they were influenced by punk culture and performed the protests” (Kohso 2006:430f). Kashima too points to the centrality of performance. Some would put on make-up and others dress in punk fashion, he says, but “in any case what mattered was to express and perform oneself […]. And they didn’t stick to the university, a place polluted (laughter) by the New Left” (Kashima & Toyama 1997:118f). If the group rejected the legacy of the New Left, it did not reject all past movements in Japan. Many activists speak warmly of the role of anarchism and popular revolt in Japanese history. Let me provide a close-up of the group’s relation to history through two activists, Kashima and his friend Yamamoto Yohane. Kashima pulled out of activism after Aki no

54

chapter three

arashi in order to devote himself to publishing and the history of anarchism. Anarchism, he states, is not a specified theory or body of thought so much as a “hidden impulse” which can be recognised in historical phenomena like the religious founding figures, peasant wars, the Levellers and Diggers of the English Revolution, or in Japan the medieval monk assemblies with their egalitarian structure or the Ikkō ikki. But anarchism, he claims, also comes down to us as an imperative to be implemented here and now. It is society’s return to its original form in order to renew the wellspring of mutual help. Even among people who don’t consider themselves as anarchists, it exists as a “black flag waving at the bottom of the stomach” (Kashima 2004b:171–174). After the group’s dissolution, Yamamoto too largely withdrew from activism to become a full-time manga artist. With an almost baroque abundance of counter-cultural references, his work provides an illuminating glimpse of freeter activists’ historical universe in this period. One of his manga, the 1999 Taiyō wa bokura no teki (The sun is our enemy), is, as he himself explains, based on his experiences in Aki no arashi (interview 29 September 2009). It depicts the frantic hegemonic struggles among three activist groups, based in subterranean labyrinths that branch off from the Tokyo subway. The sunglasses worn by the members of one of the groups, the “Diggers”, are symbolic, since what they fight against is ultimately the “sun” or, in other words, the emperor system. As the activist Yonfa – whose name indicates his belonging to the discriminated Korean minority – explains, he can do without the sun, “I want to find the light that bubbles up in darkness”. During the struggle, the group has to deal with infiltrating policemen as well as with the fascistoid rival gang “Groovers” which brutally defeats the third group, “Earth spiders” (Tsuchigumo, named after one of the peoples on the Japanese archipelago that was subjugated by the early Yamato state) which consists of frail homeless people led by a young prostitute. After a dramatic series of events, Yonfa and Miho, a girl who has joined the group, manage to escape above ground, where they point at the rising morning sun with their fingers and pretend to shoot: “Bang!”. Marx Girl (Marukusu Gāru), also from 1999, is written in the style of socalled gyagu (comic) manga, and stands out for its many references to historical radicalism as well as to the alternative youth movements and the pop culture of the 1990s. In the first episode, we meet a hapless, sexually frustrated adolescent, Itō Sakae (whose name is a reference to Japan’s most famous anarchist couple, Itō Noe and Ōsugi Sakae), who heads off to Shinjuku to buy colours since he is interested in painting. Entering the



the new cultural movements55

station’s subterranean passages, he looks at the cardboard houses of the homeless people and reflects that “it’s a recession all right”. There he meets a group of activists who are busy decorating the cardboard houses with paintings – among them the huge “Shinjuku’s Left Eye” (which existed in reality and which I will discuss in a later chapter). In the manga, its creator is the book’s revolutionary heroine Kanno Sugako (eponymous with the anarcho-feminist journalist who was executed in 1911), who gives Itō a good scolding for seemingly being uninterested in changing the world. Itō falls in love with her and in the following episodes he tries to find her again. Throughout the story, he and Kanno move in a milieu shared with that of freeter groups at the time. There are several references to contemporary movements in the Dameren milieu, and in one episode Mitsu himself makes a thinly veiled appearance as Akimizu Takeshi. But references do not stop at the borders of contemporary freeter activists. The manga is spiced with quotes or iconic representations gleaned from the entire history of oppositional movements in Japan as well as abroad – examples include Mao, the Situationists, Zenkyōtō, Marxist philosophers from the 1930s and the demonstrators on Tiananmen Square – and are incongruously inserted almost at random. In the storyline even right extremists come to the rescue at times, and Kanno herself seems friendly with one of their leaders. The only political figure that is consistently rejected is the violent student thug. “I dislike the student movement”, as Yamamoto explains in an interview (29 September 2009). Given the ideological ambivalence of this mixture, he is clearly rejecting most established political classifications. Instead he too, much like Kashima, seems to be groping for the “hidden impulse”, the hidden anarchist black flag, behind all ideologies, figures and slogans. Dissolution and Offspring Despite Aki no arashi’s efforts to shed itself of the legacy of the New Left, this legacy continued to haunt the group and indirectly contributed to its dissolution. Mitsu had been arrested in January 1989 and after his release he was subjected by some members to painful demands for “selfcriticism” (Mitsu 1995:276, 297–302). Other members were alarmed by this harsh treatment, which seemed to signal a reversion to the worst aspects of the New Left. A meeting was held where the group decided that from now on, no one should be subjected to such demands. In case of police suppression, it was to be borne by all group members solidaristically (Kashima 2009).

56

chapter three

During the following year, tensions mounted in the group around how the group should relate to the runaway youngsters who flocked to Speaker’s Corner. Near Christmas 1990, a sexual harassment incident occurred that precipitated Aki no arashi’s dissolution. When one group member sexually assaulted one of the runaway girls living in the group’s free space, Ōta Ryō and other members reacted with fury, visiting the assailant’s home on the same night to collectively “lynch” him. Although no violence was used, the assailant felt threatened enough to call the police, who arrived and arrested four members in the morning (Mitsu 1995:280f). Criticising the “lynching”, Kashima stressed the group’s earlier decision to settle all internal matters through dialogue. The group around Ōta defended itself by pointing out that the victim was the girl and that the attitude to settle everything through civilised talk between male activists left her out of account (B & C, former group members, interviews 29 September 2009). A host of problems were actualised by this incident: the disagreements around Speaker’s Corner, the unresolved issue of how the group should relate to the runaway youngsters, the problem of how to deal with crime in the movement without involving the police, and the apparent readiness of some members to repeat the violent practices of the New Left. To complicate the picture further, it turned out that the assailant had been a police informant (Mitsu 1995:281). Unable to deal with all these problem, Aki no arashi was dissolved in early 1991. Aki no arashi pioneered several tendencies that later would become prominent in freeter activism. It abandoned the unidirectional communication typical of previous agitation, by putting the voices of the “street” on the same level as those of the activists. This went hand in hand with a greater tolerance for heterogeneity among the group’s participants and a tendency to downplay theory and ideology in favour of music, pleasure and fun. The development of Speaker’s Corner is one example of how innovative forms of reaching out to the public emerged in the latest phase of the group’s history. Organisationally, the break with older forms of organisation was more problematic – as the group’s reactions to collective “lynching” and demands for “self-criticism” demonstrate. In the attempt to break with the New Left there were reversals, but also attempts to learn from each reversal. Importantly, this process did not end with Aki no arashi, but was continued in other groups that Mitsu took the initiative to before his death in a motor cycle accident in 1995. I will return in chapter 5 to one of these groups, Inoken, which later developed into one of the most significant organisations in Japan’s homeless movement under the name Nojiren.



the new cultural movements57 The League of Good-for-Nothings

Another group which played a pioneering and influential role in cultural activism during the 1990s was Dameren, which was formed in 1992.2 Emerging in the same milieu as Aki no arashi, it took a less openly political stance, largely withdrawing from openly confrontational activities and preferring to devote itself to exploring new lifestyles and creating alternative spaces where people regarded as “no good” (dame) could intermingle and talk, having fun together without spending much money. The lifestyle of dropouts, they affirmed, could be much more fun and rewarding than that of being a “respected” citizen or regular employee. Despite the flippant attitude, Dameren also had a serious aspect. In actively propagating an upturning of the value hierarchies through which people could be branded as “losers”, it was clearly a radical group whose aims were hard to reconcile with mainstream values. They can be seen as Japanese exponents of a certain Leftist tradition that emphasizes liberation from work and which in the West is represented by writers such as Paul Lafargue, the Situationists, or the so-called hedonist Marxism of the autonomia movement (for the latter, see Gill & Pratt 2008:5ff). Dameren came into being in 1992 at the initiative of two former Waseda students, Pepe Hasegawa (1966-) and Kaminaga Kōichi (1967-). At the time, it was simply a small group participating in the demonstrations against the proposed PKO law, to which they brought a flag made from Kaminaga’s sheets with the words “Dameren” written on it. Most early participants were non-sect students at Waseda who were uncomfortable with the New Left factions which they felt were behaving like “gangster organisations” trying to dominate the campus (e.g. Kyūkyoku 1997b, 2004:163ff; Ogura 2006).3 As for the two founders, Pepe had long been 2 For presentations of Dameren, see Kohso (2006), Mōri (2005a). In addition to interviews with eight former participants in the group (Kaminaga, Hasegawa, D, G, S, W, X, Y), I make use of the group’s books, essays and other publications including the group’s ‘minikomi’ Ningen kaihō (9 numbers 1993–1997), which give a good insight into the process of Dameren’s evolution in regard to politics, art and subalterns. 3 An interesting question is how Dameren related to Aki no arashi since both groups originated among students at Waseda University. At the campus, contacts between them do not appear to have been very frequent. Many of the students who later joined Dameren were engaged in rather traditional student movement activities and reportedly did not associate much the rock-playing group around Mitsu (S, interview 1 October 2009). Pepe Hasegawa jokingly explains that another difference was that Dameren members identified as unpopular and unsuccessful, and were unable to recognise themselves in Mitsu’s rock star-like persona (interview 1 October 2009). Despite this, Dameren members regarded Mitsu and his groups as “pioneering Dameren” (Kyūkyoku 2006:168). Mitsu himself remarked shortly before

58

chapter three

active in non-sect student movement circles at Waseda, while Kaminaga lacked experience of political activism and only tied up with Pepe after he quit his salaryman job. The poet Kyūkyoku Kyūtarō (2006:169) – who was one of the central participants in Dameren – points to Kaminaga’s position as a newcomer to activism as crucial in creating the atmosphere of liberation and tolerance that became a hall mark of Dameren. During the 1990s Dameren developed several features that influenced subsequent freeter activism – its advocacy of “no-good-ness”, its active engagement in creating alternative spaces, and its efforts to contribute to the empowerment of various “no good” groups. Let me now turn to each of these features in turn. The Good-for-Nothing Revolution One of the most obvious ways in which Dameren renewed activism was by groping for a new possible constituency of a social movement through its use of terms such as dame (no-good, worthless, or good-for-nothing). A person who is dame is someone who is considered a failure. It can for instance be a person who is unable or unwilling to work or pursue a career, who is not good at communicating with others, who lacks friends or sexual partners, who has mental problems, or who is generally a person lacking the skills needed to be a “winner” in mainstream society. The group’s manifesto defines the word as a “generic term for everything that has the possibility of being called “no-good” by family, school, company, society or the state” (Kaminaga 1999a:7). From the start, the group attracted homeless people, artists, rasta people, sexual minorities and people unpopular with the other sex (himote). Increasingly, it also came to function as a magnet for social withdrawers and people with depression or other mental problems – especially in the latter half of the 1990s when the group became more widely known. In this way, the word dame helped clear the way for a new category or even a new subject of dissent in Japan which was different from the “workers”, “citizens” or “minorities” of older movements and which adumbrates later terms, such as the “precariat”, used in the precarity movement today. The word dame was deployed polemically, in order to upset the value judgments sustaining the mainstream order. Dameren’s message was that his death that Dameren was a copycat imitating Aki no arashi (quoted in Kyūkyoku 2006:168 and by C, interview 29 September 2009). Dameren in fact participated in many of Inoken’s activities, and Dameren members referred to themselves as Inoken’s “farm team” and as “a subcontractor of Inoken” (Kaminaga, interview 13 May 2010; Hasegawa et al. 1999:166).



the new cultural movements59

being dame was in fact a condition that should be affirmed. As Kaminaga (1999a:4f) explained, the word dame in fact meant “alternative”. What was needed was a society that could be enjoyable and comfortable even for good-for-nothings. In 1993, during a symposium at Waseda arranged by Dameren on “Work and Life”, Kaminaga succinctly summarized the group’s position. Arguing against the job-searching that was customary for students nearing graduation, his talk ended with a plea for what he called the “good-for-nothing revolution”. He started by pointing out that by taking job searching for granted as self-evident and not giving themselves the time to wonder about life, most students would end up “working while ‘dead’, meaning the end of life”. What sustained this system, he claimed, was people’s fear of being regarded as no-good. In order to enjoy life, one must not be swayed by the values of society. Instead one had to choose “the way of the good-for-nothing” (dame no michi). “Live life as an original! To live inside the system is to live as if one were dead”. He ends by expressing his hope that from now on, with the changes underway in society, the number of “good for nothings” would increase. If more people choose “the way of the good-for-nothing” the result will be a “good-for-nothing revolution” (dame kakumei) which will lead to society with where each individual’s life will be able to blossom (Kaminaga et al. 1993). As Kaminaga’s words indicate, his revolt against mainstream values was fuelled by a form of vitalism. Within the group, he was the most eloquent advocate of the idea that it was only by dropping out and accepting being no-good that one could really live. What lent urgency to his talks and writings was a vitalistic anxiety that “life” would be wasted unless one revolted against the roles doled out by society. Much like the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in the 1960s in France, he argued that “living” required a  revolt against the mere “survival” offered by the system to those who conformed to its rules. The rewards offered by the system – money and status – were a poor substitute for things that are really fun and meaningful, things like exhibiting one’s paintings in a park or posting poems on street corners. Repeatedly he stressed that our desire for success (udatsu) and “prestige” (haku) limit our lives, making us lose our imagination and spirit of experimentation. This is our one and only lifetime, so there is neither any “native land for which to sacrifice one’s life”,4 nor any “success” or “prestige”. Abandon 4 The words about the ‘native land’ are a reference to a well-known tanka by Terayama Shūji – one of Kaminaga’s favourite writers.

60

chapter three “success”­and doubt all things you believe to be self-evident. Isn’t that the kind of life from which something can be born? (ibid. 1999a:5).

In a poem, entitled “Work and Life”, Kaminaga drives home the message that the real losers are those who lack the imagination to break with mainstream life: “To all you who care for nothing but what others think, here’s our reply: ‘You’re the ones who are wasting your life’!” (ibid. 1993:13). Dameren probably became most well-known for its rejection of the Japanese work ethic. “There is no need for industriousness”, as the group stated in a 1994 manifesto (Kyūkyoku & Bunpuku Engels 1994:51). How­ ever, its questioning of mainstream values did not stop at work, but also extended to other areas of life, such as sex, marriage and family. For instance, the search for ways of living together outside the nuclear family involved the group in communal child-rearing together with a group of young mothers (Kanō et al. 1997; Hasegawa et al. 2000:14).The rejection of the work ethic was only part of a more comprehensive rejection of the model middle-class male life course according to which life would progress in predetermined stages from university to employment at a large corporation, and further on to marriage and becoming a family father. Alternative Spaces, Talk and Sociability While Aki no arashi’s activities were essentially played out in the open space of the Harajuku streets, Dameren made its most lasting contribution to the movement scene in Japan through its promotion of alternative spaces to which people could drop out and experiment with alternative lifestyles. Usually its members gathered in places along the Chūō Line west of Shinjuku where relatively cheap living was still possible or at their own hangout Akane (a pub-like place that was opened in 1998 near Waseda University). This activity made Dameren a precursor to the “alternative” or “independent” cafés that sprang up in various places in Japan beginning in the latter half of the 1990s, where excluded or marginalised groups could gather and participate, and which could also serve as places of refuge from the pressures of capitalist life, school or the family. However, Dameren did not simply withdraw from the public to private spaces. What animated the group was the idea of an alternative public that would be open to “good-for-nothings” and other marginalised people. This concern with openness was evident in the interest many in Dameren held in what they called an isōrō lifestyle. To live isōrō literally means to live as a dependent or parasite in someone else’s house, but in the circles around Dameren this lifestyle was affirmed as ideally suited to the open,



the new cultural movements61

propertyless and itinerant life many of them were aiming at. Several of them combined an isōrō life with extensive travelling around the Japanese archipelago, making a living as sidewalk artists while travelling. Sometimes this would take them to a situation hard to distinguish from homelessness, and in fact many homeless people also joined Dameren’s gatherings. Here are the words of one practitioner of this lifestyle: My hobby is wandering around. Basically I never stay at inns. So where do I sleep? I use trains in motion, libraries and local museums. Sometimes I sleep in 24 hour open coin laundries. Often I sleep in university dormitories. I want to construct a society in which you can get food and a place to sleep without trouble even if you lack money. (Ogihara 1995:33)

Why was openness such a central value in Dameren? A good way to finding an answer is to look closer at what appears to have been the group’s main activity, namely talk. Talk was important to Dameren for several reasons. Firstly, talk could have a therapeutical function, helping participants work through anxieties, relativising mainstream social norms, and using humour to create distance to various problems (Kaminaga 1999a:2f). Secondly, talk was a crucial requirement for sociability, which was a value which Dameren never gave up on, despite the group’s talk of reaching out to social withdrawers and asocial individuals. It is by considering the pleasures of sociability, I suggest, that it becomes easiest to understand why openness was so highly valued. Let me quote Kaminaga: I like acts that turn the city into a place for encounters. It may be a hackneyed phrase, but it’s more rewarding to associate with a single person than to read a book. To bite into a person and talk about life – there is narrative and poetry in that, and above all that’s where you can find the quiet (or hot) anger calling for a struggle against the present state of affairs. (Kaminaga, in Hasegawa et al. 1999:203)

In Dameren, dropping out was not meant as a farewell to togetherness, but rather as a return to a world of resurrected sociability where encounters would be possible. Encounters yielded pleasures that couldn’t be found on the market or in private space. We have already seen this desire for a city that would be a space for encounters in what Kashima called squarism. To Kaminaga too, turning the city into a place for encounters was part of a larger strategy of resuscitating the dead streets and inducing a thaw in the frozen, instrumental human relations typical of capitalist society. Thirdly, talk also had a direct political function. The revolution, Kaminaga claimed, consisted in the transformative process of talk itself and in spreading arenas for talk.

62

chapter three Normally people who use the word revolution easily get too worked up and upset when others don’t understand. What we propose is to take it easy and talk about things. In the midst of that, there will be small revolutionary moments now and then almost every day. (Hasegawa & Kaminaga 1996:27f)

Ogura Mushitarō, another long-time participant in the group, went even further, describing talk as the very image of communism, since it implied treating the relations to other people as a telos in itself, rather than a mere means (Ogura 1999; Ogura in Ueno et al. 1999:376). To Dameren, then, associating, communicating and having fun were forms of activism in their own right in the sense that they directly created alternatives to mainstream society. Dameren’s alternative spaces were thus not just meant to serve as shelters or sanctuaries for dropouts. The ambition was rather to open up a truer and better public than the mainstream public, a public that would be open to all kinds of marginalised “no-good” people and that would allow for genuine encounters. Empowerment Dameren helped redefine the role of social movements by its engagement in therapeutical activism. As the group received increasing media attention in the latter half of the 1990s, it came to attract many people who were referred to in the group as kokoro-kei, literally “the lineage of the mind or heart” (kei being a popular suffix in youth culture). This included people or were mentally disabled or depressed, social withdrawers and anorectics. The important role of such participants was one of the most striking traits of Dameren and makes it different from most anarchist or autonomist groups in the West.5 The role of alternative spaces was important in the group’s therapeutical activities. However, the group’s aspiration to make its spaces open involved it in a dilemma, since it sometimes conflicted with the needs of the kokoro-kei. On the one hand, some of the latter appear to have appreciated the relief Dameren provided from mainstream social norms. For instance, one anorectic writes that to her Akane is a “shelter”, a place that “makes me feel very good” (“Moto”, in Kayama et al. 1999:307). On the 5 This difference appears to reflect the situation in Japan, where social withdrawal became very highlighted as a social problem in the 1990s and where sociological surveys indicate a link among young Japanese people between the search for self-realisation, low incomes, unmarried status and lack of communication skills (e.g. Miura 2005:168ff, 172, 204f) – a profile corresponding rather neatly to the participants in Dameren.



the new cultural movements63

other hand, other kokoro-kei found the unbridled communication in Dameren burdensome. Some felt hurt by their inability to keep up with the playful and sometimes rude communication going on in Akane, where a “hierarchy” was erected on the basis of people’s “communication skills” (“Albert”, in ibid. 310, 314; Sugiyama 1999:271). Reports from Akane give a glimpse of how communication there was carried out and what was experienced as particularly burdensome. “Hizz”, for example, describes the discussions as demanding unending time and energy and often leading nowhere. “I felt like poking my head into a world in which the one who shouts loudest and continues saying the same thing until the end wins” (“Hizz”, in Nakagawa et al. 2010). People were urged to be as open as possible, exposing their “no-good” sides, but would then often be made fun of or laughed at (Nakagawa, in ibid.). Communication, then, was “uncivilised” in the sense that people would be given little relief from personal problems, with joking often overriding considerations of tact. In this sense, Dameren contrasted sharply with self-help groups, where communication is subjected to rules to avoid hurting participants (e.g. letting people depart whenever they wish, not letting hierarchies emerge, not judging other participants, and keeping the talk confidential). One participant in Dameren who had experience of self-help groups states: That’s why people [in self-help groups] can talk about their families or themselves or trauma without having to worry. I think many who joined Dameren came wishing for that kind of rules, but instead they would themselves become a topic, one exaggeration giving birth to the next. (Negoro, in Nakagawa et al. 2010)

In Dameren, a clear tension seems to have existed between the orientations of those members who were interested in actively pursuing an alternative life-style, and the kokoro-kei, who were attracted to the idea of a shelter and often lacked self-confidence and communication skills. These problems were never solved by Dameren, although it did take important steps towards making empowerment a central movement task, such as establishing forums or networks free from the pressures of surrounding society, where the kokoro-kei themselves could jointly grope for solutions (Kaminaga 1999a:2, 1999b).6 6 For assessments and critical reflexions regarding the success, failure or limitations of these attempts, see Hosotani (1999:289), Kyūkyoku (2006:167–170). Discussions can also be found in Ningen kaihō, Dameren’s ‘minikomi’, especially No. 9 (October 1997) which is a special issue on “problems of the heart” (kokoro mondai).

64

chapter three

To some extent this tension seems to have existed in Dameren even before the arrival of the kokoro-kei. From the start, there had been two wings in Dameren: the “anxiety faction” (fuan-ha) and the “ecstasy faction” (kōkotsu-ha). The former consisted of people who suffered from anxiety about the future and to some extent had internalised mainstream value judgments. The latter were those people who, like Kaminaga, enjoyed exploring alternative lifestyles and who polemically took on the label dame to signal their rejection of mainstream values (Hasegawa & Kaminaga 2000:62; ibid. 1996:15). Although the talk of these two factions was part of a self-caricature by Dameren-members, the caricature had a basis in reality. Kaminaga’s notion of a “way of the good-for-nothing” paradoxically seemed to require a great deal of strength. As he writes on the inside back cover of the third issue of Ningen kaihō (April 1994): “I don’t give a damn about how other people decide about me or if society labels me as no-good. In other words, I am big.” Momoyama Pēko, a long-time participant in Dameren, remarks that pronouncements of this kind showed that Kaminaga was “not a good-for-nothing but rather a superman (Übermensch)” – a choice of words that suggests a Nietzschean project of reevaluating all values (Momoyama 1995:37f). Pepe and Kaminaga themselves admitted that “being a good-for-nothing requires its own effort” (Kaminaga & Hasegawa 1996:31). Here the group came close to acknowledging that there was a paradoxical character to the “good-for-nothing revolution”, since perhaps those who were “no-good” lacked the strength to affirm it wholeheartedly. Is This Politics? The Relation to the New Left Is Dameren’s designation as a political movement group justifiable? The group itself issued many statements that invited the criticism that it was apolitical. DADA’s sloth communist manifesto, for example, states: “We hereby declare our intention not to resist power by power, but to live like amoebas slipping through between the powers. Luck comes to those who relax. Human beings of the world, relax!” (DADA 1999:33). However, we should note that despite its rhetoric Dameren did participate in a lot of “traditional” political protest. These included anti-war events, the Gay and Lesbian movement and the Men’s Lib movement, movements for the homeless, for disabled people and for immigrant workers, and in protests against the emperor system. Furthermore, even as they rejected the New Left organisations, the group retained a strong attachment to the counter-culture of the 1960s (Kaminaga et al. 2000:23, Hasegawa 2008:88f).



the new cultural movements65

Among participants, however, it was not uncommon to find the argument that the group’s real political significance resided in its seemingly more apolitical activities. One former participant, for instance, claims that Dameren was a “revolutionary social movement” whose political importance did not stem from its participation in political campaigns, but from the participants’ active attempts to free themselves from the norms that underpinned family and capitalism (D, interview 12 May 2010). The idea that Dameren’s political importance lay in its “cultural” struggle against the mainstream values of capitalist society is also suggested by Yabu Shirō – a well-known autonomist writer and activist with a background in the Dameren circles – who refers to Dameren as a “molecular revolution”, borrowing Guattari’s expression. A reversal of capitalism, according to Guattari, involves not only overt protest or a struggle against material exploitation, but also a break-out of capitalist libidinal relations and the creation of alternatives – and this, Yabu points out, was what Dameren was doing (Yabu, interview 30 September 2009; see also Yabu 2003a; Guattari 2007:108). According to this viewpoint, Dameren fulfilled what Melucci (1989) points out as one of the most important functions of movements, namely to serve as a laboratory for trying out new cultural forms, lifestyles, ideas and identities in partial protection from sanctions by the outside world. A further reason for seeing Dameren as a political movement is that playful togetherness at least in some cases contributed to the empowerment of subaltern groups. Thus Kyūkyoku believes that the group through its activities, its “lightness” and the “air pockets” it created provided relief from mainstream values actually did help heal some wounds (1997a, 2004:164f). Taken together, the group’s activities contributed to exploring new forms for radical political movements in an age in which many young Japanese were sceptical of existing New Left organisations. The group contributed to a renewal of political activism by creating “a new cultural paradigm where the freeter’s generation can express itself”, as Kohso puts it (2006:433), and in which freeters could question and challenge the value system that had marginalised them. The End of Dameren Although Akane is still running, Dameren has not been active in arranging any events since 2002. Kaminaga – burned out after the 9.11 attacks – turned to rave music and wanderings in nature, while Pepe and other members became active in the precarity movement. Today the group is widely acknowledged as an important root of the precarity movement.

66

chapter three

Amamiya Karin, for instance, embraces Dameren as the precursor of almost the entire precarity movement and its different groups because of its early interest in issues like poverty, work, survival, homelessness and “mental health”. “Dameren, which was known both as a ‘cultural movement’ and a ‘life movement’ is still breathing in all kinds of places today, in the new millennium, in changed form”, she writes (Amamiya 2010:45). At the same time, she points to the transformations in society that have contributed to making Dameren somewhat dated. In the late 1990s, she writes, the number of people who were unable to find regular work and marry exploded, making “no good-ness” a generalised condition that had become taken for granted (ibid. 33). While Dameren’s advocacy of dropping out fitted the early idea of freeters in the 1980s and early 1990s, the overwhelming tendency in freeter activism today is to stress that freeterhood is not a choice but a condition forced on young people by the precarious job market. In an interview in 2010, Kaminaga says that people often tell him that nowadays everyone is forced to live like him. It has become difficult to spread Dameren’s message today, he says, which is why he “no longer makes so many public statements anymore”. At the same time, he emphasizes that, at heart, he still sees Dameren’s message as valid. The contradiction between that message and the concern for security among many freeters today is only superficial, he thinks. What he had meant by advocating the “way of the good-for-nothing” had not been that freeters should accept their lot, but that alternatives were needed. It is the lack of alternatives that makes people fear unemployment. Such alternatives are needed not only for freeters, but for all. Above all he wanted to convert those who had regular employment and a career, the “winners”, because they were the ones who were deceiving themselves, just as he had done himself before he decided to drop out of his work as a salaryman (interview 13 May 2010). A slight change, then, can be detected in Kaminaga’s thinking. To be sure, he is as critical of the salaryman model of life as before. The plight of many freeters is that they see possibilities neither in the life of a regular employee nor in the insecure freeter life which they are living. What is needed is some form of life that can function as an alternative both to the salaryman and to the freeter form of work. The freeter, then, is no longer his model for the alternative, as it tended to be during the 1990s. Instead, the alternative is a third something, which is harder to pinpoint, but which Kaminaga feels he can sense in activities such as organic agriculture, walking in the mountains, travels or in events like concerts with the homeless



the new cultural movements67

(ibid.). In an interview from 2008 he says that venturing out into nature is good for escaping the ads and the brainwashing that goes on in society: Recently I often go hiking in the mountains with friends, camping, making fires or sleeping outdoors. Delivering myself over to nature, in some place without media or news, I feel liberated. I can recover myself, live fully as I originally am, and get to know others better. To directly experience a vast landscape is also a good medicine against being engulfed by capitalism. The world is profound. It’s good, I tell you. (Kaminaga 2008:41)

Just like in the 1990s, then, Kaminaga still seems to believe that people suffer because they think they must live in a certain way, throwing themselves into the competition and finding satisfaction in outdoing others. Just like then, the remedy is to search for alternatives. Anti-War Protests and the Prehistory of Sound-Demos On 21 March 2003, after the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq, the biggest anti-war demonstration in Japan since the Vietnam War took place in Tokyo. Spearheading the demonstration as it headed towards Ginza was a colourful group of some 300 people, dancing and playing music on sound systems, drums, tambourines or other instruments while shouting or holding placards with the words “Korosu na” (Do not kill). Korosuna was also the name of this group. Among them were Sawaragi Noi, banging a gong, and his friend, the artist and ethnographer Oda Masanori (also known under the nom de guerre IllCommonz) with a huge bass drum in a strap around his shoulder. The group had been organised by them in 2003, together with the gallerist Yamamoto Yūko and the writer and curator Kudō Kiki.7 In his 2003 book, Kuroi taiyō to akai kani (Black sun and red crab), Sawaragi looks back on the 21 March manifestation: Participating in a street demonstration for the first time since I was born, I made many fresh discoveries […]. Today, the street is undoubtedly one of the few “good places” left where we can reassemble our thoughts and once more move to action. (Sawaragi 2003a:256)

Sawaragi’s discovery of the street as a “good place” marks a significant shift in his thought and offers a significant contrast to the portrayal in his previous books of Japan as a “bad place” and “closed circle” – a portrayal that 7 Presentations of Korosuna can be found in Cassegård (2010), Gonoi (2012a:166–172), Mōri (2005a).

68

chapter three

had much in common with the “exitlessness” and “lack of exteriority” in the writings of Murakami Haruki and Karatani Kōjin (Cassegård 2010). In a way, this discovery can be seen as symbolic of the entire direction of movement activism in these years. The mobilisations in 2003 and 2004 against the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the Japanese government which supported them, represent a startling revival of street protest and public manifestations of dissent in Japan. The rally on 21 March alone gathered some 50,000 protesters according the organizers. In March 2004, 130,000 people in 120 places across Japan marched on the streets (Hanawa et al. 2008:153). These may have been small numbers by the standards of many other countries, but they were extraordinary in Japan where nothing on that scale had been seen outside Okinawa for more than three decades. Although these mobilisations invited comparisons to the movements of the 1960s they also highlighted several differences. Firstly, many commentators noticed the prominent role of wireless communication, which was used to mobilize participants and collect signatures, whereas unions and other organisations had played the central role in mobilising participants in street demonstrations in the 1960s (Clark 2003, Mōri 2005a:19) Secondly, although the big mobilisations were mainly in the form of conventional street demonstrations, new forms of demonstration also developed.8 One type, appealing to ordinary citizens who did not necessarily identify with the Left, was represented by the “peace walks” arranged by the network CHANCE! (formed in 2001), which was composed mainly of young people whose style implied a clear break with the image of old Leftist politics. Not only did it reject the helmets, waving banners or chanting associated with the radical student movement, it also abandoned the very term “demonstration” (demo) in favour of “peace walk” or simply “walk”. As one participant states: What CHANCE! is doing is a certainly not a “demonstration”, but a “walk”. After all, young people don’t like the style of anti-war movements until now – raising flags, wearing helmets or wrapping towels around the head. So we thought a new style had to be developed. (Shiba 2002)

CHANCE! became one of the main organizers of the coalition World Peace Now (WPN), which was an umbrella organisation of 50 citizen groups, labour unions, religious organisations, international NGOs and other groups. Its style came to exert a great influence on WPN as a whole 8 For descriptions of the conventional styles of street demonstration during the decades before the anti-war movement, see Steinhoff (2006).



the new cultural movements69

(Michiba 2005:606–614; Mōri 2005a:20; Egon 2003b; Hanawa et al. 2008). Members of CHANCE! liked to emphasize the difference to older peace organisations, which they claimed were marked by the confrontational structure of left parties and infighting. Instead they aimed at a loose and open structure, without any designated leaders or bureaucratic organisation. “I think we attracted many people because it was easy for them to join. Many Japanese are hesitant to join protests organised by the labour unions”, one member states (Hanawa et al. 2008:156). Realising the need for a broad movement, they deemphasised conflict, going so far as to publicly thank the police.9 Another type of demonstration that achieved a breakthrough in Japan during the anti-war protests was the “sound-demo” (saundo demo), which was far less ingratiating with the authorities and soon became emblematic of freeter activism.10 These are street parties, colourful events with dancing demonstrators that in slow pace follow a truck pumping out music over the streets. The word “sound-demo” was used for the first time in May 2003 by a loose grouping called Against Street Control (ASC), consisting of musicians, designers, DJs, writers, activists, anarchists, scholars, students and freeters. Many in this group were inspired by the British Reclaim the Streets and aimed not only at ending the war but also at liberating the streets. One participant, the anarchist writer and DJ Noiz, states that the issues of “anti-control” and “anti-police” were as important to this group as anti-war (Noiz 2009:12). Significantly, the people in ASC came together to arrange sound-demos as a self-conscious reaction against groups like CHANCE! or WPN. In an early report on the 2003 sound-demos, Oda Masanori writes that what made them different from previous demonstrations was not just the music and the dancing. It was also a matter of not trying to ingratiate oneself with the police or “doing as one was told”. There was an exciting feeling of risk and of “not knowing what might happen”. The sound-demos, he summarizes, turned the harmless “amusement park” of Tokyo into a “wilderness” (Oda et al. 2005:121).11 Futatsugi Shin, another participant in 9 On thanking the police, see CHANCE! (2001). Not surprisingly, CHANCE! was criticised by older political activists, who argued that talking of ‘walks’ repressed the recognition of real conflicts and lead to depoliticisation (Mōri 2005a:20; also see Michiba 2005:632f). 10 For brief histories of ‘sound-demos’ in Japan, see Futatsugi (2008), Gonoi (2012a:149– 163) and Noiz (2009). 11 Here ‘amusement park’ stands for spaces whose function is determined in advance, while ‘wilderness’ is a space where use is determined by users – a distinction derived from the architect Aoki Jun (2004).

70

chapter three

these sound-demos, refers to the bodily sensation of being in conflict with the system as the source of their attraction (Futatsugi 2005:166, 2008). Against the “peaceful” people of CHANCE!, Noiz writes tersely, there appeared the demonstration of the “unruly” people who disliked the police (ibid. 7ff). It should be pointed out that despite the emphasis on confrontation in these statements, sound-demos in Japan have never involved violence or property destruction on the part of the demonstrators. Neither have they usually been unsanctioned in the sense of lacking police permits. Despite this, sound-demos in Japan were often met by harsh police measures, especially in the early years during the anti-war protests and in the early stages of the precarity movement. One way of bringing the contrast between these two forms of demonstration into relief is by looking at how they relate to the public sphere. Participants in the “peace walks” can be said to have aspired to the role of “responsible” citizens deliberating on their common affairs within the confines of the mainstream public sphere. This was true even of those occasions – such as the “peace parade” in Shibuya on 9 December 2001 – when they anticipated the style of sound-demos, with a DJ on a truck followed by dancing young people. In the writings of Kobayashi Ichirō, who took the initiative to CHANCE!, it is clear that his concern is above all with stopping the war. Worried that the use of music will be seen as mere enjoyment, he justifies it pragmatically, as a way to reach out to and recruit the young in Shibuya. The time for “choosing the future” is here, and as many people as possible need to be mobilised. Can we create a future in which there is no fighting or not? It is we who must make that choice. We ourselves want to make it, not leaving the choice to authorities above us. (Kobayashi 2001)

This is the language of a critically minded but good citizen. The street is important above all as a means to convey a message to the general public, not as a place of enjoyment in its own right. To many participants in sound-demos, by contrast, the aim was to create “liberated zones” rather than appealing to authorities. Demonstrations served to temporarily transform the streets into places for a new kind of life and for activities that were felt to be impossible under ordinary everyday conditions. Rather than using the streets as public space, they transformed them into what Lefebvre (1991:381ff) calls counter-spaces – spaces in which behaviour considered transgressive of mainstream norms is visibilised. This desire to reclaim and liberate space also distinguished the sound-demos from the orderly, narrow marches of people carrying



the new cultural movements71

placards and repeating slogans that had became the typical form of street demonstration in Japan after the ebbing away of the radical student movement and which, in the eyes of many young demonstrators were lacking in possibilities of individual expression. All in all ASC arranged six sound-demos, all in Shibuya. The first demonstration was “Street Rave Against the War” on 10 May 2003. Famous DJs like Seino Eiichi participated, and participants quickly swelled to around 500. The police was clearly unprepared for the new type of demonstration. Confusion reportedly reached a climax when a contingent of Korosunamembers suddenly joined the demonstration carrying Oda Masanori in a palanquin. Despite the presence of riot police, the demonstrators were able to do much as they pleased on the street, including stage diving from the truck (Noiz 2009:12, Futatsugi 2008:184). When three participating musicians evaluated the demonstration in a round-table discussion later the same day, they were euphoric: “Yesterday”, the state, “was the first time that dance culture had a political impact in Japan” (Noda et al. 2003:94). During the third demonstration (19 July), the thousand participants were met by 500 riot police who, together with the regular police, surrounded the entire demonstration and arrested two participants. In response, the rapper ECD composed “We won’t do as we’re told” (Iu koto kiku yatsura ja nai zo), which was immediately adopted as an anthem by the freeter activists, and organizers kept up steam by forming a group, “Defend our party”, to protest against the suppression. ASC’s next demonstration (5 October) became a climax, starting with a carnival in Miyashita Park with two DJ booths, followed by a symposium with Dameren’s Pepe Hasegawa and the philosopher Ukai Satoshi. Then fatigue set in and ASC was dissolved after a sixth and final sound-demo on 22 February 2004, at which Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu served as DJ and which gathered some 500 participants (Noiz 2009:9–17; Futatsugi 2008). By that time, however, Kansai had become another centre of anti-war sound-demos. Here, just like in Tokyo, the anti-war protests catalysed freeter activism towards open protest. Just like in Tokyo, young people reacted against the older forms of demonstration which seemed to involve just “marching” or “walking” (interview with Nakamura Ken, 15 June 2005). Two networks were especially important. One was known by the name the Rabble Etc (Uzōmuzō sono ta), which arranged all in all four anti-war sound-demos in Osaka and Kyoto, the first in October 2003 and the last in November 2004. The other network, Anti-war Anti-government Action (Hansen Hanseifu Kōdō), was based in northern Kyoto and, starting a bit later, arranged three sound-demos in Kyoto from July 2004 to September

72

chapter three

2005. Sound-demos also spread to Nagoya, Fukuoka, Sendai, Kōenji, Akita and, within Tokyo, to Shinjuku and Shimokitazawa (Futatsugi 2008; Noiz 2009:18–20). The “Sea of Fire” and Other Predecessors Where did these sound-demos come from? Even though the term “sounddemo” was only established in 2003, the roots go back further in history. Before the appearance of ASC, anti-war manifestations by groups like Korosuna and other artists spearheaded the adoption of music and dancing in street demonstrations. Styles anticipating the sound-demos had also been developed by CHANCE! (Kobayashi 2001). People using drums, dancing samba or traditional Okinawan dances also figured prominently in WPN’s demonstrations. Precursors to the sound-demos, however, go back even further.12 The road was well prepared by over a decade of evolving cultural movements. Important developments happened in the sphere of rave music, which became something of a boom during the years 2002–2003 and had become an important part of the youth culture in which many activists took part. The ease by which rave could turn into political protest is illustrated by the struggle to defend the underground student circle rooms at Waseda University, which were closed down by the university in July 2001. As a last attempt to bring the university to the negotiating table, the students planned a late night meeting in late June. Realising that the effort would be futile they decided to turn the event into a rave party instead. Some 200 students attended the party, which was held on campus in the middle of the night, not stopping until the riot police arrived (Amamiya 2010:176– 197; Gonoi 2012a:149). Although not planned as a demonstration in a narrow sense, the event illustrates how thin the line was between rave and activism, and how small the step was that separated events like these from the explicitly political raves that finally arrived in Japan during the antiwar protests. Another inspiration was the parades of groups of sexual minorities, such as the Pride Parade in Tokyo, the Rainbow March in Sapporo, or the Kansai Rainbow Parade. Beginning with the 4th Rainbow March in Sapporo, held in 1999, these parades used cheerfully decorated open cars called “floats” – Noiz compares them to the floats (dashi) used in traditional festivities – which also functioned as a stage for DJs. However, they 12 For a discussion of predecessors, see Noiz (2009:4, 25f, 28), Kubi & Yaba (2009).



the new cultural movements73

differed from the anti-war sound-demos in that they avoided friction with the police (Noiz 2009:7f). In their confrontational stance, the anti-war sound-demos had more in common with early groups like Aki no arashi, which had played punk music through loudspeakers loaded on handdrawn carts during its demonstrations at the time of Emperor Hirohito’s death (Kashima 2003).13 In the Tokyo area, however, there was little sense of any continuity between such predecessors and ASC’s sound-demos, which as Noiz points out were inspired by foreign models like Reclaim the Streets (ibid. 12).14 Popular culture also provided models for the sound-demos. Both Oda Masanori and the rapper ECD, for instance, were inspired by the “pandemonium march” (hyakki yakō) when the monsters march out into the street from an old dilapidated house in the old horror movie Yōkai hyaku monogatari (1968, Daiei). Oda states that this scene had given him the dream of making a “demonstration of ghosts and animals” and that it was his model for Korosuna (Oda 2003:92; Oda et al. 2005:125). In Kansai, which had its own local tradition of sound-demos, there was more of a sense of continuity with earlier movements than in Tokyo (Noiz 2009:17ff). Student activists in Kyoto had played music from sound-­ systems during street demonstrations already in the early 1990s, the difference being that they usually loaded the sound-system on hand-drawn carts rather than trucks, as in sound-demos today. This local background helps explain why Reclaim the Streets was of minor significance to Kansaibased activists. Nakamura Ken, who was one of the organisers of the Rabble Etc, explains that to him and his friends, the important inspiration had been domestic movements in the past, such as Aki no arashi or the “Sea of Fire” (Hi no umi) demonstrations held in Kyoto in the latter half of the 1990s. As for Reclaim the Streets, he had not known of its existence at the time (interview 15 June 2005). The “Sea of Fire” demonstrations (formally “The anti-emperor struggle ‘Sea of Fire’”) were pivotal events to many activists in the Kansai area. Like Aki no arashi’s gigs, they were meant as protests against the emperor system, being held annually on 20 July from 1995 to 1999 to protest against the “Ocean Day”, which had been instituted as a new holiday in 1995. The first year that they used a sound-demo was in 1996. Participants were young 13 Even earlier, in 1982, there had been an event that technically could be classified as a sound-demo, when a band had performed on a truck during a protest event (Noiz 2009:6; B, interview 29 September 2009). 14 Noiz writes that there were even crash-courses on RTS. This, however, is denied by Oda Masanori, who believes that few in ASC were inspired by RTS (Oda et al. 2005:122f).

74

chapter three

men and women, numbering well over a hundred and maybe close to two hundred.15 Some were wearing helmets – red in the manner of Bundaffiliated students or black with the anarchist “A” – a legacy of New Left culture which was stronger in the 1990s than today. A big banner was held with the words “Turn the Ocean Day into a Sea of Fire” (Umi no hi o hi no umi ni), written in blue and red. An innovation for this demonstration had been the use of two colourful hand-drawn carts, one for each loudspeaker, to get the best possible sound. The DJ was Nakazawa Takaharu (1970-), a rock musician and student at Dōshisha University, who recalls that it “definitely was the greatest thing he ever arranged”. A climax had been when they reached the Shijō-Kawaramachi crossing, when he had slowed down the speed to let the dancers – dancing to James Brown – occupy the crossing for as long as possible. He had also sampled slogans, some “serious” and some that were more “silly”, but due to a technical mishap the serious ones couldn’t be played. When a right-extremist (uyoku) bus started to follow them during the demonstration, he had turned up the volume and played the nonsensical “One, two, three – DA!!”, a quote from the prowrestler Antonio Inoki. After the demonstration they had a party on the river bank near Sanjō Bridge. The bus with the right-extremists had parked on top of the bridge. Some of the demonstrators had gotten drunk and went up to the bus, surrounding it. Some started to push it rhythmically and threatened to topple it into the water until the police arrived and stopped them (Nakazawa, interviews 27 June 2010, 29 July 2010). Sound-demos on a smaller scale had long been common in Kyoto, where a lively student activist milieu existed among non-sect students on several university campuses. They first developed among students at Dōshisha University. Tellingly, the occasion had been a break with the existing New Left groups. When a scandal led to the sudden closure of the students’ self-management organisation (jichikai), Nakazawa and his friends – all musicians who described themselves as “non-political” – had been given the chance to start up the organisation from scratch. This gave them free rein to develop a new style as well as access to the organisation’s six-storied house (the “detached house no 2”), where they squatted for several months. Although not yet known as “sound-demos”, they started to arrange campus-based demonstrations mixing political agitation, rock music and theatre already in 1989–90, leading older activists to 15 Not much material exists about these demonstrations and I therefore rely on interviews with the DJ Nakazawa (27 June 2010 and 29 July 2010) and one of the prime arrangers, Morioka Shingō (via e-mail 15 August 2010).



the new cultural movements75

disparagingly­call them “party-Leftists”. The event that had really made Nakazawa realize the power of music had been at the time of the entrance examinations in 1990 when they had marched from the “detached house” to the main university entrance – with him as a DJ dressed all in red, with red helmet, red kimono and red bellbottom trousers. There he had let loose Red Hot Chili Peppers on full volume, triggering a scuffle which had lead to people getting hurt on both sides. During the 1990s he and his friends tried out a variety of sound-demos. On several occasions, they had “band-on-the-truck” demonstrations – inspired by Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar Flatbed Truck Tour Announcement 1975. Once they stopped the truck in the middle of Shijō Bridge in downtown Kyoto, playing music until the police arrived (ibid., interview 29 July 2010). Sound-demos, then, did not start in 2003. Nor were they inspired solely by groups such as Reclaim the streets in the alter-globalisation movement abroad. Local context in Japan mattered. At the time of the anti-war movement, they appeared new in Tokyo, while in Kansai they were seen as a continuation of local developments in the 1990s that were still fresh in memory to activists in the Rabble Etc and Anti-war Anti-government Action. The latter, for instance, continued to use hand-drawn carts in the style of the “Sea of Fire” demonstrations, even innovating on the format by using two connected carts with a band on top in a sound-demo in 2004 (Noiz 2009:18, 32n14). Hand-drawn carts are also common in sound-demos organised by its still existing successor organisation Anti-war Livelihood (Hansen Seikatsu). As the anti-war movement faded away in 2004 and 2005, sound-demos were picked up by the quickly emerging precarity movement. They also continued to develop – sprouting forms such as the “hand-made sounddemos” (tezukuri saundo demo) of the homeless movement when participants simply bring along instruments or things that make a noise rather than using a sound-system, or incorporating elements from the demonstrations of the alter-globalisation movement abroad, such as when giant puppets were used for the first time in the demonstrations against the G8 summit in Tōyako 2008. As many activists point out, today people are no longer as agitated about them as before and the police too have become more used to them (Futatsugi 2008; Yamaguchi et al. 2009). They have become established as the preferred, typical form of freeter demonstration. The Anti-War Movement and the Legacy of History How did the turn to open protest at the time of the anti-war movement affect the way freeter activists related themselves to previous movements

76

chapter three

in Japan? The eruption of open protest on a scale that invited comparisons to the era of the Vietnam War appears to have made it urgent for many of them to show that they were not repeating the mistakes of the past – without, as Sugita Shunsuke puts it, evoking associations to the “Red Army” (Sugita et al. 2006:72). A notable phenomenon accompanying the turn to open protest was the tendency to search for positive models of present-day activism in Japanese history. The New Left still appears to have been shunned as a model, but instead many turned to premodern Japanese history and the wealth it offers of popular protest and resistance. Sound-demos in particular evoked associations to the eejanaika movement, fūryū odori and other religiously inspired dancing sprees that had repeatedly accompanied social unrest in the past (e.g. Oda et al. 2005:138; Noiz 2009; Mōri 2009:202). During the years following the anti-war protests, premodern or early modern references were gleefully incorporated by freeter activists in many events, such as o-mikoshi (portable shrines), bon-dancing or chindonya street musicians (see e.g. Hayashi & McKnight 2005:89, 103, 106). Referring to street demonstrations as ikki (premodern uprisings or egalitarian leagues) became very popular. A close up of this process whereby present-day activism became modelled on what was perceived to be attractive historical models and how these were implicitly contrasted to the New Left can be seen in the case of Korosuna. Although Korosuna was clearly felt to represent something new on the movement scene, in certain respects it explicitly repeated older movements. A few days before the 21 March demonstration in 2003, Sawaragi had sent out a short e-mail appeal in which he mentioned the artist Okamoto Tarō and Beheiren (Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam) as inspirations. The latter was a famous Japanese citizen group, active from 1965 to 1974, which mobilised millions of supporters in its anti-war protests during the late 1960s. Dear Everybody, I know it comes all of a sudden, but we’re starting an antiwar movement. Its name is Korosuna. Incidentally, “Korosuna” is adopted from the words of Okamoto Tarō that were posted by Beheiren in the midst of the whirlpool of the movement against the Vietnam War in Washington Post 1967. If anyone feels offended by this e-mail, I truly apologize. To those who feel like giving it a try, please join us! (quoted in Egon 2003a)

When Sawaragi (2003b) also pointed out that there was no need for participants to subscribe to any particular ideology and that anyone could take part in Korosuna’s activities, his words sounded like a direct echo of Beheiren, which was notable for its loose, network-like organisation where



the new cultural movements77

everyone was welcome to participate regardless of political conviction. In April 1967 Beheiren posted a full-page ad in Washington Post, which featured the words “Korosu na” – Do not kill! – drawn in spiky and tilted calligraphy by Okamoto Tarō. Sawaragi apparently saw this ad for the first time during the build-up towards the war in Iraq in early 2003 – a time when he confessed to an “emotional heightening without precedent” – and reports: “At Tarō’s ‘Korosuna’, I experienced a shock of such freshness as I have never felt before” (ibid. 2003a:254f). His decision to start Korosuna was taken shortly afterwards and Okamoto’s spiky piece of calligraphy was chosen as the group’s emblem. Deliberately referring to a “citizen movement” like Beheiren – a part of the social movement milieu of the 1960s and 1970s which is usually contrasted with the New Left – could easily be interpreted as an implicit rejection of the latter. Significantly, however, Sawaragi’s turn to activism went hand in hand with reaching back even further in history. His writings at the time of the anti-war movement reveal that he thought of Beheiren and Okamoto as only the latest links in a chain of historical predecessors which included an entire submerged tradition of Dadaistic-anarchistic revolt in Japanese history, stretching back to pre-modern millenarian yonaoshi (world rectification) movements, pre-war Dada and the avant garde of the early 1960s. A typical example of Sawaragi’s reevaluation of history can be seen in his discussion of Dadakan (a.k.a. Itoi Kanji), a Dadaist prankster and artist who had run naked through the streets pretending to be an Olympic torch-bearer at the time of the Tokyo Olympics and who again showed up at the World Fair in Osaka 1970 (Expo ’70) wearing nothing but a pair of sunglasses. Sawaragi only started to portray him in a decidedly positive light after his own turn to activism, placing him in a tradition going back to the famous anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. He pointed to the earthquake’s millenarian or Utopian symbolism. According to folklore earthquakes are caused by a gigantic catfish (namazu), which is also a symbol for the rectification of the world (yonaoshi) (Sawaragi 2005:216f, 226–236). As Gregory Smits shows in his discussion of catfish paintings (namazu-e) drawn in the wake of the Ansei Earthquake 1855, the idea of the huge black catfish was connected to millenarian expectations aroused by the arrival of Perry’s black ships as well as to calls for a redistribution of wealth to the poor (at the hands of another “big black”, the god Daikoku with his cornucopia-like mallet of luck) (Smits 2006). The echo of the catfish, Sawaragi writes, can still be heard in Dadakan’s pranks, carrying “the far-away overtones of the lost opportunity

78

chapter three

of a Dadaistic-anarchistic revolution created by the Great Kantō Earth­ quake” (Sawaragi 2005:236). Dadakan is thus portrayed as part of an anarchistic undercurrent with deep roots in Japanese history, resurfacing at the time of the Expo. Sawaragi’s own turn to activism, I would suggest, came about as he became able to relativise his previous bleak image of Japan as a “bad place” and “closed circle” through his discovery of this tradition, for which he nowadays sees the “street” as one of the few remaining spaces left open (Cassegård 2010). As the example of Sawaragi shows, history offers many more objects for the selection of predecessors than the New Left. As activists turned to open protest after the turn to the new millennium, these other points of reference performed a valuable service by offering themselves up as images of an untainted past that could be incorporated in a new “language” of activism used by freeter activists. This need for a new language partially explains the startling popularity among many activists of folklore and premodern references. Many seized on the ideas of the historian Amino Yoshihiko, who had played an important role in stimulating a more general revival of interest in the Middle Ages. To many readers, his investigation into popular ideas of freedom in the Middle Ages, like muen, resonated well with contemporary ideas of the “nomadic” associated with thinkers like Deleuze & Guattari and seemed to be refreshingly free of many of the unpleasant features of the New Left – ideological dogmatism and hierarchical, tightly organised collectives demanding loyalty and commitment. Amino’s ideas were an important point of reference to Sawaragi as well as to many other activists today (see Cassegård 2011). The popularity of premodern references is a striking trait characterising much recent freeter activism and can also be seen in the precarity movement that took off in the wake of the anti-war mobilisations.16

16 Today’s freeter unions are fond of likening themselves to kakekomi-dera, the ‘refuge temples’ of the Edo period which offered protection and divorce to women. The idea of chōsan – premodern mass-emigrations in protest against feudal oppression – has been prominently quoted in manifestations like the “Anti-war and resistance festival” in Tokyo 2007 and the “Dispersal and disobedience” May Day in Kyoto 2010.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE RISE OF MOVEMENTS AGAINST PRECARITY Freeters may be free from the companies, but they are terribly chained by capitalism and the market. – Asato Ken

Beginning in 2004 a new sort of May Day demonstrations appeared on the streets of Tokyo: colourful street parties with dancing demonstrators slowly following a truck blasting out music on high volume. This is how one of the first and still very small-scale “Freedom & Survival May Days” demonstrations in Tokyo is described by a participant. Amidst the heavy dark clouds and dull colours of the afternoon that covers the pavement along the neon-litted Shibuya Jingu-mae, a sudden downpour of people came in with lively music and resurrected the dead streets with dance, flag waving, banner lifting and megaphone chanting, altogether they broke the monotonous silences of the city that keeps them blindly working every day. (Jong 2005)

While the dancing demonstrators voiced out their “concerns about inhuman labour conditions”, the police “in full battle gear […] tried to forcibly suppress the joyful resistance in the streets” by forcing protesters into a single line. Despite this, the narrator continues, the loud music “spilled out the resistance everywhere, infecting everyone with the virus of rebellion” (ibid.). The Freedom & Survival May Day is the oldest and probably best known of Japan’s freeter May Days, also referred to as “indie May Days” to distinguish them from traditional May Day demonstrations. Springing up first in Tokyo and then in places like Kyoto, Matsumoto and Fukuoka, they are now held in most major cities and in several provincial towns. The Freedom & Survival May Day has been arranged annually in Tokyo since 2004 by the General Freeter Union (Furītā zenpan rōdō kumiai or Furītā rōso for short). The demonstrations have grown to popular events gathering up to a thousand participants, largely freeters but also with notable elements of older workers, students, activists, self-proclaimed NEET and homeless. They call themselves the “precariat” (purekariāto), a term by which they try to capture the entire stratum of workers with insecure or precarious living conditions that has grown in pace with the deregulation

80

chapter four

of the labour market that has accelerated in Japan since the mid-1990s. Together with the participants of similar manifestations around Japan these groups are often referred to as the precarity movement.1 The precarity movement is well known for its many freeter unions, which work for the empowerment of irregular workers by protesting against abuses, supporting them through counselling, providing information about labour rights and negotiating on their behalf, and influencing public opinion through the mass-media. They also frequently ally with other movements to protest against war, sexism, environmental destruction, racism and the discrimination of groups such as immigrants, homeless, NEET or social withdrawers. Although hardly institutionalised in the sense of having a recognised official role, the movement has today become an institution in the sense of having become an established element within the culture of young freeters in Japan. The movement’s breakthrough in public consciousness came in the years 2006–2007. Shinoda (2009) points out that especially from 2007 onwards one sees a “mainstreaming” of the labour issue in Japan, with mass media and politicians rushing to position themselves as friends of the workers. Already in 2006, a boom of interest in poverty had taken off when the NHK broadcast a special documentary called “The Working Poor”.2 In 2007 the writer and precarity activist Amamiya Karin published Ikisasero! – a book which made a considerable impact on public opinion, describing not only the plight of young workers but also the resistance that had started to emerge though the precarity movement.3 Helped by this public attention, the movement managed to score several small victories in the years that followed. Its relative success can be seen in the popularity of its demonstrations, in the proliferation of new unions and Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs) dealing with the problems of labour, in 1 Here I use precarity movement in a wide sense, including groups in the so-called ‘antipoverty’ (han-hinkon) movement. 2 The ‘working poor’ (wākingu pua) are people who work but still earn less than the minimum level of public welfare (see NHK Supesharu “Wākingu pua” reporter team ed. 2007). After the NHK documentary other media started picking up the issue and in the following years a flood of publications on issues such as poverty, precarity, or the lost generation appeared. 3 The road to this public breakthrough was paved by a tide of research reports and publications on freeters, NEET and social withdrawers by academics in the field of labour research or the sociology of education (Kosugi Reiko, Genda Yūji, Yamada Masahiro, Honda Yuki), studies on economics and stratification (Tachibanaki Toshiaki, Satō Toshiki), psychiatry (Saitō Tamaki) or the sociology of consumption (Miura Atsushi). Although not linked to activism, these publications helped direct public opinion to the work problem of young people.



the rise of movements against precarity81

the establishment in 2007 of a nationwide network, and in the impact the movement has achieved in public with its interpretation of reality. One can also see clear responses from the establishment: Diet members have participated in the demonstrations, controversial law bills such as the “white collar exemption”4 have been withdrawn, courts have handed down sentences ordering temp agencies (such as Full Cast and Good Will) to pay fines or stop operations, and since 2007 the government has on various occasions promised and even implemented reforms to stem problems caused by the deregulation of the labour market. In 2012 the Dispatch Worker Law was partially amended to improve conditions for workers (albeit in a version watered down through compromises with the opposition). The Resurgence of Material Concerns in Freeter Activism With its use of performances, art, music and dancing, the precarity movement shares many traits with what Mōri Yoshitaka has called “new cultural movements”. However, what disappears from view if the precarity movement in Japan is explained simply as a reflection of the rise of these new movements since the early 1990s is that it is the product of a shift within a broader current of freeter activism. Following the turn to the new millennium, the advocacy of dropping out and constructing alternative arenas lost ground in favour of a more confrontational (although nonviolent) stance, emphasising street protest and conflict with employers and authorities. This shift has gone hand in hand with a resurgence of material concerns such as the precarisation and pauperisation of young people in Japan since the 1990s. This makes their situation vastly different not only from Dameren or the “post-materialist” new social movements that emerged in many countries in the 1970s and 1980s, but also from the student movements of the 1960s. As Suga Hidemi points out, the latter were regarded as a “revolution in the midst of wealth” and an anomaly in the eyes of those who still adhered to the old Marxist position that the revolution would be caused by pauperisation (Suga 2003a:218). Freeter activism, then, is by no means solely focused on culture, experience or lifestyle. As I will discuss further below, this coexistence within the precarity 4 The idea of this reform was to let workers above a certain level work at their discretion, rewarding their results regardless of working hours (in effect setting the salary for overtime work to zero). The reform was part of the drive to labour-related laws which often referred to as the rōdō biggu ban (labour big bang) starting in 2006, but had to be withdrawn after a wave of protests in 2006 and 2007 (Shinoda 2009).

82

chapter four

movement of cultural as well as material concerns – and the tension between them – is one of its central traits. To be sure, the rising prominence of material concerns and public confrontations has not meant that freeter activists have returned to the fold of the established labour movement. Refusing to identify either with the traditional working class or with middle-class citizens or a “vanguard” of university students, there is little or no sense of commonality with the older labour movement, the citizen movements or the student “sects” of the 1960s and 1970s (PAFF 2003a; Asato & Takahashi 2005). Usually they emphasize their commonality not so much with regular full-time workers as with other marginalised groups such as homeless people, immigrants, NEET, social withdrawers and mentally disabled. Their self-­understanding as marginalised or subaltern is also highlighted by their frequent use of terms such as “lost generation” or “working poor”. This realignment of solidarity towards groups marginal to the established labour movement points to the importance of the conceptual work performed in recent years, in which new ways of framing the worker have been tried out centred on the coinage “precariat”. The precarity movement, then, combines a cultural orientation with a keen sense of material deprivation, a will to reach out to other marginalised groups in society and an increased will to protest in public. The aim of this chapter is to understand this mixture of elements. What exactly is the relation between the desire for cultural expression and economic concerns in the precarity movement? A related question concerns the element of protest and confrontation in the movement. While aiming for social change, its goal is also to empower individuals by resuscitating “life” here and now. What is the balance here and how are these two aims interrelated in the movement? I start by briefly introducing the Japanese precarity movement, focusing on the General Freeter Union in Tokyo and its attempt to forge a new, broad solidarity among the marginalised through the category of the “precariat”. I then return to the questions of culture, material concerns and confrontation by focusing on the tension in the movement’s discourse between “life” and “survival”. From Dameren to the Precarity Movement When precarity activists today refer to Dameren as an inspiration, the emphasis is usually not on dropping out, but on confronting authorities and calling for social change, as in the following slogan: “A May Day for good-for-nothings [dame na yatsu] is coming, a May Day linking together



the rise of movements against precarity83

unemployed and overworked, a DaMayDay!” (DaMayDay executive committee 2006). The slogan is taken from the announcement of the “DaMayDay” (DaMay being a pun on dame) street demonstration on 1 May 2006 in Matsumoto, during which a hundred people in their twenties or thirties progressed slowly to the background music of hardcore punk, holding a banner with the text: “Flowers to the good-for-nothings”. Despite similarities in rhetoric to Dameren, the emphasis in manifestations like these is clearly no longer on dropping out, but on confronting authorities and calling for social change. The “good-for-nothings” and “losers” are articulated as subjects of a protest movement. Unlike Dameren, the precarity movement identifies itself as a workers’ movement – where the workers are not the regular workers of old but the new and growing class of flexible labour, the “precariat”. To understand why this more combative aspect of freeter activism has come to the fore, we need to pay attention to the changes that have been wrought in Japanese society since the onset of the “post-bubble” recession in the 1990s. As mentioned, the term “freeter” underwent a change of meaning along with the shift on a mass-scale to flexible, disposable labour during the 1990s – instead of designating independent-minded young people who put greater value on freedom than money, it increasingly took on the meaning of cheap and disposable labour lacking the rights and privileges of regular employees. With this trend, the advocacy of volitionally dropping out of regular work unavoidably took on a dated quality. Instead, in the new stratum of working poor and young flexible workers, a movement protesting against the impoverishment and insecurity of life began to take form. This was the birth of the precarity movement. The irony, then, was that while Dameren had advocated dropping out from mainstream society and actively choosing freeterhood, in the course of the 1990s the freeter became firmly enmeshed in the mainstream of Japan’s employment system, reproduced as part of the cheap, disposable labour force needed by capitalism. The fate of Dameren, then, was similar to that of many activists from the 1960s and 1970s elsewhere in the world, namely that their demands for more individual freedom were partially incorporated into the new capitalism. With the transition to a postFordist economic model emphasising flexibility, the activists were in a sense given what they had asked for (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). As Oguma Eiji argues, the criticism against the dreary predictability of an affluent “controlled society” was typical of the Fordist era but lost its teeth and became dated when precarity instead emerged as the main problem (Oguma 2009:828–831, 840).

84

chapter four

This diagnosis, however, needs to be partially corrected. As I will show, the precarity movement is still strongly infused with the values and style of Dameren. The desire to find alternatives beyond the career of a salaryman is still alive even in this social movement, which often vacillates between an affirmation and rejection of precarity. Later I will show that this tension shows up in today’s Japanese precarity movement as a tension between “life” and “survival”. The Formation of Freeter Unions Next to its eye-catching street demonstrations, the precarity movement is perhaps best known for the struggles and disputes waged by freeter unions against companies that abuse worker rights. The fact that unions were used as the organisational vehicles for these struggles was not self-evident, considering the bad image that unions and other traditional Leftist organisations had with young freeters. Despite this, the first decade after the shift to the new millennium saw a rapid proliferation of new, small unions for freeters all over the country, the earliest ones appearing in Tokyo, where the rate and speed of precarisation was greatest compared to the rest of the country.5 First was the Metropolitan Youth Union (Shutoken Seinen Yunion), which was formed in 2000. Other well-known unions include the General Freeter Union (formed 2004 in Tokyo), Union Bochibochi (formed 2005 in Kyoto/Osaka), and Freeter Union Fukuoka (formed 2006 in Fukuoka).6 Why did small, independent unions become so central in this movement? The first, simple answer is that the Labour Union Law makes it easy to form them – all that is needed is for two people to declare that they have established a union and set up regulations – and gives them powerful tools to protect members from abuses by employers. Once formed, employers are forced to accept demands for collective bargaining, regardless of union size (Hashiguchi 2011:90). A second answer to why so many 5 Only 10.5 percent of new employees in Tokyo had been irregular in 1982, a figure which had risen to 42.4 in 2006 and to over 50 percent among women. The rate of regular employees as a whole in Tokyo had been over 70 percent in 1987 but slipped to below 50 percent in 2007 (Hashiguchi 2011:124f). 6 For presentations of these and other freeter unions, see Guyonnet 2011, Hashiguchi 2011:108–143, O’Day 2012. In addition, several unions have been formed that specialize in dispatch workers, such as Haken Union, Fullcast Central Union, Hitachi Haken Union, Sokuhai Union, Goodwill Union and M-Crew Union. The movement also includes many NPOs such as Gaten-kei Rentai (formed 2006), Moyai (formed 2001) and Posse (formed 2006).



the rise of movements against precarity85

new unions have sprung up is that established unions in Japan have traditionally been preoccupied mainly with the rights of regular full-time workers (Watanabe Hiroaki 2012:29, 46).7 The freeter unions, however, did not spring into being wholly without help from older unions. The Metropolitan Youth Union stands out through its close relationship to Zenrōren, a large and well established trade union federation linked to the Japanese Communist Party. Many other freeter unions received know-how and other resources, such as access to office space, from so-called community unions. These are usually small local unions created around small or medium-sized enterprises, many being formed in the 1970s and 1980s and bringing together people outside the standard employment framework such as women, foreigners and parttimers. These community unions can be seen as forerunners or at least an inspiration to today’s freeter unions (Guyonnet 2011; Hashiguchi 2008, 2011:90f; Shinoda 2009). This link to older, more established unions can be seen in all major freeter unions. The General Freeter Union, for example, received help and rents office space from Tokyo Kanrishoku Union, whose members are described by their younger colleagues in the freeter union as “senpai” teaching them the tricks of collective bargaining (Shimizu 2007). Union Bochibochi is perhaps the clearest example of a freeter union nurturing close ties to local community unions, with Kyoto Union giving them advice and lending them office space. Freeter Union Fukuoka was inspired by the General Freeter Union and was helped by a teacher union and local labour unions in Fukuoka (Hashiguchi 2008). Established unions, however, are not the only roots of the precarity movement. Another important input came from the anti-war movement. The anti-war protests brought together people, such as musicians and political activists, who might not otherwise have met. These networks continued to be important, not least as conduits for transmitting the know-how of sound-demos, when people who had been active in the antiwar movement turned to precarity activism. For instance, from 2005 onwards, the General Freeter Union and the executive committees of the Freedom & Survival May Days have usually included people with a background in ASC or the anti-war demos (Hashiguchi 2011:157f; U interview 10 July 2007). Looking back today, Takahashi Ryōhei, a founding member of 7 According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, only 23 percent of labour unions accepted part-timers as members in 2009, and for dispatch workers the figure was a dismal 3.1 percent (Mainichi Shimbun 18 July 2009).

86

chapter four

the union, states that “Without the ASC there wouldn’t have been any General Freeter Union” (Takahashi 2011). However, the anti-war movement was not just a positive model for the emerging unions. It also inspired a discomfort which spurred activists to turn to precarity activism. Asato Ken, who took the initiative in forming the General Freeter Union, felt that the anti-war issue was too removed from their daily lives: “It’s not enough to pour out into the street and demonstrate as soon as something happens. Shouldn’t we be doing something more rooted in the conditions of our daily lives?” (Asato & Takahashi 2008a). The mixed feelings that many of the activists who founded the freeter unions had about the anti-war movement were also striking in the case of Union Bochibochi and Freeter Union Fukuoka. The origins of the former can be found in the networks formed in Kansai during the antiwar protests in 2003 and 2004. Nakamura Ken, one of the union’s founders and its first chairman, was central in the Rabble Etc which organised the first anti-war sound-demos in Osaka. Many of the other union members had been active in the Kyoto-based Anti-war Anti-government Action. Despite these close ties to the anti-war movement, Nakamura had felt that the war in Iraq was distant from and unrelated to the “close problem here at home” (interview 31 July 2007). Freeter Union Fukuoka too was formed by people who had met through the anti-war protests in 2003. Ono Toshihiko, its first chairman, had reflected at the time that he wanted to do something more rooted in his own everyday life than the war. “I wanted to bring about a shift from making statements about problems ‘out there’ towards something determining our everyday life” (quoted in Hashiguchi 2008). Anti-war activism, then, was important in giving activists the experience of protest and transmitting the know-how of sound-demos, but at the same time many freeter activists appear to have been yearning for another issue more directly related to the situation of freeters. Finally, it should be pointed out that although unions are the most central organisations in the precarity movement, few precarity activists seem to identify very strongly with them. Instead, the union is usually seen as a strategically developed part of a greater movement or network. Thus Yamaguchi Motoaki, a core member of the General Freeter Union, thinks of the union members as part of a wider network of anti-authoritarian activists in which the union simply happens to be in charge of the labour aspect. All people don’t gather just because of the aspect of “labour”. They come from various places – many from existing resistance milieus around Tokyo, like [the anarchist info shop] Irregular Rhythm Asylum in Shinjuku or the Amateur Riot in Kōenji. […] The General Freeter Union simply exists as one



the rise of movements against precarity87 manifestation of the aspect of labour within this web of relations. (Yamaguchi et al. 2008:65f).

Similarly, Nakamura Ken states that to him Union Bochibochi is “only a part of the movement Bochibochi” (interview 31 July 2007). These statements show that despite the prominence of unions in the precarity movement, it is too narrow to see the latter as merely a labour movement. Instead it stretches out beyond the limits of labour issues, joining hands with freeter groups interested in developing their own autonomous culture and cooperating with support organisations for the poor and other people outside the labour market. The General Freeter Union and the “Precariat” The General Freeter Union is probably the most well-known of the many small new unions that make up the precarity movement.8 It was born in 2004 out of a network of irregular workers called PAFF (Part-timer, Arbeiter, Freeter & Foreign worker). Despite its name it welcomes any kind of individual member: not only freeters, but also regular employees, unemployed or other forms of irregular workers.9 The initiative to the union was taken by the “proletarian poet” Asato Ken (a.k.a. Tokuda Miguel) (1969-). The union originated in the mood and ideas floating around in the non-sect radical circles of the Dameren milieu in Tokyo during the 1990s in which Asato participated. It is easy to find lines of continuity between Dameren and the General Freeter Union. The union’s emphasis on fun, humour and the defence of “laziness” carry on the legacy of the earlier group. During the first years, the union’s office was located in Dameren’s old stronghold Akane. Several union members had a background in the Dameren milieu, including founding members such as Asato and Yabu Shirō. Nowadays, Pepe Hasegawa himself is a member of the union. 8 For presentations of the General Freeter Union, see Amamiya (2007a), Asato & Takahashi (2005, 2008a), Grapefruit (2005), Hashiguchi (2008, 2011). In addition to numerous texts published by the union or union members (in the form of articles, books, declarations and public statements on the union homepage), I also rely on interviews with two founding members (Asato Ken and Yabu Shirō) and three other activists (E, T, U) conducted between 2007 and 2009. 9 Asato states that the ultimate aim was to organise a movement for all workers: “As an expedient means for that purpose, I decided to start by putting the spotlight on the ‘freeters’ who were a hot topic in society then” (mail interview 24 February 2008). Another reason for using the word freeter was that the activists hoped to impress people with the fact that “freeters too can form labour unions” (ibid. 152ff; E, interview 7 August 2007).

88

chapter four

At the same time, we must not overlook the differences between the General Freeter Union and Dameren. Not only is the former oriented to confronting authorities and employers, but it also understands the situation of freeters differently. While Dameren tended to focus on the negative aspects of regular work and the straitjacket of mainstream life, the precarity movement tends to emphasize the problems caused by the lack of regular work.10 The Idea of a New Working Class Movement During the early 1990s, Asato had been engaged in San’ya – home to Tokyo’s largest yoseba, or day labour recruitment centre – where San’ya Sōgidan was a powerful movement for the day labourers, famous for its protests against the yakuza’s involvement in the construction business. However, with the burst of the economic bubble, the air went out of the construction industry and many day labourers became homeless. This was not a process limited to San’ya: large populations of homeless people soon appeared – living in cardboard or plastic vinyl-covered houses under bridges, in parks or living on the street – in all major cities in Japan. Among activists in the day labourer movement many had reacted by arguing for a shift away from confrontational tactics towards support activities and dialogue with the authorities. In contrast to such voices, Asato and his friends argued that “the urgent task today” was a “reorganisation of the former movement structure to fit the present situation”. Around this time he was involved in two unions in the Tokyo region and started planning for a union that would organize the entire kasō, or “lower stratum” of impoverished people in Japan, from homeless people and day labourers to freeters and unemployed. This union, which he planned to call the “Lower stratum union” (Kasō yunion), never came into existence, but the ideas Asato sought to realize were the embryo of what later became the General Freeter Union. If we look at the idea of the General Freeter Union as laid out in the central documents prepared during its formation (PAFF 2003a, 2003b, 2004), we can see that compared to the idea of the “lower stratum union” day labourers and homeless have become more de-emphasised while the idea that the union should develop into a movement for the entire working class is more clearly articulated. 10 This difference is reflected in Asato’s critical appraisal of Dameren today: “It is a fact that I myself once tried to approach them, but their opportunism when it came to ‘class’ and ‘organisation’ made it impossible at least for me to get along with them” (mail interview 24 February 2008).



the rise of movements against precarity89

The founding documents from 2003 and 2004 contain three important ideas. The first is that the aim is to form not merely a union, but a social movement. This should not just be a protest movement of people “shaking their fists”, but they should themselves realize its demands through mutual help. It should also be a consumer movement, rejecting “junk food” and engaging in consumer boycotts and anti-war activities, as well as a “creative movement” engaging in culture and art. This broad ambition, which certainly outstrips that of most regular labour unions, is reminiscent of calls heard in the alter-globalisation movement. The second idea is that, while addressing itself specifically to freeters, it ultimately aims to be a movement for all workers. Freeters are not a problem apart from the rest of the working class, since the spread of irregular work threatens the conditions of regular workers as well: Freeters and other irregular workers are being utilised as a tool by finance and government to force down the wages of the working class as a whole and to enforce discrimination and division within it. […] Therefore, the problem of the freeter stratum is also the problem of all workers. (PAFF 2003b)

The danger of focusing narrowly on the situation of freeter is not only that it risks creating a split among workers, but also that it will invite portrayals of freeters as pitiable victims to be saved by being given regular jobs – when the real task is to fight capital through a broad, system-critical movement (see Asato & Takahashi 2008b). A third central idea is that the new labour movement should accord a central role not only to freeters but also to students. To Asato, this is a logical step, since the universities today have turned into worker factories. Unlike in the student movements of the 1960s, today the students are no longer an elite distinct from the workers (ibid. 2005:100). With regular jobs dwindling, students are themselves a “freeter reserve army” and the universities have turned into a “yoseba for freeters” (ibid. 97). “Today’s students have finally fallen from the status of a privileged middle-class ‘student stratum’, and as a social stratum they are now in reality nothing but half-unemployed or ‘student’-labelled freeters”. The students should fight, not for the workers, but as workers (PAFF 2003a). The Union’s Maturation and “New Order” The General Freeter Union’s activities were initially modest, with much energy being poured into associating, setting up study-circles and

90

chapter four

arranging­the annual Freedom & Survival May Day. During the first year after its inauguration, the union engaged in practically no counselling or labour disputes.11 This changed, however, with two important shifts that occurred in 2005 and 2006 (Hashiguchi 2011:162). The first of these shifts, in 2005, was a result of internal disagreements over the relation between the union and PAFF, the network from which the union had sprung, and revolved around whether loose networks or unitary organisations were to be preferred. Some participants – including Asato – advocated subordinating PAFF to the union, while others sought to preserve it as an independent network. The latter group won out, with the result that Asato and Takahashi quit the union (ibid. 155ff). Today PAFF still lives on as an independent network, but there is little activity going on and the union is the main movement body. A second, more momentous shift in direction came in connection with the May Day demonstration in 2006, which was subjected to a police crackdown in which three participants, including the DJ, were arrested.12 The shock threw the union into a crisis and many members left the union, which was on the brink of being dissolved. Five remaining members decided to restart it and arranged a “Hit back demonstration” in Akihabara in August to protest against the suppression (Settsu 2007a; T, interview 10 July 2010). Since then the Freedom & Survival May Days have continued to grow in popularity, with the number of participants reaching a thousand in 2008. Helped by the boom of mass-media interest in freeters and “working poor”, the number of union members also grew quickly, reaching two hundred in 2011 (Hashiguchi 2011:164). Among today’s members, most of whom joined the union after 2006, a strong sense exists that the events of that year represented a profound break. Some even use the term “new order” (shin-taisei) (E, interview 7 August 2007). A significant change was that the union now started pouring energy into counselling and labour disputes. The number of workers contacting them for help increased quickly in 2006, many cases revolving around unpaid wages, unlawful dismissals, bad working conditions, workers being forced to do 11 The only dispute in which it engaged was when it confronted one of its own members who was running a small bar for the illegal firing of an employee (T and U, interviews 10 July 2007). 12 This happened under the pretext that the demonstrators were disturbing the traffic (despite having been granted a police permit) (T and U, interviews 10 July 2010). During the years when sound-demos were still new, they were often subjected to harsh policing and seemingly unprovoked arrests. This can be understood as part of the generally repressive measures used in Japan against street demonstrations whose participants are perceived to be radical and few in numbers (for an overview of these measures, see Steinhoff 2006).



the rise of movements against precarity91

work not covered in the contract or livelihood problems. In this process, the help provided from other, older unions in Tokyo in the form of legal know-how and other resources was often invaluable. Another significant development after 2006 was the spread of freeter unions to other cities in Japan, a process in which the General Freeter Union often provided support. It also started to cooperate more closely with other groups in the so-called anti-poverty movement, such as the NPO Moyai (Shimizu & Sono 2009:51f, 58, 64f). In 2007, a nation-wide network, the Anti-Poverty Campaign, came into being that brought together the major organisations in the precarity movement in Japan. With increasing cooperation large-scale coordinated actions, such as the nation-wide Precariat May Days that started in 2008 or the Anti-G8 actions at the time of the 2008 G8 summit in Hokkaido became possible. With the onset of the global financial crisis in autumn 2008, which within months led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs among dispatch workers in Japan, the union started to diversify its activities. It was engaged together with other organisations in supporting the hundreds of jobless dispatch workers who had formed a tent village in Hibiya Park in December 2008 (the so-called New Year Dispatch Village). Soon afterwards it rented two old wooden buildings which it renovated and renamed the “Freedom & Survival House”, and which now provide cheap rooms to jobless dispatch workers and freeters with low incomes (Negoro 2009; Shimizu & Sono 2009:74–78). It also started up new sections in order to provide support to gasoline stations workers (in 2008) and women working at socalled cabaret clubs (in 2010).13 Despite its increasingly “serious” activities, the union still retains a provocative, anarchist streak which is well expressed in a May Day speech by Yamaguchi Motoaki in Miyashita Park in 2009, just before the demonstration was about to start. Let’s liberate the parks, hotels and shopping malls! The streets, the mountains and the waterways belong to no one; they’re ours! Don’t permit people to get rich simply for having been born to rich parents! Let’s put an end to a world in which poor people hate each other, compete with each other and kill each other! Let’s rob back the bread and roses! The imagination and 13 The Gasoline Stand Union (GSU) won its first dispute after having started a strike in the form of a workplace occupation against a company that had pressured workers to work unpaid overtime at its gasoline stations (cf. Shimizu & Sono eds 2009:107–114). The Kabakura (Cabaret club) Union was created since the General Freeter Union started receiving calls from women working at cabaret clubs asking for help – a category of workers long neglected by established unions (Negoro 2010; Amamiya 2010: 236–249).

92

chapter four ­creative activities of six billion comrades who are forced to a life of precarity – the precariat – has already started. We call out to you! Living is good! In order for us to be able to lead a decent life, we want everything! So let the May Day begin! (quoted in Amamiya 2010:166f)

Despite all changes, then, a strong continuity with the original General Freeter Union exists in the ambition to reach out to the entire lower stratum of marginalised or excluded people, a stratum for which the union since 2006 uses the term “precariat”. The Concept of the Precariat The term precariato or “precariat” is said to have originated as street ­graffiti in Italy in 2003 and gained wide popularity though activities and demonstrations associated with the EuroMayDays beginning in 2004. The  term, which is derived from precario (precarity) and proletariato ­(proletariat), is used for the class of workers that are forced to live in a state of precarity, above all workers with non-standard jobs. Cross-cutting traditional class boundaries, it includes “chain-workers” as well as “brain-­ workers”, freelancers as well as manufacturing temps. Unlike similar terms, like “flex worker”, the term carries strong connotations of political agency: “The precariat is to postindustrialism as the proletariat was to industrialism: the non-pacified social subject” (Foti 2004a, 2004b).14 That Japan was one of the first countries where the term caught on outside Europe may reflect the similar background of a once comparatively stable and secure employment system which started to unravel though deregulation policies of the 1990s. The media activist Sakurada Kazuya was the first to popularize the term in Japan, through events at the NPO Remo in Osaka in 2005.15 It gained wide currency when the journal Impaction produced a special issue on the precariat in spring 2006 14 Note that this usage differs from the narrower use later made of the term by Standing (2011), who sees the precariat as part of the bottom rung of the “new fragmented global class structure”, and as lacking work-based identity and career prospects which is dangerously unintegrated in society and community. This usage excludes ‘brain workers’ as well as many migrant workers and workers who identify with their work, such as art workers or dismissed elderly workers. This narrow usage of the term can also be seen in Obinger (2008) and Savage et al. (2013) – the latter being even more emphatic in making the precariat a category for those deprived of all forms of capital (economic, social as well as cultural). 15 The first time the term was used in Japan was in the 2005 translation of Ronald Dore’s New Forms and Meanings of Work in an Increasingly Globalized World (Hataraku to iu koto – Gurōbaruka to rōdō no atarashii imi, Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho, 2005) (Sakurada Kazuya, e-mail correspondence 13 July 2007).



the rise of movements against precarity93

(Sakurada 2006; Itō 2006). Soon afterwards it was picked up by the General Freeter Union, which used it for the Freedom & Survival May Day the same year, its first appearance in a street demonstration in Japan. As Settsu Tadashi, a then board member of the union, points out, part of the attraction of the word is that it derives from the worker movement itself, not from the corporate world or researchers: “The word ‘precariat’ differs from, for example, the word ‘multitude’, since it didn’t come into being as an academic term but was born from anonymous wall-graffiti” (Settsu 2006). The term was also attractive since it put something into words which until then had not been clearly articulated – an awareness among freeters that their plight was not their own fault, but a product of neoliberal labour market policies. The term’s electrifying effect can be gauged from how Amamiya Karin describes how she encountered it. She saw it for the first time in an announcement for the 2006 Freedom & Survival May Day, and “had the feeling of having discovered something extraordinary, a big exit, a way to break out” (Amamiya 2007a:16). The word helped her sort things out in her mind and turned her into a precarity activist. “I finally sensed that I had caught a glimpse of what I had been hunting for, an exit from the ‘difficulty of living’ of young people, and received an enormous shock” (ibid. 2006b). Let us have a look at how the term precariat is used by the General Freeter Union. A standard explanation in its publications is that it means “people who are forced to a condition of uncertainty, including freeters, dispatch and contract workers as well as unemployed and NEETs”. This usage is close to what we find in the EuroMayDay. However, in actual usage among activists in Japan, the word tends to become broader and also to include mentally and physically disabled, social withdrawers, wrist-cutters, the homeless, overworked regular workers and even small shop-owners. The adoption of the term “precariat” in Japan can be understood as a response to the felt need among activists for some overarching or bridging category or possible basis for alliance among such groups. As a DJ who is a member of the union says: I have the feeling that the concept “precariat” as used by us in the Freedom & Survival May Days is different from the European concept. We’ve interpreted it our own way, adding elements like mentally handicapped who are neither working nor regarded as part of the neoliberal labour market. So we’ve expanded the concept. (U, interview 10 July 2007)

A good example of this wide definition is Amamiya’s enthusiastic announcement of a sound-demo in 2006:

94

chapter four You to whom living is hard, freeters, NEETs, social withdrawers, paupers, working poor, workers on the verge of death from overwork, temp workers, illegal overstayers, regular employees without insurance, you who long for suicide, all kinds of addicts, all you with physical or mental handicaps, wristcutters, or in other words: all members of the precariat – let’s roll out on the street and demonstrate! (Amamiya 2006a)

In this passage, the “precariat” virtually merges with what Dameren used to refer to as dame or “good-for-nothing”. In fact, Settsu suggests that dame is a suitable word describing the union’s target group and points to Dameren as an important predecessor. To those who complain that they don’t understand the foreign word “precariat” (“Why don’t you use a Japanese word?”), I usually reply that since ten years back there’s been a movement called Dameren which is unique to Japan. The “precariat” and dame might not be exact synonyms, but Dameren was an important movement for the self-representation of and mutual help among those people who had opted out of the regular or typical way of life. Dameren is our forerunner and we have a lot to learn from its experience. (Settsu 2007b)

The wide sense which the term “precariat” has acquired in Japan reflects the rise of social withdrawal, NEET-hood, homelessness and suicides as major issues and “social problems” in public awareness. Making the term inclusive has allowed it to function as a tool for bringing together activists and subaltern or marginal groups. It should be noted that “precariat” is not the only term used in the precarity movement.16 There is a profusion of terms used by groups and activists to denote themselves. Some groups, like DaMayDay in Matsumoto, stick with terms like “good-for-nothings” (dame) or “losers”. Union Bochibochi prefers the simple “pauper” (binbō). “After all”, Nakamura Ken says, “‘precariat’ isn’t easily understood by Japanese people, but if you say ‘pauper’ we know at once what means” (interview 31 July 2007). The term “pauper” is also used with glee by other groups, such as the Great Pauper Rebellion (Binbōnin daihanran) in Kōenji in Tokyo or the Union Extasy in

16 Some activists are critical of the term ‘precariat’. Yabu sticks to the ‘proletariat’ to affirm the continuity with earlier struggles against capitalism (interview 30 September 2009). Asato too is critical of the term, which only became adopted after he had quit the union. He claims that when he first saw it, he feared that the appeal to a particular “freeterstratum” would spoil the broad working class solidarity he had had in mind (mail interviews 12 February 2008 and 24 February 2008). For discussions about the term ‘precariat’ in relation to other terms like ‘people’, ‘multitude’, ‘have-nots’, ‘junk’, etc, see also the journals Impaction (No. 151 2006), People’s Plan (No. 35 2006) or Anakizumu (No. 9 2007), which are all special issues on the precariat. .



the rise of movements against precarity95

Kyoto. Other terms used by activists are those of “rabble” (uzōmuzō), “desperados” (narazumono) or “unstable poor” (fuantei hinmin), all connoting lowly social status as well as a heterogeneous composition. A noteworthy fact is that all these terms are inclusive of people not working or incapable of working. What provides the source of identification is not the notion of a respectable and honest working class, but rather that of an unruly, despised Lumpenproletariat. This is also evident in some of the terms used by intellectuals associated with the movement, like “junk” (Suga 2003b), “rats” (Hirai 2005) and “dogs” (Sakai 1997). Common to these terms is, firstly, a self-deprecating humour lacking in the official or academic terminology. Secondly, the terms stress material and social deprivation, and imply identification with the underdog. Thirdly, they imply rebelliousness. When activists use terms like “losers” they are at the same time signalling their rejection of the value judgments ordinarily associated with the word. Denigrating terms are taken over, but only to be turned into objects of polemical affirmation. There is something paradoxical and ambiguous about these names, which appear to be able to include almost anyone – in line with the polemic principle that all will adopt the name of the most despised or marginalised. We may recall Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that politics is quintessentially about “improper” names, or “misnomers”. The political act par excellence is what he calls subjectivation, an act whereby subaltern groups make themselves visible by polemically rejecting given identities, often in favour of new categories that appear unreasonable or paradoxical. Conversely, politics dies whenever groups submit to given, unambiguous categories, an act which he calls “identification” (Rancière 1999:35–39). When demonstrators call themselves the “precariat” or “good-for-nothings” or “paupers”, terms whose very ambiguity signals antagonism, this is an example of subjectivation. Freeters or day labourers may be submissive, but not the precariat or the rabble. “Life” and “Survival” in the Precarity Movement Here I will return to the role played by vitalism in the discourse of today’s freeter activists, i.e. the belief in a life-force that needs to be affirmed and liberated in the course of activism. We have seen that a vitalistic jargon was prominent in early freeter groups like Aki no arashi or Dameren. What happens to this vitalism with the rise of poverty and other material concerns in the precarity movement? How is “life” talked about and what problems does this talk address?

96

chapter four

To address these questions, I will turn to the tension between two orientations in the rhetoric of the movement which I refer to as “life” and “survival”. *** In the early 1960s, the French Situationist Raoul Vaneigem provided a classical formulation of the desire for a full and non-alienated life in the slogan that “up to now surviving has prevented us from living” (Vaneigem 1981:93). Surviving means conforming to the dictates of mainstream society in return for material rewards and social status. Typically it means a life of working hard and consuming much. Participants in Dameren rejected such survival in favour of dropping out in order to pursue a freer and more fulfilling life through what they called “simply living” (tada ikiru koto). Dropping out would certainly mean a lowering of one’s standard of living, but the spare time, they argued, could be used for imagination and – to quote Kaminaga – for “reading, watching movies, listening to music or ­losing oneself in thought, looking at grass moving in the wind or listening to raindrops falling” (Hasegawa & Kaminaga 2000:64). Something of this attitude remains in the precarity movement, but here the issue of “survival” – expressed in the demands for material sustenance – has resurfaced as a major issue, resulting a tension between “survival” and “life” as two directions or tendencies co-existing uneasily in the movement’s discourse. Look, for instance, at Amamiya’s slogan “Let us live!” (Ikisasero), which since 2006 has been used in the Freedom & Survival May Days and which is also the title of one of her best-selling books. The book abounds with examples that make it clear that the slogan is both about survival and living. “The theme of the struggle is simply ‘survival’. It is ‘let us live!’. Hand over the money we need to live! Let us eat!” (Amamiya 2007a:10). Her closing words are forceful: What I want to say is simply: let us live! Simply living, who can live a decent life in a country where even that is threatened? Let us live! If possible without dying from overwork, without becoming homeless, without committing suicide, and, if possible, happily. (ibid. 282)

Life should be more than mere survival, but in order to live we need the money to survive – that appears to be Amamiya’s message. She also expresses the keenly felt experience that protest activism itself can contribute to the resuscitation of life. The precarity movement is not just about realising demands, it is also fun in itself, a liberation of life, just like the old millenarian movements and peasant uprisings:



the rise of movements against precarity97 The precarity movement demands a minimum right to existence, but once one starts the movement itself becomes terrific fun. There is a feeling that one’s actions count and actually have some influence, and there is a tremendous attraction in the primitive irresponsibility which reminds me of the peasant uprisings [ikki] or the rice-riots. (Amamiya & Oguma 2007:38)

What is perhaps most striking about these passages is the unwillingness to give up on either “survival” or “life”. Settsu brings out the potentially conflicting nature of these two slogans in a reflection written after 2007 year’s “Anti-war and resistance festival” in Tokyo, which had “survival (ikinobiru) as its theme. To “survive” is important, but we must ask about the content of life too. To affirm whatever life (indiscriminately) is the meaning of “survivalism”. But the problem is if life is worth living or not, and what we are calling for is “Let us live a life worth living!” (Settsu 2007c)

The tension between the emphasis on survival and life can be seen as a defining trait of the precarity movement. It is neither a purely “cultural movement” unconcerned with economic issues nor a pure “anti-poverty” movement. In the words of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), it embodies both a social and an artistic critique, and that is why it is wrong to state that the rise of material issues has made the latter obsolete. When Ogawa Kyōhei, a Kyoto-based activist, visited the “Anti-poverty festival” in Tokyo 2007, he pointed out that “Anti-poverty” failed to capture the atmosphere of the event, which he felt also expressed a mood of “Viva poverty!” (Ogawa Kyōhei 2008). The precarity movement, then, is not only about fighting material deprivation. It is a movement that both protests against the precarisation of life and gropes for new ways of living beyond the confines of capitalist society. In the movement, calls like “Give us money!” and “Give us work!” are mixed with other calls saying “We don’t need money” and “We won’t work!” (Hashiguchi 2011; Watanabe Futoshi 2012:186). This co-presence is not tension-free. Sometimes it gives rise to conflicts, as when the General Freeter Union had to scrap its slogan “Don’t work, live!” in the 2005 Freedom & Survival May Day since some members felt it was insensitive to the unemployed (Yamaguchi et al. 2006:107). The tension has produced what might be called two distinct currents of statements put forward by the precarity movement. Firstly, we find appeals and protests emphasising “survival” and material relief. They include demands for raising minimum wages and better working conditions, and calling for a “basic income” as a way of guaranteeing the minimal means of survival for everybody. This is likely the aspect of the

98

chapter four

movement that is most familiar to most Japanese, especially those who know it through groups identifying with the so-called “anti-poverty” slogan or through the reporting on the New Year Dispatch Village – a tentvillage set up by activists in Hibiya Park in late December 2008 for dispatch workers axed after the onset of the recent global economic crisis. These calls are usually directed to authorities as well as the general public, and can typically be seen as belonging in the public sphere, the arena where citizens discuss their common affairs. While these demands can be seen as calls for a new, reformed version of the welfare state, we can note that there is not necessarily any nostalgia for “life-time” employment in them. The demand is rather for flexibility to be combined with basic social security, often through some form of basic income.17 As Nakamura Ken puts it: “I don’t mind if I have an insecure job if I can lead a secure life” (interview 31 July 2007). Behind this statement is the observation – familiar from Dameren – that regular workers are not winners either, and that their life can be as hard as that of irregular ones with stress and long working hours. There is a tendency to think of the problem of work today as the problem that irregular workers can’t become regular workers, but I wonder if the problem is not wrongly posed. What I think really should be accomplished is a society in which it is easy even for irregular workers to work and live. (Nakamura 2009:37).

In the second current, the emphasis is on “life”. Here we find calls for realising a different living here and now, often in opposition to mainstream society. These calls are usually not oriented towards public authorities but rather to other activists. A typical example is when sound-demos are used to create counter-spaces on the street. Even when demonstrators ostensibly call out for survival, the call’s purpose is not necessarily to transmit messages to the public or the authorities. It can be done in a fashion that is so theatrical or outrageous that it is clear that what matters is not so much the content of the call as the performance itself – as when demonstrators during the 2007 “Anti-war and resistance festival” screamed “Give us money!” while stretching out their hands towards the pavement like zombies (Amamiya 2009a:170).

17 For discussions in Japan on ‘basic income’ and the related idea of ‘social wage’, see for instance the contributions to the journal Vol (No. 2, 2007), a special issue on basic income. The centrality of survival in the precarity movements discourse can also be seen in publications such as Shimizu & Sono (eds) 2009.



the rise of movements against precarity99

I will now turn to two forms of valorising “life” in the rhetoric of the precarity movement: first a weak variant in which the dream of “simply living” is maintained but wedded to calls for material survival, and then a more emphatic valorisation celebrating the direct blossoming out of life here and now, through creative activity and struggles for autonomy. PAFF’s “Unpatriotic Declaration” and the Dream of Simply Living As mentioned, Dameren was keenly aware that dropping out of work would mean a lowering of one’s standard of living, but argued that the spare time could be used for imagination, doing things together and for enjoying “looking at grass moving in the wind or listening to raindrops falling”. Echoes of this pastoral ideal of “simply living” can still be heard in PAFF and the General Freeter Union, but now in a context which gives it a significantly different meaning. A good text in which to listen to these echoes is PAFF’s 2005 proclamation “Unpatriotic declaration for not raising the human ability of the young”. The proclamation was read aloud outside the Tokyo International Forum on 26 October 2005 until the police arrived and made the activists leave. The title is a travesty of a declaration issued earlier the same year by Keidanren (the Federation of Economic Organisations) which aimed “to raise the desire to work of young people and nursing their abilities”. PAFF denounces the Keidanren-declaration for blaming the young for their “lack of eagerness to work” when in reality their precarious employment situation is caused by business elites like the Keidanren itself. These elites are fond of propagating that “the young should be made to work at all costs, as if there was no greater evil than not working”, while in reality they haven’t got the slightest intention of “restoring workers to ‘splendid’ regular employees”, preferring to use them as cheap, dispensable labour while “extracting their self-accusations” (PAFF 2005). In part, PAFF’s argument is one that has become common in the precarity movement. Protests are not just directed at neoliberal deregulation, but also at the tendency to put the blame for young people’s precarious situation on their own idleness or unwillingness to lead a conventional life. Against such arguments, activists usually emphasize that the problem has social, not individual, causes. They point out that many freeters do not wish for anything else but regular work, that they are not lazy and that working hours of freeters are often as long as or longer than those of regular employees. However, PAFF’s declaration stands out by its explicit argument that what is wrong with the notion of “self-responsibility” is not that young

100

chapter four

people are not lazy. To be sure, it is absurd to lay the blame on the laziness of freeters themselves since there are so few regular jobs available, but the remedy is not the return to full employment. What is wrong is rather the work-centrist conviction as such, and what is needed is a greater tolerance for alternative ways of living, for the “idea of living pure and simple” – formulated below in terms that are distinctly reminiscent of Dameren’s ideal of “simply living”: Human beings are more than labour power. Life should be something richer, with things like talking and laughing with friends, watching movies, reading books, listening to music, travelling and loving. Such things are not necessarily earned by labour. We don’t remember having been asked if we wanted to stuff our entire lives with work. We freeters are forced by our cheap wages to work long hours to feed ourselves. And you have the stomach to tell us to work more! (PAFF 2005)

This rejection of work-centrism is also foregrounded in the Freedom & Survival May Days, during which placards and megaphones are used to raise an array of slogans such as “Regular job holders are losers too”, “Life is more than making a living”, and “We won’t kill ourselves by overworking”. What PAFF is driving at is a defence of the right to be lazy, of the reasonableness of not working so hard, and of the idea of a society in which “simply living” is possible. Like in Dameren there is a criticism of the hard work ethics of Japan and an affirmation of a more relaxed life. In contrast to the members of Dameren, however, social circumstances are now portrayed as preventing such living. Here is the announcement of 2006 year’s Freedom & Survival May Day. This is a far cry from fishing in the afternoon and debating in the evening. When we get home we’re dead tired, and yet we’re accused of being workshy and presuming on others. Always the problem is reduced to the individual. The unsolicited preaching of “heightening human power” is gaining influence. Exposed to hostility and ridicule, we face constant unpredictable instability day after day. Is this our fault? (Freedom & Survival May Day committee 2006)

As the reference to Marx’s idea of a non-alienated life in the first line of this quote makes clear, what the precarity movement calls for is not simply a restoration of lost employment security, but a new and presumably non-capitalist form of life where simply living will be possible without precarity. Unlike in Dameren, the idea of “simply living” recedes into a dream or utopian image of what would be possible in a better society. To Dameren, “simply living” had a heterotopic rather than a utopian quality, being something that could be realised in the right places here and



the rise of movements against precarity101

now by dropping out. To PAFF, by contrast, the only way to realize the dream is by changing society first. The ideal of “simply living” therefore no longer goes hand in hand with dropping out, but with protests and street demonstrations. Life Through Autonomy: Yabu Shirō In the precarity movement, the valorisation of “life” comes to the fore in still another guise – one which has shed the pastoral quiet of Dameren’s ideal of “simply living”. Instead, life is pictured as something that can be dramatically realised here and now, in the midst of struggle itself. It is among the proposals and methods associated with this latter idea that the vitalistic attempt to reconnect to and resuscitate life in the midst of a deadening and lifeless society becomes especially central. Below, I will first discuss one variant of this attempt by Yabu Shirō (1971–) and then turn to another by Matsumoto Hajime (1974–). In the course of the 1990s, several radical groupings developed in the circles around Dameren. One of these was a group of activists centred on Yabu Shirō and Yamanote Midori who in 1994 organised Sentōteki rōdōsha kyōkai (The Bathhouse-like Workers’ League, pronounced as the Militant Workers’ League), ostensibly to protest against higher fees in Tokyo’s remaining public bathhouses (Yabu & Yamanote 2001:18). Yabu went on to play a central and influential role in the autonomist and/or anarchist scene in Tokyo through his writings and his participation in the anti-war and precarity movements. In 2001 he organised ACA (Anti-Capitalist Action), in which he participated with future members of the General Freeter Union like Takahashi Ryōhei. He himself was one of the founding members of the union and for many years ran a small bar in Shinjuku’s “Golden-gai” called Jacobin. Despite his active participation in the early sound-demos in Japan, he is far from viewing them as any kind of plea or appeal emitted to politicians or the larger public. To him, a street demonstration is not an attempt to communicate, much less a protest. It is an act of autonomous life, of reclaiming life, and refusing to be influenced by the norms of mainstream society. It has to do with being true to one’s desires, to having fun and being alive every minute. To him, a demonstration or a strike is above all an end in itself, and only secondarily a means to achieve some purpose. For an illustration of what being true to one’s desire can mean, we can turn to his reports of two anti-war demonstrations at the time of the invasion in Iraq in 2003. In one report, he describes a clash with the riot police

102

chapter four

in which he is hit, his glasses fly away and he tumbles to the asphalt, a forest of arms and legs barring his sight. There, through a tiny opening was the gorgeous blue sky. My thoughts leapt out of my scull, merging with the things around me. Fused with my skin, the cold and distant materials pulsated as if they were alive. I was the asphalt in front of the station, I was the arrested safety boots, I was the anti-war blue sky – and I felt I could have affirmed the whole world! (Yabu 2003b:47)

In a second report he looks back at the sound-demo on 10 May in Shibuya. He expresses his admiration for the demonstration’s truck-driver who persisted in driving stubbornly at snail’s pace despite pressure from the infuriated police to drive faster, thus prolonging the time the street party could go on: He was acting in a dimension apart from the utilitarian question of “what will come out of it”, being true to his desires. What matters is not to try to achieve some result through the demonstration. Since dancing in the street is what you really want, you won’t let go of that no matter how much you are being yelled at. (ibid. 2003c)

What matters in a strike or demonstration, then, is not to be successful. Regardless of success, there is no need to seek understanding from people around you if the action is endowed with meaning for you yourself. “Be careful about whether the action will allow your desire to blossom or not. If you do that you rarely fail. You can walk without maps” (Shiraishi & Yabu 2005:178f). His stance is therefore confrontational without being communicative. Public “protest” is, paradoxical as it may sound, not voice, not an attempt to get across a message or to engage in dialogue, but a form of withdrawal from public communication. Life can only be secured by rejecting the prevalent views in mainstream society and refusing to be influenced by them: The desire for empathy is a sign of life’s decay and approaching death. You cannot live merely by communication and empathy, by doing things together with others. If you’re not able to stare at a tatami-mat, at the ceiling, at the back of a sofa, or at the edge of a bath tub and discover part of yourself in it, then life is slipping away from you. Indeed, if you can’t stare intently at the grain of the ceiling without impatience, then you’re not likely to be able to communicate about trifles with others either. (Yabu & Yamanote 2006:165)

As in what Lefebvre calls counter-space, these spaces in which life suddenly blossoms arise not through dialogue so much as through the friction



the rise of movements against precarity103

with the norms governing mainstream public space. His participation in street demonstrations does not aim at participation in the public sphere in a strict sense, but rather at the resuscitation of life. Yabu’s writings offer an explicit example of what I call movement vitalism. In Japan, such vitalism could be seen already in the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, who asserted that the “free life” had to be “tasted” here and now, guiding each step of the revolution rather than being postponed until the latter was accomplished (Ōsugi 1974:241). Similarly, Yabu stresses that no activity is revolutionary unless it goes hand in hand with an emphasis on the immediate or bodily experience of living. A free life is not to be dreamt of as a far-away goal to be realised only after the struggle, but blossoms in the midst of struggle itself. To assert life is to live a life of unconditional “autonomy” here and now, even if it means colliding with the structures of power or the spectacle of ideas and lifestyles in mainstream society. Autonomy must infuse life as a whole, and living such a life is itself the “movement”: We are involved in the movement every day… gathering in parks, drinking  alcohol, tearing away important-looking advertisements, throwing ­cigarettes on the roadside, shoplifting foodstuffs, unintentionally bilking ­restaurants – in other words, simply living a life doing this or that is the movement. (ibid. 45f)

It should be pointed out that to Yabu autonomy does not mean that individuals should close themselves off from other people. Being true to desire is a way to form human relationships that run counter to the expectations of mainstream society. What matters is not to get caught up in the mainstream criteria of validity. The opinions that matter, he states, are those of people who tend to be neglected and not very visible in public, such as women, children or foreigners. They are the ones I think should judge if our movement is correct or not. For instance, can we get understanding from foreigners who don’t understand our language? Or if children are watching, do they tell us that it looks fun or not? (Shiraishi & Yabu 2005:167)

To Yabu, assuming the standpoint of “labour” is no way to safeguard autonomy. Labour has itself become part of the system. While affirming what he calls the “labour movement”, he emphasises that such a movement should not aim at grabbing power or raising the material standard of life of workers. Paradoxically as it might sound about a person who participated in founding the General Freeter Union, what matters to him is not labour issues in the sense of getting fair wages or making employers live up to the Standard Labour Act. Labour, to him, is opposite to autonomy.

104

chapter four

It means to live a life in the service of the spectacle, a life of mere survival. Labour is a category integral to capitalism, not one that points beyond it. While he uses the term “labour movement”, he has little but contempt for regular workers and their values and outlook on life. In his eyes workers are corrupt and imbued with the mechanisms of control, surveying one another and receiving the payment for their collaboration in their salary account. “I don’t want to become such a person and I want to exclude them actively”, he asserts and concludes grimly: “The worker, guilty” (Yabu & Yamanote 2006:192). This is a militant version of Dameren’s rejection of mainstream work: an advocacy of dropping out of work, but in a new, more aggressive and confrontational guise. The life that is to be achieved through such dropping-out is no longer pictured in terms of any idyllic “simply living”, but as a heightened intensity resulting from the struggle to guard one’s autonomy. “The winner is the one who has the best time”, he concludes. “What is really fun is to go on strike. To regain one’s powers, to yell against the forest” (Shiraishi & Yabu 2005:176f ). “A Post-Revolutionary World in Advance”: The Amateur Riot The activists of the Amateur Riot (Shirōto no ran) are based in an arcade near Kōenji Station in Tokyo where they run a number of recycle shops, a free space and a café. The first of these shops was a recycle shop established in 2005 by Matsumoto Hajime, who has today achieved something close to national fame as the chief prankster among activists in Japan. Although following Dameren in creating alternative places or arenas of life to which young people can drop out, he is far more intent on creating what he calls “commotion” (sawagi) and using the street as an arena for public protest than Dameren. While he appears to value autonomy as much as Yabu, he prefers to rely on the magnetism of fun to attract outsiders to join him in his “revolution” rather than shutting out communication. Matsumoto formed his first group “The society for preserving the squalor of Hōsei” (Hōsei no binbōkusasa o mamoru kai) while a student at Hōsei University in 1997. Using provocative pranks, picnics and nabe (hot pot) gatherings it protested against the renovation and prettification of the campus which he saw as part of the university’s offensive against student activism. When he left the university in 2001, he instead formed the Great Pauper Rebellion (Binbōnin daihanran). Here he developed what has become his trademark street event – cooking nabe on the pavement and inviting passers-by such as unemployed youngsters, office workers, students, or homeless.



the rise of movements against precarity105

Since 2005 his base of activity has been the shopping arcade near Kōenji station where the Amateur Riot shops function as places for gathering, talking, watching films, eating and drinking, and generally arranging a variety of “guerrilla events”. Their ambition in starting the shops, apart from enabling them to make a living, was to create an environment suited for a typical freeter income, where people could have fun without money (Matsumoto 2008a:82ff, 2008b:112, 117; Asahi Shimbun “Rosuto jenerēsyon” reporter team 2007:214). The street demonstrations arranged by the Amateur Riot activists typically seem to aim more at maximising the sense of freedom on the street gained by participants than at conveying protests or appealing to authorities. Matsumoto has arranged a great number of sound-demos and he consistently uses the street as a scene for humoristic and at times wild pranks reminiscent of artistic happenings. The “Return our bikes!” (Ore no chari o kaese) demonstration in 2005 was a protest against the removal of illegally parked bicycles and gathered some hundred participants. Knowing that the police had been cracking down on street party events in Tokyo, they chose to go by a new name, Kōenji NEET Union (Kōenji nīto kumiai) when they applied for the demonstration permit, partly to trick the police into believing that they were novices. Matsumoto describes the event as a raving success which infuriated the police since the number of participants was far greater than they had anticipated. Maliciously, he followed up the event by what later became a great hit on You Tube – the “We are the three” demonstration in 2006 in which the police were again made fun of, since this time he only turned up with the tiniest following. Later the same year, he arranged another boisterous sound-demo called the “Apartment rent zero insurrection” (Yachin o tada ni shiro ikki), which gathered some 300 participants and apart from the sound-car featured a mikoshi (portable shrine) and a “movable living room”-platform. Wary about police suppression, Matsumoto and his friends next started to grope for a way to “liberate the street” that would avoid the risks of a formal demonstration. In 2007 he took advantage of a legal loophole, running for a local ward assembly seat and turning the street around the campaign van, which was loaded with a sound system, into a resounding street party every evening. “Of course, our aim was to take back the street, not to get an assembly seat”, he explains (Matsumoto 2008b:129).18 In the following

18 For accounts of the other events mentioned above, see Amamiya 2007a:226–238, 2007c, Futatsugi & Matsumoto eds 2008:67–204, Matsumoto 2008a:95–138, 2008b:136–170.

106

chapter four

years Matsumoto continued arranging sound-demos, achieving a spectacular impact with a series of demonstrations against nuclear power that began in April 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear accident. *** Matsumoto and other activists at the Amateur Riot appear to have very little in common with older Leftist movements in Japan in style or orientation. Neither do they appear to identify as Leftists. Asked about the word “Leftism” (sayoku), a youngster in one of the shops replied: “Neither left nor right, but oneself. The Left always demands self-sacrifice, so it’s nothing for me” (quoted in Komaru 2007:42). The Amateur Riot also sticks out in the precarity movement. As Matsumoto points out, his strategy for liberation is cooking nabe on the street rather than protesting against companies or appealing to authorities. “They are demanding the improvement of working conditions and social welfare by making appeals to the government and corporations, while I’m instead trying to exit that world as completely as I can” (Matsumoto 2008b:183f). Here we might ask what Matsumoto means by the word “exit” (ridatsu). Rather surprisingly he connects it to revolution – another word which he and the other activists in the Amateur Riot are fond of using (as can be seen in the cheap “revolution lunches” and “revolution blend” coffee on offer in their café). Exit is not meant to indicate leaving or disappearing from mainstream society, but rather that there are other ways of engaging in revolutionary activity than demanding improvements of working conditions or the welfare system. But what does he mean by “revolution”? Asked about his dreams for the future, Matsumoto says: Wouldn’t it already be a revolution if groups like The Great Pauper Rebellion sprang up all over the country and joined together? Instead of organising a movement and trying to change society by confronting it head on, I’m more fond of the idea of constructing a post-revolutionary world in advance and then just telling everyone: “Come, it’s more fun over here!”. (quoted in Amamiya 2007c:39)

“If it ain’t fun, it ain’t revolution”, as Ichino Yoshiya, a member of the General Freeter Union, says. Here, like in Yabu’s writings, “revolution” is redefined into a process of autonomous activism that prefigures the liberated­condition. It is neither a stoic self-sacrifice for the organisation nor a patient and disciplined reliance on history, but a joyful endeavour. Matsumoto points to this idea of “constructing a post-revolutionary world in advance” as the very essence of his activism (Matsumoto 2007:66). He



the rise of movements against precarity107

started to use this phrase at the time of his election campaign in 2007, when the place in front of the campaign car was turned into a “post-­ revolutionary world”, with people dancing and stage-diving (see Matsu­ moto 2007: 62, 66; 2008a:129, 142; 2008b:195; 2008c:199). The ideas of exit or revolution through the multiplication of alternative spaces may appear similar to the dropping out advocated by Dameren – and indeed, there is much in the jargon of the Amateur Riot that is reminiscent of that earlier group.19 Like the activists in Dameren, Matsumoto emphasizes that fears about survival and material standards of living are often exaggerated. Like them, he also propagates ways of making a living without being employed and has published a book which is filled with information on ways to live and have fun without having to use much money (Matsumoto 2008a). However, as Matsumoto points out, it would be a mistake to portray him as a proponent of frugal ways to “survive in income gap society” since his real aim is “to create a commotion” and “turn over the world” (ibid. 2007:50, 66). More than in Dameren, there is an affirmation of actively occupying parts of and disrupting the flow of surrounding society. The “post-revolutionary world” is above all to be realised on the street, during street parties or other events that break with the everyday, capitalist routine. Unlike in Dameren, there are no attempts to create a sanctuary for withdrawers or people with mental problems. Instead, alternative space is seen as something with a potential to spread to and infect the surrounding society. “Let’s call their bluff and start the great insurrection of paupers, multiplying throughout the world! We’ll do what we want to do by creating places for us to be, liberated zones on the street” (ibid. 2001). Constructing an alternative place is thus made into much more of a festive and provocative public event and an active challenge to the surrounding society than in the case of Dameren. *** Another difference compared to Dameren is that the recycle shops, cafés and second-hand clothes stores serve the Amateur Riot activists as a source of livelihood. Matsumoto’s ability to enjoy a life of independence from employers is also why he feels that he has little in common with NEET, withdrawers or “working poor” (Matsumoto 2008b:183f). The shops 19 Matsumoto himself was not active in the Dameren milieu in the 1990s, but Yamashita Hikaru – another central figure in the Amateur Revolt scene – associated both with Dameren and the art collective Okagarō in the late 1990s (Futatsugi & Matsumoto eds 2008:20).

108

chapter four

also enable him and his friends to circumvent the need to struggle as wage-labourers. However, being independent of employers does not mean that the problems of survival have been solved. Instead, the tension between life and survival is displaced onto the management of the shops, where it shows up in the potential conflict between the need to make them economically viable and using them as bases for a “post-revolutionary world”. Matsumoto states that he originally thought of his store simply as a way to make a living, but gradually it turned into a base for his activities (ibid. 112). But could shop and rebellion be combined? He is by no means certain that the shop is a viable solution to how to combine rebellion and livelihood, since the shops only generate a small income and since even alternative forms of survival make demands that potentially run counter to “life”. My greatest anxiety now is how to maintain the balance between the shop’s function as a mainspring of my and the staff’s living, and its function as a base of riots and commotion in the style of The Great Pauper Rebellion. If the shop folds and I lose my income, it won’t be easy to continue doing the activities I’ve been doing up till now. So I want to keep the shop running. I make my living from the shop and I and my companions use it for gathering, so nothing will remain if it falls over. Or course I can’t do things that are too unprofitable and I always have to think about procuring things that will sell, but on the other hand there is always a part of me thinking “Is it really OK for me to bother my head only about such things?”. But if we only do demonstrations and meetings, the shop will fail. That dilemma is always there (ibid. 119).

The tension between shop and rebellion is related to the conflict between life and survival, which exists even for Matsumoto. The shop gives him an independent economic base, but it is also an Achilles heel since everything depends on the shop’s survival. Shop-owners are independent of employers, but not of the market. He is clearly aware of the danger that even forms of “alternative survival” such as running a recycle shop might be detrimental to life. *** Matsumoto’s activism is interesting as an example of the rich array of historical references in freeter activism. A tradition he is fond of quoting is that of the shitamachi, Edo’s plebeian “lower city”. He himself grew up in Kameido, a relatively backward and poor part of Tokyo located in the old shitamachi. Kōenji, where he settled in 2005, is also a plebeian neighbourhood, which he describes as an “immigrant town” which was populated by refugees from the Great Kantō Earthquake and people escaping the burnt



the rise of movements against precarity109

down parts of Tokyo during the war (Matsumoto 2008b:129). To him, belonging with this shominteki (plebeian, or for the common masses) culture also goes hand in hand with recreating the local community. Recycling, he points out, is not only good for the poor, who can’t afford new things, but also for building up community ties. Customers are often from the neighbourhood, and they don’t just buy but also often sell. It is in such human relations, he asserts, that you make friends who can help you if you are in need, not in supermarkets or department stores (ibid. 2008b:107, 2008a 64). The value he puts on neighbourhood ties shows up in the delight he shows in telling how he and his friends overcame the initial distrust of their many elderly neighbours in the shopping arcade who felt anxious about the youngsters roaming about late at night. Today, he states with evident pride, they participate in the local festival by carrying the o-mikoshi, help their neighbours fix broken antennas or computers and are at good terms with everyone (ibid. 2008a:80f). Hirose Jun once described the Amateur Riot as a rebellion of the countryside (inaka) (Inoue 2008a), and that may be true. Matsumoto himself refers to Kameido, where he grew up, as a “remote countryside” (katainaka). He can also be said to actively create countryside around himself by emphasising the local neighbourhood and recreating a mood of living that dispenses with urban consumer culture. To him, this way of living is associated with Edo period society. Lambasting contemporary demands for efficiency, he hails the “lazy” Edo period town people as a model. Then people helped each other without depending on the state – a contrast to today when people are isolated and under the sway of authorities and companies: “What I’m trying to get across is how much higher level Edo society was at” (Matsumoto 2008b:196f, 2008a:11). Clearly this is a traditionalism, but one that takes its foothold not in the elitist orthodox version of Japanese tradition, but in the tradition of the small people, fused with an anarchist undercurrent. Importantly it is also a tradition of rebellion. He likes to compare his own sound-demos to the 1918 rice riots or to ikki (egalitarian federations or uprisings in premodern Japan). “In Japan, there is a splendid tradition called ikki”, he writes, adding that ikki were not simply riots or rebellions, but attempts to construct communities with one’s one hands, independently of the governments, through self-rule (ibid. 2008b:11). During his election campaign in 2007, which he baptised the “Kōenji ikki”, he urged participants to “follow in Ōshio Heihachirō’s footsteps” – Ōshio being a famous Confucian official who sold his books and started an uprising in 1837 to protest against the authorities’ misrule at the time of the Tempo famine.

110

chapter four ***

Amamiya Karin claims that Matsumoto should be counted to the precarity movement since his activities provide what they are all striving for, “the feeling that you’re allowed to do anything, the highest degree of freedom” (quoted in Matsumoto 2008a:170). In his activities, fun is created not just by dancing or playing music, but above all by what could be called mischief – by challenging, provoking and outsmarting the police and other authorities. The political import of these pranks consists perhaps above all in his success in turning the “nature” around him into “history”. Following Walter Benjamin (1985), nature can be seen as anything that people experience as being given and determined by fate, while history is what appears to be created by and changeable through human action. That Matsumoto creates history is evident in his talent for creating human, as opposed to thinglike, relations around him. He obviously enjoys eliciting responses from the environment – from the police as well as from onlookers, as when passers-by join picnics or start to applaud the sound-demos. History is reawakened not only through struggle or through achieving social change, but also by encouraging elements of human interaction. Bringing about human interaction is itself a form of victory. This means that what is important to him is not conflict per se. He even notes with evident triumph that the local police in Suginami Ward have started to become friendly (Matsumoto & Oda 2008:5). Rather than conflict, I would suggest that what matters to Matsumoto and the other activists in the Amateur Riot is play. If play is to be developed to its fullest, however, it cannot be contained within the limits set by a given order. The pranks and demonstrations are good examples of how empowering play can be when it breaks through and expands across those limits, since they suggest the joy of speaking one’s mind in the face of power and getting away with it. Play only occurs where the semblance of nature yields, and possibilities for making the world respond are opened up. Play is therefore not opposed to attempts to change the world. In a sense, such attempts have an affinity to play since they presuppose that the world responds. Matsumoto himself has responded to the criticism that his playful demonstrations do not achieve any specific concrete political goals. Even if results are not achieved, he states, demonstrating is a way of keeping up the pressure – and that is necessary, for the opponents will not cease their pressure (Matsumoto 2008c:197). While being fun, then, playing is also



the rise of movements against precarity111

empowering: a way to build up experience and training oneself in not being meek towards authorities. To summarize, Matsumoto’s gatherings and happenings are ways to have fun and at the same time provocative gestures aimed at the general public. If Yabu could experience himself as isolated and freed from the surrounding society in street demonstrations, in Matsumoto the creation of a “post-revolutionary world in advance” reveals itself as a message addressed to society, as an invitation to join a more fun world. What they have in common is that both strive for a direct realisation of life here and now, a realisation that must be achieved through one’s own efforts, and not by appealing to authorities. How the Jargon of “Life” Has Developed There is a tendency to view the precarity movement as a response to economic or material deprivation, but as I have tried to show it is at the same time driven by a longing for “life” that transcends a mere taming of neoliberalism. This is why freeter activism will hardly vanish even if the economic conditions of freeters improve. Despite the continuities between Dameren and today’s precarity movement, there are clear differences in how they understand the situation of freeters. The increasing precarisation of work has made “survival” a more central concern, and, along with this, freeter activism has become more oriented to a confrontational stance and more insistent on protest and social change. Although many precarity activists are anxious to preserve a valorisation of “life”, such valorisation tends to be expressed differently than in Dameren – namely in acts of public protest, as if “life” were no longer possible without confronting society. As I have shown, the ideal of “life” is pictured in two ways in today’s precarity movement: one in which the Dameren-like ideal of “simply living” lives on, but as a dream of what would be possible in a better society rather than as something that could be instantly realised here and now by dropping-out; and another in which struggle and revolt are themselves seen as the source of a resurrected life. I have also suggested that these two ideals are connected to different orientations to space. The former goes hand in hand with the use of space as a platform for projecting messages to the wider public with the aim of bringing about a better society. The latter sees life as blossoming in counter-spaces. I should point out, however, that even those activists who aim at creating counter-spaces, such as Yabu or Matsumoto, still retain some elements of participation in the general public sphere, albeit in opposite

112

chapter four

ways. To Yabu, a street demonstration calling for “survival” could itself be a vehicle for momentarily realising “life” here and now. Conversely, Matsumoto’s provocative display of liberated life functions as a message to the general public, calling on it to reflect on the sacrifices exacted by the orientation towards “survival”. To summarise, I see two currents in today’s precarity movement, both of which carry on part of Dameren’s legacy but in different ways. Put simply, Dameren’s advocacy of “simply living” by dropping out branches off into two directions. On the one hand we find organisations that call for public measures guaranteeing the minimal means of survival for everybody. In these calls the ideal of a relaxed and peaceful “simple life” may be retained but only by being turned into a distant dream to be realised when social conditions guaranteeing “survival” are secured. On the other hand, there is an opposite tendency to rely on events in which “life” is momentarily realised here and now. In this strand, a satisfying life is seen as possible in the midst of the present society but only through revolt, struggle or insubordination. The two currents also represent different attitudes to the so-called “selfresponsibility” argument which puts the blame for young people’s precarious living conditions of their own laziness. Many precarity activists have rejected this argument as absurd since many freeters have no choice but to accept insecure jobs. This rejection is hard to reconcile with an affirmation of relaxation and dropping out, and has therefore gone hand in hand with playing down Dameren’s legacy in the movement. If we look at Yabu and Matsumoto, by contrast, we find a strong tendency to downplay the portrayal of oneself as a victim and to actively assume “self-responsibility” as part of one’s freedom. It should be pointed out that while these two currents represent different directions, they both coexist in today’s precarity movement. Importantly, both represent a movement away from Dameren through their greater emphasis on protest and confrontation. Today’s precarity activism is often understood as a response to the economic woes and drastic transformations of Japanese society that began in the 1990s. However, as I have shown, the precarity movement has inherited many early developments in freeter activism that are rooted in the late 1980s before the burst of the “bubble-economy”, as can be seen in its valorisation of “life”, the use of art and popular music in street demonstrations, the preference for a loose network-like organisation and the attempt to reach out to a wide spectrum of “lower stratum” people through coinages like the “precariat”. At the same time, the precarisation of employment and increasing poverty in the recent decade have meant that labour



the rise of movements against precarity113

and survival have become acute issues. The precarity movement is both very cultural in its insistence on living here and now on the one hand, and oriented towards survival and insisting on solidarity with the poor or precarious on the other. Despite its name, it is concerned as much with cultural expression and living as with precarity. A tension can often be felt between these orientations, but this tension can be creative. As it turns against the precarisation of work as well as the increasingly obsolete ideal of full-time employment, the precarity movement gropes for possible ways of combining life with survival, for a society in which the freedom of flexibility will be possible without the economic insecurity of precarity. Coda: The Debates on “1968” and the Rehabilitation of Activism A final point that needs to be addressed in connection with the precarity movement is the contribution it made in rehabilitating the idea of activism in Japan. In this it was helped by the emergence of “poverty” and “income-gap” as focal points for public concern from 2006 onwards. The result was an increased public legitimacy for and interest in activism. One tangible expression of this is the small flood of publications looking back on the activism of the 1960s that has appeared in the recent decade, written by journalists, academics and former activists.20 The ease with which the legacy of the New Left is discussed today indicates that is no longer as traumatic as it once was. Among academics, several significant works on the activism of the 1960s have been published in recent years by people like the historical sociologist Oguma Eiji (2002, 2009), the political scientist Ōtake Hideo (2007), the literary critic Suga Hidemi (2003a, 2006a), the sociologist Michiba Chikanobu (2005) and the film critic Hirasawa Gō (e.g. Hirasawa & Yomota 2010). The debates around these works among intellectuals and activists show that while many still consider the New Left discredited and unsuitable as a model for present-day activism, others have started to reappraise it in various ways. They also show that the history of the 1960s is very much a terrain for contemporary struggles. The debates are not only about the portrayal of the past but also about the implications of this portrayal for today’s freeter activism. 20 For example, Akane & Shibata 2003, Konishi 2000, Kosaka 2006, Shima 2005, Suga ed. 2005, Suzuki 2009, Watanabe Hitomi 2007, as well as a documentary about the United Red Army by Wakamatsu Kōji (Jitsuroku Rengō Sekigun, 2009). The interest in the events of ‘1968’ appears to have been stimulated not only by nostalgia on the part of the generation that took part in the struggles but also by the publications on ‘poverty’ in contemporary Japan and news of the alter-globalisation movement abroad (e.g. Hasegawa 2008:87).

114

chapter four

Considering that the decade of the 1960s tends to evoke both the radical New Left student “sects” and more ideologically uncommitted “citizen movements” like Beheiren, it is perhaps not surprising to find two prominent positions in these debates. Firstly, there are those, like Oguma and Ōtake, who are sympathetic to the citizen movements and to the progressive or modernist intellectuals close to them, but who tend to be critical of the New Left and Zenkyōtō. Oguma in particular is harsh in his portrayal of the political ineffectuality, romanticism and intellectual poverty of the Zenkyōtō students.21 The second position is best represented by Suga, who rejects the facile dichotomy between a “good” Beheiren and a “bad” Zenkyōtō as untenable (Suga 2006a:75–81, 88–100). Suga is clearly sympathetic to Zenkyōtō, which he sees as an attractive model for freeter movements today for two reasons: one, it was a movement of “junkified” students who could no longer identify with the elite, and two, he sees it as essentially a non-sect movement which had a brief moment of glory in the late 1960s after the sect-dominated Zengakuren and before the renewed sect-wars that soon engulfed it (ibid. 2003a:7f, 263). A good way to complicate the somewhat simplistic picture of two opposing standpoints is to return to Sawaragi Noi, who is criticised by Suga as an example of the tendency to praise Beheiren at the expense of Zenkyōtō (ibid. 2006a:75–100). While Sawaragi’s Korosuna appeal with its favourable mention of Beheiren and Okamoto Tarō superficially resembles the interventions of contemporary academics sympathetic of the citizen movements, his stance differs from theirs since he couches his defence of Okamoto in the language of art. As I have shown, what he chooses to affirm in these predecessors is not the attitude of the responsible citizen, oriented to political dialogue in the public sphere, but an anarchic impulse, represented by such things as the pranks of Dadakan or the folklore of the gigantic catfish that brings about world rectification through earthquakes – all things that cannot be contained in the system and which therefore offer a way out of the suffocating closure of the “bad place” Japan. In Sawaragi’s rewriting of history, there is more that links 21 Ōtake and Oguma differ slightly in how they relate the New Left to today’s movements. While Ōtake (2007:28) sees today’s freeter activism as a resurrected New Left modified by internal self-criticism, Oguma (2009:840f) portrays today’s precarity movement as primarily economically oriented and lacking the desire for a non-alienated life that was characteristic of the Zenkyōtō students. Suzuki (2009) also points to the preoccupation with ‘searching for the self’ in the New Left, but unlike Oguma he is much more appreciative of this tendency which he believes is also strongly present in today’s precarity movement.



the rise of movements against precarity115

him to the anarchist currents in the freeter movement than to the citizen movement. Further complicating the picture is the fact that a third standpoint is also becoming increasingly visible, especially as one moves from the texts written by established academics towards texts written by activists and radical intellectuals close to freeter activism – namely a wholehearted affirmation of the radical energies of “1968”, including the legacy of the “sects”. Yabu, for instance, has declared his readiness to “accept the entirety of the history of the New Left” (2006:84). Such a move goes beyond the selective rehabilitation attempted by Suga by not seeking to avoid the “bad” legacy but instead redefining it into something that no longer needs to be rejected or disavowed. Most outspoken among these advocates of “1968” is Hirasawa Gō, himself an activist who played a prominent part in the anti-G8 protests 2008 and who is a member of the collective that since 2006 publishes the radical journal VOL. Speaking in the wake of the outbreak of the world financial crisis in autumn 2008, he explains the surge of interest in “1968” by referring to the rampant crises in the realms of finance, poverty and the environment that cannot be solved within the confines of the present capitalist system. In a situation like today in 2009, what is needed is precisely to negate the condition of existing politics, philosophy and culture. We need to rethink the possibility opened up by the year 1968, which was a year of groping for a new world, and to theoretically and practically inherit that possibility. What is required of us, if we don’t want to let the “1968”-boom end in a mere boom, is the will to approach the possibilities of that year in a genuine fashion. (Hirasawa 2009)

The perspective from which he advocates a reappraisal of “1968” is laid out in a book from 2010 which he edited with Yomota Inuhiko. The book is critical both of what it calls the new de-politicised revisionist scholarship about “1968” and of the old “mythologised” discourse of participants (Hirasawa 2010:8). It also stands out by not focusing narrowly on the political events of the year 1968, but more broadly on the culture of the period of which the movement was only a small part. This appeal to culture is not coincidental. Among many freeter activists today there is a nostalgic attachment to the culture of the 1960s. An activist going by the name “Left” in the culture jamming group Radical Left Laughter (RLL) expresses his love for the angura (underground) culture of the 1960s, especially its aesthetics and its theatre, saying that “inside him, the student movement is still continuing”. At the same time, he creatively blends angura with other elements, mostly from Taishō period popular

116

chapter four

culture and contemporary goth, to adapt it to his present. Gothers, he says, are people who side with the vengeful ghosts of everything that has been lost and shuffled aside in the progress of history, and in his case that loss is the counter-culture of the 1960s (interviewed in Amamiya 2010:183f). In this connection, we might recall that the angura of the 1960s was itself suffused by a premodern imagery – festivals, chants, calligraphy and headbands (Eckersall 2006:29f). Affirming angura is thus only a short step removed from affirming the premodern imagery which, as I have suggested earlier, has already become an important part of the movement culture of contemporary freeter activism. In an interview Hirasawa explains that he himself has no background in the student movement or the New Left factions that still exist on the universities, but rather came into contact with the global movement scene through his travels. It was from such a point of departure that he started to engage himself in activism when he returned to Japan, just in time for the anti-war protests in 2003 when he became a member of Against Street Control. Rather than being partial to this or that tradition, he wanted to revive what was important in the movement culture of the 1960s and 1970s as a whole, namely the will to change the world. A noteworthy point is that his endorsement of “1968” is formulated from the point of view of younger freeter activists, rather than from the point of view of what he calls the “generation of 68”. It was precisely the near-monopoly on narrating “1968” of that generation that he wanted to counteract, since many of them were uninterested in being reminded of their old anti-capitalism (interview 29 September 2009). That freeter activists no longer feel the same urge to disavow the legacy of older Leftist movements indicates that a significant recovery has been achieved from the trauma of the New Left. Instead of shunning the past, activists like Yabu, Hirasawa or “Left” seem capable of accepting it without feeling bound by it. The debates about the legacy of “1968” may have been a sign of a new ease of verbalisation and an increased detachment from the trauma of the New Left.

CHAPTER FIVE

SPACE, ART AND HOMELESSNESS Public Space, Counter-Space and No-Man’s-Land Homelessness increased rapidly in Japan with the burst of the “bubble economy” in the early 1990s and tent villages started to appear along the rivers and inside the parks of the big cities.1 Since the turn of the millennium authorities in Japan have conducted an increasingly intensive campaign to evict the homeless from parks and riverbanks, often with the excuse of planned international exhibitions or sporting events. In response, activists and homeless people have protested and demanded the right for the homeless to live in the tent villages without fear of eviction. In Tokyo and Osaka, only a handful of small tent villages remain. Some homeless have instead been given a temporary abode in shelters while others have been granted welfare – something that until recently was practically impossible for those who had not reached retirement age – but the overwhelming number have instead been set adrift on the streets, sleeping where they can find space, in stations or under bridges. Using the struggles over the homeless encampments in the Shinjuku underground passages, Nagai Park and Miyashita Park as my main examples, I will try to show in this chapter that homeless activism in contemporary Japan offers important insights into the transformation of the idea of the public sphere in the course of political struggle. Following Habermas (1989), the public sphere can be characterised as a sphere of social life where citizens can deliberate on their common affairs while disregarding matters and circumstances deemed to be of only “private” relevance. Although, as Habermas has argued, it fulfils the important function of a sounding board or “warning system” that alerts the state about problems that need to be solved, it is also a stratified arena in which not all have equal opportunity to voice their discontents. Historically the voices of groups such as women, children, the lower classes, foreigners and 1 For background on homelessness in Japan, see Aoki (2006), Hasegawa (2006:23–52), Iwata & Nishizawa (2008).

118

chapter five

minorities have tended to be relegated to the margins or excluded (for an overview of criticism against the “public sphere”, see Dahlberg 2003). However, as the mainstream public sphere increasingly becomes viewed as an unresponsive arena, places meant to offer an alternative to the prevailing mainstream values can easily be seen as providing the possibility of an “alternative public” more open to participation by subaltern groups – a marginal space where communication, action and a recovery of political commitment are again sensed to be possible. Defending the homeless communities of parks therefore often involves a confrontation with tensions and ambiguities in the notion of “publicness”, as the idea of a genuinely free and open public is invoked against the perceived elitism of the mainstream public. The processes whereby the tent villages have turned into sites for reimagining the public have come about in tandem with an increasing popularity of cultural activism in the homeless movement. In what follows I will focus on the role played by freeters in this movement, in particular in connection with their role in the adoption of cultural or artistic activities.2 As I will show, cultural activism in the homeless movement takes a significantly different form compared to movements consisting mainly of freeters, such as the precarity movement. To bring this out I will focus on the issue of space. I will start by introducing a typology consisting of three concepts of space, each of which I believe is needed to understand aspects of homeless activism. Three Kinds of Space The concept of no-man’s-land is basic to understanding homeless activism. No-man’s-lands are spaces that, mainly because they escape official attention, allow for forms of behaviour not normally approved of according to the norms governing mainstream public life. Such spaces have been referred to as “dead zones”, “wastelands”, “terrain vague” and “urban voids”, and can be exemplified by derelict harbours or train yards, 2 It should be pointed out that freeters are not always the main carriers of cultural activism in the homeless movement. The homeless themselves frequently make use of poetry, music, theatre and performances in their activism. Examples include the kamishibai (picture-story shows combined with theatrical performances) of Musubi, a group of former homeless in Osaka; the poet Tachibana Anjun who uses his cardboard house as a medium for poetry and posters; the “blue sky” karaoke in Tennōji Park; and the “summer festivals” arranged in yoseba districts, in which homeless people or day laborers enjoy performances of everything from enka to hip-hop artists. On these and other examples, see Sakai & Tachibana (2006), Ueda (2006), Haraguchi (2005).



space, art and homelessness119

abandoned barracks, empty lots, spaces below bridges or next to highways (Doron 2008; Franck & Stevens 2007; de Solà-Morales 1995). Many of these terms seem to suggest empty space, devoid of habitation and use. As Doron points out, however, these spaces are seldom empty. People often live there, unfolding their own lives and creating their own economies through scavenging, barter and partial participation in the official economy. What characterizes these spaces is not the absence of human interaction, but that this interaction lacks official recognition (e.g. Doron 2008:204, 209). Here I will call these spaces no-man’s-lands for simplicity. The term highlights the fact that they are unclaimed (or not used by its formal owners). The fact that they can usually not be claimed formally by any of those who use them, at least not without a long struggle to gain official recognition, is important in shaping social life there, since users have to engage with another on the basis on other principles than those of formal ownership, recognising the character of the space as a form of “commons” or as partitioned in unofficial turfs or territories.3 An example of a no-man’s-land mentioned by Doron is the military zone on the outskirts of nineteenth century Paris – a ring of fortifications populated “by thousands of people whose homes had been demolished by Haussmann’s neo-classical restructuring of Paris and by farmers who were drawn to employment in the redeveloping city but could not afford to live inside it” (Doron 2008:206). This population of mainly rag pickers were known as zoniers. But more than just a residential place for workers and ragpickers, this ring of ragged wasteland just outside of the city also served as the working class’s “nature, their trysting ground, their countryside, their park” (Nesbit 1992:190; also cf. 169f, 190–194). It is illuminating to compare this “zone” to another well-known abandoned former military facility, the Freetown of Christiania in Copenhagen. Unlike the Parisian zone, it is located in the heart of town, in the working class district Christianshavn. It governs itself through consensual democracy and possesses its own laws and flag. Since 1971, when the empty facility was first occupied, it has been inhabited by a mix of political activists, middle-class dropouts and marginalised individuals, the latter often with drug problems. These groups added up to a synergetic mix, since “the 3 I do not directly equate the no-man’s-land with the commons. Although it can develop into a commons, a commons involves shared rules (e.g. who should be included or excluded, that no one should claim the territory for him- or herself etc.) (see Hyde 2010; Ostrom 1990).

120

chapter five

latter were not only tolerated by the community, but were also involved in its work” (Thörn 2012:153). When an eviction date was set in 1976, cultural activism (including a record released for the benefit of the Freetown by leading Danish rock bands) and a massive rally helped save Christiania. Based on a special law, it was officially recognised as a “social experiment” and allowed to exist. Although controversial, it has gathered broad popular support and is today one of Copenhagen’s prime tourist destinations (Thörn 2012; Doron 2007a; Miles 2008:195ff). Comparing the Parisian “zone” with Christiania, the contrasts stand out. The former thrived because of the neglect of authorities, while Christiania publicly declared its existence as a “Freetown” from the start and maintained its survival through a highly visible public struggle. To clarify the difference between the “zone” and Christiania, I will refer to the former as a “no-man’s-land” and to the latter, using Lefebvre’s (1991:381ff) term, as a “counter-space”. While no-man’s-lands exist by virtue of public neglect, counter-spaces arise in defiance of mainstream publics and are typically embroiled in struggles with authorities about the use of the land. At the same time, counter-spaces have deep affinities with the no-man’s-lands. Often they arise in order to defend the no-man’s-lands from being developed or in other ways appropriated by authorities or legal owners. Ironically, although counter-spaces may have their origin in the desire to protect the no-man’s-lands, the latter often become irrevocably transformed in the process of being defended. Even if the struggle to defend them is successful, as it was in the case of Christiania, this success can usually only be had at the price of official recognition and hence a form of incorporation in the mainstream public order. What was typical of the no-man’s-land, namely its clandestine and unregulated character, is thereby lost. No-man’s-land as well as counter-space must both be distinguished from a third kind of space, namely official or mainstream public space. Typically such spaces, such as squares or public libraries, are fully at home in official discourses and on official maps. To speak with Lefebvre, they are “isotopic” in relation to mainstream society, attuned to the rhythms of mainstream life, in relation to which they pose few or no jarring elements. That such mainstream public spaces have an officially recognised role in politics is a trite fact. It is wrong to assume that they are wholly tamed, that they give no room for oppositional voices or that political activities in such spaces always keep to the bounds of routinised politics. What is typical of that politics is rather its orientation to and adaptation to the official political system. An example is when “anti-poverty” activists organised the New Year Dispatch Village around New Year 2008–2009 – which I will



space, art and homelessness121

discuss later in this chapter – using Hibiya Park as a stage to highlight the poverty issue and put pressure on the national government. As this village shows, such space can be crucially important for political challengers since it helps them project messages to a wider public and to authorities, and thereby to participate in the public sphere. At the same time, there are limits to how radical the demands and the conduct permitted in mainstream public space can be, since they need to be considered legitimate or in tune with the normative expectations of mainstream society. Politics, however, is not limited to mainstream public space. Counterspaces and no-man’s-lands too are sites with their own forms of political praxis. Counter-spaces arise through actions that are publicly visible, but they arise through a clash of rhythms. Lefebvre describes the acts whereby disadvantaged groups challenge the spatial order to retake possession of the city as a reimposition of autonomously formed rhythms of their own making on those of mainstream society (Lefebvre 1996, 2004). Such acts succeed when they disturb or overpower the rhythm of mainstream society sufficiently to at least temporarily make way for alternative rhythms to be heard. While such activity makes itself heard in public, it usually goes hand in hand with an awareness that it at least initially will appear as little but “noise” in the ears of established elites or the mainstream mass media. An example of this is the struggle to defend the homeless community in Tokyo’s Miyashita Park against eviction, during which a group of artists and activists called AIR (Artists In Residence) occupied the park for half a year in 2010, squatting in the park together with the remaining homeless and using it as an arena for art workshops, concerts, and poetry readings and as a basis for rallies and demonstrations, including “homemade sound-demos” to which participants brought frying pans, metal cans and other things that make a noise. In the course of the occupation, it became more and more evident that the activists and artists were using the park not only as a locus of protest activities directed at the authorities, but also to express, perform and enjoy an alternative way of life. No-man’s-land too has political import. Although seemingly unrelated to politics, spaces of this kind are linked to a particular image of freedom, which has been important in attracting many freeter activists and artists to the tent villages and making them affirm homelessness. As Doron points out, what is potentially liberating about these spaces is “the absence of recognition and the subsequent indifference toward it” (2007b:10). This feeling of liberation, however, is of a kind unrelated to participation in the public sphere. Unlike mainstream public space or counter-space, no-man’s-lands thrive best when the rhythms of mainstream society are

122

chapter five

too far to be clearly heard, and in their absence a relatively independent and heterogeneous world is allowed to develop. Waste and garbage, things that are free to pick up for anyone who feels like it, belong to this world. It is the riches of nature and society that are there for anyone to enjoy. In general, it is what is free, what is abundant and in free supply, or so worthless that no one wants it: the leftovers. Spaces like these are essential to the survival of homeless people, helping them generate resilience in the face of oppressive conditions. It provides them with access to spaces for basic needs, such as sleeping and attending to bodily needs, which most other people rely on private spaces for. They are also spaces where the alternative, shadow economies can develop that are necessary for them to make a living – economies depending on scavenging and collecting cans, cardboard and other recyclables (Ikuta 2005:200ff; Arimura 2007:20ff). Conversely, as we shall see in the case of Miyashita Park, no-man’s-lands are also potentially attractive to capital, as objects of enclosures and renewed bouts of expansion, in the form of gentrification or other forms of urban development. Life and Survival in the Homeless Movement Since the mid-1990s, cultural activism – including drama, dancing, paintings and music – has become increasingly conspicuous in homeless activism, next to activities geared to daily survival in the form of patrols or takidashi (food distributed to the homeless), and demands to authorities for reforms and welfare. Just as in the precarity movement, there is a tension in homeless activism between, on the one hand, a strand emphasising “life” and often stressing culture or art in their activities and, on the other, a strand much more oriented to material issues of “survival”. If AIR seemed to be all about securing an autonomous space for art and creativity, the Dispatch Village put all the emphasis on survival and the material plight of the pitiable victims. The Dispatch Village and AIR illustrate two opposed tendencies that coexist uneasily within the homeless movement. What is at stake in these two orientations is not just the matter of “cultural” versus “material” issues, but also the conception of public space and how space is used by social movements. If the aim of the Dispatch Village was to reach out to the responsible authorities, calling on them to act in a state of national emergency, AIR was more concerned with defending the autonomy of the park. It is not without risks, however, to apply concepts developed in the context of the precarity movement to the homeless movement. To oppose



space, art and homelessness123

“life” to “survival” can easily lead to the wrong associations. Firstly, material survival is central to the everyday life of homeless people to a much higher degree and in a more basic sense than to most freeters – through their dependency on sources of sustenance such as collecting aluminium cans or scavenging, through their vulnerability to cold and illness, and through the physical threats to which they are subjected by a hostile environment. The homeless movement has by necessity always been preoccupied with material issues such as food, health and a place to sleep. This is a quite different way to articulate material issues than to demand reforms from politicians. In the activism of the homeless movement, the space of activism often coincides with the space of everyday life. This means that activism is more embedded in everyday life than in the case of most freeter activists. Space is not only used for visibilising marginality or appealing to the public. It is central for survival, but of an alternative, basic kind that cannot be captured in the life/survival dichotomy that is so central in the discourse of the precarity movement. Secondly, whereas culture and “fun” are often highlighted as central ingredients in freeter activism, the homeless struggles demonstrate the limits of understanding cultural activism simply in terms of fun, enjoyability or utopian prefiguration. In homeless activism actions are generally drawn-out over long periods of time and often end in defeat, namely eviction. This affects the content of the culture, which is often pervaded by expressions of grief and anger. Although festive or carnivalesque moments exist, it is hardly these moments that are distinctive of homeless activism. Homelessness in Japan In the early 1990s the burst of the bubble sent thousands of day labourers unable to find employment out on the street. Large masses of homeless began to fill the parks and riverbeds. An important cause of the wave of homelessness was the drastic crumbling of the yoseba as a place to find employment – yoseba is a term for the places where employers would pick up day labourers and is also used about the areas in which these places were located, such as Kamagasaki in Osaka, San’ya in Tokyo, Kotobuki in Yokohama or Sasashima in Nagoya. The drastic fall in the number of day labour jobs was partially caused by the crisis in the construction industry and partially by the wider transformation of the low wage-end of the labour market. As young people flowed into unskilled and low paid jobs in the service industry, brokers and employers changed recruitment

124

chapter five

methods. The increasing number of part-time workers, temporary workers and irregular workers found employment through the proliferating employment magazines rather than through the yoseba (Aoki 2006:9ff; Nasubi 2005; Gill 2001:192, 198). As the homeless increased, they also spread geographically to parks, river banks, railway stations and other places where they could find water and relative safety and where they could make their living by collecting recyclables or by working as scalpers outside ticket offices. Apart from the ambulant rough sleepers with no fixed abode who carried their belongings with them during the day and passed the nights in stations and shopping areas, the 1990s also saw the rapid increase of homeless people with a relatively fixed “home”, usually tents made of vinyl sheets or cardboard shacks. Living in tent villages in parks and along rivers, they formed communities which provided a degree of protection since they could patrol the area, exchange information and look out for each other (Nasubi 2005). A new stage in the development of homelessness began in the latter half of the 1990s, when people who had no background in day labour work began to swell the ranks of the homeless (Ikuta 2005:198f, 2007:203f). Young precarious workers started to appear among the homeless, standing in line for food at the takidashi, sleeping sometimes in the doya (cheap lodgings used by day labourers) and sometimes on the street (NHK Supesharu “Wākingu pua” reporter team 2007:24ff). So-called “net café refugees” – young homeless people, often working in short-term jobs, who spend their nights in the cheap individual boxes provided in places like 24-hour Internet cafés or so-called manga kissa became the focus of much mass-media attention beginning in 2007.4 Japan’s system of welfare provisions has clearly been insufficient as a measure against the increasing homelessness – especially since homeless people have often been excluded from welfare with the excuse that they lack addresses or are able to work (Aoki 2006:91f; Kitagawa 2008:224f). Instead, the authorities have largely responded to the increase in homelessness through evictions coupled with the establishment of short-term shelters. These measures were justified through the 2002 “Homeless Independence Support Special Measures Law”. The idea behind the law was to promote the “independence” or “self-reliance” (jiritsu) of the 4 The word was coined by the NTV journalist Mizushima Hiroaki (see Mizushima 2007). The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in a 2007 survey estimated the number of ‘netcafé refugees’ in Japan to be around 5,400 (The Japan Times, 29 August 2007).



space, art and homelessness125

homeless­by providing them with short-time shelters as a first step to returning them to the private labour market. At the same time, the law was used to legitimize harsher measures towards those homeless who chose to remain in the homeless communities in the parks. As Sasanuma (2008:213f) points out the law triggered a wave of new big evictions: first in 2005 in Shirakawa Park in Nagoya, then a second round in Osaka Castle Park and Utsubo Park in Osaka 2006, which were followed by the eviction in Nagai Park in 2007 which will be discussed below. The law was controversial from the start, being backed by some support organisations but fiercely criticised by others (Gill 2004). Since then, even organisations that originally supported it have started to voice criticism of the law, since the shelters proved to be of little use to the homeless. Many homeless, being old and in poor health, had difficulties finding full reemployment. Furthermore, shelters were an unappealing choice to many homeless since they were only short-term, virtually guaranteeing that the homeless would soon be back on the street, having lost their tent or cardboard house in the process. While being of little help to the homeless, the law’s main effect has been to break up the communities of the homeless and forcing them to an itinerant, insecure and isolated life on the street (Kanazu 2004). As for the homeless movement, the developments sketched above stimulated several new developments. To begin with, some activist groups responded to the ageing of the homeless former day labourers by turning away from active confrontation towards cooperating with the authorities in distributing welfare. Secondly, more radical groups were formed that devoted their attention to defending the homeless communities in the parks and other public spaces against evictions. Finally, after the turn to the new millennium the emergence of young homeless stimulated the development of new organisations that engaged in the housing situation of young freeters. In what follows, I will trace the development of the various currents of the homeless movement in Tokyo and Osaka since the early 1990s, focusing not only on how they have emphasised material or cultural concerns, but also on their respective conceptions of space. I will start with the Shinjuku Cardboard House struggle in the Shinjuku underground passages in the mid-1990s, an important struggle in which many of the new activist approaches in the early 1990s grabbed public attention for the first time and which has been described as the starting knell for the homeless movement in Japan (Hasegawa 2006:2f). I then map two currents in the homeless movement, represented by the Anti-poverty Campaign and the

126

chapter five

246 Conference of Expressive Artists. I then look at the struggles of Nagai Park in Osaka 2007 and Miyashita Park in Tokyo 2010, when theatre, music and poetry were spectacularly deployed to stop the evictions of homeless people – two examples of counter-space that illustrate the increasingly conspicuous role of art in the homeless movement. Art Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Shinjuku Cardboard Village “Looking back at the pictures now, it is almost palpable how a kind of energy related to life and existence – an energy different from that of socalled political social movements – welled up from the humble practice we engaged in” (Yamane 2010). Yamane Yasuhiro wrote these words about the so-called cardboard village where he and his friends had spent almost three years, 1995–1998, painting on the walls of homeless peoples’ cardboard houses in the underground passages near the West Exit of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. These very years also saw the same passages became the centre stage of Japan’s first large-scale homeless movement, which unfolded in order to defend the village against the threat of eviction by the metropolitan government.5 As the struggle for the cardboard village demonstrates, cultural activism was an element of the homeless movement from the very start. Although not much cooperation between artists and activists occurred during the village’s span of existence, the cardboard village art was pivotal in the development of new forms of activism in Japan. As the radical critic Hirai Gen writes, it inaugurated a current of new political street art which later blossomed out in the street parties conspicuous in today’s new cultural movements (Hirai 2005:116–126). Mōri Yoshitaka agrees, pointing out that the cardboard village art movement pioneered the development of today’s cultural activism (Mōri 2005a:26, 2009a). 5 For reports and analysis of the cardboard village struggle, see: Hasegawa (2006), Inaba (2005), Kasai (1999), Malinas (2004), Mitsu (1995: 206–235, 287–291), Nakamura (1998), Yamaguchi (1999, 2006). For the cardboard house art, see Mōri (2005a, 2009a:154–160), Take (1997, 2004), and the contributions collected in Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyū (Studies of the Shinjuku cardboard paintings), Swamp publications, Kamio, Japan, 2005. The paintings themselves are available in Paintings on the Cardboard Houses at Shinjuku Underground in Tokyo, Japan 1995–1998, Swamp Publications, Tokyo, 2005, and on the webpage “Danbōru hausu kaigashū”, http://cardboard-house-painting.jp/mt/. Photos from the cardboard village are collected in Sakokawa (2013). In addition to this material, I base my account on two interviews (one with Take Jun’ichirō 2 August 2011 and another with an amateur film maker, W, engaged in Dropout TV, which made TV programmes in the passages, where they were also broadcast to the villagers).



space, art and homelessness127

What was the role of the cardboard village art in the homeless movement, and in what sense was that a political role? These questions are interesting to pose, since the cardboard village represented an early stage in the formation of cultural activism when the place of art in the homeless movement was still undecided. No similar activities had ever taken place in Japan when the painters started to paint the cardboard houses and nothing indicated that art was ever destined to become part of the regular repertoire of political activism. I will argue that the cardboard village art was immensely political, but in a sense that is exhausted by neither the concepts of instrumental nor prefigurative politics. Instead, the concept of therapeutical activism is needed to make sense of the centrality in the cardboard art of themes such as death, monsters and the uncanny. As I will show, the cardboard village artists conceived of themselves neither along the lines of the romantic notion of the creative, expressive self nor as rational self-directing subjects. Instead they tended to idealise the idea of decentring or emptying the self, which was conceived as a receptacle or channel for forces foreign to it. This way of doing art comes close to what Spariosu labels “prerational play”. As he points out, such play is by no means apolitical. While rational thought conceives of play as unfolding in a sphere separate from the power relations of society, prerational thought sees play itself as a manifestation of power, as a way of intervening in society. Although far from a mere political instrument, art becomes political by playing with reality itself and thereby fashioning new languages that allow for the expression of subjectivities outside the hegemonic or dominant frameworks (Spariosu 1989:12; Cassegård 2012). In the case of the cardboard village, trauma enters the analysis firstly through the mood of pessimism and impasse that permeated public discourse in Japan during the lost decade following the collapse of the economic bubble in 1993. As I will show, the activities of the cardboard art artists must be understood in relation to the sense that Japan’s postwarsystem, for so long a source of economic prosperity and national pride, had now utterly failed. Secondly, the homeless movement in Shinjuku was affected by the legacy of the New Left’s failure and defeat in Japan in the 1970s, which served as an important barrier to efforts to revive a radical protest movement in Japan. Art and music played an important role in surmounting this negative legacy. The focus will be on the discourse – understood as a language of expression including art – of the young artists active in the cardboard village The homeless people themselves remain silent in my account. Although several of them engaged in political protest at the time of the cardboard

128

chapter five

village, not many were engaged in artistic activities. Only much later did they start to take the initiative to artistic activities within the homeless movement, the best example being the theatre performance held in Nagai Park in 2007. The Village The Shinjuku cardboard village quickly grew up in the wake of the postbubble recession of the early 1990s and attracted attention for many reasons. One was its size. At its biggest, it consisted of 300 cardboard houses with 6–800 people, lined up along two pedestrian passages leading westwards from the Information Square, an underground plaza near the West Exit of Shinjuku Station. Another was its conspicuous location. Shinjuku Station is the busiest railway station in Japan and the underground passages are located at the very foot of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (Hasegawa 2006:71f; Yamaguchi 2006:63). A third important reason for the attention gathering around the village was that the villagers to a considerable part represented a new category of homeless people, different from the former day labourers who used make up the majority of homeless people in Japan and who tended to cluster around the workingclass district of San’ya or nearby parks in eastern Tokyo. Kasai uses the term “new homeless” for these homeless who have no background in day labouring and Aoki states that in 1995 such people had grown to 40 percent of Shinjuku’s homeless (Aoki 2006:107; Kasai 1999:22ff, 58). The geography of Shinjuku is important to keep in mind in order to understand the conflict that developed around the village. Closeness to the amusement district Kabukichō – where the homeless could obtain food and work – and to the day labour recruitment centre at Takadanobaba was an important reason why the homeless gathered in Shinjuku. In addition, the underground passages offered roof, tolerable temperatures and access to toilets (Hasegawa 2006:72; Yamaguchi 2006:59f). At the same time, the encampment’s conspicuous location at the foot of Shinjuku’s skyscraper district made it a constant thorn in the side of the ward and municipal authorities as well as many business establishments. After the first eviction, which took place in 1994, the day labourer movement and other young activists quickly mobilised to support the villagers, helping them set up meetings and organise themselves, providing food and medical care, helping villagers get welfare assistance from ward authorities, and physically protecting them against eviction. An important group of activists was made up of people from San’ya Sōgidan (San’ya Dispute League), a day labourer organisation which had long been



space, art and homelessness129

engaged in labour struggles against employers and the yakuza in San’ya, Tokyo’s largest day labour recruitment centre. A second group consisted of young activists from the Shibuya-based group Inoken (Shibuya Harajuku Seimei to kenri o kachitoru kai, or “Shibuya and Harajuku association for winning life and rights”). This was a group that had been formed in 1992 by Mitsu Takeshi, originally in order to support the Iranian migrant workers who used to gather in Yoyogi Park for their Sunday markets (known as “Little Teheran”) against police harassment (Mitsu 1995:95–107). Their activities brought them into contact with the homeless who were living in the park, and Inoken grew into a group supporting both immigrants and homeless. Together with a contingent of villagers who had set up an organisation called Nakama no kai (Comrades’ Association), the activists from San’ya Sōgidan and Inoken in 1994 formed the Shinjuku Renrakukai (Shinjuku Coordination Association, below “Renrakukai”), which became the main movement body during the cardboard village struggle. Throughout the struggle, Renrakukai aimed for mass-negotiations with authorities and official guarantees of policies to help the homeless get off the streets, in addition to protecting the village against further eviction attempts and helping the villagers in their dealings with authorities. The activists also increasingly participated in building mutual trust and a sense of community among the homeless through meetings, joint activities and mediating in conflicts.6 A second, bigger eviction followed in early 1996 under the pretext of setting up a mechanised sidewalk. The city mobilised some 600 riot police, guards and municipal employees to tear down the village and evict the villagers. The activists and villagers set up resistance together with supporters who had arrived from major cities such as Osaka, Yokohama and Nagoya. After the eviction, the homeless regrouped in the Information Square, where the supporters prepared meals and provided medical care. A third eviction was carried out in 1998. The homeless again regrouped, but a tragic fire broke out shortly afterwards, destroying fifty of the cardboard houses and claiming the lives of four villagers. The remainder were evicted, some moving to a shelter and others opting to set up a new village in a nearby park. Apart from the activists in Renrakukai, the village also attracted many other young people who got engaged in activities connected to the village – volunteers, religious groups, street musicians, artists and others (Kasai 1999:292–296; Yamaguchi 2006; Noe 2007). A special kind of space 6 For insider reports of these mobilisations and the formation of Renrakukai, see Hasegawa (2006), Kasai (1999), Malinas (2004), Mitsu (1995:206–235, 287–291).

130

chapter five

was produced in the interaction between these groups and the activists and the homeless. Inaba Tsuyoshi – one of Renrakukai leaders – writes that with artists coming to paint the houses and photographers setting up photo exhibitions, the cardboard village had the air of a “liberated zone” (Inaba 2005). This space, however, could be conceived of in different ways. Many of the activities of the activists were oriented towards the fostering of a political community, and solidarity for the sake of ­struggle – a use of space in which space was viewed above all as a stage for promoting political participation in the mainstream public sphere. From the start, for instance, the Inoken activists had been interested in arranging circles for discussion and joint decision-making in order to create solidarity among the homeless as well as between the homeless and the activists (Mitsu 1995:226–230; Kasai 1999:39, 44, 59, 66–69). Among the young artists there was also an appreciation of space as a noman’s-land, as an unofficial shadow world that existed apart from mainstream society. What attracted the artist Take Jun’ichirō was the idea of outcasts living in a society of their own, in an unofficial economy and without the strictures and protections of the affluent mainstream world. He points out that the cardboard villagers were living a “millennial economy, gathering up the leftovers and refuse of the Tokyo metropolitan economy just like people did in primitive ages when people lived by picking up pampas grass and branches to build their homes” (Take 1997:60). To him, the homeless were more than pitiable victims or subjects of rights. They were also active agents who had managed to construct a society of their own. To both Inaba and Take, the village was a space experienced in ambivalent terms. Both stress the cruelty and brutality of life in the village. Inaba states that it was a place where extremes met – where people both helped and fought one another. Take stresses the cruelty of the village, where there was stealing, violent quarrels, killings and people who were dying. He constantly feared being robbed while he was painting. At the same time, he felt that the village was a “miracle”, a place for mutual help, where everybody was “naked” and “vulnerable people who were different yet dependent on each other were helping each other” (interview 2 August 2011). While certainly having cruel and even hellish aspects, he claims, “I certainly saw ‘utopia’ there” (Take 2005b:13). The Paintings Fresh from having dropped out of art school, Take started to paint the cardboard houses in 1995 together with his friend Yoshizaki Takewo.



space, art and homelessness131

Joined by Yamane and a few others (the number fluctuated with time), they painted more than a hundred houses until the end of the village in 1998. It all began when he and Takewo went to Shinjuku to do guerrilla painting – without any thought of painting cardboard houses. Having failed to find a suitable spot, Take describes how they felt overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the city and left themselves drift along until they ended up at the station’s West Exit underground passage. Realising that the cardboard houses would make a fine painting surface, they knocked on one of the doors and got permission to paint by the surprised villager (interview 2 August 2011). From that day on, they commuted to the underground passages, painting every house where they were granted permission. The motifs ranged from the grotesque or surrealistically dreamlike to macabre pastiches of Buddhist hell paintings, with stylistic influences from manga and graffiti. Some pictures were highly expressionistic, others reminiscent of ukiyoe. They had three rules: 1) asking for permission from the inhabitant, 2) not painting according to the inhabitant’s requests, and 3) not painting “pretty” art (Yamane 2005:17f). During the first period, until the first big eviction in January 1996, they often worked together on the paintings. The first setback for the artists came in 1996 when the Tokyo Metropolitan Government spent 40 million yen on “contemporary art sculptures” to prevent the cardboard houses from being rebuilt after the eviction. Take got arrested when he modified the sculptures into funny dolls (Take 1997:58). Around the same time, Yamane quit painting, but others joined the group instead. From now on, the artists started to work individually rather than together. They kept on painting as long the village itself existed, until the fire in 1998. All paintings were destroyed in the wake of the fire, damaged by water and discarded by the authorities along with the remains of the cardboard houses. Shamanic Space Take states that he started painting without any particular political motive. He claimed to feel a power in the passages, which compelled him to paint. Asked by a visitor to the cardboard village how he did his painting, he is said to have replied “There are spirits here”, and while drawing, he often said: “I feel so sad” (Fukase 2005:54, 67). What drove him, he explains, was the air or “scent” of the passages, which he tried to make apparent through his art and which he came to associate with the spirits (seirei) of dead people (Take 1997:61).

132

chapter five Rather than feeling that I had created the paintings with my own imagination and talent, I felt as if I had been made to paint by a mysterious force… as if I had been a mere medium… I called it “spirits”. It was nothing that could be seen, only felt. (ibid. 2004)

Painting meant being receptive to the spirits of the homeless people who had died in the passages – in quarrels, out of weakness or cold. “This is a place where people really often die. When you walk by you often see people lying there and you don’t know if they’re alive or not” (ibid. 1997:60). The first days, he says in an interview, he didn’t have the latitude to think of his experience in terms of spirits, but the feeling grew stronger the more he painted. Although he used the word “spirit”, he still does not know what it was. The underground passages were the only place where he had ever felt like that, and he has never felt it anywhere since. “In any case, whenever I went to the cardboard village, I would always get inspiration” (interview 2 August 2011). Take’s attempt to turn himself into a mere “passage-way” or “channel” (ibid. 2005a:7) for the spirits makes him define his role as a shaman rather than a political activist. Although sprits have been driven away everywhere in society, ironically a “shamanic space” had reappeared here, at the very foot of the Tokyo metropolitan government (ibid. 1997:60). To Take, this space was an embodiment of the unconscious and of the traumas of the modern city, which are repressed and denied in the attempts to create a clean, fashionable surface. “The surface is prettified with shops and boutiques, but the whirling resentment of the dead spirits down here in the underground will surely never be extinguished” (ibid. 2004). Eyes and Monsters The artworks painted on the cardboard houses were characterised by a striking profusion of eyes and faces. The most famous of these eyes was probably Shinjuku’s Left Eye (Shinjuku no hidarime), which was painted on a particularly big cardboard house used as a storehouse on the Information Square. The entire painting is occupied by a single colossal eye, the contours of which resemble flames that suggest an explosion. In the iris is a city, with people, buildings, and shapes resembling planets. Inside the pupil is a smaller eye, also surrounded by flames, and inside the second eye is a third, still smaller eye. Despite the strong explosive colours the overall impression is one of serenity. The eye in the centre, towards which



space, art and homelessness133

the onlooker’s gaze is pulled as if by a gravitational force, gives the impression­of silently watching the onlooker and perhaps the entire cosmos. Take, Takewo and Yamane had gotten to work at it early in 1996 and painted from night until morning, all three at the same time with brush in hand. Take describes their collaboration as akin to a jam session. “I had played in a band and wanted to draw paintings in the same way” (Take 2005a:6). He also describes it as a “battle of three” where one would paint and somebody else paint over it, a process that was repeated over and over. The result was a powerful work, a symbol-laden and dreamlike mandala. It was “village, Shinjuku and Tokyo”, all hanging together and creating an “image of cosmos”, as Yamane writes (2005:19ff). After finishing the painting, he wrote in his notebook: This painting Shinjuku’s left eye Is it the manifestation of a new religion? I am a religious painter. This religion has no holy scriptures. No need of theoretical exegesis. It calls out to heart and soul Shinjuku’s left eye is a religion that lets me be myself. (ibid. 21)

Photo 1. Shinjuku’s Left Eye, 1996, painting by Take Jun’ichirō, Yoshizaki Takewo and Yamane Yasuhiro on cardboard house, Information Square, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo. Photo: Sakokawa Naoko.

134

chapter five

The idea of painting an eye had originally been Yamane’s. He had gotten it because of Shinjuku’s Eye, a gigantic glass eye created by Miyashita Yoshiko in 1969, which was located on a nearby wall next to the entrance of one of the passages leading away from the square. Since it had struck him as unbalanced with just one eye, he had wanted to paint another to match it. Referring to the fact that they eyes now formed a pair, Take evokes the image of a huge two-eyed creature or monster that had sprung to life – a newborn god of the underground. “In the Shinjuku Underground a gigantic pair of eyes has come into being, belonging to the Underground, a living creature with its fangs turned against Shit-Japan” (Take 2004). Randall Collins points out that successful interaction rituals – and surely the “jam session” of which Take speaks must be counted as that – give rise to symbols that are laden with the emotion experienced in those moments: “whenever the group assembles and focuses its attention around an object that comes to embody their emotion, a new sacred object is born” (Collins 2004:37). This appears to have been what happened in the case of Shinjuku’s Left Eye. The new object was the subterranean monster who had come into being, and its emotion-laden symbol was the painting itself. The idea of complementing an existing eye with the missing one is generally associated with the popular Daruma-san doll – a round and rather cute doll whose missing eye is filled in when a wish has come true. In fact, the Daruma-san doll was the explicit motif of another artwork, Takewo’s Daruma-san totem pole. To connect the birth of the underground monster with some form of wish-fulfilment is not farfetched. Take himself often expressed his hope that something would be born from the underground passages. If one looks at the station’s underground complex from the air, he says, it looks like a womb, forming a pair with the Metropolitan Government Building which rises to the sky like a phallus, the symbol of the conscious ego that tries to synthesise the city’s teeming myriads (Take 1997:63). He had always felt that the Shinjuku underground was something “organic”, something moist, soft and warm that possessed life. “That’s why I imagined that a big creature or monster might be living there, although I didn’t know whether it was a force for good or bad” (interview 2 August 2011). Asking him what kind of creature he imagined it to be, he says he has no concrete visual image, except that he thought of it as still unformed and grotesque. Hirai Gen, who was born and raised in Shinjuku’s red light district, appears to have shared Take’s vision, but to him the monster was explicitly linked to the growth of urban poverty. In what was surely an oblique reference to the cardboard village, he affirms



space, art and homelessness135

the revolutionary potential of Shinjuku, “a gigantic wilderness run through by innumerable passageways and tunnels”. “The lower stratas blown in there are certainly multiplying. From inside one hears the wailing of demons, struggling to get out” (Hirai 2010:191, 210). The idea of a huge underground creature ready to vent its resentment at mainstream society is in fact an old one and connected to the idea of a world rectification (yonaoshi). Such symbolism can be seen in premodern portrayals of Daruma-san, which sometimes depicted him as a namazu, a giant subterranean catfish popularly believed to cause earthquakes. As mentioned earlier, this catfish also symbolized the idea of world rectification, the punishment of the greedy and the redistribution of wealth (Faure 2011:62; Smits 2006). Several other cardboard paintings depict ominous birth-scenes. In Child from a flower (Hana kara kodomo), a sinister-looking child is born from a flower: “This country likes to put the lid on everything that smells bad, but under that lid a fearful multitude of monsters are proliferating”, Take remarks. A similar motif appears in Praying hands (Ogamu te), which depicts two gigantic hands holding a mother giving birth to a baby who glares provocatively at the viewer, “signalling the coming birth of something that will overturn all existing values” (Take 2004). These children and monsters appear to symbolise a return of uncanny forces – the return of something familiar that has been repressed, or, to quote Freud, “something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light” (Freud 1990:364). Why were eyes and faces such a prominent theme? Since the face is a powerful symbol of humanity, painting faces may have been a device to resist the dehumanisation suffered by the homeless. This would be in line with Mōri’s characterisation of the cardboard village art as aiming at “visualisation of those who were forced to be invisible in urban space” (Mōri 2005a:25). However, referring to this art simply as a project of visibilisation risks missing an important point. As Take writes, passers-by are used to looking at the homeless as mere things without the ability of looking back at them in return. But what if they looked back at you? I emphasise eyes because I want to raise the self-awareness of the passersby, who always seem to look at the homeless village […] as nothing but a heap of things […]. I wanted to make them realise that they too were being watched. (Take 2004)

The art was not just about providing visibility to the homeless, presenting them as objects for the public gaze. It was also about showing that they

136

chapter five

were looking back, that the gaze was returned. If anything, it was about showing that the repressed people too were subjects. One might use the word “subjectivation” for this kind of intervention in the public, a term Rancière uses for acts where one polemically adopts a role for which the political order lacks place in order to lend voice to the repressed. Implying a challenge to the established order or “distribution of parts”, such subjectivation often appears grotesque, as a breach of aesthetic form (Rancière 2009). Another painting, Kick (Kikku), depicts a gigantic foot aimed at the passersby. This foot, just as the many eyes and faces, appears to express a similar subjectivation: you’re wrong if you think that we are passive objects. Earlier I pointed out that the underground passages could be viewed both as the stage for participation in the mainstream public sphere and as no-man’s-land, depending on viewpoint. The cardboard paintings helped it to also function as a counter-space which, through art, declared its diffidence to mainstream society. “On each of these houses were paintings. Mysterious and magical, they threw vivid colours of resistance out into space, a kaleidoscope of derisive laughter against the state” (Take 2004). Goodbye to the Grotesque After the end of the cardboard village struggle, Take’s engagement in homelessness and squatting drove him to participate in the Shingenchi project in Kobe 1998–2000 (a land occupation by people displaced by the earthquake) and the struggle to defend Miyashita Park 2007–2010. Each of these activities ended in setbacks or disappointments that made him withdraw from activism. Today he produces art that contrasts strikingly to the art of the cardboard village. People no longer appear in his drawings, nor any faces or eyes. Typically it consists of black and white drawings of intricate miniature worlds, with small planets covered with towns, houses, trees and flowers. One might call them vortex paintings, since they produce a sensation of being sucked in or drawn in. There is a strong sense of movement. Feeling as if flying, there is no time to let one’s eyes wander leisurely.7 He explains that he developed this style during his periods of withdrawal from the engagement in the cardboard village and the various squat-communities in which he had been engaged. His repeated setbacks made him want to depict the ideal world in his art instead. Instead of making his art 7 His recent works can be found on his hp (http://take-junichiro.tumblr.com/).



space, art and homelessness137

on the spot – as in the underground passages or squat-communities – he today works at home, in the atelier. I started to think that I should reproduce the utopia I had seen in the midst of the drawing itself, here in my room. Probably, somewhere in my mind was the idea that since reality won’t change, I should at least express my longing in drawings. (Take, interview 2 August 2011)

Take’s explanation of the shift in his style is also related to changes in society. In the suffocating climate of the 1990, he explains, he could rest satisfied with hoping for the birth of a grotesque monster that would liberate life. But today, the grotesque is proliferating in ways that threaten life – as in the case of violent right-extremist groups or radioactive fallout after the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. The grotesque may have been a lifeaffirming force as long as life was repressed by form, but today form itself is collapsing. That is why he prefers to depict his ideal world, instead of hoping for more destruction. In the 90’s I had really seen and felt that world myself in the midst of reality and wished for it to continue eternally…. I now believe that I have to realise that other world – or rather universe – in the midst of my drawings instead. (ibid.)

The shift in Take’s later works towards drawings that no longer celebrate the grotesque appears to reflect a more general shift within freeter activism. Just as Dameren’s advocacy of dropping out of work no longer seems very rebellious in today’s generalized precarity, the grotesque is no longer subversive when so many of the social structures and cultural patterns associated with the “Japanese model” already lie in shambles. What matters now is rather to try to preserve life from the grotesque forces that have become rampant. Looking at his recent art, the small worlds he depicts give the impression of being separated from the viewer by an unbridgeable distance. His task, he explains, is not to live in utopia, but to paint it in his pictures. At the same time, these worlds are still reminiscent of the Shinjuku underground – it is not about wonderful people creating a wonderful community, but about “good-for-nothings” and drunkards helping each other. It looks like it’s very detailed, but if you look closely the lines are roughly drawn… To me that’s important. So many of us are far from brilliant or perfect. I want to show that beauty arises from all these imperfect lines, or when you gather together all these imperfect people or dilapidated things. (ibid.)

Here, then, what might appear like a prefigurative element enters his art, but at the same time it is tinged with resignation, being backward-looking

138

chapter five

rather than forward-looking. Barred from letting utopian play contaminate social reality, he now paints utopia as another world to which we no longer have access. A Politics of Resurrection? Was the cardboard village art political? If so, in what sense? Unlike in many of the manifestations of today’s homeless movement, there was hardly any collaboration between artists and activists in the Shinjuku cardboard village struggle, and some leading Renrakukai activists are even reported to have disliked the paintings (see the report in Inaba 2005; cf. Kasai 1999:296). Take himself explicitly denies any political commitment behind his art and takes care to identify himself as an artist rather than an activist. To him and his friends, the passages were more than a space of action for movement activities. It was a space where the spirits of the dead themselves told them to paint. Art, he writes, must have something in it that is incomprehensible – or “prerational” to use Spariosu’s term – and it becomes uninteresting if it is exhausted in a political aim. Despite this, it is not hard to detect explicit political messages in his art. Pleasant life relaxation express (Jinsei kairaku yutori-gō) shows a train headed for “Rich Japan” with passengers laughing maliciously at a man who is falling off the train. A political message is also present in works like Spider man and woman (Kumo otoko to onna). A big half-human spider bends over a woman who is ensnared in its web, trying to make her accept the food it offers her drooping from its mouth while she keeps rejecting it. This painting, as Take reveals in a commentary, depicts the relation between the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the homeless (Take 2004). How should we understand this vacillation between avowedly apolitical and de facto political stances? A reasonable interpretation is to recognise that no-one can be completely apolitical in the sense of being neutral. Take’s repeated statement that he is not political is best understood as meaning that his art does not serve any existing political ideology or political group. However, acting as a shaman trying to give voice to the traumas of the underground can itself be political. Giving voice to the repressed is an act of therapeutical politics, since it protests against repression and forgetfulness and, in doing so, furnishes a language for what has been silenced. The recovery of discourse is a precondition for other forms of politics since, as long as people feel unable to express their concerns, there can be neither instrumental nor prefigurative politics. By using the term therapeutical politics, I have tried to indicate that art can be political even where it fails to conform to the models of



space, art and homelessness139

instrumental or prefigurative politics. I have also sought to relativise the common assumption that cultural activism tends to be permeated by fun and pleasure and hence to function prefiguratively. The cardboard village was not a blueprint for an ideal society. If it was utopian, as Take claimed it was, it was by virtue of the fact that the cruelty and misery was not hidden or denied, and in that sense offered a way out of the self-deceptions of mainstream society with its ever-present desire to repress unwanted others. Therapeutical activism may not be sufficiently free from past burdens to project any straightforward utopias or enact a liberated life, but where it succeeds, it helps people deal with problems that concern them. By doing so it can also help movements as such recover. When the language used by a movement is expanded, more potential supporters become able to recognize themselves in it. One obvious way in which the cardboard art renewed social movement activism in Japan was by catalysing the deployment of art in political activism. Despite the gulf between activists and artists, the cardboard village became the starting point of a development towards closer cooperation between political activists and artists, a development that came to fruition a decade later in the movements to defend Nagai Park and Miyashita Park. Anti-Poverty and Viva Poverty In the years after the cardboard village, homeless activism developed in two directions. One was centred on appeals to authorities and the general public. Here a line of development can be traced from Renrakukai to today’s “anti-poverty movement”, which caters to freeters as well as homeless people, usually with a distinct ambition to participate in the public sphere. Another direction emerged among young artists who actively experimented with setting up their own alternative spaces. In this current, we can see a coming together of homeless, artists and freeters around cultural activism. Repertories such as street parties were imported into homeless activism. Together with the rejection of mainstream values of work, there was also an affirmative attitude to the idea of no-man’s-land and the lifestyle of homelessness – an attitude which I will refer to as “viva poverty”. Appealing to the Public: The “Anti-Poverty” Movement A reasonably straight line goes from the cardboard village struggle to today’s anti-poverty activism. After the dissolution of the cardboard

140

chapter five

village, Renrakukai grew less confrontational, more distant from the homeless community and more oriented to participating in policy-making with authorities. Two areas in which it was particularly active was in promoting the 2002 “Homeless Independence Support Special Measures Law”, and in cooperating with authorities in setting up short-time shelters for homeless who wished to get off the street (Hasegawa 2006:117–138). Meanwhile, Inoken went through a creative dissolution in 1998, mutating into two new organisations, one dealing with the problems of immigrants and another with homelessness. The latter took the name Nojiren (Shibuya Nojukusha no seikatsu to ijūken o kachitoru jiyū rengō, “Shibuya Free Association for the Right to Housing and Well-being of the Homeless”) and is today one of the most important groups in Japan’s homeless movement. Rather than appealing for assistance to get off the street, the group stresses the homeless people’s right to live where they were, relying on “selfmanagement” rather than on assistance from authorities (Nojiren 1999). Important activities include providing food for the homeless through regular takidashi in Mitake Park in Shibuya, in counselling and patrolling, and in protesting against the evictions which have become more common in recent years in Shibuya. However, despite its aspiration to be a movement by the homeless themselves, rather than one led by activists or “supporters”, the group continues to rely to a great extent on the efforts of younger, not homeless people (Yuasa 2009c:23). Despite their partially shared roots, Renrakukai and Nojiren thus ­developed in different directions, one becoming more institutionalised and cooperative towards authorities, the other emphasising its character as a grassroots movement. Despite this divergent path, in 2001 two of their leading activists – Inaba from Renrakukai and Yuasa Makoto (1969-) from Nojiren – came together to start up the NPO Moyai (formally Independent Life Support Centre Moyai), one of the best known organisations in today’s “anti-poverty” movement. Moyai’s original aim was to help its clients get apartments by providing them with guarantors (Inaba 2009a; Ōhata 2007). Rather than being oriented towards older homeless with experience of day labouring, most of Moyai’s clients nowadays are younger people who have either recently become homeless or who are about to become homeless since they will be driven out of their apartments. The background behind this orientation is the increasingly harsh economic condition of freeterhood. Inaba states that especially since 2003 or 2004, young precarious people who stay in net cafés when they can afford it and at other times live in dormitories or with friends, have increased markedly among the clients. Inaba proposes



space, art and homelessness141

the term “housing poor” for these people, defining it as people whose right to housing is infringed because of poverty. Such people increased dramatically in the wake of the worldwide economic crisis that started in the autumn 2008, when many freeters and dispatch workers lost their lodgings or apartments after having been laid-off. It was also around this time that many new groups protesting against “the housing poverty” (sumai no hinkon) started to appear (Inaba 2009b). Observing that young homeless people and homeless women (often victims of domestic violence) are often more isolated and “poor in human contacts” than other categories of homeless, Moyai also tries to create spaces for fostering togetherness, like the café “Salon de Komorebi” where people can come and go freely and which is meant to be a place for relaxation rather than struggling (Utetsu 2009). The name “Moyai” – meaning a rope used to tie together ships to protect them in a storm – was chosen precisely to emphasize the importance of human contacts. Although originating as part of the homeless movement, Moyai thus ended up becoming known mainly for its work with young freeters or dispatch workers. With the growing public concern with youth poverty it was propelled into the media limelight as a representative organisation not so much of the homeless movement but rather of what came to be known as the “anti-poverty” movement – a movement that dealt centrally with poverty rather than homelessness per se, and which became associated not only with homeless people but also with freeters and dispatch workers, single mothers and other “working poor”. Moyai also works closely with freeter unions, in particular with the Metropolitan Youth Union.8 In October 2007 Yuasa went on to set up a nation-wide network, the Anti-Poverty Campaign, together with other anti-poverty groups and freeter unions. The network brings together activists from Japan’s three major union federations – Rengō, Zenrōren and Zenrōkyō – as well as freeter unions, NPOs, and many lawyers. More than 90 organisations are represented. In 2008 the network started holding an annual “Anti-poverty festival”. Later the same year the “Anti-poverty nationwide caravan” was launched. Activists drove round the country with a caravan car, inspiring 8 In 2007 the Anti-poverty Mutual Help Network (Hanhinkon tasukeai netto) was started on the joint initiative of Yuasa and Kawazoe Makoto, secretary general of the Metropolitan Youth Union (Yuasa 2008:158–167; Kawazoe & Yuasa 2008). Such cooperation between freeter unions and anti-poverty groups is not uncommon. Hashiguchi points out that there is a tendency today for freeter unions to cooperate more and more with various support groups, since problems of work and of poverty are so entwined (Hashiguchi 2011:242ff).

142

chapter five

several new anti-poverty groups to be set up around the country and ending with a demonstration in Tokyo’s Meiji Park the following year – the “Anti-poverty world rectification insurrection” (Hanhinkon yonaoshi ikki). As their mascot, they have a rather cute black ghost named Hikkii, the idea being that poverty is like a ghost that will only go away if society acknowledges the problem and deals sincerely with it (Yuasa 2008:214– 220; Amamiya 2009b:26ff). The “anti-poverty movement” born out of this networking overlapped to a great deal with what I have referred to as the precarity movement. It achieved a zenith of public as well as official endorsement with the New Year Dispatch Village (Toshikoshi hakenmura) set up over New Year 2008– 2009 (see Utsunomiya & Yuasa 2009, Shinoda 2009, Amamiya 2010:93– 107). The village consisted of tents set up as a temporary relief measure by anti-poverty activists in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park and offered shelter to hundreds of laid-off temp-workers for a few days in the wake of the global economic crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The collapse of demand in overseas markets had made the Japanese economy abruptly slid back into recession for the first time since 2001. The brunt of this shock was absorbed by irregular workers. Among dispatched workers, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 19.4 percent in 2009 from 5.8 percent­the year before (Japan Times 30 July 2009). In the absence of an adequate safety net, many of the laid-off dispatch workers became homeless, having been turned out of their lodgings as they lost their jobs. More than 500 of these dismissed workers took their refuge in the Dispatch Village from 31 December until the village was dissolved on 5 January, a number far exceeding expectations. Public opinion reacted with overwhelming sympathy, contributing large quantities of food and money from all over Japan (Shinoda 2009; Yuasa 2009b:9f) – a remarkable show of compassion of a kind never extended to homeless former day labourers, as some activists dryly pointed out (Ikuta 2009). Prominent leftist or left-leaning politicians like Kan Naoto, Fukushima Mizuho or Shii Kazuo came to visit. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare – located just next to the park – quickly stepped in to help, opening up its auditorium for the homeless to sleep in and arranging lodgings to which they could move after the village was closed. The activists for their part displayed pragmatic swiftness when they, after having successfully pressured the state authorities to assume responsibility, were quick to cooperate with them as soon as they offered help. Part of the successful outcome of the establishment of the village can be explained by the prior existence of the Anti-Poverty Campaign, which



space, art and homelessness143

had catalysed the cooperation between support groups and labour unions. Yuasa acknowledges the crucial contribution of the latter, stating that they would never have been able to act as quickly and efficiently without them. “That the labour union people played a central role in tackling this problem and that they became engaged in the problem of labour and survival […] was a major achievement” (Yuasa 2009b:5). With the Dispatch Village, old established unions and new freeter unions were also working together publicly for the first time, signalling their willingness to put old rivalries behind them (ibid. 29; Shinoda 2009). Another reason for the success was the activists’ skill in using the park as a public space to attract media attention and put pressure on politicians. The location was brilliantly chosen: by using Hibiya Park, neighbouring several government ministries, the activists ensured the village an enormous symbolic impact and mass-media attention. As Yuasa explains, a primary aim of constructing the village had been to make poverty “visible”, and in this respect the village was a major success: “To have that much media attention was the first time for me” (Yuasa 2009b:9). The aim, then, was not simply to provide relief to people in need, but also to reach out to the general public and to the authorities. The activists had discussed locating the village elsewhere, closer to the factories in Tokyo’s north where most of the dismissed workers had been working, but decided that a highly visible, symbolic location was the best way to pressure the authorities into action (ibid. 6). The attempt to reach out to the general public was evident in how the young workers in the village were portrayed: not as a threat to mainstream life, but as people in acute need of help to get back to mainstream life. They were victims of a global crisis that had originated outside Japan’s borders, and supporting them was therefore a project that went well with a national show of compassion and even feelings of national unity. The activists’ public orientation was personified in the “village mayor”, Yuasa, who throughout his activist career has combined a strong commitment with inventiveness and pragmatic flexibility in order to achieve movement goals as efficiently as possible, whether these goals have been empowering isolated homeless people or pressuring politicians into action. This pragmatic stance can be seen in his attempt to promote a more positive image of the “activist” (katsudōka), a word which has had a bad image since the 1970s. As part of this effort he set up a course for “becoming an activist” (katsudōka icchō agari) with the help of the NPO PARC (Pacific Asia Resource Centre) to transmit the basic knowhow of activism, including things like how to call press conferences, arrange demonstrations, get hold of rooms for activities, print leaflets or set up

144

chapter five

unions – a basic knowhow which he claims that young people no longer get at the universities because of the decline of the student movement (ibid. 2009c:25f, 2009a:77). To Yuasa, an activist is a person who, while having his or her feet on the “ground”, also knows how to skilfully use the media to transmit problems to society and apply pressure on politicians (ibid. 2009c:24). As is readily apparent, this is a conception of activism that puts the stress on instrumental politics and which contrasts sharply with more romantic notions of protest or, say, the stern autonomism we saw in the case of Yabu Shirō. Although Yuasa too shares the interest in direct action and in creating alternative spaces for poor or discriminated people, in his case there is much more of an emphasis on the need to reach out to the general public and to engage the political system to bring about social change. This can be seen in his belief in the power of dialogue and communication. “People who earnestly listen have increased. That in turn encourages people to speak” (ibid. 2009c:24). After the DJP election victory in 2009, Yuasa was invited to participate in Kan Naoto’s new “National bureau of strategy”. Behind his decision to accept the post was a keen sense that the economic crisis had brought about a favourable juncture for social change. What mattered now, he stated, was to “strike while the iron is hot”. Before resigning in February 2010 to return to activism he did manage to implement one reform he has long pressed for – the “One-Stop Service” for jobless, which facilitates procedures for job seekers at unemployment offices – and also played a great role in the “official dispatch village” set up in Tokyo with official assistance the next year. Artists, Squatters and Travellers The legacy of the cardboard village also lived on among young people who were groping for ways of combining art and activism. Many of these were young activists and artists who were drawn to the lifestyle of homelessness and to the idea of exploring the potential of no-man’s-lands for creativity and for lifestyles free of mainstream values. One of these artists is Ogawa Tetsuo (1970–), who had once been close to the Dameren circle.9 Along a winding path in the south-western part of Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, 9 Ogawa Tetsuo travelled much and practised what he called “rotating isōrō” from 1996 onwards, only staying 3–10 days in any place before moving on (Ogawa Tetsuo 2005a; Ogawa Tetsuo & Ogawa Kyôhei 1999). In the 1990s he started up the art collective Okagarō together with two other artists (Oka 1999).



space, art and homelessness145

it is still possible to see scattered blue sheet tents, forming a small village with some fifty inhabitants where he lives.10 When he moved into the village after years of itinerant life in 2003, it had been a much larger settlement of 350 people. The reason for settling down there, he explains, was his sympathy for and curiosity in the culture of the homeless. “The biggest reason I started to live as a homeless was my hunch that a new culture would be born from the homeless” (Ogawa 2005b). Later the same year, he was joined by Ichimura Misako (1971–), another artist, who also put up her tent in the village. Together they opened an outdoor café, called Enoaru (meaning “there are paintings”, a pun on Renoir or “Renoaru” in Japanese) and started up a painting circle together with the homeless villagers. Ichimura also took the initiative to regular tea parties for the village’s women, who had used to live isolated from each other (Ichimura 2006b). Ogawa and Ichimura belong to a handful of homeless activists who actively affirm and advocate homelessness.11 Everyone thinks that the homeless lead a life of misery, Ogawa writes, while in fact they “possess a brilliant culture” (Ogawa 2006:131). Contrary to common prejudice, he continues, they are neither lazy nor dirty, and they are more tolerant than the mainstream society that seeks to exclude them. In 2006, with the prospect of more and more freeters joining the ranks of the homeless, he claimed to be “looking forward to seeing an increase of young homeless” (Ogawa, in Nakagiri et al. 2006:66). In Chiruru, a dispatch worker and activist in Nojiren who periodically lived as a homeless, we find a similarly warm and enthusiastic acknowledgement of the free atmosphere of the tent-villages of the homeless in the parks. “I wish the people who are engaged in labour unions for freeters would come more often to the places where the homeless live. If they do, I bet for certain they would want to live there”, she writes (Chiruru 2007:182f). In fact, it is not hard to find freeter activists in Tokyo who refer to Enoaru and the tent village around it as a form of ideal or utopia. Pepe Hasegawa states with emphasis that “Enoaru is the best café in Tokyo” (interview 1 October 2009). Take Jun’ichirō explains that he regards the Yoyogi village as a picture of the “utopia” he tries to depict in his work (interview 2 August 2011). Inoue Masaya of Union Extasy explained that while engaged in Kubikubi Café, “the mere fact that we had managed to create a space like Enoaru in the midst of Kyoto University made me satisfied” (Inoue 2009). 10 For descriptions of this homeless village, see Ichimura (2006a, 2006b), Ogawa (2006). 11 For other activists sharing this attitude, see Chiruru (2007) or Nakagiri et al. (2006). Non-activist writers who enthusiastically embrace homelessness as an inspiring model include Sakaguchi (2011), Katō (2012).

146

chapter five

The village’s attraction for people appears to depend on the contrast it offers to the commercialism and hustle and bustle in Harajuku and Shibuya just outside the park. Describing her first visit to the village in 2003, Ichimura writes that she felt as if she had lost her way “into a fairytale world” or “enchanted forest”. In the village, she writes, people have time, take care of things discarded as rubbish elsewhere, and help each other. Villagers subsist on the refuse of capitalist society and on the occasional irregular job, but life in the village itself is beyond the spell of money, exchanges instead being mediated through a form of barter or gift-economy. This goes for the café as well, where money cannot be used as payment (Ichimura 2006a:8, 39, 50–53). In formulations reminiscent of Take’s on the “millennial economy”, Ichimura criticizes the idea that we need money. Just look at the homeless, she writes: They are circulating all these great quantities of leftovers and connecting with each other. Then they make a place for themselves for free in public space. What they need is not money, but human companions to protect themselves. (ibid. 2008:60)

Ogawa’s writings in general give a picture of village life as peaceful – people­talking to cats, playing shōgi, watching cherry blossoms or shovelling snow. The forest is described with insects, snails, frogs, cicadas, rats, crows, doves, dogs, cats, eels and rabbits. “A woman living in the park said there is nature in this lifestyle, and that that’s why everyone feels healed” (Ogawa 2005c). This idea of the village as peaceful and otherworldly also appears among many accounts written by visitors. One visitor describes Ogawa as “otherworldly” and as a hermit saint: “I get the impression of a young hermit, wholly without malice” (Nogiku 2005). To Ogawa, Ichimura and their visitors, the park appears to function not just as a place to make a living but also as a place for healing, providing relief from life in mainstream capitalist society. However, as mentioned, in recent years the tent village has been decimated. Black-yellow ropes have been set up along the paths as visible reminders of the strict controls that today forbid anyone to move his or her tent or setting up new tents. Patrols visit the tents, one by one, to persuade people to move out. “In that way, all of us who have been helping each other and cooperating will become dispersed”, Ichimura writes with dismay and adds: “If only they could leave us alone” (Ichimura 2006a:35). Walking around in the decimated village, Ogawa writes, feels like walking around among ruins. “Several years ago, I wrote in a magazine that my



space, art and homelessness147

hope was that young homeless would increase. But today, unfortunately, I don’t see anything hopeful anywhere” (Ogawa 2009a:46). The fondness of the idea of no-man’s-land among artists like Ogawa and Ichimura is detectable in the way they use space when they protest against authorities. Take for instance the “G∞” summit in Shibuya, held in Tokyo at the same time as the G8 summit in Hokkaido in July 2008.12 The infinity mark was meant to suggest a wholly open summit, something that was also expressed in the slogan “wherever people gather is a summit”. Anticipating interference from the police, they had prepared a number of empty lots, small squares and out of the way parks as their summit locations. Chased away from one place, they would simply move on to the next. Rather than as part of mainstream public space, these spaces were described as “interstices” or “air pockets”. One participant wrote that they existed “in the interstices between the public and private, in places that at first glance looked like dead spaces” and added that in “such corpse-like places” he felt “the possibility of regenerated life” (Ogawa 2009c:58–61). In December 2007, Ichimura and Ogawa took the initiative to forming the 246 Conference of Expressive Artists (246 hyōgensha kaigi) together with Take Jun’ichirō.13 The occasion was that the homeless people living under the R246 overpass near Shibuya station had been told to leave, since the walls of the overpass were going to be used for a wall painting – “The small brook of spring” (Haru no ogawa) – produced by students at the Japan Designers School. “Haru no ogawa” was the name of a song, written in 1912, inspired by the small Kōhone river, a tributary to the Shibuya River close to the overpass. Today the river it refers to has been turned into an underground sewer, and the wall painting was meant to evoke the pastoral scenery of the time when the river still existed. After the completion of the wall-painting, the new brightly lit passage was given the name “Shibuya Art Gallery 246” and a plaque was put up on the wall celebrating the new “safe passage”. Ogawa’s, Ichimura’s and Take’s reacted with indignation, not least at the fact that art had been used as an instrument for driving away homeless (Ichimura 2009:76f; Ogawa & Take 2007). Despite this anger, the activities of the 246 Conference were only very little oriented towards protest and more towards actually using the unregulated arena of the urban 12 Compare the similar idea of Esaman (2009). 13 For presentations of the group, see Aida (2008), Aida et al. (2008), Mōri (2009a:225–232), Ogawa Tetsuo (2008, 2009c:52–55).

148

chapter five

no-man’s-land­in various ways. As Ichimura emphasizes, living on the street means being exposed to constant physical threats and violence from passers-by and youth gangs. She also insists that the street can turn into something else, something better, and tries to help that something with her art. On her initiative, the group started setting up small temporary autonomous zones on the streets, the “Kitchen 246” street picnics. On these occasions, food gathered up in Shibuya was prepared and enjoyed together with the homeless. Her hope was that these events would help stem the violence of the streets (Ichimura 2008:64f). Following a fire burning down one of the remaining cardboard houses under the overpass, she set up her own cardboard box there in December 2007 and lived for nine months with the homeless. A number of times she experienced how her box was being hit or kicked from the outside by passers-by. In reaction, she decorated the box and its surroundings with bright silver stars, hoping to provide protection for it as well as visibility to the homeless. Learning that “rockets” was the name the homeless people there used for their houses, she called the artwork “R246 stars and rockets”, evoking the image of travelling through the night (ibid. 2009:77f; Mōri 2009a:225–228; Nakanishi 2009). To her both art and picnics function as means to limit violence and build human ties and solidarity. Art is political, but not in the sense of being used as propaganda. As she says, it is used for surviving on the street, not to bring out a message. The 246 Conference and its affirmation of no-man’s-land contrasts with the way homelessness is usually treated within the anti-poverty movement. The discussion during one of the group’s meetings, held two weeks after the end of the Dispatch Village in early 2009, reveals how the artists demarcate themselves from anti-poverty activism. Ogawa observes that the Dispatch village did not aim at creating a community, but was a temporary political manifestation aimed at appealing to the authorities. Furthermore, while the dispatch village revolved around the problems of work and unemployment, the 246 Conference is about art and seeks to respect even no-work or such work that doesn’t yield money (Ogawa et al. 2009). If the Dispatch Village represented a pinnacle of public performance – a skilful mediated spectacle for the purpose of visibilisation, as Mōri (2009a:223) puts it – the 246 Conference represents a contrary orientation whereby no-man’s-lands are used to explore possibilities of living. Rather than using space as a stage for participating in the general public sphere, space tends to be conceived of as a place to create and live beyond the norms and regulations of mainstream institutions. Underlying these artists’ engagement is an ideal that can be put as follows: to live in



space, art and homelessness149

no-man’s-land – as a homeless or together with the homeless – rather than to be merely an activist in mainstream public space. “Waking up From the Dream”: Nagai Park’s Theatre of Resistance As authorities stepped up evictions in the 2000s, anti-eviction struggles became central to much of the homeless movement. On several occasions – such as Shirakawa Park in Nagoya 2005, Utsubo Park and Osaka Castle Park in Osaka 2006, and Nagai Park in Osaka 2007 – homeless encampments became the staging ground for protests against planned evictions. All actions were drawn-out over long periods before finally ­ending in eviction. Cultural resistance was particularly conspicuous in the struggle around Nagai Park, where homeless villagers and activists put up a theatre performance on the day of eviction as a last ditch attempt to keep the guards at bay. This is the only time so far in Japan that theatre has been used to resist an eviction. In what follows I will try to illuminate why this form of cultural resistance was chosen by describing the events leading up to the theatre performance and how they were experienced and narrated by participants.14 I will do this firstly by looking at how the attempt to defend the tent village went hand in hand with a change in the conception of the village space, from a no-man’s-land into a counter-space. Secondly, I am interested in bringing out the emotional aspect of the form of togetherness that was created in this attempt. As I have pointed out, the homeless struggle demonstrates that cultural activism cannot be understood simply in terms of fun or a preference among activists for enjoyable forms of activism. To understand the central place of negative feelings amidst the emotional heightening brought about by the struggle around Nagai Park, I will suggest that the shift to counter-space was accompanied by the emergence of what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas. This communitas, however, was of a particular kind, which I will refer to as a communitas of defeat.

14 I base myself primarily on interviews with six participants (Nakagiri, F, J, K, L, M) in the struggle and the personal records collected after the eviction in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (eds) (2007a, 2007b) and other participant reports (e.g. Nakamura et al. 2008; Ōta 2009). Background on the situation of the homeless in Osaka was also obtained by interviews with B1, C1, D1.

150

chapter five

Communitas and the Defeat of Movements Victor Turner’s ideas of liminality and communitas are often used to formulate the experiences of togetherness, joy and sense of possibility achieved in certain moments of social movement activism.15 Turner describes communitas as a transitory sense of diffuse togetherness accompanied by feelings of freedom, euphoria and possibility that may occur in “liminal” states when conventional norms are annulled (Turner 2007:112, 132). Not surprisingly, the concepts of liminality and communitas have been popular among theorists of prefigurative politics since they seem to signify the experience of a liberating rupture with ordinary society and provide a utopian foretaste of non-repressive forms of togetherness (Branagan 2007; Juris 2008; Katsiaficas 1989; St John 2004). Relating the ideas of liminality and communitas to forms of space, it seems reasonable to assume that no-man’s-lands as well as counter-spaces have an affinity to the liminal (or liminoid) states described by Turner. Although not necessarily lacking “structure”, both of these kinds of alternative space offer relief from the norms governing mainstream society. Entering them is also partially to enter a world in which the status and identity accredited to people in mainstream society are bracketed or suspended. As no-man’s-lands shifts into counter-space one might expect favourable conditions to exist for a communitas to appear, since the mobilization of activists to create a counter-space is likely to generate strong feelings of togetherness. At the same time, the fact that a counterspace per definition challenges the dominant values of mainstream society means that is always threatened by the risk of repression. To the extent that it promotes the formation of communitas, then, it will often be a frail communitas that is shot through by anxiety, the premonition of defeat, and doubts about the correctness of strategy, rather than by jubilant togetherness, empowerment and the sensation of victory. It should be pointed out that communitas is not necessarily linked to any experience of success or victory in Turner’s writings. He points out 15 Research on the rapture of revolutionary moments and the sense of freedom, liberation and joy in it has a long standing, going back to Le Bon’s work on the crowd and Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence. For the similarity between the latter and Turner’s concept of communitas, see Olaveson (2001). Turner himself suggests that these experiences are not limited to the “liminal” rites of premodern societies, but recur in “liminoid” situations, or threshold situations, in modern societies, such as revolutionary moments, insurrections, carnivals and other reappearances of “anti-structure” (Turner 1992:34, 45). In social movement studies, Zolberg’s (1972) idea of “moments of madness” and Katsiaficas’ (1989) discussion of the “Eros effect” were both inspired by Turner.



space, art and homelessness151

that in rites of passage it often emerges in situations of extreme deprivation and hardship, in conditions evoking death (2007:95). That the concept of communitas despite this has tended to be associated with empowerment, victory and jubilant feelings of togetherness when applied to social movements is unfortunate, since it leaves us without a concept to describe those moments of emotional heightening and often intense collective effort that end in traumatic defeat or failure.16 It is to remedy this lack that I propose the concept of a “communitas of defeat”. Such a concept is important in order to understand struggles to defend homeless encampments in Japan, which regularly end in defeat, i.e. eviction. As the eviction is carried out, inhabitants of the encampments and activists are scattered, literally destroying the community. The coming defeat is practically always foreshadowed by the “voluntary” leave of many inhabitants in the encampments (usually under heavy pressure from guards and authorities) before the actual eviction is carried out. Only a tiny fraction of the original village is usually still left to make a stand together with activists at the time of the eviction. Furthermore, although strong feelings of togetherness and collective solidarity are built up among remaining villagers and core activists as they brace for the coming eviction, participant reports indicate that there is also tremendous variation in the way the struggle is experienced. A communitas of defeat is a complex phenomenon in which collective effort, shared focus and emotional heightening can go together with pain, inner doubt, and a marked heterogeneity in the way events are subjectively experienced. This is close to the way the anthropologist Michael Taussig reconceptualises communitas in his attempt to theorize the “yagé nights”, ritual gatherings among Colombian shamans and healers that involve the use of the hallucinatory drug yagé. Taussig criticises Turner for 16 Defeat is still an under-theorized area in the sociology of social movements (cf.  Polletta 1998; Voss 1996). In particular, this is true of how defeats are experienced (cf. Kleres 2005). A concept that would arguably be easier to apply to defeats than communitas is what Collins (2004) terms ‘collective effervescence’. However, although more sensitive than Turner to conflicts and cleavages among participants, he resembles Turner in directing attention mainly to the positive and solidarity-generating outcomes of interaction rituals. While acknowledging that in ‘power rituals’ and ‘violent interactions’ the emotional energy usually goes largely to one side (Collins 2004:111–138; ibid. 2012), he offers no analysis of how such rituals can take place without generating any emotional energy at all. The latter seems to have been the case in Nagai Park, where the eviction hardly produced any feelings of elation or solidarity either among the defeated (villagers and activists) or the ‘victors’ (mainly municipal staff hired to do the job of eviction). Among scholars inspired by Turner’s concepts, Yang (2000) does focus on the defeat of a movement, but without discussing how defeat affects the experience of communitas.

152

chapter five

offering an overly unitary conception of togetherness that misrepresents the real heterogeneity of anti-structure. While the yagé nights are communal gatherings that transport participants into the realm of the sacred, the emotional state of the participants, who may laugh one moment and vomit and feel sick the other, is unstable and unpredictable. Everything is full of unexpected, dreamlike reversals, connections and juxtapositions. Instead of unity, there is volatility and heterogeneity. It is a “sensory ­pandemonium”, a dance of leaping shadows, a “chaotic mingling of danger and humour” (Taussig 1987:441f). This, as I hope to show, is not too ­dissimilar from the way activists experienced the struggle around Nagai Park – a struggled marked by immense effort taking place in a liminoid setting far removed from everyday life, in which individual differences in emotional response were immense. Evictions and Resistance in Osaka Osaka is the city in Japan that has the largest number of homeless. A 2003 survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare estimated that 6,000 homeless were living in Osaka, but many activists engaged in homeless support estimate the number to exceed ten thousand (Kanazu 2004). A reason for the large number is that it is home of Kamagasaki, the largest yoseba (day labourer recruitment area) in Japan.17 As Osaka’s construction industry suffered during the recession, many of the day labourers became homeless. In addition, many unemployed who came from all over Western Japan to Osaka to find a job ended up as homeless (Ikuta 2005:208). The homeless movement in Osaka consisted in part of older organisations with roots in the day labour struggles that had transformed themselves into support organisations for the homeless during the 1990s. One of the newer, more radical groups was Kamagasaki Patrol (Kamapato), which was founded in 1996 by the young autonomist Kanehagi Atsushi. The name of the group is taken from the regular nightly patrols which it performs among the homeless to check their health and protect them from attacks. With his newly formed group, Kanehagi participated in the Shinjuku cardboard village struggle, where he was struck by the presence of women, former salarymen and others among the homeless who did not look like former day labourers. This helped him realize that day labourers were only part of a single stratum of precarious workers that also included freeters like himself and who therefore ought to be able to form a common 17 For presentations of Kamagasaki, see Aoki 2006:27ff, Gill 2001:91–99.



space, art and homelessness153

front (interview 12 July 2011). He was one of the first activists to formulate this idea (see Kanehagi 1999), which is today often encountered among freeters in the homeless movement (e.g. Ikuta 2001a, 2001b, 2007). Based on this idea the activists in Kamagasaki Patrol insist that they are not helping the homeless, but that they and their homeless comrades are partners in a common struggle of have-nots (Kanazu 2004). Another central idea in the group is that the state of homelessness should not be shunned as “bad”. The homeless, they assert, have a right not only to welfare but also to live on streets and in parks without discrimination or exclusion, and shouldn’t be made to conform to mainstream society’s notions of a “good” life (Kanehagi 1999:44f). These ideas were taken over by a group that was to play the central role in the struggle over Nagai Park, the Comrades’ Association of Nagai Park (Nagai kōen nakama no kai), which was formed in 2000. Much like Kamagasaki Patrol, the group rejects the division between supported and supporters. Instead, they seek to set up a relation of “mutual help and complementarity”. The initiative to forming the group was taken by Nakagiri Kōsuke, who at the time was a member of Kamagasaki Patrol. Impressed by a 1999 article by Kanehagi that convinced him that freeters were part of the same struggle as the homeless, he dropped out of Kyoto University and moved into the tent village in Nagai Park in 2002. At the time of eviction, he had lived for five years in the park, making his living as a day labourer and part-time editor (interview 11 July 2011; Nakagiri et al. 2006:36). Like Ogawa Tetsuo, he actively promotes life in the tent villages, which he describes as “healthy and culturally rich”. Calling for solidarity between young people and the homeless comrades, he states: “I hope that young people in particular will try homelessness” (Nakagiri et al. 2006:47f, 67). Homeless people had been living in Nagai Park for a long time because of its convenient location on the way between the day labour centre at Kamagasaki and places like Yao or Sakai where they could collect aluminium cans (Suzuki 2007:125). The authorities planned the first eviction before the 1997 National Athletic Meet, when around 50 people were living in the park. At that time, due to Kamagasaki Patrol’s negotiations with authorities, 30 of the villagers had been able to live on in the park. The number of homeless peaked around 1999–2000 when there were over 500 tents in the park. In preparation for the 2002 World Cup, Osaka City started a campaign in 2000 to pressure the homeless in Nagai Park to leave the park and enter a new shelter (opened in December 2000, closed in 2003). It was in reaction to this campaign that the Comrades’ Association

154

chapter five

was founded. Despite this, the number of tents was drastically reduced to a mere seven. Evictions were also carried out in Osaka Castle Park 2002 and Tennōji Park 2003. In the following years, the number of tents in Nagai Park again began to increase slowly. In 2006 the number had reached around 26 tents. In January that year, two large-scale evictions were carried out in Utsubo Park and Osaka Castle Park in preparation for a World Rose Convention and a National City Greenery Fair scheduled to take place later in the spring. Following these evictions, Osaka City renewed its campaign to pressure inhabitants to leave Nagai Park, using the 2007 IAAF World Championships in Athletics as a pretext.18 An eviction of the park’s remaining tents was announced to be carried out on 5 February 2007. Many of the remaining villagers chose to leave the park – some finding work, some applying for livelihood assistance, and some moving to other parks (J, active in the Comrade’s Association, interview 25 July 2011). When the day of eviction arrived, only ten tents were left in Nagai Park with seven inhabitants. “It’s Got to be Theatre, Nothing Else Will Do” Groups like Kamagasaki Patrol and the Comrades’ Association did not use to be concerned with art. So where did the idea of resisting the eviction through theatre come? To begin with, the connection between art and homelessness was not new in Osaka. Poetry, music and picture card shows (kami-shibai) had long been engaged in by the homeless and performed at festivals and other events related to homelessness, and cafés such as Cocoroom in the neighbourhood of Kamagasaki have served as a nexus for bringing together art and homeless people (Ueda 2006). A second important impulse came from Kyoto students engaged in the tradition of so-called tent theatre. The two students who wrote the script for the play performed in Nagai Park, Ōta Naori and Inoue Yuzuru, were both part of the dynamic activist culture that had started to develop on Kyoto campuses in the 1990s. This was a culture in which the tradition of travelling radical tent-theatre was still alive. Ōta today participates in one 18 Activists criticised these evictions as part of a gentrification drive whereby city authorities tried to marketise Osaka globally, removing the homeless while attracting fairs and sports events. They also pointed out that the 2006 evictions occurred against the background of a planned reexamination of the 2002 homeless law making it important to city authorities to show how much they had reduced the number of homeless (Haraguchi 2006; Nakagiri 2007a:225f).



space, art and homelessness155

of Japan’s best known tent-theatre troupes, Yasen no tsuki (Moon of the battle at night), and Inoue toured Japan with two other tent theatre troupes, Yume ichizoku (Dream clan) and Gyojin teikoku (Fishman empire), in the 1990s (Inoue, interview 23 July 2011). The theatre in Nagai Park was thus a late-flowering manifestation of the tradition of travelling tent theatre. These are troupes that travel around and perform in tents both in the countryside and in bigger cities, entertaining the audience with fire and water and with plays in the angura style, often in locations close to the homeless, such as San’ya in Tokyo, Kotobuki in Yokohama, or the various parks in Osaka.19 The Dairin festivals (Big wheel festivals) – arranged since 2004 in Nagai Park by the Comrade’s Association – were important in making these traditions cross-fertilise. The idea of doing a theatrical play first came up at the Dairin festival 2005, in a gathering of homeless people and young supporters from Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe and Nagoya, many of whom were engaged in music or some other expressive activity. This resulted in a play called “The theatre of Poponcho” (Poponcho no shibai). Rehearsals took place in Nagai Park and Osaka Castle Park, where tent villagers came to watch. Afterwards the actors gathered in the village, where the villagers offered tea and they would eat and talk together. Some of the villagers started to participate in the rehearsals and two of them took part as actors on stage when the play was performed publicly for the first time in early 2006 at Seibu Kōdō – an old stronghold for student activism at Kyoto University (Nabetani 2007:21; Nakagiri 2007b:10; Noe 2007:77). Already on this occasion, the villagers suggested doing a second play – with one villager being particularly eager and repeatedly urging the students: “Let’s do it again!”. During Kyoto University’s November festival, villagers again travelled up from Osaka to inform the students of the coming eviction and repeated their desire to perform a play together and this time to do it in Nagai Park. A decision was taken by villagers and students to stage the play during the New Year’s Eve mochitsuki (rice cake pounding) contest in the park. The script for the play, called “Waking up from the dream” (Yume ga sametara) was hurriedly written by Ōta and Inoue. As rehearsals started, enthusiasm spread to the other inhabitants in the village and the idea of performing the play on the very day of eviction took 19 Yasen no tsuki emerged in 1994 from the famous Kaze no ryodan (The travelling troupe of the wind; active 1982–1994). On the latter troupe, see Nishidō (2006:33, 144f, 201ff). For the roots of the tent theatre in the underground (angura) theatre of the 1960s and its affinity to the New Left, see Goodman (1988).

156

chapter five

hold (Inoue, interview 23 July 2011; Ōta 2009:114f; Nabetani 2007:21; interviews with two activists K and L 10 July 2011). The process behind the setting up of the theatre shows an interesting interplay between younger activists and homeless villagers. Although starting as a project among younger activists, the initiative was soon taken over by some of the villagers who became the driving force behind the play. Their central role is illustrated by an incident that occurred during a festive gathering – the so-called “petit Dairin festival” on 21 January. Two villagers showed their displeasure with a lecture held by a supporter by standing up and declaring that the villagers had already agreed to stage the play and that all that supporters needed to do was to protect it. Several supporters point to this incident as a decisive event that “won them over” by removing their doubts about whether the play was really desired by the villagers themselves or not (Nakamura et al. 2008:39; Fujimuro 2007:174). Eviction Day Tension rose as the day of eviction, 5 February, approached. Petitions and letters of protest were handed over to the city. After intense preparations, the play was staged for the first time on New Year’s Eve and then a second time during the “petit Dairin festival” on 21 January.20 The day before the eviction, more activists started arriving to help defend the village. The night was the coldest of the year and one activist reflected that it was “murder” to take away their tents on such a day (Makino 2007:113). In the morning, 200 people – most in their twenties or thirties – had arrived to help stop the eviction from Kyoto, Kobe, Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and other places. Many sat in a protective ring around the stage, which had been erected in front of the remaining tents. Some were playing bongo drums. Above the stage was a white banner with the words “We seek dialogue, not fighting”. Facing them were 200 city employees and 300 guardsmen. Further outside were journalists and some two thousand onlookers (Nakagiri 2007b:10). The play started around seven o’clock – a time which had been set to coincide with the arrival of the guards and city employees. In the 20 One guest living in the village was the film-maker Satō Leo, who had lived in the village since November the previous year to record the life of the villagers and who later produced a documentary about the eviction, Nagai seishun yoi yume uta (Nagai Park Elegy, NDS Nakazakichō, 2007). Ogawa Tetsuo and Ichimura Misako also arrived from Tokyo to live as guests in the tent village, making drawings of the tents, assembling junk into art objects and constructing a small playground for children.



space, art and homelessness157

theatrical troupe, which had been baptised “Panic”, five of the seven remaining villagers participated plus a former villager who was now living on livelihood assistance. In addition, the troupe consisted of eight young people, mostly activists who had long been engaged in the tent village and who were on friendly terms with the villagers. The performance started with an improvisation, somebody taking up a song, “Hitoribochi no yoru” (Alone at night), which had been written by the young street musician Noe and which had become the villagers’ anthem. The actors sang it together as they went up on stage, some starting to cry and hugging (ibid. 64). The play consisted of a series of fragmented episodes forming a cavalcade of human destinies.21 After a welcome talk by a comic monologist (mandanshi), the colourfully dressed actors entered the stage one by one. Here we find people like “Yumehito” (Dream man) who angrily tells everyone to get out of his dream, the tired salaryman Kusunoki, an old man looking for his mother, and a man speaking to a cherry tree. A conspicuous character is Miyuki, a man in kabuki-like make-up who is travelling around the world longing for human ties: “You are there!”, he shouts, “You and I are friends!”. Yōryō is a cynical businessman played by Nakagiri who says: “What’s friends? All that matters in the world is money”. Together with a girl called Sekai (world), a man named Mūmin also appears, pulling petals from a tulip saying “I love you, I don’t love you…”. Finally he spreads his arms and exclaims that he loves the world. The play comes closest to a political vision in a farcical episode in which two older women from Osaka and Kyoto meet a person called the “Death metal farmer”, who obsessively digs up the ground wherever he is. Asked if he is homeless, he replies that he’s a simple peasant. A peasant’s work is to dig, he says. “But this is concrete”, the Kyoto woman objects. Yes, he replies defiantly, concrete is what I will dig up first of all. “The soil is sleeping below it. I can hear the voice of the soil”. The women warn him they’ve paid for the concrete with their taxes and that he’ll get arrested. Upset, he replies that humans have been digging the earth for ten thousand years. If one gets arrested for that, there’s something wrong with the cops. He ends by vowing to dig up all Osaka. This playful exchange evokes associations with the Diggers of the English Revolution as well as the Situationist slogan about the beach waiting below the asphalt, in addition to touching

21 The following account is based on the script (Gekidan Paniku 2007) and reminiscences from participants.

158

chapter five

on a favourite theme in homeless activism, the question of who has the right to use the land. Other episodes involve dancing, singing and throwing out candy to the audience. Near the end, Yōryō again enters the scene, exclaiming that “it” is approaching. Being an unstoppable force that will destroy the gathering, “it” appears to be a thinly veiled reference to the eviction. Throughout the play, guardsmen and city staff interrupted the play with announcements and the noise of removal preparations. The play was performed two times and had just resumed for a third time when they moved in and started demolishing the tent village. It was over in just a few minutes. The activists linked arms to protect the stage, but finally the stage too was torn down. Who is a “Tōjisha”? The activists who were most engaged in the play all had a long history of attachment to the village. Most of them had committed to the village because of personal networks. Others had become friends with the villagers since they happened to live nearby. They all emphasise that they were not just outside “supporters”, but experienced the loss of the village as a personal loss. Many confess that they needed the village for strong personal reasons, such as the human ties they found there. Very common is that they portray the village as a place of healing, contrasting with the cold and lonely world outside it.22 At the same time, many of them also stress that the village should not be idealised. Quarrels were common. Young female supporters encountered sexual harassment – an experience that later led them to set up a “safer space” called Udauda space during the Dairin festivals to create a place where women could feel secure (L, interview 10 July 2011; K, interview 10 July 2011). One particular source of strain was the question of who really belonged to the village. Ōta Naori recalls in an essay the pain she had felt during the rehearsals that stemmed from her desire to be accepted in 22 One activist writes that to her the village was relief from loneliness. “There I found a warmness I hadn’t felt in all my 24 years of life” (Kawahito 2007:48). Another describes the tent village as “a refuge from the isolated one-room apartment claustrophobically enclosed in the city” (Ōta 2009:114). Some of the young people engaging in the village had their own personal problems. These people were especially emphatic in expressing that they personally needed the village and in portraying the village as a place of healing (e.g. Yamanishi 2007:194–197). One participant had not yet fully recovered from a depression at the time of the eviction. The village, she told a social worker, was her day care centre and she didn’t need any other (Noe 2007: 85).



space, art and homelessness159

the ­village. A quarrel had erupted between her and a leader figure in the village, a man who often used to lash out at outside “supporters” with little experience of village life. Being a student and living under precarious circumstances, she herself felt like a potential homeless and intensely disliked being called an outside “supporter” or “volunteer”. Her “only hope”, she writes, was that by performing a play together, the differences between homeless villagers and non-homeless supporters would be overcome. But in the pressure and tension generated by the events, she states sadly, everything broke down and she had to face defeat alone (Ōta 2009:115ff). What troubled Ōta was the distinction between supporters and socalled tōjisha (those who are most directly affected or victimised by the events). As we recall, abolishing this distinction was one of the stated aims of the Comrades’ Association. Achieving this in practice was not easy, and many other participants also struggled with the distinction. The desire to overcome it is also prominent in an account written by Tsumajima Yōsuke, who played the “Death metal farmer”and who argues that the designation “supporter” is inappropriate for those non-homeless who had developed strong ties to the homeless. In line with the ideas advocated by groups like Kamagasaki Patrol or the Comrades’ Association, he suggests that the basis of the solidarity between homeless people and freeters should not be philanthropy but the fact that both are victims of capitalism (Tsumajima 2007:56ff). Nabetani Yoshiko, another young activist who did not live in the village but who had long been engaged in it, claims that the loss of the village victimized her too. When somebody had doubted her qualification as a tōjisha, she had bitterly replied: Hasn’t she suffered? Hasn’t she lost something too? (Nabetani 2007:72). We can note that the dichotomy supporter-tōjisha is not deconstructed in these arguments, which rather aim at showing that supporters too can be a kind of tōjisha, or victims. They are victims as freeters exploited in the new post-Fordist economy, or as friends of the villagers, or as people dependent on the village for psychical well-being. Ironically, attacking the distinction through the argument that the village’s destruction also victimised many of the “core” activists who had been engaged in village life for a long time and formed strong emotional bonds to the village had the result of erecting a new distinction between such “core” activists and other less committed ones who merely rallied to defend the park on the day of eviction. Generally, the latter did not know the villagers very well. One of them writes about his shame at not being a tōjisha, feeling like an irresponsible outsider who felt unable to account for what he was doing

160

chapter five

there and even to recall the faces of tōjisha afterwards (Tattan 2007:151f). Another activist also writes about his shame of not really knowing the villagers and explains that he tried to remedy this fault by visiting the village before the eviction and getting to know the villagers (Chō 2007). One activist even doubts that he shared any experience at all with the “comrades” in the village or the activists close to them. I was groping in the dark regarding how to treat tōjisha or people in a state close to that of tōjisha […]. If “we” shared any experience, what could that have been? What could it be said that I shared with anyone else and to what extent? (Watanabe Takuya 2007:204f)

Were these people my “comrades”, he writes, and was I among theirs (ibid. 204)? As these statements show, the privileging of the tōjisha as the authentic subject of resistance not only produced shame among many supporters, but also undermined the sense of unity and solidarity. What Was the Aim of the Play? What was the aim of using theatre to resist the eviction and to what extent did participants feel that they had been successful in reaching that aim? Ōta states that there was no agreement about the reason for staging a play: some saw it as cultural resistance, some as a proper way to bid farewell to the tent village. She herself denies that it functioned as resistance. Her dream had simply been to show the “culture of the excluded”, their “always unique” life and world (Ōta 2009:117, 120). In the turbulence and chaos, however, even that failed. If theatre has special power, it consists in the actors’ and the audience’s ability to create a separate world. A world where it is possible for a special time to flow. I didn’t want to struggle on the basis of a flow of time decided by the authorities. I wanted to launch a world constituted by a time we ourselves had let flow. I desired for our own time to flow, a time not led astray by the violence of the authorities. If you really seek resistance, you should grab a weapon. We chose a theatrical play. A play is not resistance. In that sense, on that day we succeeded neither in offering resistance nor in staging a true play. (ibid. 119)

“Through defeat”, she writes, “my time stopped, and the time of the authorities alone felt real” (ibid. 117). Noe too states that she thinks the idea of the play as resistance was meaningless. Next to the pain of losing the village, the play was simply futile. Frankly, I never believed that theatre could be resistance. I still don’t. I don’t even understand the meaning of “cultural resistance”. That’s my honest



space, art and homelessness161 opinion. That’s why I still can’t think that it was a success that the play was performed. After all, it’s gone, right. The tent village. (Noe 2007:102).

Nabetani concurs, doubting if “expression” and “movement”, or theatre and protest against eviction, can really go together (Nabetani 2007:73f). The desire to try out cultural resistance was not the only reason advanced by activists for staging the play. One important idea, expressed by Nakagiri (2007b:14) and several others, was that a play would demonstrate the villagers’ willingness to reach out and engage in dialogue with authorities and the general public. This was felt to be especially urgent in light of the experience of Osaka Castle Park and Utsubo Park, where the media had highlighted conflict and confrontation. Many activists were especially eager to reach out to the guards and municipal workers, who were themselves irregular workers sharing the precarious circumstances of the homeless and young activists. Tsumajima states that he liked the idea of the play because “an ideal struggle is one in which the enemy becomes your friend” – something he dreamed could be achieved by the music he was going to use when he made his appearance as the “Death metal farmer” (Tsumajima 2007:60f). The idea of dialogue was also expressed by a huge banner over the stage, which called for “dialogue, not fighting”. Similarly, in announcements before the eviction, the Comrades’ Association stressed that all resistance would be non-violent. “If we manage to make them hear the lines, we’ve won” (Nakama no kai 2007). Another pragmatic reason for the play was that staging a play would help transcend ideological differences. One villager stated that what was so good and “healthy” about the struggle in Nagai Park was that people were able to come together and have a “festival” despite their different “isms” and ways of thinking (SF 2007:39). Among the villagers, the most common argument for staging the play was that it would be a good way to end the village, since it would give them the opportunity to “speak their mind”. Many of them had a strong desire not to repeat the sort of resistance that was waged in Utsubo Park and Osaka Castle Park. What had happened there was that activists and villagers had used the standard method to physically obstruct the evic­ tion by linking arms and chanting slogans and so-called wasshoi shouts (rhythmical shouts used when activists move in a group). The method had proven painfully futile and several villagers in Nagai Park explicitly stated that they didn’t want the village to end that way. Some young activists recall that villagers, impressed by the music performances during the 2006 Dairin festival, had said: “This will be a good way to end if we too are evicted”. Many of the young activists in turn felt that staging the play

162

chapter five

was a way to show “respect to the tent village” and “to the desires of the people who were going to be evicted on that day” (L, interview 10 July 2011). But why would a play be a good way to end the village? In particular, many villagers valued the possibility offered by the play of “saying what was in my heart” – something that could be achieved far better through a play than by wasshoi shouts (ST 2007:39). The villagers interviewed by Suzuki Yoshiaki similarly stress that the idea with the theatre was to “speak one’s mind”, one of them saying: “You see, I’m no good with words, so I’ll say it with the play. What I want to say is contained in the play” (Suzuki 2007:123). Behind the choice of the play, then, was not simply the artistic desire to create good art or the instrumental idea of using the play to project a more appealing image to the general public. Many realised already from the start that resisting the eviction would be futile, and to them a prime reason for the play appears to have been the desire to “end” in a good and satisfying way, without leaving any regrets. How Well Did the Play Succeed? How well did the play succeed, then? In contrast to the enthusiastic praise of some outside commentators (e.g. Sasanuma 2008:298) the assessment of participants was remarkably bleak. To Ōta and Noe, as mentioned, the play failed miserably both as resistance and as art. Neither was the goal of inviting dialogue successful. Neither city officials nor the city staff on the ground responded to the play. The lines were hardly audible beyond the immediate vicinity of the stage, since the city staff constantly disturbed the performance with megaphones (Nabetani 2007:64; Tsumajima 2007; Ogawa Kyōhei 2007:123). Afterwards, one villager stated that he still places hope in dialogue, but stresses that it failed on that day. “If you won’t lend us your ears, we’ll continue to sing until you do”, he writes (T.H. 2007:103). As a way to transcend ideological differences and project a more appealing image to other activists, it apparently functioned better. Several activists confirm that it helped mobilize support for the village among young people such as students, some admitting frankly that they themselves would not have joined if it had not been for the play (e.g. Fujimuro 2007:180; Hasegawa 2007:169; Nakamura 2007:211; Nakamura et al. 2008:38). In this sense, the play had some success in breaking with the standard resistance methods from the time of Utsubo Park and Osaka Castle Park,



space, art and homelessness163

but it did not set a precedent – Nagai Park was the first and only time so far that theatre has been used to resist an eviction in Japan. Finally, as for enabling the villagers to speak their mind, the result appears to have been mixed. One villager, originally the most enthusiastic promoter of the play, was not satisfied with how it turned out. “I wasn’t able to say all that was in my heart”, he writes – although he adds that it went a little better the second time they performed the play (O.J. 2007). Other activists, however, were more satisfied with how the play had turned out. Inoue Yuzuru had been sceptical to the idea of using theatre as resistance, but “looking back at it now, I have come to think it was good that we did it”, he says. Staging a play had been the right thing to do, because it showed that people couldn’t be cleansed away like garbage (interview 23 July 2011). Another activist who helped defend the stage on the day of eviction had also originally been skeptical, but now believes that it was important for the villagers to visibilize themselves and demonstrate their will to resist. When I asked him if he meant visibilising themselves to the authorities or the general public, he answers: “To themselves”. Since they normally live a dispersed life, it was important for them to demonstrate their will to resist to each other (M, interview 17 July 2011). Even if the struggle had failed to achieve its aims, then, activists could retrospectively judge it as a success because of other reasons than those stated at the time. Still one more example of this, although differing from the other voices above, is a former villager who had helped protect the stage during the play. He is sceptical about the goal of defending tent villages at all cost. The villagers are not activists, he says. What they primarily want is somewhere to live, not to fight the system. Many feel that they have themselves to blame for their situation – perhaps because of personal histories of getting into debt or ruining a marriage.23 Some chose to resist in Nagai Park, not because they were blaming the system, but because they were angry about how they had been treated, and because resistance is a form of negotiation, a way of showing authorities that a problem has not been solved. To my surprise, he states that in hindsight,  he thinks it was good that they were evicted from the park: “after all, that is not a place to spend one’s entire life” (J, interview 25 July 2011). 23 These observations accord well with the results of research on homeless people in Japan (e.g. Tsumaki 2004).

164

chapter five

Was it Fun? The play may have been meaningful, but was it fun? Considering that “fun” and “pleasure” are often emphasized as being characteristic of the new cultural movements, the question about what role fun played in staging the theatre in Nagai Park deserves attention. Judging from the testimonies of participants, few of them experienced participating in the play as fun or pleasurable. Nabetani’s account is interesting since she is one of the few actors to openly admit that she enjoyed it – “It felt so good to take part in the play”.24 She had first discovered how enjoyable it felt during the performance of “The theatre of Poponcho” in Kyoto. Even at the time of the eviction, she had discovered to her surprise that she enjoyed it to the fullest: “I felt wonderful, like ‘We’ve made it!’ […] I relished the fact that we managed to perform the play to the last” (Nabetani 2007:71). But meanwhile, she adds, the tents were demolished and several of her friends were taken away, some screaming. Suddenly, she realised that the other actors had dispersed and she came to her senses. I had thought I was participating for the sake of everyone, for alleviating everyone’s suffering, but despite that I had totally forgotten about everybody else, thinking only about myself. I hadn’t even been together with the others. (ibid. 72)

In her case, then, “fun” led to grief and “enormous pangs of conscience” as she recognised that she had been enjoying herself all by herself instead of sharing the emotion of the others. “From then on I just felt apathy and pain. It was as if I had spent my time just by myself” (ibid. 72).25 Among other activists, feelings like nervousness, despair, bitterness and shame were common. In a moving account, one participant writes that what she remembers of the 5th of February was only fright and that she was shivering. She felt ashamed for not having been of any use in defending the stage and for just having wanted to be together with the others. Afterwards, she relapsed into depression: “To me, that day was a festival with a very bad aftertaste” (Noe 2007:75, 90–98, 102). 24 In another rare account, one of the homeless villagers writes that the best and most pleasurable thing about that day was participating in a play for the first time: “In all of the 57 years of my life, I never imagined that I would take part in a play” (FN 2007:41). 25 This example can also be seen as the effect of what Benford refers to as feeling rules in social movements. These rules are about “how people should actually try to feel” and “become legitimated and solidified as participants recount their and others’ emotional responses to various movement-related encounters” (Benford 2002:65).



space, art and homelessness165

While several of the activists who travelled to the park on the day of eviction expressed admiration for the play (Eguchi 2007:119; Ogawa Kyōhei 2007; Ogawa Tetsuo 2007), many of these short-term visitors also felt ill at ease. As we have seen, the sense of unity was hardly strong among them. Some felt isolated and apart from the others in the village. Among those who had been engaged in the village for a longer time there was a stronger sense of identification with the village, and here prominent emotions were despair at losing the village, anger at authorities, nervousness, shame, grief, and doubts about the rightness of their strategy. Few participants appear to have felt elated or empowered by the collective effort. The dominant impression is rather one of an extraordinary heterogeneity and susceptibility to quick shifts in the way the eviction and the theatrical play was experienced. After the Eviction After the eviction, villagers and activists were fatigued, but protests did not end. The first protest demonstration was held already the following day. Later in 2007, on 30 April, homeless people and freeters together arranged a May Day event in the park, the “Bright Poverty May Day” (Akarui Binbō Mēdē), with the Comrades’ Association, Kamagasaki Patrol and Union Bochibochi as some of the main organizers. This too was an event with a distinct flavour of “cultural” activism, being staged as part of the nation-wide precariat May Day. Although theatrical plays have not been used as resistance against evictions in Japan after the Nagai Park struggle, plays continue to be staged in the Dairin festivals, which are still held annually in Nagai Park. In October 2007, the play “Waking up from the dream” was staged a last time during the 4th Dairin festival. The Comrades’ Association still exists, now based in a house close to the park called Oshiteriya, where information and counselling is provided to the homeless and which functions as a “salon” every Monday where the homeless can gather, eat and talk. Many of the former villagers today live on livelihood assistance. Some of the people who participated in the struggle have died. In Osaka today, after the disappearance of the big encampments in places like Osaka Castle Park, Tennōji Park or Nagai Park, only a few small tent villages still exist in parks such as Nishinari Park or Ōgimachi Park. Looking back at Nagai Park’s theatre of resistance, we can make a few observations. Before turning into a counter-space through the attempt

166

chapter five

to resist eviction, the park functioned as a no-man’s-land that was relatively free from mainstream norms and hospitable to homeless people as well as young musicians, activists and supporters. The play was intended by many participants as an attempt at participation in the public sphere through dialogue. But even as they tried to invite dialogue, the play was literally transformed into noise by the loud, interrupting calls of city officials. However, although the play failed as an attempt at participating in the public sphere, it can be said to have succeeded in bringing about a counter-space, briefly  visibilising the life of the villagers in the face of authorities intent of ­evicting them. Did these efforts also bring about a communitas? I would suggest that what came into being in Nagai Park was a communitas of defeat – a state resembling the yagé nights described by Taussig in the sense that a liminoid situation was created that was characterised not only by positive but also strong negative feelings, or by a heterogeneity of positive or negative feelings shifting and replacing each other. Judging from testimonies of the day, there was clearly a shared focus of attention accompanied by an intense emotional heightening. It differed, however, from how communitas has usually been portrayed from Turner and onwards, because of the internal tensions among participants and because of the predominance of feelings like despair, grief, anger, disappointment, bitterness, shame, guilt, doubt and fatigue. The predominant role of negative feelings in the Nagai Park struggle has implications for how so-called cultural activism should be understood. Cultural performances deployed in protest events are often understood as a form of prefigurative politics, but in Nagai Park’s theatre of resistance prefigurative elements are hard to find. To the “core” activists, it was everyday life in the village rather than the play that was experienced as a utopically tinged element – as a place for healing, for genuine human ties and for togetherness. As such it was opposed to the world outside, which was a place of loneliness and pain. The essential community, to those activists who committed most strongly and for the longest time, was the village rather than the gathering of activists on the eviction day. In other words, what they appear to have cherished was their image of what the park had been when it was still a no-man’s-land, rather than the counter-space created in the attempt to resist the eviction. If we look closer at the forms of togetherness that existed in this communitas of defeat, we notice that the villagers and “core” activists formed a kind of community from which some of the activists who merely



space, art and homelessness167

travelled to the park at the time of eviction felt excluded. The split between activists who were part of this community and those who were not is best explained by considering the park’s shift from no-man’s-land to counterspace. The sense of togetherness among the “core” activists stemmed from the memory of when the village had still been a no-man’s-land rather than from the counter-space that came into being at the time of eviction. Together with the villagers, they formed what could be called an elegiacal community based on the memory of no-man’s-land. By contrast, the counter-space on the day of eviction gave rise to a togetherness which included activists outside the “core” but which was much more fragile and characterized by internal tensions. If the play was not pleasurable to most participants then for what reasons was it staged? On the one hand, to many activists there were instrumental reasons for the play, which was regarded as an efficient way of reaching out to the public and to bridge ideological differences. On the other hand, many villagers point in particular to the satisfaction of being able to “speak one’s mind”. This appears to have been a way both of paying respect to the lost community and venting one’s anger at those who sought to destroy it. The fact that the initiative to the play had been taken by the villagers themselves is a reminder that culture is not necessarily a mere adornment or superfluous addition which people can afford when more basic, material needs are satisfied. Culture can be a way to maintain a sense of self-worth in the face of a treatment felt to be unfair. The latter reason points to the fact that to some participants the play was a valuable experience in itself, rather than as a mere means or instrument, despite not being “fun” or directly prefigurative. Miyashita Park: Can a No-Man’s-Land be Defended? The protests staged by support activists, homeless people, artists and other concerned citizens against the planned renovation of Miyashita Park in Shibuya, Tokyo, are perhaps the most striking example to date of how cultural activism has made its imprint on the homeless movement.26 26 For presentations of the struggle in Miyashita Park, see Cassegård (2011), Kindstrand (2010, 2012), Mōri (2009a:229–232). Important statements by activists include Ogawa (2009b, 2009c, 2012). In addition to the abundant material available on the homepage of AIR (http://airmiyashitapark.info/wordpress/) and the coalition (http://minnanokouenn .blogspot.com/), I base my account on participant observation and conversations during four visits (in March, May and July 2010) and interviews with four activists (Ogawa and Take from AIR, and Z and A1 from Nojiren).

168

chapter five

Like Nagai Park, this park became the staging ground of a counter-space when artists and activists under the name AIR (Artists in Residence) occupied the park for six months in 2010 to block the construction work and to keep the park open for use by the homeless. During this time, the park was used as a basis for public protest and as the stage for a variety of artistic activities, such as art workshops, exhibitions, concerts, filming and poetry readings. The protests started in 2008 when it was revealed that Shibuya Ward had sold the park’s naming rights to Nike Japan. According to the original plans, sports facilities would be constructed by Nike Japan in cooperation with the ward. Renamed Nike Park, the new facilities would charge visitors an entrance fee and the homeless were to be evicted. Rallying against this “Nikefication” of the park, a coalition to “preserve Miyashita Park” was established in June 2008 in which the grassroots activists of Nojiren and the artists of the 246 Conference played central roles, cooperating closely with each other. Through street demonstrations, petitions and demands for negotiations, the activists attempted to initiate a dialogue with politicians and the general public, but these attempts proved futile. Activism entered an intense stage in March 2010, when the authorities announced the imminent closure of the park in preparation for construction work to begin. In response to this, AIR was formed and occupied the park to prevent the closure and to maintain it as an autonomous place for creativity and togetherness. For six months the park was an exuberant playground for art and activism before it was finally cleared and fenced in by the authorities in September. Reconstruction started shortly afterwards and the new park, complete with Nike-sponsored sports facilities, was opened to the public in late April 2011. The artists in AIR lived in some ten tents on the northern side of the park. During the occupation, the park was filled with imaginative dolls, banners, sculptures and a variety of other art objects assembled from the garbage that happened to be at hand in the park. Activists cooked food together, and arranged workshops, rock concerts, rave parties, film screenings, outdoor karaoke, poetry readings and football. A park library was created and a community garden created. Along the park fence, banners were hanging with texts such as “Park is ours” or “We create park”. The park was also used for offensive forays into the surrounding public spaces. So-called “home-made” sound-demos were arranged, in which hundreds of homeless, musicians and other participants paraded or danced through Shibuya while drumming, blowing trumpets and trombones or beating frying pans, metal cans or other sound-making items.



space, art and homelessness169

Outside Nike’s new boutique in Shibuya a three day “NO Nike fashion show” was arranged in March during which activists dressed up in rags and other things they had found in the park. On other occasions, the artists and activists in AIR staged sit-ins outside Nike’s headquarters, reversing the “Nikefication” of the park by proclaiming the “parkification” of Nike (Kindstrand 2010:6). What conceptions of space guided these artists and activists? The AIRoccupied park may appear as a perfect example of a counter-space, but as I will show, the idea of counter-space was hardly dominant among them in the early stages. It emerged as a major model for the park at a comparatively late stage, and largely as a by-product of the desire of the artists and activists to preserve the park as a no-man’s-land. To many of them, it was in fact the latter idea of space that appeared to be dearest. The struggle for preserving Miyashita Park largely revolved, I suggest, around the question of how to defend a no-man’s-land. In general, as officials and corporations move in to utilise seemingly unused and neglected spaces, rendering them “publicly” and commercially useful, it is at first glance a paradoxical undertaking to try to defend such spaces, since the very act of publicly defending them throws them into the public limelight, depriving them of the official neglect which is usually one of their conditions of existence. If the relatively unregulated and unofficial life going on  in such spaces depends on such neglect, can it really be defended ­publicly – and, if so, how? I will suggest that artists and activists resorted to the idea of counterspace as a possible solution to this dilemma. This solution, however, created tensions that undermined the no-man’s-land that it was supposed to  protect. After six months of existence, the counter-space itself was destroyed when authorities moved in to evict AIR and reincorporate the park into official public space. Looking at how activists and artists conceived of the park during these six months allows us to gain a close-up of the difficulties of trying to defend a no-man’s-land and to see how they wrestled with different conceptions of space as the park was transformed, first from a no-man’s-land into counter-space and then, with their final eviction from the park, into part of mainstream public space. Eels and the Resurrection of the Dead Let me begin by indicating the larger context in which activists and artists placed the struggle around the park. The overall frame was that of the major reconstructions going on in the area around Shibuya Station.

170

chapter five

Although Shibuya is already one of Japan’s most commercialised and fashionable environments, it still contains a few visible remnants of the more lacklustre past of the early postwar decades – subterranean old arcades, alleys and neglected parks. Among the latter is Miyashita Park, which was created on top of a narrow parking house north of the station at the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The blue tents of the homeless started proliferating in the park in the late 1990s. Around 80 people were living here in 2005 (Ogawa Tetsuo 2009c:56f, 2012). The park was also often used as a gathering place for street demonstrations. As the ward tried to make people move out, the number of inhabitants dwindled to about 30 houses in 2009. As both activists and many journalists pointed out, ­getting rid of the homeless seemed to be the ulterior motive behind the “Nikefication” plans and part of the ward’s redevelopment plans in Shibuya (Hall 2010). To the activists and artists, the struggle against “Nikefication” was a struggle against the way capitalism and corporations like Nike expropriated urban spaces, turning them into places for consumption and eradicating their history (Ogawa 2012). Resisting this process was therefore also a struggle to, at least on a symbolic level, resurrect the past which had been buried in the course of the city’s modernisation and gentrification. As the symbol of this past, the activists in Miyashita Park chose the eels that had once been common in Shibuya River, a small river next to the park that was turned into an underground drainage conduit during the reconstruction before the Tokyo Olympics. “Surely”, the activists felt, “the phantom of the eel would rise up from Shibuya River, turned into a sewer” (ibid. 2009c:58). This idea of the eel as a vengeful ghost inspired the logo of their struggle, a black eel resembling the Nike swoosh together with the words “Just doite” (Just move away) – a parody of Nike’s “Just do it” slogan (Take 2008). The eel figured prominently as a symbolic presence throughout their struggle. For instance, they used their own local currency named una (after the word for “eel”, unagi) during their Summer festival, and they also constructed eel puppets as well as a statue of the “Eel boy” (Unabō) in the park. The eel was also a potent symbol for another reason. The logo was quite distinctly reminiscent of the black catfish (namazu), believed in folklore to cause earthquakes. As pointed out earlier, the catfish was associated in premodern popular imagination with upheavals, world rectification (yonaoshi) and the redistribution of wealth. The theme of death and the resurrection of buried, subterranean powers was also invoked in many other of AIR’s activities. In March 2010, a demonstration in the form of a “funeral parade” was carried out with



space, art and homelessness171

participants dressed as mourners or like ghosts parading sombrely in tune to a brass band. The activists also constructed a huge spectacle-wearing puppet called Miyashita-san, an incarnation of the park who had now – according to a proclamation during a street demonstration in April – risen from the earth to voice its wrath against the park’s Nikefication (Kindstrand 2010:7, 2012). To the activists the park was clearly a liminal space where things out of the ordinary, suppressed in the course of Japan’s modernisation and urban development, were allowed to reemerge. Articulations of Space In the Miyashita Park struggle, activism related to all three conceptions of space took place – mainstream public space as well as no-man’s-land and counter-space. Firstly, many of the activists and artists viewed the park as a part of mainstream public space that ought to be open to everybody and argued that entrance fees and evictions were inconsistent with the idea of “public gardens” (the literal translation of kōen, park). The renovation plans would transform the park into an “ad for Nike”, a place for consumers rather than citizens. Here are the opening words of a manifesto issued by the General Freeter Union in which heavy emphasis is placed on the need to uphold and defend the “public” (kōkyō) nature of the park. Miyashita Park must remain a park. A park is a public space. It must remain a place where anyone can freely enter, meet other people, talk, relax, recuperate and be creative. Allowing people to use it only after charging them an entrance fee means that it has become dysfunctional and that it can no longer be called a park. (Furītā zenpan rōdō kumiai 2010)

The idea that public space ought to be open to all was, however, also invoked by the authorities. While activists invoked it to protest against the discrimination and planned eviction of the homeless and the planned entrance fees, Shibuya Ward defended its project by claiming that the presence of the homeless made the general public avoid the park, which was therefore not in use by the public today (e.g. Hall 2010). Defending the park as a place that ought to be open to all citizens was thus an ambiguous undertaking which could be turned against the homeless and which required a struggle over who were to be included among such citizens. Secondly, not all activists relied on the idea of mainstream public space in their protests. Activists such as Ogawa Tetsuo were instead explicit in invoking the idea of no-man’s-land. In an essay responding to the ward’s argument, it is interesting to note that he does not invoke the reasonable

172

chapter five

argument that the park is used today – and not only by the homeless, but also, for instance, by social movements for political manifestations. Instead he states that the reason he likes Miyashita Park “is that it is more like a vacant lot [akichi] than a park”. It is because it has remained a vacant lot so long that the homeless have been able to build their huts there. “I happen to like Miyashita Park being just like that”, he writes, adding that he thinks that “culture and art are born out of vacant lots”. He also points out that the character kō / ōyake in the word kōen has strong connotations of state authority and that the very idea of public space (kōkyōchi) is premised on the idea of disembodied interaction that leaves little room for everyday activities of a shared life such as eating and sleeping (Ogawa 2009b:185). It is a mistake to see mainstream public spaces as essentially free and open. The public character of such spaces is no guarantee that they are open or free from control. In most cases it simply means that they are administered by public authorities, a fact which is compatible with strict regulations.27 To Ogawa it is important that the vacant lot, unlike mainstream public space, is a place for those who have suffered discrimination. In an interview (12 May 2010), he explains that the homeless, like the outcasts of Japanese history, have been rejected by society and are forced to live in the “interstices” (sukima). The settlements of the outcasts in premodern periods were often located on riverbanks and wastelands, just like many of the tent villages where the homeless live today. Referring to the historian­ Amino Yoshihiko, he points out that during the Middle Ages those places were considered to be muen, places where one left behind one’s status in the surrounding society. Such places functioned as sanctuaries for the outcasts and other marginalised groups such as criminals, lepers and beggars, and provide a model for what he and his friends are trying to create in Miyashita Park. “Today’s parks often originated in land belonging to temples or shrines, places that were left in peace and were relatively open to everyone”, he says. “They provided a place for the destitute or the discriminated-against and allowed them to settle down. Historically they functioned as muen”. Asked if he thinks that function survives today, he replies: “We try to recreate it in our activities” (ibid. 2010). To Ogawa and his friends, then, the idea of a park is an object of competing forces. 27 The idea of vacant lots is inspired by Ogawa’s previous years of isōsō life, during which he tried to create such vacant lots – which he describes as similar to the “hidden bases” of childhood – in the homes he lived in. Another inspiration for the idea was Okamoto Tarō, who during his trip to Okinawa in 1959 was struck with the “complete emptiness” of the sacred groves which he visited and which he described as a “vacant lot” (Ogawa & Ogawa n.d.; see also Okamoto 1996:40f, 164ff).



space, art and homelessness173

Against the administrative view that parks belong to the public (kō) – a view that resonates with the idea that they are gifts from “above” – they try to reconnect the parks to their other and largely forgotten origin as places open to those in need, places more akin to riverbanks and mountain slopes than “gardens”. It is clear that the idea of vacant lot was held in high regard among many of the activists. During one of my visits in the park, I saw a cardboard sign saying “I love vacant lots!” (akichi daisuki!). Asked what they meant by “vacant lot”, several activists replied by bringing up Doraemon, a popular animated television series for children in which the children usually gather to play in a vacant lot in their neighbourhood (Take 2008; N, interview 27 March 2010). Comparing Miyashita Park to a “vacant lot”, Take writes: In this present Heisei era, there is truth in the idea that parks and streets must turn into spaces for aimless play. Places the use of which is undecided, places with no purpose, places where you can just rest without doing anything, places where you can come up with your own ideas of how to play – if such autonomous places cut off from social rules didn’t exist, I think people would go mad. (Take 2008)

Also referring to Miyashita Park, another activist explains that, “I can’t help believing that for every ‘vacant lot’ that is destroyed, one more person will fall into mental illness” (quoted in Amamiya 2010:218). Words like vacant lots or interstices resonate with what I call no-man’slands. The opposition that activists articulate between such spaces and public space appears born out of a discontent with the elitism and exclusionary nature of the mainstream public sphere. When activists use the word “public” we need to recall that to many of them the word has strong connotations of already finished rules that are seen as disadvantageous to weak groups in society. Although such rules can be referred to in appeals to authorities – e.g. when they criticised the lack of transparency in the ward’s deal with Nike Japan, which was struck without open bidding – what they tried to build in the park was something else: a no-man’s-land where nothing was decided in advance and everything was tried out and decided on by the participants themselves. Thirdly, the park transformed into a counter-space after AIR moved in to defend it. With its various activities, puppets, concerts, art workshops and demonstrations, the park now became the very opposite of a quiet backyard, and rather bathed in public light. As such, it differed from noman’s-land, but it also differed from mainstream public space. The point was not just to participate in the public sphere, but to create room for and

174

chapter five

further the spread of autonomous life even at the cost of open conflict. One activist explained that it was a matter of “prefigurative politics”, of creating here and now the ideal society they were striving for (IllCommonz 2010). Instead of merely trying to pressure politicians, they wanted to realize an ideal society or “ideal park” here and now. Artists and passers-by were invited to discuss the park’s future together. New gaily coloured benches and tables were constructed instead of those removed by the park authorities. By using the park in various ways, they tried to show how free and open it could be, and that a park where everyone was welcome was possible. Among the art objects on display along the fence was a large piece of cloth on which someone had painted an “ideal image of the park”. On it is a big verdant park where people sleep under the trees and relax. Next to them are big houses with free rent. On a bridge one sees a father bringing his son to the park, saying: “Come, let’s go to the park. It’s so free!”. That this was a politics of counter-space rather than of mainstream public space was evident in the fact that the occupied park was never treated by the authorities as an arena for legitimate political protest. Activists had to make rounds every morning since they were under constant threat of being evicted. In addition, the fact that the park was officially closed for reconstruction – despite being held physically open through AIR’s occupation – contributed to the sense that it was no longer part of public space. As Kindstrand points out, it had literally been transformed into an indeterminate border space that was neither fully public nor fully private (2010). As a counter-space, the park was balancing precariously in the midst of a contended transition from what had largely been a neglected no-man’s-land used by marginal people into an officially sanctioned public space controlled by authorities and corporations. Can a No-Man’s-Land be Defended? The struggle over Miyashita Park puts the spotlight on the question of what happens when no-man’s-land has to be defended against urban development or gentrification. If it thrives on official neglect, is it possible to defend it through a publicly visible struggle? Once it has been turned into a counter-space, as in the case of Miyashita Park, the unregulated nature of no-man’s-land becomes difficult to uphold. Rules are established and new forms of solidarity tried out under the influence of the struggle. Openness may be compromised and access to the space restricted. Although some activists may still feel loyalty to the idea of no-man’s-land,



space, art and homelessness175

this idea will no longer match the reality of social interaction in the counter-space. As the public spotlight is turned in on the struggle, homeless people mainly interested in surviving may leave, trying to find a no-man’s-land somewhere else to live in. Compared to that in Nagai Park, the role of the homeless villagers was in fact comparatively minor in AIR. Instead activists and artists took centre stage. The dilemma that no-man’s-lands tend to disappear through the very acts that are meant to defend them was never solved by the activists or artists in AIR. Instead, they appear to have arrived at a recognition that certain contradictions were unavoidable. This can be seen in relation to the problem of how to maintain the openness of the park, which was much discussed by the activists. Throughout the occupation, they kept the park open for circulation and use by the general public, and many passers-by continued to pass through it daily on their way to the neighbouring Shibuya Station. In defiance of the ward’s attempt to close the park, a big sign near the entrance announced that “Of course you can walk through”. At the same time, Ogawa admits that there is a limit to how open the park can be. It is part of the “human condition” to be limited by one’s body, since people physically need a place to be in and sleep in. Such bodily limitations are incompatible with the idea of total openness. The activists did not seek a public modelled on that of mainstream society, an abstract arena in which quotidian life with all its bodily and material aspects is relegated to the private sphere and bracketed. By trying to create an arena in which anyone had the right to participate in quotidian doings like eating and sleeping, physical limits were also erected to the openness. As Ogawa says, this is self-contradictory, but at the same time it is an inescapable condition for all human togetherness. The heart of the problem is the contradiction between universal openness and the fact that human beings have a body occupying space. That is a contradiction inherent not only in spaces for the homeless or other public spaces, but in all spaces. (Ogawa 2012)

A similar contradiction existed in relation to rules. Ogawa explains that in Miyashita Park rules emerged in tandem with constant reflection and discussions. This especially concerned relations between men and women in the park, since it was necessary to create a space free of sexual harassment. Asked about the risk that the rules might undermine the openness of vacant lots, he hesitatingly answers: “Vacant lots are not meant to last. Spaces like vacant lots actually exist here and there almost wherever one looks”. In the long run there is perhaps no other way to defend them than to constantly search out and create such spaces anew. But at the same

176

chapter five

time, he recognizes that it would be too facile to simply abandon the park, what they had created there together, and the homeless whose right to live there they were claiming to defend (interview 12 May 2010). As indicated by the centrality of “vacant lot” as a keyword among the artists in AIR, no-man’s-land appears to have been the conception of space they most clearly favoured. However, in the course of the campaign, the idea revealed its vulnerability. While no-man’s-land remained a cherished ideal during AIR’s occupation of the park, the place itself turned into a counter-space for protest and for publicly proclaiming an alternative model for society. Already at that stage, the park had clearly ceased to be a no-man’s-land. Part of the difficulties encountered by the artists and activists in their attempted defence of the park had to do with tension generated as they turned the park into a counter-space. Although the counter-space was greeted with enthusiasm when it came into being, it was difficult to sustain. Thus, disappointed activists pointed out that AIR itself gradually took on a policing function, imposing its own set of rules and procedures on life in the park. This led several activists to drop out of the activities. Some felt they were being excluded or “purged”. Other artists were frustrated by the endless and tiring discussions. Fatigue also set it. By the time the ward authorities moved in to clear the park and close it for construction in September 2010, the wave of enthusiasm and creativity that had characterised the early period of the occupation had already faded (P, interview 10 January 2011; Take, interview 2 August 2011). Just like in the case of Nagai Park, then, the attempt to defend the park by creating a counter-space failed. Apart from the fact that the park was allowed to retain its old name, Miyashita Park, the activists won few concessions from Shibuya ward or from Nike (Hall 2010; Gonoi 2012a:159f). When the renovated park opened in April 2011, it was fully incorporated into the public space of surrounding society as an officially approved part of that space. To a large extent it has today become the “ad for Nike” which activists warned it would be, with the Nike brand featuring prominently in the sport events held in it. Although the park is nominally open to the public – fees only being required for the various facilities within it – it is closed at night and not a welcoming environment for homeless people (Ogawa 2012). Among activists, however, the ideal of no-man’s-land remains as cherished as before. The tenacity of the ideal is evinced by the fact that after the closure of the park in September 2010, the activists on their homepage expressed the hope that in the future the park would again revert to a “vacant lot” (MC Kasurippa 2010).



space, art and homelessness177

Conclusion With the harsher neoliberal climate after the shift to the new millennium, rising poverty and precarity triggered a notable shift towards open protest among freeters. During the same years, authorities who were determined to curb the growth of homeless settlements in the major cities carried out a number of evictions, leading to the disappearance of homeless villages from most parks and riverbanks in central Tokyo and Osaka. The growing tide of freeter activism and the evictions together stimulated a confluence of the freeter and homeless movements, which increasingly started to cooperate. The result was a series of campaigns to defend tent villages by turning them into counter-spaces, as in the case of Nagai Park in 2007 or Miyashita Park in 2010. The creation of these counter-spaces was made possible by the cooperation between freeters, homeless people, artists and activists. This points to a remarkable development since the Shinjuku cardboard village a decade earlier, when the relation between artists and activists was characterised by mutual indifference and lack of cooperation. Today, art appears to have become part of the regular language of the homeless movement. Cultural elements have  become much more consciously integrated as part of the political struggle, and artists are given a more central and recognised role in the movement. As I have shown, it is possible to distinguish two currents in how homeless activism has developed since the Shinjuku cardboard village. To begin with, there are groups – such as Renrakukai or Moyai – that primarily seek to help the homeless to get out of homelessness and readily cooperate with authorities. These groups move within what could broadly be seen as the public sphere, conceiving of the spaces used by the homeless as a public space under the joint responsibility of the state and the citizens. Secondly, and representing a diametrically opposed direction, we find artists in the homeless movement who are more oriented to the idea of no-man’s-land, the latter being idealised not only as a refuge for the homeless, but also as an arena of freedom and creativity for the artists themselves. These artists are also the ones most prepared to defend this no-man’s-land by turning it into a counter-space for spectacular public performances and activities. Thus, in the manifestations of the 246 Conference or AIR, space is not so much used to stage a message aimed at the general public as it is used as zones or pockets for liberated life. In-between these two currents, there are also grassroots groups like Nojiren, which seeks to legitimize homeless life by stressing the right of people to live where they are and pursue alternative forms of survival. In

178

chapter five

putting forth this right in public, they are still aiming for a dialogue with authorities and mainstream society, but compared to groups like Moyai or Renrakukai, Nojiren is far more approving of the idea of space as a noman’s-land necessary for daily living, regardless of its public political function. The differences between these currents stand out clearly when we look at their attitudes to homelessness and their conception of empowerment. The anti-poverty activists in Moyai seek to help the homeless young workers get off the street, the implicit assumption being that homelessness is a negative state from which people need to be rescued. As for empowerment, the emphasis is on furthering solidarity among the homeless, developing skills to pressure authorities and to cooperate pragmatically with them. Nojiren, by contrast, affirms the right of the homeless to live where they are. Empowerment consists of self-management and mutual help, combined with a readiness to protest to stop evictions. The artists of the 246 Conference have a celebratory view of homelessness – close to what I call “viva poverty” – in which homelessness is redefined as an attractive lifestyle. Here empowerment is sought for in the healing achieved by encountering people or nature outside the reach of mainstream society, and by utilising the freedom of “interstices” and “vacant lots” as spaces for alternative economies and alternative lifestyles. It is tempting to understand the distinction between the “anti-poverty” and “viva poverty” currents as articulating an opposition between material and cultural concerns. However, even a brief glance at homeless activism brings out that this is not so. Firstly, in the homeless movement, artists and “cultural activists” have hardly been indifferent to material issues; on the contrary, they often appear to be attracted precisely by the idea of an alternative economy conceived of as taking place in a no-man’s-land beyond bureaucratic control and capitalist property relations. Secondly, it is striking how the cultural forms of activism seems to have sprung up from situations that perhaps more than any other are characterised by acute material needs. What is pursued is not just material security and sustenance, but also a fulfilled life here and now – both at the same time. Finally, it deserves to be stressed again that instead of “fun”, the content of cultural activism in the homeless movement is often pervaded by expressions of grief, trauma, mourning and anger, or – like a mirror image – by stillness, peace and a sensation of healing. Labelling it prefigurative politics is only rarely apt, since what they enact or transmit is hardly a fully formed Utopia or model of a new society. Instead, it often conforms better to the model of a therapeutical politics, in which culture is mobilised to



space, art and homelessness179

express past traumas. Such a culture is expressed in the “shamanic space” of the Shinjuku underground, the dances of the dead in the activities of the 246 Conference, the communitas of defeat in Nagai Park with its grief, selfaccusations and its peace and its healing, and in the liminal space of Miyashita Park, where the eels were pictured as rising vengefully against the urban development project.

CHAPTER SIX

ALTERNATIVE SPACE, WITHDRAWAL AND EMPOWERMENT The rise of youth unemployment and the shift on a mass-scale to flexible, disposable labour in the course of the 1990s in Japan went hand in hand with what appeared to be an increase of groups that experienced themselves as excluded from many of the main arenas of society. I will refer to these groups as subaltern in order to emphasize that they were usually seen as unable to participate fully in society or to make themselves heard effectively in the mainstream public sphere. Among them one finds the mentally ill as well as young people referred to through labels such as futōkō (school refusers), hikikomori (social withdrawers) or nīto (NEET, “Not in Employment, Education, or Training”, i.e. young people not participating in the labour market or undergoing education). The aim of this chapter is to study how social movements have attempted to reach out to and empower these groups and what role alternative space has played in the process of empowerment. As stated earlier, by empowerment I mean the strengthening of people’s self-confidence as political actors – especially the process whereby people who have long felt powerless are made to feel that they have the power to protest and work for meaningful change in society and their own lives. In the introduction I argued that movements engaging in empowerment had to be able to construct alternative discourses to the hegemonic ones. As I will show in this chapter, such an activity also involves questioning the very labels by which young people have been branded as social problems. Alternative space plays a crucial role in enabling the construction of, and the playful experimentation with, such alternative discourses. However, the setting up of alternative spaces can create its own set of dilemmas. To promote the process of empowerment, they need to be “safe” spaces where subalterns and marginal discourses can be sheltered from criticism from mainstream society, but they also need to function as bases for reengaging with mainstream society, often through protest or public confrontation. Between those tasks tensions can arise. A movement that overemphasizes protest risks alienating the subalterns, while one that rests satisfied with providing a “safe” arena will be unlikely to challenge the social order.

182

chapter six

Here I will suggest that a fruitful vantage-point on social movements is to look at how they have handled this difficulty and to what extent they have managed to avoid or mitigate it. Below, I will first briefly introduce social withdrawers and NEET in Japan, two categories of subalternity which I will interpret not as “naturally” existing but as the result of labelling practices that have increasingly become contested by social movements. I then turn to two types of groups that in recent years have engaged in the problems of the empowerment of subalterns – first professional support organisations and then freeter unions in the precarity movement.1 The Social Construction of Social Withdrawers and NEET Much discontent among young Japanese since the 1990s appears to be expressed through withdrawal rather than overt protest. Social withdrawers are mostly young people who withdraw from most forms of social relations and feel unable to return despite apparent physical and mental health. Many live an isolated life in a room in their parental home. The phenomenon of social withdrawal first drew wider attention in the early 1990s, when it became apparent that many children who refused to go to school went on to lead isolated lives as grownups without studying or working. In the late 1990s something of a moral panic evolved around the phenomenon, although evidence regarding its extent was (and still is) rather unreliable, with estimates ranging from 200,000 to more than a million people (cf. Furlong 2008; Hashiguchi 2011:244–247; Horiguchi 2012; Saitō 2005; Shiokura 2002). A term that partially overlaps with that of social withdrawal, NEET, was introduced in 2004 by academics like Kosugi Reiko and Genda Yūji. Although originally an import from the United Kingdom, where the term was used for young unemployed of high-school age who were not studying, the term’s meaning changed significantly in Japan, where it became used for people between 15 and 34 years of age who withdraw from studies and from labour market participation for a protracted period. In Japan estimates of the number of NEET range from 650,000 to 850,000, depending on definition (see Higuchi 2006:51; Inui 2005; Kosugi 2005a; Genda 2005b; Genda & Maganuma 2006:18–22; Toivonen 2012). 1 I draw on interviews with representatives or prominent activists of the various groups conducted 2007–2010 (Tanaka of Awaji Platz, O & Q of New Start, Nishijima & R of New Start Kansai), their publications and, in the case of New Start and New Start Kansai, shortterm participant observation visits in Chiba and Tonda.



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment183

A good, initial point of departure for understanding the emergence of social withdrawers and NEET as social problems in Japan is the social constructivist approach, which has highlighted the role of “claims-makers” such as academics or support organisation leaders in the definition and construction of such problems. Once constructed, social problems are made to serve various interests by being turned into objects of special policies targeting the young or giving rise to new “industries” of therapy and support that colonize the constructed problems. According to this view, support organisations and other actors engaged in these industries do not simply support or empower naturally existing categories of young people, but rather contribute actively to the construction of these categories to serve their own interests (Goodman et al. 2012; Toivonen 2013). I would like to emphasise that I do not see the withdrawal of young people from the labour market or from social life as merely the result of a “discursive” construction. The discourse of social withdrawers and NEET articulates a real malaise with roots in the increasing precarity in the 1990s which may have furnished “claims-makers” with fertile soil for their claims but which was not itself a mere construction. The constructivist approach is most fruitfully applied in a cautious way that recognises that an underlying malaise existed that was linked to the problem of work. Some central “claims-makers” themselves acknowledged this connection to underlying economic factors. Saitō Tamaki, for instance – one of the psychiatrists most responsible for popularising the label “social withdrawer” – points out that social withdrawal occurs against the background of a precarious economy in which practically no-one feels like a “winner” (kachigumi) (Saitō 2005:14). The connection between precarity and withdrawal was also stressed by other researchers. Aoki Hideo (2006:91), an expert on homelessness in Japan, points out that in Japan, many young people who would have become homeless in other countries end up protected by their families, and suggests that this family-sponsored “Japanese style welfare” is the reason why the number of homeless people in Japan is so comparatively low in international perspective. Withdrawal and homelessness can thus be understood as twin processes generated by the same underlying factors. Withdrawers, moreover, face a real risk of homelessness once their parents are no longer able to support them. Regardless of whether they become homeless or not, the grim reality awaiting most withdrawers is that they will remain poor for the rest of their lives – even if they find their way back to some form of employment, it will likely be of the low-paid and precarious kind (Imaizumi 2009; Tachibanaki 2006:144).

184

chapter six

Despite the good intentions of some scholars, the overall result of the construction of “problem youth” categories has been to reify particular social groups that become identified as the source of social problems. Whether one looks at official support measures for withdrawers and NEET or at the various support groups that have emerged, by far the most predominant aim has been to encourage the withdrawers to “return to society” (shakai fukki). In this perspective, mainstream society escapes criticism. Instead, the youth are one-sidedly called upon to re-adapt. Although the introduction of the term NEET shifted the emphasis in the debate on withdrawal from the restoration of social relations towards the problem of work, the problem continued to be framed as a matter of how to encourage or induce young people to return to work. The construction of labels has thus de facto functioned as a way to deflect criticism from mainstream society. Ironically, the very strength of this hegemonic discourse, according to which mainstream society is never to be blamed, may be part of what causes the phenomenon of withdrawal. Withdrawal often goes hand in hand with strong negative self-feelings and a tendency for the withdrawn to shoulder the blame for their predicament themselves (Hommerich 2012:214). This dovetails with the common observation that withdrawers and NEET are usually not deviants from mainstream society when it comes to values – many hold on to the valorisation of a lifestyle in which men are breadwinners with full-time employment. Although unable to participate in the labour market, they often still wish for a job and identify with the idea that a (male) person ought to work. It has been suggested that this very adherence to mainstream hegemonic values is what causes shame and withdrawal once they experience a setback. In this sense, withdrawal is far from an intentional protest against or “exodus” from mainstream society (e.g. Nishijima 2006; Ueyama 2001:151). The social construction of youth problems, then, is part of a larger discursive struggle that has landed many young people in a situation in which they face great difficulties in articulating the pain of their setbacks in any language but that of the hegemonic discourse. In that sense, an important part of the background of withdrawal is the weakening of the oppositional discourses that still existed in the 1960s which has created a situation in which the salaryman lifestyle has come to appear as a natural life-choice to many Japanese. When this lifestyle became unattainable for an increasing number of young people during the 1990s, the lingering identification with hegemonic values meant that many young people would react with withdrawal rather than open protest.



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment185

The Discursive Counter-Attack of Social Movements If social withdrawal is rooted in the abovementioned economic and discursive factors, then counteracting it would appear to require finding solutions to problems such as how to create an economy that generates less anxiety and how to promote values that are alternative to the hegemonic ones. As mentioned, however, the basic stance of official support systems as well as the majority of support groups has been to promote a readaptation to society of the young withdrawers. This stance has become increasingly contested. Toivonen (2013) points out that despite the official aims, some official programmes entrusted to support organisations – such as the Youth Independence Camps and Youth Support Stations – in practice come to function in ways that furthered the development of empowering practices at odds with official intentions. A more explicit rejection of official goals can be found among some social critics and researchers, as well as some support organisations, who have argued that society too is at fault. If withdrawal is a reaction to dysfunctions in mainstream society, then sending the youth back to social life is no solution. To genuinely deal with the problem, the dysfunctions in mainstream society themselves would first have to be rectified. Ironically, support organisations that have adopted this stance have found themselves forced to wage a battle on two fronts – working therapeutically with withdrawn youth on the one hand and pushing for social change on the other. These two tasks have by no means been easy to reconcile, as I will show. Some social movement groups aspiring to empower subaltern groups have adopted a more radical approach – namely that of questioning and challenging the very labels used to designate the “problem youth” and the hegemonic values imbuing them. In this way, they contest the very construction of social problems. Being less dependent on institutional ties to policy-makers than most support organisations, these social movement groups are also less inclined to accept the categories of withdrawal and NEET as “natural” and instead attempt to destabilise them through new coinages like the precariat, which are harder for policy-makers to recuperate. While these alternative labels are not more natural than the official ones, they serve the purpose of empowerment since they relativise the hegemonic discourse. Another strategy used to subvert the official “problem youth” labels is by polemically affirming them, as I will show in the case of NEETopia below. The empowerment that these social movement actors work for, then, is not empowerment in the narrow sense of a psychological recovery that enables young people to return to a “normal” life

186

chapter six

in society. It is first and foremost a readjustment in discourse that provides a liberation from hegemonic labelling and from the negative feelings associated with it. Even so, however, the negative feelings can be deep-rooted among subalterns. These social movement groups too have often found themselves split between activities oriented to supporting subalterns and activities oriented to confrontation with authorities. As I will show, the difficulty of integrating these two types of activity is reflected in the character of the alternative spaces they set up. The Functions of Alternative Space I will now turn to alternative spaces intentionally created by social movements for the purposes of empowerment. A particular tension often characterises such spaces since they usually need to function both as spaces for shelter from mainstream society and as bases for agitation and movement activism. One way to bring this tension into view is through Nancy Fraser’s (1992) concept of “subaltern counterpublics”. As she points out, disadvantaged groups, such as women, gays or lesbians, ethnic minorities or the working class, have often felt the need to establish discursive arenas sheltered from the mainstream public sphere where their stigmatisation can be shared, exposed and discussed without fear of discrimination. She also points out that such counterpublics never remain mere enclaves. They possess a “dual character”: “On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (Fraser 1992:124). Ultimately, they therefore return to the mainstream public and “help expand discursive space” by bringing stigmatisation out into the open, protesting against discrimination and insisting on their right to public visibility. The dialectical relation Fraser detects between the mainstream public and the subaltern counterpublics is important. The characteristic motion she describes – withdrawal followed by a return to the mainstream public  – is propelled by the tension between the mainstream public’s democratic semblance on the one hand and the real continuing exclusion on the other. Through this dialectical process the mainstream public is continually challenged in the name of its own ideals and forced to become more inclusive. What we see here is the use by oppositional groups of partial exit from the public in order to secure a sanctuary or breathing space outside mainstream society where they take the first steps towards



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment187

empowerment,­before returning to the public in order to transform and expand it through voice.2 Figure 1 clarifies the dual character of counterpublics. Social movements that aspire to empowering subaltern groups cannot confine themselves to operating within the mainstream public sphere (A). Instead they need to establish a counterpublic or alternative space (C), which is open to the participation of subaltern groups (B). The arrows in the figure are meant to give a sense of the overall direction of the movement suggested by Fraser: the subalterns are people who have withdrawn from the mainstream public because of experiences of exclusion or inability to participate meaningfully (the movement from A to B). Their road to empowerment may start by gaining access to alternative spaces (the movement from B to C), but empowerment in a more emphatic sense requires that they learn to confront the dominant discourses in the mainstream public through protest or other activities aiming at social change (the movement from C to A). The activities of social movements, then, are B. Space of withdrawal

A. Mainstream public sphere

C. Alternative space (space for counterpublics)

Figure 1. The dual orientation of alternative space.

2 The terms exit and voice are derived from Hirschman (1970).

188

chapter six

not exhausted in challenges and confrontations directed at the ills of surrounding society. The more people react to setbacks and frustrations by withdrawing into a world of experienced powerlessness, the more movements need engage in setting up alternative space in order to address the task of empowering such groups. Like Fraser’s counterpublics – but unlike spaces that remain mere “safe spaces” (Gamson 1996) – what I call alternative spaces are not necessarily mere spaces of withdrawal that must be protected from outside society. What is crucial is that they are not felt to induce a sense of powerlessness. Alternative spaces can thus be created in public in moments when mainstream society is felt to shed at least part of its oppressive features, for instance on the street during a successful demonstration. This means that they are not necessarily tied to a particular physical place. Although they usually need distance from the mainstream public in order to thrive, the distance can be closed. In fact, it is often a sign of successful empowerment that subaltern groups return to the mainstream areas of society and manage to at least temporarily experience them as liberated or nonoppressive space (see Cassegård 2012). Figure 1 suggests three important tasks for movements engaging in empowerment. The first is to provide a sheltered space for subordinated people where they are no longer subordinated and which also offers an alternative to confinement in a purely private life. The second is the strengthening and consolidation of the alternative spaces themselves (for instance by building up contacts and skills, broadening the range of activities in the space, or experimenting with various forms of participatory democracy). A third task is to provide people with the experience of protesting or in other ways working for meaningful changes in society and their own lives. Between these tasks, however, conflicts can arise. A recurring source of tension in alternative spaces is that providing shelters for the subaltern has often required abstract forms of interaction, while protesting or working for social change require concrete ones. By abstraction I mean the process whereby one systematically brackets one or several aspects of the given social reality, while concretion stands for the process whereby such aspects are attended to and allowed to guide interaction. Simmel’s (1997) discussion of the sociability of bourgeois salons is a good illustration of bracketing. The interaction here is playful since participants engage in interaction for its own sake, while disregarding the material interests or personal problems that burden it in everyday life. As Simmel points out, such interaction has a “democratic” character since all participants, within



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment189

certain boundaries, behave as if they were equal. In that way, they create an artificial environment in relation to which individuals no longer appear powerless or like a “negligible quantity” (as Simmel once described the individual’s self-experience in modern society). A sensation of pleasurable lightness and freedom from the burdens of everyday life is created through a bracketing of social reality. Such bracketing can be used to provide relief for subalterns. However, Simmel’s discussion also demonstrates the limits to how far abstract interaction can contribute to empowerment. The “democratic” semblance is fragile since the “realities” of social life are never wholly forgotten even in salons (Simmel 1997:124f). At most this playful form of interaction offers a partial and temporary refuge. Even more problematically, while bracketing creates a democratic semblance, it also prevents real inequalities in status, power and wealth from being challenged. An antidote to the feeling of powerlessness seems to require some form of acting back on the surrounding society, and this engagement in turn requires concretion, i.e. giving attention to aspects previously bracketed. However, the turn towards concretion is a risky process. If it occurs too abruptly there is a risk of alienating those who have sought refuge in alternative space from the experience of marginalisation. New exclusions, this time from alternative space itself, can occur if activities revive painful memories, bring about renewed setbacks, or create new hierarchies. As I will discuss later, this element of heaviness can appear even in activities that are superficially playful, like street parties or free concerts, and make subalterns reluctant to join them. A fruitful vantage point on social movements is to look at how they relate to the difficulty of balancing abstract and concrete forms of interaction against each other. The question of how movements have handled shifts between the tasks of alternative space and possible tensions between them has seldom been treated in previous research.3 To shed light on it, I now turn to support organisations for social withdrawers and NEET. 3 Fraser never problematizes how subaltern counterpublics shift between “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” and “bases and training grounds for agitational activities”. The same goes for much other research devoted to counterpublics or alternative publics. For instance, Haine (1996:234ff) points out that the “proletarian public” of Parisian working class cafés in the nineteenth century functioned in three ways – as “scene”, “refuge” and “incubator of revolts” – and Squires (2002) likewise observes that “enclave” and “satellite” publics that maintain distance to the mainstream public may be transformed into “counterpublics” that polemically engage in debate with dominant publics. However, none of these scholars pay much attention to how movements or activists handle the transitions between these functions or the conflicts that can accompany them. In the literature on

190

chapter six Support Groups for Social Withdrawers and NEET

Support groups for social withdrawers became popular during the 1990s and exist in a wide variety of forms, some being authoritarian and fond of disciplinary methods while others are more accepting and accommodating (Furlong 2008:317f; Miller & Toivonen 2010). Here I will turn to three of the more accommodating support groups. They all try to provide alternative spaces where withdrawn young people can practise human interaction while recovering and find shelter from the pressures of mainstream society. Even among the accommodating groups, however, there are important differences. As the sociologist Higuchi Akihiko points out, most of them aim at returning their clients to society, i.e. sending them back to work or studies in mainstream society, whereas others are animated by the idea of finding a place to work outside the company or mainstream economy (Higuchi 2005). Awaji Platz exemplifies the former direction, New Start and New Start Kansai the latter. Awaji Platz Awaji Platz (founded in 1992) is a support organisation for withdrawers and NEET in Osaka. Its goal is to “return” its clients to mainstream society. It is interesting because of its explicit experimentation with the role of alternative spaces – which it calls “free spaces” – in the process of recovery. Its primary method of helping withdrawers consists of offering a place outside the family and company where withdrawers can “commute without anxiety and expand their experiences of life through building human relations” (Awaji Platz n.d.). There they can be sheltered from criticism and pressure and engage in social activities. Among the activities are sport, study, cooking, camping, travel and preparatory job training. Originally Awaji Platz adopted what they called a model of “waiting”, simply providing a space where young withdrawers could form human ‘free’, ‘safe’ or ‘unpatrolled’ spaces, one strand of research emphasizes the importance of ‘free’ or ‘safe’ spaces as shelters, but tends to downplay their role as the basis for public protest (Gamson 1996). Another strand focuses on the strategic benefits of such space for oppositional movements, but tends to give little consideration to how such spaces may function as shelters for people who are still in the process of recovery (Scott 1990; Tilly 2000). Even scholars who pay attention to both of these functions and to conflicts that may accompany shifts between them tend to focus on factors internal to the ‘free space’, viewing empowerment as having little to do with what happens when activists venture outside the movement network to interact with mainstream society (Evans & Boyte 1992; Polletta 1999).



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment191

relations at a pace suited to them. During the first years, they made the painful discovery that almost none of their clients managed to return to society. Instead they had withdrawn into free space itself (Hasei et al. 2005:4f, 21–25). From around 1997, Awaji Platz therefore changed track. Realising that the return to society was a two-stage process, involving not only leaving home for free space but also leaving the free space for the surrounding mainstream society, they intensified efforts to “push out” their clients into society. Concretely this meant making it clear that Awaji Platz was only a passing-through station. They imposed a time limit of at most two years for their clients, and initiated programmes of workplace practice (at places like restaurants or apple farms) to facilitate getting back to society. This turn-around in the organisation’s method was controversial and some parents protested against the course change. Subsequently, Awaji Platz modified its stance again and started to emphasize the need for “support suited to each and each”. The individual needed to be supported “through a plurality of organisations”. It was detrimental to rely on just one organisation and troubles could be minimised by combining them in a network, so that spending time in a free space like Awaji Platz was combined with, say, participation in a self-help group or seeking help with a therapist (ibid. 19, 24–32; Shiokura 2002:124ff). The present director, Tanaka Toshihide, believes that this latter reorientation was largely correct. Recovery is a two-step process, “waiting” being a sound method in the first stage while “pushing out” may be necessary later (Hasei et al. 2005:8). Awaji Platz has thus focused on returning withdrawers to work in mainstream society, although the methods for achieving this goal have varied. The absence of criticism of mainstream society goes hand in hand with an affirmative attitude to political authorities, with which Awaji Platz work closely. Awaji Platz is thus entrusted with the “NEET support” programme of Osaka Prefecture and offers trial jobs adapted to NEET as part of the “employment support” (shūrō shien) offered by Osaka City (Tanaka, interview 31 July 2007). In Awaji Platz, then, spending time in free space or doing volunteer work is only a stop on the way, not an alternative lifestyle in its own right. Logically, however, an alternative solution to the difficulty that clients tend to withdraw into free space might be to expand the free space into a more comprehensive alternative society, in which people would be able to live more permanently and which might serve as a model for the larger mainstream society. This idea of developing alternative arenas plays an important role in New Start and New Start Kansai.

192

chapter six

The Sibling Organisations New Start and New Start Kansai I now turn to two support organisations – New Start in Chiba and New Start Kansai in Tonda outside Osaka (established in 1993 and 1998 respectively). Both provide help and support to social withdrawers and NEET. Their aim is not simply to “return” the clients to society. Both organisations emphasize that the problems of withdrawers cannot be solved within the family alone and that what matters is the creation of new social ties and a circle of friends outside the family (see Futagami 2005; Nishijima 2007). When they are contacted by parents, they visit the homes of the withdrawers, try to build up a relationship of trust and to persuade them to move to a residential facility (Kawakami 2007). Once at the facility, the withdrawers get accustomed to interacting with others and to performing simple tasks like cooking, cleaning and laundry. After around three months, they get their first “work experience” – for instance at a café, a day service centre or some other external workplace, like a bakery or hospice. No coercion is used and the withdrawer can go through the stages at his or her own pace. New Start founder Futagami Nōki states that on average it takes one year and three months until they “graduate” by finding a job or commencing to study and quit life at the dormitory (Futagami 2005:137ff, 166; Sawaji 2007:8; O, interview 11 July 2007). However, the ultimate aim of support activism is not the re-adaption of subalterns to existing society. Compared to other support organisations in Japan, New Start and New Start Kansai stand out by their relatively radical vision of an alternative society where the demands for efficiency, profit and growth are downplayed. Such a society would be close to the “slow life” ideal advocated by the activist and anthropologist Tsuji Shin’ichi and it would also be “communist” in the sense that each would contribute according to ability and receive according to need, Futagami writes (2005:208ff).4 Neither of the two organisations engages in open confrontations to bring about a realisation of this vision.5 Instead both engage forcefully in the construction and expansion of alternative space. In the case of New Start in Chiba this takes place in comparatively large-scale projects 4 The slow-movement first emerged in 1999, when Tsuji and others founded the Sloth Club (Namakemono kurabu). It recognizes that the stress and anxiety in today’s society are rooted in global capitalism and tries to spread a slow and environment-friendly lifestyle which, it argues, will also feel good to human beings (Tsuji 2001). 5 There are, however, examples of clients in these organisations who have become activists on an individual basis (cf. Ueyama 2001, interview with Q 7 August 2007).



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment193

made possible through the cooperation both with local authorities and government­ministries. Apart from its extensive facilities in Gyōtoku in Chiba, New Start has established a “mixed welfare village” (zakkyo fukushimura) with the help of the local authorities of Togane City in Chiba Prefecture. Here it is hoped that social withdrawers will be given work experience and opportunities to earn their own money. The “village” is meant to be a place for “a more human, slow way of living” where people will enjoy a simple life and withdrawers can work at a leisurely pace with taking care of the elderly or with farming. Futagami envisions a web of horizontal relations of mutual help between withdrawers, elderly, disabled and children in which the distinction between those who provide service and those who receive it will melt away (Futagami 2005:206–213, 2006; Sawaji 2007). Futagami emphasises that the village is not only a therapeutical station for withdrawers, but a model for a better society. He says that he often tells the withdrawers: What we’re doing here is not just for you. We’re creating a model here that we’ll take out and promote within society as a whole […]. The kind of integrated welfare community we’re building at Gyoutoku is something we’d like to establish throughout Japan, throughout the world. (Asano & Futagami 2006)

Despite this system-critical orientation, New Start is not confrontational in its stance. As seen above, it works closely with authorities, and has no qualms about experimenting with capitalist organisational forms, such as setting up joint stock companies (Slow Work Ltd, established in 2005) or toying with the idea of establishing an alternative microfinance bank. This is also why “Q”, who works at New Start in Chiba, is dissatisfied with the group. New Start, he explains, works “within the confines of a society which is taking on an increasingly neoliberal hue” and “does not at all see the gap between wealthy and poor as a problem and makes no demands for redistribution” (Q, mail interview 3 August 2007). By contrast, the sibling organisation New Start Kansai, based in Tonda outside Osaka, is explicitly critical of capitalism and cooperation with authorities. It shares New Start’s basic approach of bringing the withdrawers out of the family and getting them accustomed to social life through life in dormitories and work experience, but differs through its interest in workers’ collectives and taking part in a broader movement against neoliberalism (interviews with Nishijima 18 July 2007 and R, staff of New Start Kansai 6 July 2007). It has also chosen a different way to create alternative space. Being a smaller organisation with fewer resources than its sibling organisation in

194

chapter six

Chiba, and more negative to cooperation with authorities, it has poured its efforts into setting up a complex cooperative network with other organisations in the Kansai area, several of which have been established by New Start Kansai itself. Through this network, the group has become involved with the social movement scene in Kansai and has also developed ties to freeter activists in the precarity movement. Most important of its partners in this network is the NPO Slow Work, which was founded by New Start Kansai in 2002 (under the name New Start Workers). The two organisations work in close symbiosis. While New Start Kansai concentrates on the daily running of support activities for withdrawers, Slow Work focuses on the task of propagating an “alternative form of work” and bringing about a general change of values through events and publications. Slow Work is openly system-critical and describes itself as an “alternative labour movement” working not only for withdrawers but striving for the liberation of all labour. On its homepage, the organisation explains that slow work does not simply mean to work at a slow pace. It also implies a rejection of work mediated through the market as a “labour force commodity” (Slow Work n.d.). Concretely, what is needed for change is: the establishment of “direct participatory” management in the style of cooperatives, the establishment of an economic system of circulation through local currencies, company evaluation through CSR/SRI [Corporate Social Responsibility/Socially Responsible Investment], the transformation of com­ munity business into work for the public good through outsider-evaluation, a reform of finance though a merger of civic finance and local currencies […] (ibid.)

In Slow Work, then, withdrawers are pictured as embodying the “alienated” existence in capitalist society in general, i.e. as representing the condition of all workers. In 2002 New Start Kansai established another organisation, the Workers Collective Support Centre, to support the creation of worker collectives among the staff as well as among the young clients who were given work experience in the cafés and shops of the network. New Start Kansai also took part in the founding of two local currency systems, Kyoto LETS (2001) and Osaka LETS (2002), the idea being that participating in such economic systems might help social withdrawers discover a way back to social life.6 6 The idea of LETS (Local Economic Trading Systems) was initiated by Michael Linton in Canada in 1982 and gained popularity in Japan in the late 1990s. LETS resembles a system of reciprocal gifts, since the currency is freely issued by the purchaser at the time of



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment195

Since capitalism was an important source of the stress felt by withdrawers, it was hoped that a state of “multiple belonging” to several economic arenas would relieve people of having their self-worth hinge solely on achievements in the mainstream capitalist economy (Ueyama 2000). In this network of groups, alternative cafés also play a conspicuous role. Most well known is Café Commons, established by Slow Work in 2005. It is an ecologically oriented café staffed mostly by young clients that also functions as an event space for concerts, LETS markets, study circles, talks with invited activists and academics, and other activities. Since 2006 Slow Work also runs another café and a small shop, called Utataneya and Kameyan respectively, in a nearby hospital and uses them as work and management training for its clients (Miyaji 2006). Another café with which New Start Kansai had no official ties but with which several of its staff or activists were engaged was the small Café Taiyō 2, located in an apartment in Osaka. It was run for nearly two years 2005–2006 by the sociologist Watanabe Futoshi who nowadays holds regular events and meetings – known as “Commons University” – at Café Commons. A friend who helped him set up the café was Takahashi Atsutoshi, one of the core activists in New Start Kansai and Slow Work, today the keeper of Café Commons and coordinator of Osaka LETS (Watanabe 2006, 2012:171–183). Both Watanabe and Takahashi were engaged in starting up the annual NEETopia held at Café Commons, an event with a flavour reminiscent of the cultural manifestations in freeter activism. The event has been held since 2010 on NEET Day (10 February, “two” and “ten” being pronounced as nīto, or NEET, in Japanese). On the occasion of the first NEETopia, Takahashi’s “NEETopia manifesto” (Nītopia sengen) was read out aloud. It is characterised by a subversive humour that is rarely found in support groups. The idea that NEET are a cost to society and that they should be made to go back to work is ridiculed. Playfully, the text argues that it is because the NEET don’t work that others are able to get by – namely by lessening the competition (Takahashi 2012; Watanabe Futoshi 2012:183–186). A band that often performs at NEETopia and other events at the café is “Nīto wa jazz” (NEET is jazz), which is composed of self-proclaimed NEET. Here they are quoted on a leaflet announcing their performance at the café in August 2009: buying. As soon as a transaction is made, the amount is subtracted from the account of the seller and added to the account of the buyer. The seller thus immediately gets his or her money, while the minus post of the buyer represents his or her debt to the LETS-community.

196

chapter six NEET!! (Proletariat!!) [Musankaikyū] NEET is jazz NEET is jazz NEET is jazz Today you don’t want to go to work. Such times you too are a NEET. Niniini, nininiini, nininiinii Niniini, nininini, ninniiniini Today you went to work Even so, you’re a NEET NEET is jazz NEET is jazz NEET is jazz

Glossing the word NEET as musankaikyū (literally the non-propertied class), an old Japanese term for proletariat, the concept of NEET is stretched to include all those who work but don’t like working. The band also issued a “Manifesto for NEET’s tomorrow” in which the “NEET revolution” is announced. The world is called upon to show gratitude to the NEET for not working by paying them money (Nīto no ashita 2009) – a demand which sounds like an echo of the Italian autonomia movement’s demand for wages to the unemployed. One of the band’s songs urges everyone to become NEET, in particular the police. The playfulness of these texts notwithstanding, there is a serious undertone to the rhetoric, namely what seems to be a deliberately provocative affirmation of NEET-hood which is significantly more radical than the official stance of New Start Kansai, since it clearly rejects the idea that NEET are victims in need of support measures. Instead, NEET-hood is affirmed as a preferred condition in a gesture similar to the autonomia movement’s “refusal to work”. At the same time, the provocative humour of the NEETopia coexists with more sombre considerations among its arrangers. Watanabe suggests that it is because of the despair felt by many subalterns that the humour and lightness is necessary. In a society where countless people meet their death daily, the standpoint I want to assert strongly is that life must be prioritised over work. That is the ethical kernel of NEETopia. (Watanabe Futoshi 2012:193)

The aim of NEETopia is thus not to assert that so-called NEET are already fully empowered and able to voluntarily reject mainstream society from a position of strength. Instead the event is staged as a struggle against



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment197

the hegemonic powers in society that “make us reject weakness” and that “prevent us from complaining when we feel exhausted or anxious” (ibid. 192). Remaining Problems New Start Kansai’s network building strategy appears to have brought it several benefits. One is that it has facilitated a division of tasks. New Start Kansai has been able to focus on practical activities for supporting individual withdrawers, delegating the task of social criticism and propagating for social change to Slow Work and other groups. Another benefit of the network is that clients are provided with access to a plurality of interlinked alternative spaces with varying degrees of public visibility. The network includes labour movement groups as well as independent cafés that cater to the general public. It thus provides not only shelters, but also pathways that clients can flexibly try out in order to find activities that suit their present needs. The possibility of travelling through the network gives them the possibility of regulating their process of recovery by sometimes opting for more abstract and sometimes more concrete forms of interaction. However, the question is to what extent the clients of New Start Kansai make use of this network. Higuchi Akihiko points to an important limitation of the “Slow Work-like” idea of finding a place for alternative forms of work, namely that such places are still in their infancy (Higuchi 2005). Until such alternative arenas have expanded sufficiently, New Start and New Start Kansai have to vacillate between advocating alternatives on a rhetorical level while settling for a “return to society” of its clients in practice. A second problem is that subalterns can feel excluded from the more extrovert and politically flavoured activities of the NEETopia type. A withdrawer who writes under the name Umeten criticises the activists who hope that festive performances and sound-demos will be able to mobilize and empower withdrawers. There is no hope in the “practice of performance art”, he writes, for people “like me, with the ‘handicap’ of not being able to feel solidarity”. I can’t imagine the sight of social withdrawers, freeters, working poor, unemployed, or people on welfare hurrying to get out in public to do some special sort of performance. […] I can’t help thinking: how about those who can’t gather? […] Both humour and laughter are difficult tasks. How about those who can’t laugh? (Umeten 2012)

198

chapter six

Umeten is equally critical of older groups like Dameren. The people in Dameren, he feels, “were hardly ‘no good’ since they were able to associate”. He also criticizes the alternative space of “Commons University”, which he has attended several times. Talking of love and humour to someone like me, who couldn’t care less if I were dead, is talking to deaf ears. People with a replete “real life” (ria-jū) sometimes come to Commons University, making my time there nothing but pain. It is said to be open, but in my mind Commons University is a place for suffering precisely because it is too open. Such people are filled only with themselves and don’t think of others. (Umeten 2012)

Just like Dameren’s gathering place Akane, “Commons University” was experienced by people such as Umeten as in need of more protective bracketing, in order to create a more abstract space. A third, related problem is that clients seldom share the activists’ desire to change society. This is hardly surprising considering that many clients hail from middle-class families and often appear to identify strongly with mainstream values. Nishijima Akira, chairman of New Start Kansai, clarifies in an interview that few youngsters receiving support are interested in activism. Even if they “try to explain about society to them”, they rarely change their basic values and “still want to become salarymen”. The fact that the clients are often unreceptive to the vision of an alternative form of work accentuates the gap that exists between activists and subalterns in New Start Kansai.7 To be sure, some former withdrawers are part of the staff and help bridge this gap. Sharing the experience of withdrawal with the young inmates, they find it easy to make friends with them (Nishijima, interview 18 July 2007). Despite this, the interaction in the network is still largely structured by the division between those who provide and those who receive support. To be sure, during their stay at New Start Kansai, the young clients become more able to verbalize their own situation, but this ability is not necessarily tied to a critical stance towards society and rarely turns them into activists. What in practice counts as a successful treatment is that they feel able to leave the organisation to start looking for work or to study. Nishijima is aware that no fundamental problem is solved by sending withdrawers back to society in its present state, and that is why they also work for social change through Slow Work (ibid.). Until such change is achieved, then, a gap will remain between the vision about an 7 This gap is discussed in Ueyama 2001 and in several interviews with activists, e.g. R 6 July 2007, Q 7 August 2007.



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment199

alternative society and the treatment of clients which in practice is oriented towards returning them to society. The contradictions of empowerment as a process to be achieved under the guidance of support organisations can be illustrated through the lifestory of Ueyama Kazuki, a former withdrawer who is nowadays much engaged in the debate on social withdrawal. Many withdrawers, he states, live a “traumatised” and “wounded” life and have given up all hope of influencing their situation through communication (Ueyama 2001:53, 164, 199f). His first important step towards recovery was his “coming out” as a withdrawer at a meeting in Osaka in 2000. “I had said it. That’s how it felt. Finally, I had said it, in public… In those five minutes, all the cogwheels started to change” (ibid. 108). This became the occasion for getting engaged in support activities in New Start Kansai. Soon, however, he became embroiled in tensions and quarrels with what he described as the “Zenkyōtō generation of Leftist old men” and this lead to his break with the organisation. Rather than the support group, he claims that what helped him was meeting people who needed him (ibid. 115–121, 157). Today he repeatedly stresses that political struggle and activism is an integral part in recovery. The “task of support for withdrawers is not to enable them to ‘return to society’, but to enable them to become ‘subjects of political negotiation’” (ibid. 2006). To him recovery crucially hinges on the possibility of reappropriating “voice” and thereby reconnecting to society. Reconnecting to society does not have to mean employment, but can happen in the form of social activism – by doing things like helping other withdrawers and working for spreading awareness of their problems. In his account, then, trauma and politics hang together. Trauma is to have experiences one no longer hopes being able to transmit to others, while politics is the recovery of voice. Here it is important to note that his advocacy of politics does not entail an endorsement of any existing social movement or social vision. He is clearly uncomfortable with what he refers to as the “Leftist old men”. Behind this is the legacy of the old protest movements, which he claims has left behind a strong sense that “doing something collectively is unappealing and bad”. What are needed are new forms of activism for people who “cannot get used to collectives” and a “solidarity that is not leftist in a bad sense” (ibid. 2005). To summarise, both New Start and New Start Kansai actively encourage the empowerment of subalterns by letting them spend time in alternative spaces and making it possible for them to engage in volunteer work and creative activities. In New Start Kansai these alternative spaces take an

200

chapter six

innovative form that enables the organisation to connect up with freeter activists, alternative economies or groups engaged in labour issues. The support for subalterns is in other words not only provided by individual organisations but also by the possibility of “travelling” within the network in order to regulate the degree of human interaction. Cafés are important nodes in this network, partly because they provide a place for activities and partly because they offer the possibility of interaction with outsiders in areas free from the pressures of family or work. These opportunities often come during the well-attended events held at the cafés, such as concerts or talks, when the atmosphere is playful and festive. To the general public, they serve as possible entry-points into the network, which may be easier to approach than the formal organisations in the network. Problems, however, remain since the arenas for alternative life are still limited, since the social vision of activists does not always match the orientations of the clients. Freeter Unions: Narratives of Recovery In the precarity movement, an often expressed ideal is that of a broad solidarity between freeters in a narrow sense and groups such as NEET, social withdrawers, and homeless – a solidarity thought to be necessary since these groups are all victims of the precarisation of work (e.g. Ichino 2006; Ikuta 2007; Sugita 2005:27ff). Although in reality, withdrawers have seldom participated in social movement activism, the call for a solidarity of subalterns is not wholly without substance. By looking at cases where subalterns have turned to freeter unions, I will argue that such unions sometimes play a crucial role in empowerment processes by providing opportunities for social criticism and confrontational activities that are felt to be lacking in support organisations. How have freeter unions been working with empowerment and what is it more specifically that encourages subaltern groups to participate in the precarity movement and gives them confidence to protest? Is there not a risk that they will be even more excluded and marginalised in activist organisations than in support organisations? Looking into these questions will also illuminate how freeter unions work with empowerment more generally – not only of withdrawers but also of freeters and the “precariat” more generally. What stands out is that unions usually work for empowerment both by providing sheltered spaces and by offering the opportunity to “retaliate” on society by public protest.



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment201

Providing Shelters Many freeter unions emphasise that providing a place for people to be together (ibasho) is one of their important tasks. Such spaces are usually conceived of as sanctuaries offering relief from the evaluations of mainstream society. As one activist says, it is necessary to have a “place where it is possible to say: it is not my fault” (quoted in Amamiya 2007a:204). One example of a union that has put particular emphasis on developing such spaces is Union Bochibochi. Emphasising that it welcomes unemployed, NEET and social withdrawers, it concentrates as much on constructing spaces for being together as on disputes with employers (Hashiguchi 2011:92–95). Such spaces are seen as being not only for withdrawers, but for all union members. Creating the union was motivated by the need for freeters to find a place of their own, to meet and exchange experiences and share problems. Nakamura Ken reports that when starting up the union, many participants had expressed relief at discovering that they were not alone and at finding a place where it was possible for them to talk about their anxieties. “There’s no place for me to express my complaints or worries”, was a typical lament (Nakamura 2006:49). The union’s inauguration manifesto, issued in 2006, similarly stresses the need for freeters to have a place to talk to each other. “We lack a space to tell each other about our suffering. We lack words to explain why we feel so irritated” (ibid. 50f). Finding such words, the document implies, is a prior task that needs to precede traditional union activities like confronting employers. Even if we try to talk of the world seen from our horizon, no one listens or other words are substituted for ours. Instead, it is society that is one-sidedly surveying us and talking about us, with words like “freeters” or “NEET” […]. We start the Union Bochibochi to become subjects again, to weave our own words. (ibid. 50f).

Here we can note, firstly, that the freeters who started up the union themselves appear to have felt like subalterns, lacking the communicative resources needed to participate fully in the mainstream public sphere. Secondly, the task of the union is explicitly described as constructing alternative discourses capable of challenging the hegemonic ones and putting words on the members’ sufferings. The example of Bochibochi shows that the motivation behind the freeter unions can be strongly interwoven with the attempt to create an environment that is welcoming to subalterns. Hashiguchi Shōji, a sociologist who is also a member of the union, suggests that one way in which freeter unions

202

chapter six

have adapted to the needs of the subaltern­is their loose organisational form. It is by adjusting to the “dislike of organisation” of many young people that unions are able to retain them as members (Hashiguchi 2011:156). Thus the unions never insist that members participate in their activities or identify strongly with the union. Abstract arenas are constructed in which “members who are absent” are as respected as those who participate. Some unions manage to make members stay even though the unions do not necessarily function very well as spaces for being physically together. Based on his interviews with members, Hashiguchi argues that those who are absent still find “meaning” in the connection (tsunagari) to the union, some stating that even if they shrink back from “associating” or from “activism” they still desire some form of “vague belonging”, which can be fulfilled by reading the regular newsletters and paying the membership fee (ibid. 134–139). Freeter unions, then, have in a sense evolved into organisations suitable for asocial people or even for social withdrawers. In this strategy, we can see an attempt to come to grips with the dilemma I mentioned earlier – how to manage the tension between the need to organize subalterns in a movement while at the same time sparing them the possible pain of having to take steps towards more concrete forms of interaction. Going Wild on the Street – Voice as Empowerment However, there are limitations to the degree of empowerment that this strategy can bring about. Interestingly, it is just as easy to find examples of how feelings of empowerment have come about not through providing shelters or loose forms of belonging, but through publicly venting anger and through confrontation with authorities or adversaries. Among freeter unions, Freeter Union Fukuoka (FUF) has been particularly successful in mobilising NEET and social withdrawers. A high percentage – for a time almost half – of its members are social withdrawers or people who have been out of work for long periods. Hashiguchi points out that there is a surprisingly strong “anti-labour” emphasis to the union’s activities, one public spokesman even stating publicly that he would prefer not to work (Hashiguchi 2011:244; Umano 2008:83). An interesting fact is that FUF’s orientation to NEET and withdrawers goes hand in hand with an enthusiastic use of sound-demos. Here is the appeal to its 2008 Freeter May Day demonstration, which is a call for withdrawers to rally to revolt. All unstable paupers, freeters, NEET, social withdrawers, and unpatriotic fellows! On this coming first of May, let’s desert the workplace, school, family and consumption! Let’s turn a merry noise on all the scoundrels who



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment203 make our life and work precarious and disparage us, from the second generation one-man boss to the war-making state. (FUF 2008)

FUF’s stress on subaltern support in combination with sound-demos was even further emphasised in another small union on Kyūshū, KUMASO (an abbreviation of Kumamoto Rōdō Seizon Kumiai, Kumamoto Labour Survival Union, but also the name of an ancient people on southern Kyūshū subjugated by the expanding Yamato state). This short-lived union – it was formed in January 2008 and dissolved in March 2012 – was based in the city of Kumamoto, where it arranged several sound-demos, among them the first NEET demonstration in Japan, which was held on 10 February (“NEET Day”) 2008. It was established by a former school-dropout who ended up in a NEET-like condition, repeatedly quitting each job she tried. Vehemently rejecting wage work, which she compared to a “kind of rape”, she argued that work done merely to make a living was no better than prostitution. She quit her support organisation, being “fed up with support that lacks social criticism”. Learning of FUF’s existence through the Internet, she participated in its 2006 “Pandemonium” (hyakki yakō) sound-demo with a placard showing a portrait of the famous anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui. She explains that she was drawn to the union because it offered her the chance to “take revenge on society” instead of crying herself to sleep each night. Writing under the name Umano Honesuke – in an essay significantly entitled “Poor, desperate, with no future: Labour and survival movements from the point of view of NEET, social withdrawers and mentally ill” – she lists several reasons why she wanted to join the union. The most important one, she states, was the desire to participate in sound-demos. Another reason was that she was sick and tired of support organisations focusing only on the mental state of withdrawers while ignoring labour and welfare. Itching to “go wild on the street”, she then set up KUMASO in her hometown Kumamoto (Hashiguchi 2011:264–267; Umano 2008:83ff). One of the General Freeter Union’s high-profile members, Ichino Yoshiya (1981–), is a former social withdrawer and the author of Hikikomori no shakairiron (A social theory of social withdrawal, 2006), in which he argues that the increase of social withdrawers, NEETs, freeters, school refusers, suicides and self-destructive crime are all rooted in the same social processes (Ichino 2006, 2009). For five years, he writes, he didn’t speak to anybody and had no friends. What cured him, he believes, was writing the book. As soon as it was finished, he travelled to Tokyo and joined the union, longing to participate in the freeter May Day. Like Umano, he is critical of support organisations and explicitly denies that

204

chapter six

the support organisation of which he had been a client had been of any help. His blog contains a scathing criticism of all such organisations, which he claims have the common fault of putting all the blame on the individual and ignoring society (ibid. 2007). Like the case of Ueyama Kazuki, then, Umano’s and Ichino’s accounts both illustrate how empowerment can come about through a turn to social activism and how the break with support organisations can be a crucial step in this process. Yet another example of how a turn to activism has contributed to empowerment is Amamiya Karin (1975–) – icon of the precarity movement and well-known to the public through her media appearances, books and trademark Lolita fashion. Although she was never a withdrawer or NEET, she had a troubled youth during which she was the victim of bullying and made repeated suicide attempts. In her autobiographical texts she writes how she went to Tokyo after high school just in time for the “ice age of employment” and ended up as a freeter. Wanting to punish herself for being unwanted in society, her self-destructive tendencies increased, with new incidents of wristcutting and OD’ing. She felt like “having fallen into a hole”, living an existence filled with constant anxiety and suffering from a “lack of exits”. Having first been attracted to the doomsday sect Aum Shinrikyō as an exit from “this suffocating country”, she next turned to a right-extremist group where her self-destructive tendencies healed since she felt needed by the organisation (Amamiya 2007b:61ff; 2007a:12f). Her feelings of suffocation are well expressed in the following quote: My pain stemmed from the fact that no matter what we did we were unable to move this country one millimetre. I knew that in the recent past, young people like those in Zenkyōtō had still suffered from the delusion that they were able to move this country. How I wished to be able one day to feel at least one tenth of that delusion! (Amamiya & Kobayashi 2007:44)

As mentioned, her encounter with the word “precariat” in 2006 gave her the feeling of having finally discovered “a big exit, a way to break out”, helping her realize that the “difficulty of living” that had plagued her was rooted in “the collapse of work” and turning her into a precariat activist (ibid. 2007a:16, 2007b:61ff). A factor that recurs in the three examples above is that Umano, Ichino and Amamiya were all attracted to the precarity movement because it engages in social criticism, squarely putting the blame for social problems on society rather than on the individual. We can also note that in two cases – Umano and Ichino – it was dissatisfaction with support organisations that propelled them onwards to the precarity movement. A further



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment205

recurring factor in these three cases is that all three were attracted by street demonstrations. Amamiya expresses the liberating effect of participating in sound-demos in the following words: Reclaiming the streets, making a fuss, going wild, singing, expressing with the entire body that we are alive. That’s the only way we can live. Rather than as a movement, I think of this as an extraordinarily rich and luxurious culture. More than anyone else, we who have nothing to lose are probably in a position to radiate an irresponsibly and extremely fun culture. (ibid. 2009a:145)

Street demonstrations are not necessarily something engaged in only by activists who are already fully empowered in the sense of being confident in their power as political actors. Instead it appears that they can themselves contribute to empowerment. How can we understand this effect? One good place to start is by recalling Yabu Shirō’s comment about participation in demonstrations as being a way of being true to a desire rather than a means to bring about change in society. In a succinct formulation, Settsu explains that what street demonstrations change are the participants. In fact, demonstrations won’t bring about any immediate change in the world or society. Rather, what changes is oneself. That’s right. Demonstrations are not for the sake of the future, but for the sake of the present. (Settsu 2006).

Takemura Masato, another activist, agrees: “By participating in demonstrations you meet a lot of interesting people, but above all you meet a new self” (Takemura 2008b). How is this change produced? Freud has pointed to the crucial role that verbalisation can play in processes of recovery. I have already shown in the case of Amamiya how the word “precariat” helped her overcome anxiety and sort things out in her mind. Verbalisation forms a common thread that recurs in most accounts of empowerment – those emphasising taking shelter in a place of likeminded as well as those emphasising public manifestation of dissent. In the first case, you make contact with others who share your experiences while in the second case, you direct your voice outwards, to the general public or to authorities. These two cases indicate two possible forms of verbalisation. With O’Donnell (1999) we could call the first form “horizontal voice” and the second “vertical voice”. I would suggest that not only horizontal, but also vertical voice may play a crucial role in empowerment. That would explain at least part of why protest can be experienced as so liberating and empowering. Putting one’s anger into

206

chapter six

words is not just a matter of venting feelings, but can also restore a sense of integrity. This was why the villagers in Nagai Park were so keen on performing a theatrical play on the day of eviction to “speak their mind”. Regardless of how futile the spoken words may be in as a means of struggle, the fact that they have been discovered and publicly spoken helps restore, at least on a symbolic level, the integrity of the moral order or “moral economy” that is felt to have been betrayed. That is why Amamiya insists that discontent must be turned outwards, in anger and protest. Denouncing the notion of “self-responsibility” as a device of turning the violence of the system back on the victims, she stresses the need for young people to find ways to express and verbalize the “irritation that can’t find words”, and that is why she encourages them, stating that “it’s all right for us to be angry – to get angry, to lose our temper and express ourselves in words” (Amamiya 2007a:206). Today, the gloom of young people is exploding in sad and squalid forms like wristcutting, social withdrawal and domestic violence. But if it’s hard to live, if society is not to your taste, you can go wild and revolt. It’s definitely not your fault that you’re hard up. (ibid. 2007c:40)

To people long accustomed to suffering silently, the very exercise of vertical voice can be enough to awaken the realisation that they are not powerless to act back on society. While Freud tends to portray verbalisation as important primarily for intellectually grasping a trauma, verbalisation is also important because it often goes hand in hand with praxis. Many union activists stress the importance of the “experience of winning” that freeters can get by participating in successful negotiations with employers. In the following blog entry, Amamiya lauds the General Freeter Union for helping young freeters get their rightful revenge: Marvellous General Freeter Union! I am moved! I’m set on fire! […]. Yesterday, I met the people from the Union and “A-chan”. She became a member and it was decided there would be a labour dispute! Gee! This is so fun! I guess most of you are thinking that the “labour movement” is nothing for you, but say you’re fired or that bullying at the workplace gets mean, just imagine being able to get your revenge (or rather: getting what you’re selfevidently entitled to) by entering a labour union open to individual members, even if you’re just an irregular employee. I couldn’t imagine there would be something as refreshing as that in the whole world! Is there anything more splendid than people who promptly help you when you’re really in trouble? (Amamiya 2006c)

Here Amamiya pinpoints an element in all processes of empowerment: the feeling that you are not powerless against those who mistreat you and that you can be an active agent rather than a passive victim. What emerges



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment207

here is the image of unions functioning as instruments not only for securing­or defending material interests, but also for empowerment and the resurrection of vital impulses and moral instincts which have been stymied through defeats and failures. Not All Are Saved The cases of Umano, Ichino and Amamiya suggest that the “medicine” that brought about empowerment for them in the precarity movement was the opportunity of venting their anger in public and thus retaliating on society. However, if empowerment depends on the experience of winning, then it is clearly also a fragile and uncertain process. One clear drawback with relying on public voice is that it does not work for all subalterns. Subalterns longing for a shelter may not be attracted by movements that require them to directly confront society. Thus Yamaguchi Motoaki of the General Freeter Union points out that the General Freeter Union is unable to help people whose problems cannot be solved with demonstrations or labour disputes, for instance people with mental problems (menheru). At the union they can only do this much for such people, but when they tell them so, they are met by statements like “Then I’ll die” or “So you’re an enemy too” (Yamaguchi et al. 2009:147ff). That withdrawers who participate in demonstrations are sometimes painfully disappointed is shown by the example of an unemployed former social withdrawer who participated in the General Freeter Union’s Akihabara sound-demo in 2006. She had yelled slogans in the megaphone like “Mentally ill also have a life!” or “Raise the pension for the handicapped!”, but no one else had joined in, as they had during other slogans, and she doubts if mentally disabled are really included in the precariat (Shirai 2007:79f).8 Yuasa Makoto of Moyai is also sceptical regarding the ability of freeter unions like the General Freeter Union to help subalterns. Its sound-demos are fine for healthy and vigorous people, but how about the others? “Some people are able to participate in demonstrations and others can’t, but the latter are more numerous” (Yuasa 2009c:23f). He believes that the problem can only be solved by building bridges between support movements and protest movements. He is fully aware of the importance of 8 Statements by some activists, like Matsumoto Hajime in the Amateur Riot, indicate that they have little in common with NEET or withdrawers: “Many think that life in today’s Japan is constrained and hard. But actually, it’s easy to liberate oneself from those constraints. All it takes is to do as one pleases” (Matsumoto 2008b:194).

208

chapter six

protesting and achieving results, but public struggle, he states, is not enough to help the weakest. Therefore, places for fighting need to be combined with shelter-like places for recreation, such as Moyai’s café Komorebi, where homeless old men or young dispatch workers can relax and meet each other on a quotidian basis (ibid. 2008:140).9 What is needed is to “create a plurality of places”: If this place is no good, then try the next – such a plurality of places to go to and get “reset” must be realised in some form or another. Otherwise, the burden of being locked in a single place will be too much for many people. (Kawazoe & Yuasa 2007:11f)

Protest organisations too must be part of the network. We can recall that for Yuasa, the New Year Dispatch Village was the fruit of increasing cooperation between support organisations for the poor and labour unions. The latter need the former, he writes, because “until today the labour movement has only reached out to those who are already prepared to fight”. Conversely, the support organisations need the unions, because on their own they can only provide sanctuaries. “There has been no system for connecting up with the labour movement or with labour unions. Our task today is to work out how we and the people in the labour movement can construct such a bridge” (Yuasa 2009c:29). Negoro Yū, an activist in the General Freeter Union also strongly emphasises that a network is needed within which organisations divide the tasks necessary for empowerment: “After all it’s important to divide the tasks. It will never work with only a single organisation or group, for instance only with the anti-poverty movement or groups dealing with the labour issue or self-help groups” (quoted in Nakagawa et al. 2010). Shelters or open protest alone are both insufficient. What is needed is a network offering access to both. Social Movements and Empowerment: From Dameren to the Precarity Movement Above I have suggested that in order to contribute to empowerment, alternative spaces need to be able to provide shelters from the pressures of mainstream society but they also need to be bases for challenging the 9 Yuasa’s argument is that ‘poverty’ today is not just about material deprivation but also about lack of various other resources (tame) such as social contacts and self-confidence (Yuasa 2008). Unlike older movements, today’s anti-poverty movement needs to engage also in the restoration of these other resources – e.g. in what I have termed therapeutical activism. This is a stance that is similar to what I earlier exemplified with Union Bochibochi.



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment209

established order and work for social change. As mentioned, a recurring source of tension is that spaces that can serve as shelters for the subaltern have often required abstract forms of interaction – in which the stigmas, personal problems and status differences are bracketed – while protesting or working for social change has usually been seen to require concrete ones, in which these problems or stigmas are publicly thematised. In Japan, social movements since the 1990s have grappled in varying ways with how to combine these requirements. A pioneering early group was Dameren, as I discussed in chapter 3, where conscious attempts were made to experiment with the construction of alternative spaces to which subalterns were welcome. In the group participants’ self-definition as “good-for-nothings” (dame) one can see an early example of the strategy for empowerment that, instead of accepting “problem youth” labels as natural or given, tries to question them and upturn the very construction of social problems. In Dameren, however, the emphasis was on droppingout rather than on public confrontation. In today’s precarity movement, by contrast, protest-oriented activism is revived and utilised as part of the ambition to empower the subalterns. This is also a contrast to support organisations, which have largely refrained from open protests even when they have visions of radical social change. Significantly, what happens with the shift in freeter activism towards more protest-oriented activities is not that the ambition to reach out to subalterns that was so prominent in Dameren is forgotten or that the channel connecting subalterns to freeter activism has been closed. This channel is retained even as protests and public confrontations have resumed. What happens with the precarity movement is rather that protests and public confrontations are themselves redefined into a means of empowerment and turned into part of a therapeutical politics. That therapeutical aspects of activism have remained so central in the precarity movement can be explained by the fact that precarity activists have often defined themselves as a form of subalterns, as I exemplified earlier with Union Bochibochi. But what explains the shift towards an increasing emphasis on public protest as a means for empowerment? I have suggested that there is good reason for this shift, since merely taking shelter from the surrounding society is seldom enough for curing the sense of powerlessness. The realisation among activists that they are capable of exerting pressure on society is often a crucial element in furthering their sense of empowerment. What Fraser describes as the return of the counterpublics to the dominant public in order to challenge and expand it is arguably what the precarity

210

chapter six

movement today is doing. By challenging the mainstream discourse, dominated by the idea of “self-responsibility” they are also undercutting the hegemonic values that have made so many young people lose confidence in their ability to voice their concern. Play and Empowerment The question remains, however, how the precarity movement has managed to reconcile the seemingly opposed requirements of abstraction and concretion. In the case of those withdrawers who have enjoyed engaging in open protest, the tension appears to have been mitigated by play. “Going wild on the street” during street parties and demonstrations or arranging events like NEETopia are all forms of play, since they adopt the given categories of society only to subvert and playfully redefine them. As these activities show, play is not necessarily confined to spaces like the salons described by Simmel that are segregated from social realities. Instead, play is brought out on the street and confrontation itself assumes the character of play. Play is often thought of as presupposing an abstraction from social realities. Thus Huizinga (1955:7f) sees play as a voluntary “leave-taking from ‘real’ life”. To Groos (1898:301, 304), it is a “conscious self-deception” accompanied by the knowledge that the situation is not real, and Caillois (2001:158f) describes it as a “refuge in which one is master over one’s fate” and which is possible by virtue of its “separation from reality”. To these thinkers the sphere of play is almost by definition a fragile construction that easily collapses through the contact with the outside world. To make sense of how freeter activism manages to transpose play to the street, it is necessary to go beyond this rather narrow conception of play. It is not true that play can only unfold in separation from social reality, because how then could it be that it not only survives, but even seems to thrive in the confrontation with this reality? This question is related to the following one: should what we are seeing in the playful confrontations enacted in freeter activists’ street parties be classified as abstract or concrete interaction? When demonstrators playfully proclaim themselves to be “good-fornothings” or adopt names like the “precariat”, then this appears to have very little to do with abstract interaction or any bracketing of given social categories – but neither can it be described as a concrete interaction in which participants are re-embedded in these categories. Recall that concretion and abstraction have been defined in terms of paying attention to or bracketing aspects of a given social reality.



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment211

A possibility­of relativising the opposition between them exists if this reality loses its semblance of fixity and stability, which is exactly what occurs in moments when people realise that they have the power to change it. In a changeable environment every statement about reality easily turns ambiguous. Let me return again to Rancière’s (1999) claim that politics is about improper names and misnomers. When subalterns make themselves visible in public they often do so through a rejection of given labels in favour of new categories that change the field. It is this process that Rancière calls “subjectivation” and counterposes to “identification”, the delimitation of a group to a given unambiguous category. An example of such subjectivation is when a group of self-proclaimed NEET call themselves a revolutionary proletariat. What results is neither a concrete interaction in which one accepts the label “NEET” with all its negative connotations, nor an abstract interaction in which this designation is tactfully bracketed. What occurs is rather a playful subjectivation in which the categories imposed by the mainstream order are disrupted and prevented from fulfilling their function in this order. It is in the light of these playful redefinitions of self that the role of verbalisation and action in empowerment processes can be understood. Verbalisation does not lead to recovery because subalterns or traumatised people become able to reinsert their experiences in the language given to them by the social order. Verbalisation leads to recovery because people are no longer trapped in that language, and instead invent a new one. This invention is usually made possible in tandem with action, along with the realisation that they are not powerless to act back on society. What Rancière calls politics, a subaltern group’s visibilisation of itself in public, thus helps circumventing the opposition of abstraction and concretion. Although certain forms of abstract interaction can facilitate empowerment by sheltering subalterns from the yardsticks of mainstream society, such a shelter is also provided everywhere that the feeling gains ground that the days of these yardsticks are numbered. This creates new possibilities for the participation of subalterns in society. As a matter of fact, the opposition between abstraction and concretion is not symmetric, because what abstraction brackets is always a given reality, while the reality encountered by movements is one which they are trying to change. The social reality that participants in movements encounter is therefore not the same as the one from which they once may have tried to distance themselves. Even if the subalterns again turn their eyes to and thematise their situation in society, this time it is not to identify with their roles but to question, reject or redefine them, to achieve subjectivation.

212

chapter six

The question of how play is possible in the confrontation with society can now be answered. The return to society, when it occurs with the intention of changing it, can create forms of interaction just as light, playful and free from the seriousness of daily life as those that can be produced by abstraction. Accounts of revolts and riots often mention such feelings of lightness. “It was a feast without beginning and without end”, Bakunin (1977:56) writes about the February Revolution in 1848, and the Situa­ tionists similarly described the experience of revolt as “an all-embracing reinserting of things into play” (Vaneigem 2001:264). Let me return to the question what play is. Play is not the opposite of reality, as is often asserted, but the opposite of powerlessness. Play arises when the feeling of powerlessness is overcome and it is therefore intimately connected to empowerment. In salons and cafés this can occur because we bracket our roles and statuses in the surrounding society and focus solely on the relations with other people sharing the same arena. As Simmel points out, the effect of bracketing is to create a separate sphere of activity in which participants are no longer subject to the necessities of the outer world. In order to understand how this outside world itself can be “reinserted into play” we need to accept that what gives birth to play is not necessarily the distance to the necessities of reality, but rather the softening or disappearance of the feeling of necessity as such. What is characteristic of play when it succeeds is not that people create a world that is only in pretence, but that they are able to act with a feeling of pleasure in whatever social world they happen to be engaged in for the moment. This in turn presupposes that this world responds, that they are able to influence it and make it respond through their actions. A clue to how the wider society can be transformed into a playful arena is provided by Johan Asplund, who points to responsiveness as the very source of the feeling of fun that characterizes play. When he writes that “in play the responses of the participants decide over the world instead of the other way round” (1987:67), this at first sight appears to resemble Simmel’s description of sociability as interaction for its own sake, but in fact Asplund opens up a quite different way of grasping play. The reason is that defining play as responsiveness makes it possible to assume that play can exist even in the wider society outside the salons, provided that this society does not refuse to respond. Play furthers empowerment by introducing a sense that participants can bring about meaningful change. In secluded areas, like Simmel’s salons, playful interaction does so in a limited way, by creating an environment in which all things and all people included in the interaction are



alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment213

seen as being in balance, no single thing or person appearing to dominate the others. Empowerment in a more emphatic way results when play spreads to wider areas in society, and becomes a play with reality. In the latter case, it also becomes a play with the hegemonic discourse. Rather than aiming at a solution to the “youth problems” constructed by this discourse, it playfully questions the very construction of those problems. To be sure, this way of circumventing the tension between abstraction and concretion does not fit all subalterns. Not all subalterns recognize themselves in the alternative discourses proposed by social movements, and many still primarily need a shelter where they can escape the evaluations of mainstream society. For any one single organisation or group to facilitate the empowerment of all subalterns is difficult. Instead, activists have often concluded that what is needed is a loose network of groups, characterised by a division of labour, in which subalterns can move and which can serve as a bridge for bringing together a variety of spaces.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CAMPUS PROTEST Much in this book has revolved around the recovery of activism in Japan after the perceived failure of the radical student movement in the 1970s. One indicator of how far the process of recovery has progressed is the development of campus protest, which provides a convenient close-up of how activism has changed since the 1990s. Although freeter activism has generally taken the “street” as its preferred scene of action rather than university campuses, the rise of freeter activism has not meant that universities have lost their role as platforms of activism entirely. New Left groups dating back to the 1960s continue to exist on several campuses. Even more significantly, the processes that have produced freeter activism in society at large have also fuelled the rise of distinct new forms of activism on campuses. In the years around 2010, campus unrest of a new kind flared up at many Japanese universities, with students and part-time employees protesting against the neoliberal transformation of universities into corporations that increasingly need to secure their budgets through attracting private funding and investment, raising student fees where possible, and curtailing the costs of the labour force by increasingly relying on short-term contract employees. In line with the international trend towards “managerialism” or “New Public Management” (Goldfinch 2004; Dunleavy et al. 2006), universities in Japan have increasingly adjusted to the role of service-providers in a capitalist market. In Japanese higher education, this shift was accelerated by a 2003 law turning national universities into national university corporations. The incorporation took place in 2004 and forced national universities to rely more heavily on private funding, making them more similar to private universities, at the same time as they became more tightly supervised by the Ministry of Education (Tabata 2005; Yonezawa 2013:128f, 133–136). The question how activism on the campuses has changed under the influence of this shift has received scant attention. While the mass-media has reported on the repressive measures directed towards some of the remaining New Left so-called sects, less attention has been paid to new forms of activism that have emerged in recent years. One important thing

216

chapter seven

to note is that these newer movements are not exclusively student movements. Largely they have emerged among university employees who protest against their precarious labour conditions. Another striking trait of this campus-based precarity movement is its preference for direct action – for instance sit-ins, hunger strikes or opening cafés in shacks or tents – and the role that space plays in the activities. Protests are staged in highly public and often symbolically charged spaces on campus. An example is Union Extasy which was mentioned on the opening pages of this book. Part of its aim was to promote the union’s voice in the public sphere – the café being strategically located for interaction with passers-by, for gaining general attention and for exerting pressure on the university. Typically, however, the very right of activists to use these spaces has been contested. The café was thus also a counter-space that “desecrated” a symbolic spot on the main campus and whose very existence was a gauntlet thrown down to challenge the university. During its drawn out struggle with the university, it was also important for Union Extasy to be able to use the campus as a no-man’s-land, taking electricity from nearby buildings and gathering firewood from construction sites to heat their oven in the winter. Following the development of campus protest from the 1990s until today in Kyoto I will attempt to shed light on the following questions: How have campus-based activists responded to the neoliberalisation of Japanese universities? What is it that motivates them to use direct action and how are these activities related to space?1 From Students and Employees to Freeters Campus activism today is not just a student movement and also not just a movement among employees. Behind its emergence lie social processes 1 The chapter is based on qualitative interviews, participant observation and analyses of texts. Material about Kinji House consists mainly of essays and reports left by participants (e.g. Ogawa 1997; Yamamura 1997a) and interviews with Ogawa and two other participants (F, H) carried out in 2010. Accounts of Ishigaki Café can be found in Inoue & Kasagi (2005), Kasagi (2006), Shinohara (2005), Shishido (2005). My account is based on five visits in 2005 and several conversations with Inoue and other participants. Kubikubi Café’s activities are well documented on the union’s homepage and blog (http://extasy07. exblog.jp/). I made altogether 32 visits to the café and events arranged by the union during 2009–2011. I also use various other texts written by Inoue and Ogawa (e.g. Inoue 2008b, 2009; Inoue & Ogawa 2009; Ogawa 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b) as well as reports by visitors and journalists (e.g. Amamiya 2009c; Matsumoto 2009; Mōri 2009b). In addition to interviews with activists named in the text, I also interviewed three former (non-sect) activists active on campuses in Kyoto in the 1990s (F, H, I).



campus protest217

that are increasingly transforming both students and employees into a condition of “freeter”-likeness. The precarious situation of students today has often been pointed out. “The majority of universities are no longer institutions for producing middle-class, white-collar workers, to say nothing of Japan’s future elites, but temporary camps for chronically jobless youth”, Sabu Kohso states (2006:416). Asato Ken, founder of the General Freeter Union, emphasizes that since students are now part of the precarious worker stratum, the time has come for them to fight, not for the workers, but as workers (PAFF 2003). The lack of openings for stable employment after graduation has its factual background in the overall increase in university graduates in addition to processes of deregulation and economic slowdown (Hommerich 2012:212f). That many students face an uncertain future after graduation is not all. Already as students, they enter a milieu on the campus that has been transformed in a neoliberal direction. Four interrelated areas can be discerned that have aroused student protest in recent years. One is the burden of student fees, with a movement arising both in Tokyo and in Kyoto against the “blacklisting” of students who fail to pay back their student loans (Ribault 2010). A second has been the time-consuming job hunting (shūshoku katsudō), which many students feel that they need to start engaging in already in their second or third year, reflecting the increasing competition for regular employment (see e.g. Nagata 2010). A third area is the suppression of political student activism, with Hōsei University (see Saitō 2009; McNeil 2009; Yabu 2009b) and Waseda University (see Suga 2006b, Suga & Hanasaki 2006) in Tokyo being particularly notorious examples. A fourth, related area has been what might be called the gentrification of university campuses – the reorganisation of campus life to allow a greater role to privately run cafés, restaurants and convenience stores along with a concomitant rebuilding and prettification of its physical infrastructure and attempts to ban, remove or tear down manifestations of the culture of student activism, such as standing signboards, shacks or rooms for students’ circle activities or dormitories strongly associated with student self-rule. A group that pioneered the protests against campus gentrification was the “Society for preserving the squalor of Hōsei” (Hōsei no binbōkusasa o mamoru kai). This group was formed by Matsumoto Hajime in 1997 when he was a student at Hōsei University. Aghast at the transformation of the university into what he saw as a preparatory school for work, he started inviting students to nabe (hot pot) parties on the campus, creating “liberated zones” where they would also camp. These gatherings were not political demonstrations so much as playful acts of sabotage against

218

chapter seven

the prettification of the campus, but they were popular and easy to imitate and soon spread to other universities in Japan (Matsumoto 2008a:95–102, 2008b:38–66, 70–75; Amamiya 2007a:226–238, Takemura 2008a). In parallel to these changes, a conspicuous flexibilisation of employment for university staff was also taking place (e.g. Shiraishi & Ono 2005). As will be discussed below, university employees have played a leading role in protesting against this flexibilisation. However, their protests should not be seen as separate from the protests of the students. The activism of students and employees has developed in interaction with each other and today new forms of solidarity appear to be taking form between these two groups. Below, I will illustrate this development by discussing campus activism from the 1990s onwards in Kyoto, focusing on those episodes of activism in which Union Extasy’s two founding members, Ogawa Kyōhe and Inoue Masaya, have been involved. Kinji House, or “Cleaning is Love” In the 1990s Kyoto became the place for a quite peculiar student activist ferment, which saw students at Dōshisha University develop Japan’s first sound-demos, as well as much activism related to feminism, homosexuality and AIDS. In the early 1990s many students still felt it was easy to find employment and found it easy to take breaks in their studies in order to pursue interests such as theatre or engaging in activism while making their living on irregular work (Noiz 2009:17ff, interviews with F 23 July 2011, G 20 August 2009, and I 27 June and 29 July 2010). Unlike in Tokyo, where many students who pioneered the new forms of activism chose to migrate out of the still New Left-dominated campuses, in Kyoto the new cultural movements were largely campus-based. One reason for this was the relatively strong tradition of non-sect student activism at universities like Kyoto University or Dōshisha, which meant that activists critical of the New Left “sects” had less need to find a base of activities outside the campus. A second reason for the continued importance of university campuses in Kyoto may have been their relatively liberal management, which made them more tolerant of New Left groups as well as newer non-sect groups to a higher degree than in Tokyo (Ogawa 2010a:80; interviews with H 24 September 2009 and 19 March 2010 and I 27 June 2010). One offspring of the activist ferment in Kyoto was the creation of Kinji House at Kyoto University in 1995, one of Japan’s few examples of largescale squatting. The prime mover in this enterprise was Ogawa, who had entered Kyoto University in 1989. As he looks back on Kinji House, he emphasises the importance of the year 1995 for activism in Kyoto.



campus protest219 There was a feeling that things were being born and people got connected. Gays, sex workers and others got movements started and this was bound up with expression, performances, dance and poetry… One felt that if this feeling spread, the whole world would be happy… I too existed in the margins of all that, participating here and there, and breathing the same air. Kinji House too existed in the same air. (Ogawa 2009c)

Together with a few friends he opened Kinji House in an empty building at Kyoto University for a few months in 1995. This was a building scheduled for destruction that had been left empty after the death of the ecologist and anthropologist Iwanishi Kinji in 1992. At the start, the participants were mainly students at Kyoto University and a nearby art college. They kept the house going from early June to late August, sun-bathing on the roof and sprinkling water on each other with hoses. In the house, they opened a café and a bar, a dance studio, a radio station and a gallery for exhibitions. The exhilaration participants felt in the beginning was expressed in the cleaning up that started as soon as they had moved in: “A place belongs to the ones who clean it”, Ogawa writes, adding that “cleaning is love” (ibid. 1997:227f). In these early days, a feeling appears to have existed of new possibilities, an exciting uncertainty about what would become of the project: “Rather than ‘what should we do?’, Kinji was ‘what will become of it?’”, Ogawa writes (ibid. 231). His choice of words indicates that the participants felt enveloped in something that they could no longer control, but which they nevertheless experienced as thrilling and pleasurable. Was there an idea behind Kinji House? During the occupation, there was no explicit political message which activists used to justify the occupation. A letter which Ogawa sent to the dean of student affairs at the time states that he had been guided by three ideas. The first was “direct action”, a concept which he gives his own twist by explaining that it means to try an action and see what it leads to rather than to execute an already finished plan. Hence it is an action that “does not oppose the system with a system, but directly expresses one’s feelings”. The second was the idea of action based on rhizomatous networks, i.e. on autonomous individuals rather than a group will. The third was the idea of constructing a “place for traffic, a factory, a place welcoming everything and constantly changing” (ibid. 228f). Later Ogawa also referred to the attraction of an empty space with free electricity and heating where people were free to do what they wanted. In addition, he explains, there was something “extra” which everyone treasured, and that “extra was probably our dream” (ibid. 229). At the time, there had been a vogue of interest in the idea of squatting among activists in Kyoto, fanned by publications introducing European

220

chapter seven

anarchist or autonomist movements such as Actual Action and BURST CITY. Ogawa himself had previously lived several times in empty rooms or in self-made huts on the campus, learning how to access to water and electricity and how to make fires. Often this was done stealthily, but sometimes the squat was conducted in public, as during a three-day squat when he opened a “love hotel” called “Je t’aime” after having gotten his hands on a twin bed. Ogawa was also interested in exploring lifestyles that dispensed with the idea of a fixed home. Together with his brother, Ogawa Tetsuo, he became well-known for the isōrō (a word meaning to live in other people’s houses) lifestyle he embarked on in the latter half of the 1990s, systematically moving from one acquaintance to another (Ogawa & Ogawa 1999). One of his friends described him as an isōrō artist, pointing out the similarities between isōrō and children’s play (Yamamura 1997b). Ogawa appears to have thought of isōrō and squatting as existing on a continuum, since both upset the relationship between ownership and the use of space. Rather than using space as a stage for participating in the general public sphere, in both squatting and isōrō spaces tend to be conceived of as potential no-man’s-lands, as spaces which are free to use for creating and living beyond the norms and regulations of mainstream institutions. In the end, Kinji House self-destructed because of inner conflicts – many triggered by the arrival of young yankī (“hoodlums” or members of the yankī subculture) who moved in during the summer vacations, and some of whom were violent and used thinner. In August the electricity was cut off and people started to dwindle. When the police entered the building and arrested some of the yankī, the university used the occasion to close the building. The few remaining squatters offered no resistance. “Rather than resisting, we helped cleaning up”, Ogawa writes, describing his “great sense of powerlessness” when the house was emptied of their belongings. Soon after, the building was demolished by the university (Ogawa 1997:235; 2006). The violence and fatigue Kinji House engendered shows how easy the sense of possibility and freedom associated with a space with no institutionalised, shared rules can disintegrate. “Kinji aimed at becoming a square but failed and ended up as a vacant lot”, one of the participants, Yamamura Takeyū, writes (1997a). The diversity of participants, he explains, had meant that communication broke down and that there was uncertainty about what rules were valid. Other participants described Kinji House as a “wonderland of hoodlums” or as “fatiguing” because of the threat of violence. Ogawa himself points out that the failure was not that there was any closed, “fascist” sectarianism, but rather that the ambiguity



campus protest221

and unwillingness of anyone to take responsibility hurt participants (Ogawa 1997:233, 230ff). Some thought that I, who triggered it all, was irresponsible. They would probably not listen if I suggested to them that we should do something together again. As for me, I have lost the self-confidence to suggest such things, or rather I’ve lost all desire to do it […]. But “what will become of it?” ought to be something good. I don’t understand. The only thing I can say is that “what will become of it” and “whatever” are different. The difference lies in curiosity. As Kinji gradually slipped out of control, as it finally overwhelmed me and when it was actually destroyed, I was unable to utter a single word. But in reality it never slipped out of control. What really happened was that it gradually transformed into a “whatever”. Curiosity is love. As love waned, cleaning too became scarce and the house became dirty. (ibid. 231)

Ogawa’s ideal of an isōrō-life as well as the Kinji House experiment can be seen as manifestations of a wish to create an open, unregulated no-man’sland beyond the sway of institutions, money and status. He describes himself as close to anarchism. Being unconnected to confrontation or militancy and driven primarily by the dream of a world where everyone can have fun together without hierarchies or money, this might be described as what Oda Masanori calls a “lovable anarchism”, more interested in creation and expression than in ideology (quoted in Aida et al. 2008:93). Rather than seeking confrontation, it hopes to remain undetected or that the world will be won over and tolerate its projects. Fun as Resistance: The Case of Ishigaki Café For a few months in 2005, a café existed on top of the stone wall surrounding Kyoto University’s main campus. Resting on a small platform five meters above the ground and lacking walls, customers at the café got a good view of the Hyakumanben crossing. The structure was especially striking at night, when it seemed to hover like a phantom over the crossing. Some customers described it as a “house above the trees”, others as a “secret base”. The platform could be reached through a ladder from the pavement. Shoes had to be taken off before entering the platform, where coffee was sold for 50 yen per cup, allegedly “cheapest in Kyoto”. One of the activists who had taken the initiative to the café was Inoue, who at the time was a master student in Italian. His favourite hobby was kabuki. Like Ogawa he had a history of unconventional living, having rebuilt his dormitory room into a field for cultivating rice and later squatted for three years in a small hut which he had built himself just outside

222

chapter seven

the dormitory (interview 19 July 2007; Inoue & Ogawa 2009). When the university in the autumn of 2004 announced its plan to tear down part of the wall in order to create a barrier-free entrance, he and a few others – originally four although they later became over ten – reacted by camping on the site to physically prevent the demolition. To protect themselves against the cold, they brought a kotatsu (a low blanket-covered table with a heat source beneath). Soon they had constructed a tower-like structure topped by a roofed platform. At the suggestion of a visiting waitress, they turned the tower into a café, the Ishigaki Café (literally “stonewall café”) (Inoue & Kasagi 2005; Kasagi 2006). They managed to keep the café running for seven months, from January to August. Activities included live music, bon dancing, lectures, film showings and parties. Meanwhile drawn-out negotiations were held with university representatives, ending with the university agreeing to leave part of the wall intact. After the settlement, the activists celebrated with arranging a festival that went on for three days with live music, speeches on the street, and bon-dancing, before finally closing the café (Inoue & Kasagi 2005; Shinohara 2005). During the period of its existence the café claims to have welcomed many customers, a majority of whom were non-students such as school kids tourists, and families with children. It appears to have made a relatively successful appeal to people who would otherwise lack interest in student activities. By using the form of a café the activists created a space that was considerably more open and easy to enter than a traditional form of protest group or organisation. Compared to Kinji House, the café was a much more organised space. Rules such as the banning of alcohol were imposed on the space to create an environment that was welcoming and friendly to visitors. A certain tongue-in-cheek traditionalism was characteristic of the activists in the café. As Inoue explained, the choice of a tower (yagura) was a respectful nod to previous struggles. Wooden towers were built during the Sanrizuka struggles by farmers who sought to prevent the construction of present-day Tokyo Airport. The idea of building towers was also a tradition among rebellious students at Kyoto University, whose actions, he says, would “start by building a tower [toriaezu yagura]” (Inoue & Kasagi 2005). Inoue and the other activists also liked to speak about Kyoto University’s tradition of”trouble-making” (yayakoshisa) and expressed an elegiac love for the university’s tolerant “shabbiness”. Today, they lament, new stylish buildings like restaurants, cafés and convenience stores are being built all over the campus. “If you take



campus protest223

away the underground smell it will cease to be Kyoto University” (Inoue & Kasagi 2005). The students claimed to be driven primarily by a desire for fun rather than by any serious political commitment. “Ishigaki Café was truly a ‘space for mischief’”, Inoue and another participant, Kasagi Jō, exclaimed triumphantly afterwards (Inoue & Kasagi 2005). “More than anything else, Ishigaki Café was born from the desire for fun and enjoyment”, another participant says (Shinohara 2005:202). Perhaps unsurprisingly, preserving a stone wall struck many of the more serious political activists on the campus as nonsensical and lacking a political aim (e.g. H, interview 19 March 2010). To the participants, however, fun was not unrelated to resistance. To Inoue and other activists, the act of causing mischief and trouble was clearly itself a source of fun. Conversely, Kasagi explains that it was as fun that it constituted good resistance. To perform simple café activities like selling cheap coffee and interacting with customers was in itself an act of resistance against the campus homogenisation. One participant points out that Ishigaki Café was a “counter-space” protesting against the trend in society to homogenise space, visible in the creation of new monumental spaces and chic restaurants on the campus (Shinohara 2005:194–200). They expressly distinguished their activities from those of more traditional student movements. Ishigaki Café wasn’t a place for appealing ardently to visitors to get them to support our opposition to the removal of the stone wall. […] There was no need for us to engage in any particular political activity. Everyday talk and pouring coffee in themselves constituted a performative resistance to the campus reorganisation […] (Kasagi 2006:65f)

Like Kinji House, the café involved the occupation of a space, which was torn from its officially designated use. Much more than Kinji House, however, it was established as a visible challenge to university authorities. The activists set up a tower on one of the most conspicuous spots imaginable, where everything going on in the café would take place in full visibility, and this visibility was itself something they thoroughly enjoyed. If the squatters in Kinji House thought of their project as a foray into no-man’sland, Ishigaki Café is better understood as a self-consciously established counter-space. Hunger Strikes at Ritsumeikan and Kyoto Seika University The year 2007 was an important year for campus activism in Kyoto. Several events occurred that led activists to protest against measures taken

224

chapter seven

by university managements that appeared to increase the precarious situation of employees and students. At their height, these protests included two sit-ins during which activists engaged in hunger strikes. In both episodes, counter-spaces were briefly established in which elements of fun were prominent, but unlike in the case of Ishigaki Café, these elements were now wedded to more conventionally “serious” causes and to an attempt to reaching out to the public with a message. The first of these episodes took place at the Kinugasa campus of Ritsumeikan University. Endō Reiko, a part-time lecturer in Italian and vice chair of the General Union, initiated a four-day hunger strike conducted 17–20 July to protest against the university’s practice of hiring teachers on yearly renewable contracts with a maximum length of employment of four or five years. Already in 2006, the union had conducted a strike among Ritsumeikan teachers to protest against the practice. When the university refused to renew her contract in 2007, Endō responded by initiating the hunger strike. A tent was put up at the campus which she called the Hunger Strike Café. Next to it was a flag with the words “Not just hungry, but angry”. Her demands were for secure employments for irregular staff and a reversal of the non-renewal of her contract. Backing her were not only the General Union but also the newly established Union Extasy and several other unions. When I asked her why she chose a hunger strike as her means of protest, she answered that it was the best way to get attention. She only had four days and couldn’t do a permanent sit-in. One alternative might have been to make a “performance”, but that would have required too much time to prepare (Endō, interviews 19 July 2007 and 29 April 2010). The university did not rescind its decision, but Endō’s action inspired other activists on at least two scores. Firstly, it directed attention to the so-called “3–5 year rules” which later also became a prime target of Union Extasy. Following the incorporation of national universities in 2004, they and many private universities introduced a system of hiring staff on one-year contracts to cut labour costs. These contracts were renewable, but with a limit at 3–5 years. This limitation was controversial, since it introduced an extra element of uncertainty in the lives of the staff and since no special legal basis existed for it. The Labour Standard Law only specifies that if contract renewals are repeated several times, a decision not to renew the contract cannot be taken without rational reason. The limitation thus seems to have been introduced by universities mainly in order for them to keep their freedom of action, i.e. their freedom of refusing to renew contracts should the need arise (Endō 2009).



campus protest225

Secondly, the very form of the protest – the hunger strike – inspired several other activists in Kyoto, including student activists. The second spectacular sit-in this year was performed by a student at Kyoto Seika University, Yamada Shirō, who, citing Endō as an inspiration, went on hunger strike for a week (5–13 December) to protest against the high university fees, setting himself up in a hut (which Union Extasy helped him build) with TV and kotatsu on a conspicuous spot on the campus. Later he was central in setting up the Black list association, a group that carried out sound-demos in Kyoto protesting against the blacklisting of students who failed to pay back their student loans, a movement that soon spread to Tokyo. Yamada also started raising chicken and pigs on the campus as a source of alternative livelihood, thus expanding his repertoire of action towards making use of campus space as a no-man’s-land. (interview 24 September 2009; also see Yamada 2008; Yamada et al. 2010; Shiraishi 2008). Yamada provides us with several clues to why direct action is attractive to activists today. These clues have to do with the similarities between direct action and art. To start with, both are often performed by individuals or small groups, who rely on impact rather than large numbers. Yamada explains: In a trial of strength, we are sure to lose. Better than that is to use a little imagination, irony or humour, including setting up weird buildings… What matters is not how many handbills you hand out or how many hours you spend in conferences, but rather something I think can be called art. In practice, it means doing what you think is fun somewhere where it will attract attention. (Yamada 2008:171)

In a situation in which many students were reluctant to engage politically and he lacked the backing of existing student organisations, the numbers and resources necessary for demonstrations of a more traditional kind were simply not available. Shiraishi Yoshiharu comments that in Japan “there’s no organisation of students that can conduct a strike, like in Europe or North America, so what Yamada did was that he used his own body as a stake in the struggle instead” (Shiraishi 2008:172). A second similarity to art is that these acts are meant to be more than mere means to achieve some purpose. As Yamada stresses, the acts are meant to be enjoyed for their own sake, even when they are physically excruciating. “I wasn’t thinking about dying or anything else as desperate as that”, he states about his hunger strike, “I just wanted to do it in an enjoyable way” (Yamada 2008:170).

226

chapter seven

A third similarity is that, just like many art works, these acts seem to aim at producing ambiguity. Their power stems from their ability to upset norms rather than from clear-cut political messages. Yamada’s principle of not asking permission from the university authorities for his activities is an example. When I started raising chicken on the campus, some guys engaged in some nonsensical circle activities came and asked me if I had gotten permission from the university. Of course I hadn’t. Again, when the people of the music circle wanted to do a guerrilla live concert, even they went and tried to get permission. Then they got upset when they were refused. Sure, I understand their anger, but why on earth ask for permission in the first place if you’re doing a guerrilla live? Pretty strange, in my view. In any case, that’s why I go on doing my things without asking permission. I’m ready to discuss with people if they have complaints. Not with authorities, but with other people who use the place. In that vein, by doing things without permission people will finally just think “Oh there they go again”. What’s really important is to create an atmosphere of not asking permission. (ibid. 171)

The power that statements like these, which by themselves are clear and unambiguous, have to create ambiguity stems from the struggle that is latently or openly taking place over the use of the campus and in which onlookers are invited to choose a side. While some will identify with the authorities, others will feel drawn to the activists. Ambiguity arises because the question “Is this really defensible?” reveals itself as posed to the onlooker, rather than at the activists. Kubikubi Café and Union Extasy 2007 was also when Union Extasy was founded by Inoue and Ogawa, who at the time were both working as part-time librarians at Kyoto University. The union at first made itself known chiefly through its pranks – arranging barbeques on the campus or sailing down the Kamo River on a floating kotatsu during the 2008 freeter May Day. The playful attitude was evident from the start in the big signboard near the campus entrance through which it announced its existence. Next to a smiling, violin-playing grasshopper was the text: “We want ecstasy in our work like the grasshopper. But no death by starvation, thanks!”. They also distributed pamphlets asking the reader: “Everybody, do you enjoy your workplace? Can you sing ‘la-la-la’ while cleaning up? Do you have tea time when you can sing ‘la-lala’ while pouring up tea?”. The text goes on to encourage everyone who doesn’t feel like working, not to join their union, but to set up their own unions.



campus protest227

As for the union’s name, Ogawa had insisted on “extasy” since it suggested something usually not associated with unions. By insisting on ecstasy in work, they wanted to formulate something close to a refusal of work: “Ecstasy in work is close to ‘I won’t work’”, something more akin to eros than to work (Inoue 2008b; Inoue & Ogawa 2009:37). The demand for ecstasy in work is also easy to understand as a thinly disguised stab at capitalism.­If alienation is part of all wage labour, raising the demand for ecstasy is to demand the impossible of capitalism, namely that it abolish itself. Despite the playful attitude, this time Inoue and Ogawa took aim at a subject generally regarded as serious – the precarious working conditions at the university. Part-timers make up 2,700 of the university’s employees, including teachers, librarians, janitors and guards. Most of them (85 percent) are women and like female irregular workers elsewhere in Japan their salaries are steeply below that of regular (mostly male) employees. At Kyoto University, part-timers earn 900–1200 yen per hour, a typical freeter wage, and they have almost no possibility of entering regular employment. As Ogawa points out, this is a matter of exploiting female labour, since the low wages are justified by the university with the argument that they are only meant to be “supplementary” – i.e. that the work is “housewife part-time work” (2009b). Today, this justification rings hollow since the universities are shifting from regular to irregular employees on a large scale, the latter including many single people who cannot rely on a family to supplement the income. With the five-year rule, which stated that contracts could at most be renewed for a period of five years, the position of such workers was made even more insecure. Like many other universities, Kyoto University introduced this rule in 2005 after the university’s incorporation. To protest against it, Ogawa and Inoue went on strike in February 2009 by setting up the shack that later became known as Kubikubi Café. This was a timely juncture, since the first employees scheduled to fall under the rule were some fifty employees whose contracts would end in early 2010. As inspirations for the café, the union quoted Ishigaki Café and Endō Reiko’s hunger strike. The union’s methods made some laud it as an example of “cultural” activism or “collective art” (Mōri 2009b; Amamiya 2010:194). However, the fact that it was engaged in an outdrawn conflict in which it needed to represent many employees at the university meant that less playful aspects of activism gradually came to the fore. Inoue and Ogawa both state that they learnt a lot about “responsibility” during their campaign and that they felt that they had grown closer to the struggle of the labour movement (Inoue & Ogawa 2009:40f, Ogawa 2010a:80). Another aspect

228

chapter seven

that had not been as evident in the briefer sit-ins performed by Endō or Yamada were the sacrifices involved in drawn-out campaigns, which tended to harm the human relations of ordinary life. Ogawa used the simile of nukadoko, the bran used for fermenting vegetables into homemade pickles that needs to be stirred by hand every day. I used to take good care of my nukadoko, which I look on as a living thing that helps me and greets me as I return home every day. It needs to be stirred every day. If you eat it daily, it is a simple matter since you just need to put in new vegetables and mix them into the bran. But if you can no longer return home daily, taking good care of the nukadoko becomes hard. (Ogawa 2010c)

In its struggle with the university, the union achieved almost none of its aims: the five year rule is still in force and Inoue and Ogawa both had their contracts terminated. In February 2010 the university director agreed to meet for collective bargaining but restated that it needed to maintain the five year rule to press labour costs. Further rounds of collective bargaining proved unfruitful and court verdicts also went against the union. Meanwhile, the efforts involved in keeping the café running were taking its toll on the private lives of the activists. In June 2011 Ogawa withdrew from the union and in the autumn the café closed down, after more than two years in existence. The union did succeed, however, in catalysing a movement of part-time staff in the Kansai region. Following its example, similar unions such as Union Socosoco sprang up at other universities in Kyoto (Yanbe 2010). It also took the initiative to the first “Why temporary employments?” symposium, which it arranged in Osaka in February 2010 together with other universitybased unions in the Kansai region with which it formed a network for collaboration. These symposiums have since then become an annual event – a good example of how Union Extasy also participated in the public sphere and contributed to the public debate about temporary employment.2 2 Union Socosoco was formed in autumn 2009 among former students employed as Japanese language tutors at Kyoto Seika University. Many features replicate the previous actions of Endō, Yamada and Union Extasy. Again, the target of protests was the problem of renewable contracts (this time a three year rule rather than a five year rule) and again the methods used involved requesting collective bargaining with the university plus direct action in the form of setting up a wooden booth in a conspicuous location on the campus where they would sell pork soup (butajiru), cream stew, tea and coffee, distribute information, and collect signatures from supporters. A symbolic strike was conducted during lunch hours to attract attention to their cause (Yanbe 2010:57). When it proved hard to wrest concessions from the university, Yanbe Yūhei, the union’s representative, plunged into a four day hunger strike in December 2010 – using the recipe of Endō and Yamada, but with no more success. For a presentation, see their homepage: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/soco-soco/.



campus protest229

Photo 2. “Dispersal and disobedience” (Chōsan to fufukujū) May Day in Kyoto, 29 April 2010. A member of Union Extasy bathes in an oil drum that says “Sacked after five years”. Photo: author.

Direct Action, Space and Empowerment Let me recapitulate the conceptions of space informing the activities described above. In Kinji House space was hardly used at all as a way to transmit a message or to protest, but primarily as an arena for exploring the possibility of living differently. Put in a nutshell, Ogawa’s ideal was to live in no-man’s-land rather than to be an activist in mainstream public space. In Ishigaki Café there was a valuing of counter-space as such, but not yet much of a political message. Rather, it can be said to have aimed at

230

chapter seven

a defiant demonstration of the possibility of an alternative life. In more recent activities, such as Endō’s and Yamada’s hunger strikes or Kubikubi Café, political messages came to the fore but clear elements of counterspace also remained. Over time, then, activities have become oriented more to achieving public visibility and to participation in the public sphere, although all three kinds of space are still present in varying degrees. In the development of campus activism sketched here, two trends stand out. One is that campus activism has become increasingly focused on precarisation and neoliberalisation. The actions of Endō, Yamada, Union Extasy and Union Socosoco all target the transformation of universities from institutions relatively independent of the market into profitdriven corporations in which teachers are turned into flex-workers, students are mass-produced for a precarious labour market, and campuses are increasingly subject to control and surveillance (and prettified by chic restaurants and glass-covered façades). A second trend has been the tendency for activists to resort to direct action. Interestingly, as the case of Ishigaki Café demonstrates, the turn to direct action preceded the adoption of issues such as precarity. It thus cannot have been caused solely by any need for activists to direct public attention to the issue of precarity. Why, one might ask, has the rise of a campus-based precarity movement come about in tandem with an increasing reliance on direct action? If the latter is not a corollary of the rise of precarity activism, then how should we understand it? Yamada’s remarks on the similarities between art and direct action suggest one possible answer to these questions, namely the existence of strong pragmatic concerns behind the choice of artistic methods. Resorting to activities like sit-ins and hunger strikes becomes one of the few available means for activists to gain attention. Endō too points to the hunger strike as the best way for her to get attention, considering the limited time she had. For Union Extasy as well, setting up a café at a conspicuous spot where it was a constant irritant to the university management was a rational choice for a small union that could not threaten to call out many members in a strike. Yamada also points to the fact that there may be practical considerations behind the emphasis on enjoyability. He explains that if you are on your own, you need to have fun to be able to continue (interview 24 September 2009). Still, the sit-ins, hunger strikes and cafés cannot be explained solely as a strategic choice to get attention or to keep spirits up. Getting attention is important, to be sure, but mainly from the perspective of participation in



campus protest231

the public sphere – as a means to spread a message and exert pressure on opponents. Several of the activities described above, such as the antics engaged in by Union Extasy, appear to have been aimed at more than that and appear unnecessary or even counter-productive from the point of view of swaying public opinion. But why would direct action have any intrinsic value beyond strategic concerns? As mentioned, having access to alternative arenas outside mainstream public space can be important since such spaces are crucial as spaces for empowerment. Although the activists of Kinji House or Ishigaki Café were criticised or looked askance at by some activists as being too preoccupied with mere fun or play, we can see with the benefit of hindsight that their playful activities may have been important as a form of practice or training for challenging authorities. They furnished participants with experiences that later helped them to use direct action in other struggles which had more “serious” causes but which to a considerable extent were waged using the same playful style. Without Kinji House and Ishigaki Café, there might not have been any Union Extasy. Play often involves a play with the categories of the dominant order in society, including spatial ones. Rancière (1999) points out that the dominant order is not simply discursive, but also a spatial “ordering of the sensible”. When protesters make themselves visible in public they often do so through a rejection of given spatial arrangements. Playful redefinitions of spaces can come about merely through counter-spaces, but no-man’slands too can be important arenas for exploring new uses of space since they provide activists with spaces relatively sheltered from interference by authorities.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE RECOVERY OF ACTIVISM Despite the changes in Japanese society since the onset of the “post-bubble” recession in the 1990s and the ensuing neoliberal reforms, protest movements among the young were scarce and weak during this decade. To be sure, following the end of the Cold War and the seeming triumph of global capitalism, established Leftist parties and unions had been weakened globally, not just in Japan. The absence of protest among young Japanese was nevertheless in remarkable contrast to what happened in many other countries, where during the late 1990s criticism against the new global economy gained force and the global justice movement achieved a breakthrough, especially after the WTO summit in Seattle 1999. Only with the demonstrations against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s and with the ensuing precarity movement did large-scale public protests make an appearance in Japan in which young people played a major role. Why, then, were protest movements so relatively weak during the 1990s, and why did they begin to grow during the following decade? When open protest did emerge, why did it take a form that appeared to have so little in common with older traditions of protest in Japan? What new ideas, arguments and uses of space emerged in the course of the transition? In this book I have tried to show that these questions cannot be answered simply by referring to changes that have been taking place since the 1990s. Instead, the development of freeter activism also must be understood in relation to the history of previous radical protest movements in Japan. The New Left factions of the 1960s and 1970s in particular left a traumatic and lingering legacy of political failure, sectarian infighting, dogmatism and distance from the concerns of ordinary people. Together with the growing sense of affluence in Japan produced by the country’s decades of high growth, this legacy explains why existing radical movements in Japan in the early 1990s were widely regarded as discredited and avoided by young people. Even when the sense of affluence was eroded in the 1990s, this legacy ensured that social discontent among the young was largely expressed in a mood of impasse and in acts of withdrawal rather than in open protest.

234

chapter eight

Paying attention to the legacy of the New Left makes it easier to bring into view several important historical factors that distinguish the Japanese case from other countries. It will be useful to make a brief inventory of such factors here, since they show us the specificity of the context in which Japanese youth movements have been forced to operate and thereby help us explain their trajectory. To make sense of the particularly traumatic quality of the New Left’s defeat, the first factor that springs to mind is of course the New Left’s own self-destructive violence. Violence per se, however, was not unique to Japan but can also be seen in the development of the radical Left in many other countries, such as West Germany, Italy and the United States (Zwerman et al. 2000). To make sense of the long-lasting impact of the New Left’s defeat in Japan, a second factor needs to be taken into consideration, namely Japan’s position in the world-system as a developmental state that during the postwar era achieved a remarkable “economic miracle” through its model of export-led growth and administrative guidance (Johnson 1982). The economic successes generated by this model and the growing sense of affluence in the 1970s and 1980s strengthened the hand of domestic capital against the labour movement and made the general public more disinclined to support radical anti-capitalism. This is the context that best explains the Japanese New Left’s failure to achieve tangible results and why it inspired so few successor movements (along the lines of the “new social movements” that developed in the West). The seemingly robust strength of Japanese capitalism until the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s is in turn related to a third factor, namely the timing of Japan’s turn to neoliberalism. While many other major economies suffered a crisis of profitability in the 1970s which made them move in the direction of deregulation and privatisation in the 1980s, Japan did not start to do so in earnest until during the “lost decade”, particularly from the mid-1990s onwards. Whereas neoliberalism increasingly came under fire in many other countries during the late 1990s, in Japan, by contrast, the post-bubble recession helped prop up legitimacy for the neoliberal reforms, which could be justified as necessary for a recovery of Japan’s economy and national self-esteem while their ill effects could be blamed on the recession and remaining “vested interests”. Taken together, these factors helped create a situation in which the neoliberal reforms faced little criticism when they started to be introduced in the late 1990s. They also strongly suggest that the trauma of the New Left was not simply the result of any particular event, such as the Asama Sansō incident 1972, but are better seen as the product of a larger



the recovery of activism235

discursive struggle that by the 1990s had ensured conservative hegemony and the muting of oppositional voices. Before open protest on a big scale could reemerge in the early years of the new millennium, a long and painful reappraisal of organisational form, ideologies and methods of struggle was necessary in order to reconstruct alternative discourses. The need to engage in this work explains why freeter activism needed a protracted period of “latency” before emerging in the form of open protest movements. Today, the factors that once dampened movement activism among the young in Japan have disappeared or been weakened. The general sense of affluence that once bolstered the prestige of the country’s economic and bureaucratic elites is gone and the legacy of the New Left has to a great extent been overcome, as I will discuss below in connection with the recent wave of protest against nuclear power. As that wave illustrates, today activism is no longer a stigmatised activity in Japan. A new chapter may have been opened in Japan’s social movement history and protests among the young may well continue to be common and part of the regular political landscape in the future. In the sections that follow, I start by briefly discussing what I see as the three most significant ways in which social movements in Japan have been renewed by freeter activism. The second section deals with the role of space in freeter activism and seeks to clarify theoretically why alternative spaces of various kinds are considered by activists to have a liberating or empowering function. In the third and final section, I illustrate the recovery of protest activism in Japan by discussing the anti-nuclear power movement and its lines of continuity with previous freeter activism. Three Innovations of Freeter Activism Three significant ways in which freeter activism has renewed activism in Japan are its development of new means of expression, the use of alternative space, and the attempt to reach out to and empower subalterns. Together, they help throw light on how freeter activists have managed to bring about a revival of forms of activism which are seen as untainted by the legacy of older forms of Leftism and capable of attracting the following of young people. All three relate directly to the attempt to reconstruct an oppositional language – cultural activism and terminological inventions provide freeter activism with means of expression that are seen as untainted by the dogmatism of the New Left, the attempt to empower subalterns has involved a direct challenge to the official construction of

236

chapter eight

“social problems”, and the use of alternative space has been crucial in providing a milieu in which the new alternative discourses can thrive. Let me discuss each in turn. Cultural Activism and New Means of Expression One important way in which freeter activism helped renew social movements in Japan was by developing means of expression that allow it to dissociate itself from hegemonic discourses as well as from the legacy of the New Left. Let me enumerate a few examples. Through terms like “vacant lot” or “interstices” freeter activists are articulating alternative conceptions of space free from the constraints of mainstream public space. “Problem youth” labels such as social withdrawal or NEET are contested by being provocatively affirmed and by the coinage of new terms like precariat, good-for-nothings, or paupers. A wealth of references to history and folklore help them articulate continuities with traditions of revolt and protest without having to rely on the New Left. The “self-responsibility” argument is attacked, allowing them to turn their anger outwards rather than inwards. The list could easily be made longer. Perhaps the most significant contribution to this new language is the cultural style of freeter activism. Early freeter groups like Aki no arashi and Dameren provided the newly emerging freeter stratum with its first successful vehicles for expression, and it is no exaggeration to state that this style has influenced all subsequent freeter activism. As I have argued in this book, it was developed as part of the way early freeter groups sought to separate themselves from the still existing New Left “sects” and it was animated by the mood of consumerism and affluence during the bubble economy. An important ingredient in it was vitalism, the idea that a life force existed to which activists needed to reconnect through their activities. It was a revolt against the dreary predictability of regular employment, the cultural norm of the nuclear family, and the hierarchical and closed activist organisation typified by the New Left “sect”. It thus originated as a revolt against “too much” stability and predictability, which was felt to be an obstacle to life, rather than as a reaction to precarious life conditions. This is an important part of the explanation of why this style started to bud before the economic woes and social malaise of the 1990s. Even as freeter activism changed character and become more oriented to material issues like poverty with the rise of the precarity movement in the 2000s, this strand of vitalism did not disappear. Instead, the precarity movement itself is marked by the coexistence of two strands, both strong,



the recovery of activism237

that stress the valorisation of “life” on the one hand and of “survival” on the other. One strand gives pride of place to the dream of an un-alienated “simply living” which cannot be realised except by social changes guaranteeing everyone basic “survival” and material well-being. The other strand insists on an autonomous life to be realised here and now, seeing life as something that blossoms not so much after the struggle as in its midst. That these two currents coexist in freeter activism strongly indicates that it is misleading to see this activism as driven primarily by either material or cultural concerns. The activists who have been engaged in theatre, painting or other cultural activities have hardly been indifferent to material issues. Moreover, as the homeless movement illustrates, it is striking how the “cultural” forms of activism have sprung up from situations characterised by acute material need. It seems that culture can be a necessity, just like material survival, for anyone who has things to say, who feels a need to speak his or her mind. Alternative Space That social movements do not operate solely in the public sphere is important to keep in mind when considering the development of freeter activism. The lingering effects of the setbacks and defeats suffered by radical protest movements during the 1970s meant that new networks and organisations as well as new ideas and new movement identities had to be developed before new public protests could take off on a larger scale. Much of this work happened in alternative spaces that could offer relief from the oppressive features of mainstream arenas. As I have tried to show, the alternative spaces used in freeter activism are not necessarily limited to particular physical places. Alternative spaces can also be realized in the “interstices” or “vacant lots” found in the urban landscape, or on the street during a demonstration, provided that such places can at least temporarily be turned into arenas for alternative forms of expression or living. To recognise that alternative spaces do not need to be secluded from the street is important since it helps us see that many activities that take place in public are not necessarily meant as forms of participating in the public sphere. When attempts are made to reach out to the general public or to authorities, space is conceived of as an arena for participation in the public sphere. Space in this conception serves above all as a facilitator of communication. By contrast, activism that serves to resurrect dead streets or to allow for “life” to blossom in the midst of an unresponsive society

238

chapter eight

makes use of space in quite different ways, which I have tried to capture through the notions of counter-space and no-man’s-land. The ability to navigate between or combine different usages of space has been a notable characteristic trait of freeter activism – from the early pioneering groups to today’s sound-demos, anti-eviction struggles, subaltern support and campus protest. Empowerment That not all social movement activism takes place in public is especially true of what I have called therapeutical activism which aims at strengthening people’s self-confidence in their ability to effect social change. These forms of activism have often involved cultural activities in which grief, anger or guilt have come to the forefront, meaning that the common portrayal of freeter activism as oriented to “fun” must be relativised. A better way to understand it is to see it as suffused with vitalism. Vitalism can be a longing for a recovery of “dead” vital energies, stymied or traumatised through defeats, setbacks or failure. Vitalism of this sort can be seen in the preoccupation with the dead of earlier defeats. A participant in a freeter May Day in 2008 described the demonstration as a “funeral procession” in which she walked side by side with all the dead who had committed suicide or died from overwork (Kurita 2008). The dead also figured centrally in the Shinjuku cardboard village art and in the struggle over Miyashita Park. The concern with empowerment also comes to the fore in the attempt of freeter activists to reach out to subaltern groups such as social withdrawers and NEET. Unlike most established support organisations, freeter activists have usually tried to further the empowerment of such groups by contesting the very construction of “social problems”. A typical strategy has been to relativise labels such as “social withdrawal” or “NEET” by playfully affirming them or replacing them with anti-establishment coinages such as the “precariat”. Such practices are also conspicuous in the precarity movement, as can be seen when freeters gleefully refer to themselves as “rabble”, “paupers” or “good-for-nothings”. In both cases empowerment is seen as linked to what Rancière calls subjectivation, a practice of subversive self-labelling that destabilises hegemonic discourses and paves the way for alternative ones. In relation to subalterns, difficulties have been numerous when it comes to how alternative spaces can be furnished that can function both as shelters and as bases for public protest. Despite this, the ambition to provide an environment welcoming for such groups has already become a



the recovery of activism239

hallmark of much freeter activism. Next to the spectacular deployment of cultural activism, the attempt to create alternative spaces for subalterns is one of the most significant innovations in freeter activism compared to earlier forms of activism in Japan. The Importance of Space: Contestation and Bracketing Space has repeatedly shown itself to have been crucial in the course of my investigations. I will use this section to theoretically clarify its role in activism and to discuss what it is that is experienced as being so liberating and empowering about the ability to make use of different kinds of space. I will do so by bringing out how various spaces can be seen as sites for political practices distinct from those usually associated with the public sphere. Here it will be useful to return to the classical notion of the public sphere as developed by Habermas (1989, 1996) and Arendt (1958) where we can see that this notion centrally involves two dimensions, which I will refer to as those of contestation and bracketing. The former dimension is probably the outwardly most visible one. In their portrayal of the public sphere, both stress its function as an arena for verbal contestation, deliberation and debate. However, a careful reading of their works shows that to them the public sphere also involves a sense of distance or detachment from preoccupations of everyday life, which is made possible through a temporary bracketing of dependencies and inequalities in wealth and status that define our situation in society. Only through a bracketing of real differences and relations of dependency can the semblance of a public in which participants are equal come into being (e.g. Habermas 1989:36; Arendt 2006:21). On the one hand, then, we have the emphasis on contestation, debate and deliberation, and on the other, the stress on creating a semblance of equality through bracketing. Typical of the idea of the public sphere in Habermas and Arendt is that these two dimensions are brought together in a relation in which they balance and moderate each other and thus give rise to the peculiar form of public deliberation or debate stressed by them – a form in which bracketing is employed in order to facilitate communication, while contestation is contained by being limited to things not considered disruptive of the norms of public communication itself. The point I want to make here is that both of the dimensions of con­ testation and bracketing can be understood to indicate publicness. Recognising their distinctness makes it easier for us to grasp ideas of the

240

chapter eight

public where the two dimensions have parted company. This is something that becomes important when considering theories of public space. Counter-Spaces and Urban Sociability Among theories of public space, it is possible to distinguish between those in which the contestation is foregrounded and those in which bracketing is foregrounded. Let me start with the former. Don Mitchell can serve as an example of a theorist emphasising contestation. As he points out, the public sphere has often been characterised by exclusion. People have reacted to this exclusion by taking to the streets, plazas or parks to win the right to political participation, turning these places into stages for visibilisation and representation. The idea of public space, he argues, “has never been guaranteed. It has only been won through concerted struggle, and then, after the fact, guaranteed” (Mitchell 2003:4f). [W]hat makes a space public – a space in which the cry and demand for the right to the city can be seen and heard – is often not its preordained “publicness”. Rather, it is when, to fulfil a pressing need, some group or another takes space and through its actions makes it public. (ibid. 35)

Rancière’s attempt to formulate a notion of politics is which dissent or disagreement is central – rather than faith in rationality or hope of consensus – appears to be premised on a similar idea of public space. In Rancière, publicness is seen as the very product of dissent, as something that would dissolve and disappear without it: “There is no consensus, no undamaged communication, no settlement of a wrong. But there is a polemical commonplace for the handling of a wrong and the demonstration of equality” (Rancière 1992:62). In contrast to the bracketing stressed by Habermas and Arendt, the form of dissent highlighted by Mitchell and Rancière can be characterised as aiming at what Fraser (1992:119f) calls un-bracketing: at a polemical visibilisation of inequality which disrupts and challenges the bracketing on which it is constituted. The visibilisation of things normally bracketed gives rise to a particular form of public space which I have referred to as counter-space. In a counter-space, space is used in ways considered transgressive and contrary to the officially approved norms, and the very right of activists to use the space is often contested. For examples of this we can turn to the homeless movement, in which theatre, music and poetry have been spectacularly deployed on several occasions in recent years to stop evictions. Other examples include the creation of “liberated zones” during street parties or the spectacular site occupations and other forms of direct action on



the recovery of activism241

university campuses. As I have argued, the latter usually achieve their impact much like artworks, by questioning and challenging boundaries, and by inviting the reaction: “Is this really defensible?”. Another current of scholarship on public space is represented by the works of Erwin Goffman (1963), Richard Sennett (1986), Jane Jacobs (1992) and Lyn Lofland (1973, 1998), among others. Typically, these works focus on urban spaces where publicness is conceived of as resting on norms governing the behaviour between strangers. In a striking inversion of the conception of publicness found in Mitchell or Rancière, here it is the dimension of bracketing that is foregrounded, rather than that of contestation. Thus we can see that in Goffman bracketing can signal publicness wholly in the absence of verbal interaction, as exemplified by what he calls civil inattention and other forms of tactful interaction taking place between strangers (Goffman 1963:83–88). Here it will suffice to point out that we can make a distinction between two concepts of public space, one in which bracketing and another in which contestation is central. If we try to relate the various ideas of publicness mentioned so far to the two dimensions of bracketing and contestation, we get Figure 2. The vertical axis shows the degree to which norms of bracketing conform to those perceived to be mainstream or predominant in society, while the horizontal axis shows the degree to which interaction is characterised by contestation. Bracketing

Mainstream public space (Goffman etc.)

Public sphere (Habermas, Arendt)

Contestation No-man’s-land

Counter-space (Rancière, Mitchell)

Figure 2. The dimensions of contestation and bracketing.

242

chapter eight

No-Man’s-Land, Bracketing and Empowerment There is a fourth field in Figure 2 which I still have not mentioned. Paying closer attention to this field is necessary to understand how social movements use space, because this field represents arenas governed by norms of alternative bracketing, where subalterns, activists and other people can spend time when not engaging in publicly visible acts of contestation. Such spaces can be illustrated by what I have called no-man’s-lands. These are spaces that, unlike counter-spaces, thrive on official neglect and precisely for that reason allow for the pursuit of activities not normally allowed according to the norms governing mainstream public life. While theories on how norms of bracketing govern the interaction between strangers in cities tend to focus on forms of bracketing that rest on mainstream norms, no-man’s-lands show that bracketing can also help provide protection and empowerment in alternative spaces set up by disadvantaged groups. In his classic The Hobo, Nels Anderson describes the camps (known as “jungles”) set up by itinerant hobos on the outskirts of cities as hospitable and democratic refuges where they could pass time, camp, cook food and wash clothes in freedom from molestation. Here the hobo “turns his back on the world and faces his fellows, and is at ease” (Anderson 1962:19). The rule, however, was never to inquire too deeply into each other’s personal background. Every new member is of interest for the news he brings or the rumors that he spreads. Each is interested in the other so far as he has something to tell about the road over which he has come, the work conditions, the behavior of the police, or other significant details. But with all the discussion there is seldom any effort to discuss personal relations and connections. Here is one place where every man’s past is his own secret. […] Men will brush elbow in the jungles for days and even weeks without ever learning one another’s names. They live closed lives and grant others the same privilege. (ibid. 19f)

What Anderson describes is remarkably similar to how Simmel describes the sociability of bourgeois salons: an encouragement of pleasant interaction that goes hand in hand with a bracketing of the participants’ personal background and circumstances. What distinguishes the jungles from the salons is not the presence or absence of bracketing, but rather, firstly, that the jungles offer an alternative norm for bracketing which frees hobo life from its stigma, and, secondly, that interaction in the jungles is not divorced from material concerns. These two traits were also conspicuous in the case of the occupied Miyashita Park, where much of the interaction included material aspects of



the recovery of activism243

everyday life, such as work, eating, resting or sleeping. What was bracketed here was not the blemishes of one’s body or economic circumstances so much as the yardsticks of the surrounding society. Looking back at the ideas of space developed by the activists of Miyashita Park it is striking how closely they resemble recent reformulations of the idea of the public among historians such as Amino Yoshihiko (1996) or Higashijima Makoto (2000, 2002) who in their writings have used premodern concepts like muen or gōko (rivers and lakes) to point to ideas of publicness in Japanese history that are free from the elitist connotations that still adhere to ōyake / kō, the customary translation of “public”. Both of these historians as well as the activists wed the idea of the public to an ideal of nomadic wandering rather than to that of a sedentary citizenry. They all present public places as hospitable to marginal people and they all see them as constituted less by rational discussion than by a bracketing of worldly status and power. Thus, Amino argues that arriving at a medieval muenjo – a temple unaffiliated with feudal patrons – meant to enter a world in which people were equal in the face of the “Gods and Buddhas” and liberated from the bonds that defined their position in the secular world. The activists of Miyashita Park likewise appear to have thought of the park as a liminal space, close to the dead, in which the yardsticks of mainstream society were suspended (Cassegård 2011). By using muen, gōko or “vacant lots” as models of public space, these historians and activists shift the emphasis of the concept of publicness away from its deliberative to its bracketing aspects. However, this element of bracketing is not identical to how it is formulated by classical theorists like Arendt or Habermas. To them, bracketing is above all a prerequisite for creating an arena for discussion in which everyone would be able to participate on an equal footing. In the formulations of the park activists, the liberation from the ties, roles and identities of everyday social life is much more of a goal in itself, something to be valued for its own sake – as a kind of resetting of social norms and human relations giving a foretaste of utopian freedom transcending that of secular society, a degree zero from which everything must start anew and a new and better world can be born. A final common denominator between the activists and the historians is that the spaces of gōko, muen or the “vacant lots” are not necessarily quietist places of withdrawal. Amino points out that muen inspired riots, revolts and popular federations in the late Japanese Middle Ages (Amino 1996:122). In Miyashita Park too, the “vacant lot” became a staging ground for a counter-space for provocatively displaying alternative ways of living and challenging the bracketing principles of mainstream society. At this point I think there is an important observation to be made with regard to bracketing. What tends to get lost from view when we understand

244

chapter eight

the activities of what Fraser calls counterpublics merely in terms of unbracketing is that principles of bracketing are not uniform for society as a whole, but plural, and that they vary depending on context. To be sure, bracketing can obstruct the thematisation of inequality, as Fraser points out, but it may also have an empowering function for disadvantaged groups to the extent that it contributes to the creation of alternative arenas for interaction where they are freed from stigmatisation. It would be a mistake to see counterpublics as rejecting all forms of bracketing. It is by providing their own alternative principles of bracketing that counterpublics are able to create a semblance of equality among their own participants – a semblance which helps them to function as places of refuge. We can now see clearly why counter-spaces and no-man’s-lands have political import and why they play such a prominent role in freeter activism. To many freeter activists, the mainstream public is unresponsive and marked by stratification and exclusion – an arena for the hegemonic discourse they are trying to resist. Counter-spaces and no-man’s-lands both offer opportunities for going beyond by the norms governing the politics of the mainstream public sphere, although they do so in different ways. While counter-spaces are created by acts that use space to unbracket or visibilise inequalities, no-man’s-lands are arenas where interaction is based on alternative forms of bracketing and where empowerment can be furthered even when openly political activities involving public voice are not used. Rather than focusing overly on how social movements function as participants in the public sphere, I suggest that we need to look at how they navigate between the various dimensions of publicness, sometimes emphasising contestation and at other times bracketing. Fukushima and Beyond After the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant which suffered a meltdown in the wake of the Tōhoku earthquake on 11 March 2011, popular mobilisations against nuclear power got off the ground with a swiftness that would hardly have been possible without the preceding two decades of freeter activism. The tide of protest activism included huge mass demonstrations on a scale even surpassing those of the 1960s in addition to assemblies and conferences, hunger strikes, protest camps and sit-ins. Fukushima mothers formed human chains and farmers brought their cows to Tokyo to demonstrate. In addition to numerous smaller demonstrations all over the country,



the recovery of activism245

protest actions included huge manifestations in Tokyo in which writers, intellectuals and celebrities played prominent roles, such as the anti-nuke rally in Meiji Park on 17 September 2011, with gathered 60,000 participants or the even more massive “Goodbye nuclear power” rally in Yoyogi Park on 16 July the following year, in which 170,000 people participated (Arita 2012; Slater 2011). This testifies to the fact that social movement activism in Japan has made a remarkable recovery from the setback it suffered with the defeat of the radical protest movements in the 1970s. The fact that a leading role in many of these activities was played by freeters also shows that the development of freeter activism has not been brought to a close with the precarity movement. On the contrary, one of the most important results of the latter was that a style of protest as well as a social and organisational infrastructure for protest was created and consolidated that could also be used for other mobilisations and movements. Consider the following incident. On 12 November 2011 several girls in red dresses were lying seemingly dead on Ginza Chūō Street in Tokyo. People stopped or slowed their steps and many were taking photos. No slogans were heard and no voices raised, but a closer look at the red dresses revealed that it was a political manifestation, since they were all marked by the radioactive trefoil symbol and the word “NO”. The girls in red call themselves “Red Sprechchor” (Akai shupurehikōru). None of them had been engaged in any political activism prior to the Fukushima disaster. Having formed their group on Facebook, they came together on this day for a one-day performance which they called a visual slogan. As they later stated on their homepage, they had wanted to perform an act that was strikingly visible in order to physically embody an antithesis to the invisibility of radiation. They had spent the day performing the die-in at a variety of public spaces in Tokyo before arriving in Ginza. Beginning in Hibiya Park, they had moved on to a spot next to the “tent plaza” – a well-known protest action site occupying a piece of the pavement outside METI (the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). Next, they repeated their performance outside the National Diet and the headquarters of TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the electronic utilities company running the Fukushima plant). Before leaving Ginza, they finished their day by repeating it a few more times outside conspicuous locations such as Apple, Cartier, H&M, Lion, Prada, Uniclo and Wako (Akai Shuprehikōru 2011). In Red Sprechchor’s performances one readily recognizes several characteristics of the cultural forms of activism engaged in by freeters. To

246

chapter eight

begin with, the girls were motivated by dissatisfaction with the protest methods of established organisations, which lacked “fun” and opportunities for individual expression. “Having participated in anti-nuclear power demonstrations, we wondered if there might not be some method of expression that would more original and let us be more true to ourselves” (ibid.). Secondly, Red Sprechchor’s activities involved explicit and playful references to the legacy of older movements. The word “Sprechchor”, like many other terms related to political activism in Japan, is an originally German word used in Japan for the activity of chanting or shouting slogans in unison during street demonstrations – presumably the very kind of “traditional” demonstration behaviour rejected by the group. While the group’s use of this word signalled its awareness of the history of protest in Japan, opting for a visual (but inaudible) slogan was clearly an innovative transformation. While there were practical reasons for choosing the colour red – it shows well on photos – the choice of colour also hints at an ambiguous relation to the past. Although a participant explained that it should not be read politically, it is easy to associate it with revolutionary energy. At the same time it also functions as a symbol of femininity, blood, death, emergency and love (V, interview 16 December 2012). Thirdly, we can note that there was nothing reminiscent of prefigurative activism in its performance. On the contrary, it staged an identification with the dead which rather hints at a therapeutical dimension, evident in the way the group “repeated” the traumatic disaster by staging its possible consequences actively rather than as passive victims. Fourthly, the die-in performed by Red Sprechchor resembled an artistic happening. As the words about searching for means of expression that would be “original and true to ourselves” indicate, the performances did not simply aim at political efficacy. At the same time, art was seen as a way to appeal to and influence the general public. Surely, we believed, the sight of tens of girls in red dresses lying across the street would be both beautiful and have a strong impact. Even if the power of each one of us is miniscule, as a group of girls we would have power together. (Akai Sprechchor 2011)

Rather than claiming that the performances were about either art or politics, or expressive or instrumental activism, the group appears to have aimed at a balance between these aspects, seeing art as useful precisely in reaching out to and influencing the public. Finally, the performance also implied a particular use of space. As the “guerilla art” group Chim↑Pom has stated, the very act of bringing art into



the recovery of activism247

the street is a breach of norms, since “in public space the exhibition of riddles is not allowed” (Chim↑Pom 2012:58). While Red Sprechchor clearly had an ambition to use various public spaces as a stage for an effective intervention in the mainstream public sphere, the fact that it used a form of direct action similar to art also introduced elements of counter-space. Although the group’s members are all newcomers to political activism, it is striking how their activities replicate features which have become characteristic of the so-called new cultural movements. This shows, I think, the success of freeter activism in establishing a new template of activism, which suits the needs of the younger generations and which is well-recognised enough to inspire even those with very little previous connection to activism. Apart from providing a template for activism, there were two more ways in which freeter activism paved the way for the present surge of antinuclear power protest. Firstly, the prior two decades of freeter activism appear to have helped legitimate activism in general. In particular the precarity or “anti-poverty” activism has achieved considerable public acceptance and showed that activism is possible without repeating the faults of the New Left. That activism was no longer as stigmatised as it once was, is likely to have been an important precondition of the rapid swell of the anti-nuclear power protests. A second way in which freeter activism contributed to the protests was by the direct participation in the protests of freeter activists who were already active in the precarity movement (see Ogawa Akihiro 2013).1 One of the first to act after the disaster was Sono Ryôta, a member of the General Freeter Union who initiated the sit-in in front of TEPCO a week after the disaster (Sono 2011). Also quick to act was the artists’ collective Chim↑Pom, which in an act of guerrilla art added smouldering reactors to a mural by Okamoto Tarō in Shibuya Station in April 2011 (Chim↑Pom 2012:8–12). Beginning in April, Matsumoto Hajime and his friends in the Amateur Riot started to organise some of the first street demonstrations against nuclear power. These demonstrations were sound-demos that on several occasions attracted over ten thousand participants, a number which surprised the organisers themselves. On one of these occasions, in June 2011, a crowd of 20,000 dancing people peacefully took over the 1 All did not do so by demonstrating. Yabu Shirō left Tokyo on the day after the disaster, hurling himself into the movement for measuring radiation and publishing books on the nuclear catastrophe (e.g. Yabu 2012). The well-known anti-poverty activist Yuasa Makoto for a time accepted a post offered by the Kan government after the 3/11 disaster as government representative for volunteering in Tōhoku (Avenell 2012:62).

248

chapter eight

square outside the Alta Building near Shinjuku Station, turning it into what Matsumoto, referring to the Arab Spring, called a “Tahrir” (Higuchi 2011; Kindstrand 2011; Ikegami 2012). The movement continued to swell the following year. Having to undergo stress tests or planned maintenance, all of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors were turned off simultaneously for a few months in mid-2012, the last one grounding to a halt on Children’s Day in May. Despite widespread anger and anxiety over radiation, a sense of euphoria reportedly spread as people realised that they were managing fine without nuclear power. Demonstrations started to mushroom to prevent the reactors from being restarted. Especially momentous were the weekly rallies held in front of the Prime Minister’s residence every Friday, which were arranged by the Metropolitan Coalition against Nukes (usually referred to through the abbreviation Hangenren). Having started in March 2012 with around 300 participants, these demonstrations grew rapidly in June and July, fuelled by public anger at Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko’s announcement of the planned restart of the Ōi nuclear reactors. They reached a zenith on 29 July when the crowd, reaching 200,000 in number according to the coalition, flooded the pavement and spilled out onto the street, creating a liberated zone right in front of the Prime Minister’s residence. This was the occasion when one of the coalition leaders, Misao Redwolf of the group No Nukes More Hearts, used a loudspeaker to urge the masses to return home, driving home the non-violent and orderly nature of the protests to the public (Arita 2012; Noma 2012). Admittedly, these were big rallies in which not only freeter activists participated, but also members of environmental groups, religious groups and ordinary citizens of all ages, many of whom had never participated in political rallies before.2 However, as one of its most sizable and visible contingents, the movement against nuclear power contains what I would call a “democracy movement” in which the role of freeter activists, many with a background in the precarity movement, has been central. Enraged in particular by the power of the nuclear establishment (the so-called “nuclear village”, Kingston 2012) and more generally by the way power is

2 It is possible to discern four distinctive parts of the anti-nuclear power movement in Japan: 1) environmentalists focusing on renewable energy, 2) a ‘zero-becquerel movement’ working hand in hand with citizen initiatives in measuring radiation, 3) a movement to support the destroyed Tōhoku communities through volunteerism and consumer initiatives, and 4) a broader democracy movement (for presentations of some of these movements, see Slater et al. 2012; Kingston ed. 2012; Yabu 2012).



the recovery of activism249

exercised in Japan, many of these activists see the high-handed state as the prime enemy, rather than the threat to the environment per se (Mōri 2012). The imprint of freeter activism on the anti-nuclear power protests was directly visible to any visitor to the Kasumigaseki area on Friday evenings. Apart from the densely packed rally in front of the Prime Minister’s residence – usually conducted in a disciplined way with rhythmic chanting and occasional drumming – activities were overflowing the entire area, which, although heavily policed, could best be described as a lively and heterogeneous movement space, where participants in the rallies could mix with the people of the “tent plaza” outside METI, hold a one-minute speech at the Speaker’s Area set up opposite to the Diet, watch pavement exhibitions of satirical placards, or enjoy the performances of the Drums of Fury (Ikari no doramu) as this group of amateur musicians paraded from Ministry to Ministry with their drums, trombones and saxophones, followed by an enthusiastic crowd. Other groups like Twit No Nukes symbolised the importance of social media in mobilising young people with no interest in organisation. Some demonstrators regularly showed up on bicycles, pedalling through the area with blinking lamps and dressed in funny costumes. Kinoshita Chigaya, one of the organizers of the Friday rallies, points out that the “political eruption” in the summer of 2012 was the fruit of “the accumulation of experiences during this long one year and a half since the nuclear accident”, singling out the Amateur Riot’s demonstration in April the year before as a seminal event that had contributed to attracting first time participants in political demonstration (Kinoshita 2012). Encouraging for many freeter activists was that their activities won such widespread acceptance and support. For the first time ever, they could engage in direct action, sit-ins, performances and sound-demos without being seen as provocative by the general public. They were publicly endorsed by established intellectuals, celebrities and even conservative politicians.3 As Kinoshita states, no longer were they accused by political parties, unions or citizen movements for being “too radical”. At the time of the anti-war movement 2003, sound-demos had been disparaged and participants harassed by the police. Instead people had preferred to talk of “walks” and “parades”. But today, he observes, “the word ‘parade’

3 Among intellectuals, Karatani Kōjin took part in the demonstrations arranged by the Amateur Riot and lauded the group for having reinvigorated street protests in Japan (Karatani 2012a, 2012b). An even more striking illustration of the new legitimacy of protesting was the fact that the Friday rallies were visited by political bigwigs like Hatoyama Yukio and Ozawa Ichirō.

250

chapter eight

has disappeared”, the activism has broad public support and “a new culture of action” is being nurtured (ibid. 2011). With the anti-nuclear power movement, the shadow of the New Left has almost disappeared in Japan – almost, but not entirely. Several activists I talked to look back on the moment when the protesters in front of the Prime Minister’s residence chose to disperse on 29 July as a special, almost defining moment. In a sense it was a way for the protests to publicly express that they were different from the New Left. By choosing to disperse at the very moment when they had succeeded in breaking down the order established by the police, they also accepted that there would be no repetition of the 1960 Ampo protests when the masses had broken into the Diet grounds.4 To a far higher degree than in the precarity movement, the anti-nuclear power movement has given freeter activists the opportunity to participate as dialogue partners in the public sphere – even sitting at the same table as the prime minister, as when representatives of the Metropolitan Coalition against Nukes met with Prime Minister Noda in August 2012. Although direct action and the creation of “liberated zones” are still important elements in activism, the fact that they have become so widely accepted by the public means that the spaces of such activities have lost much of the quality of being counter-spaces opposed to mainstream society. Instead they have become valued elements of a movement in which large parts of mainstream society itself have turned against the nuclear establishment. Interestingly, no-man’s-lands may be easier to find in the movement area of Kasumigaseki on Fridays than counter-spaces. Thanks to the rallies, the entire area turns into a place where people simply gather in order to enjoy themselves, and where even seemingly non-political spaces out of the public spotlight assume new functions. The stretch of pavement in front of the Diet, for example, is a relatively quiet place even on Friday evenings where individuals and small groups find the space and peace do their own thing – lighting candles or playing music. One of the people who regularly appeared here was a man whose sole activity seemed to consist in blowing in a vuvuzela. Seeing him, I realized that the area in fact functioned much like a no-man’s-land, created in the midst of Kasumigaseki as a by-product of the anti-nuclear power movement. 4 Gonoi points to the peaceful Alta Square occupation in June 2011 as another significant event that underscored how far demonstrations have evolved since the 1960s, when the area had been the scene of the violent ‘Shinjuku Riots’. In contrast to demonstrations then, he points to the “festive” and “non-violent” character of demonstrations today as distinguishing traits (Gonoi 2012a:7f, 163f).



the recovery of activism251

What effects these demonstrations will have remains to be seen. As public opinion moved overwhelmingly in the direction of immediately or gradually abolishing nuclear power, the Noda-led government pledged in September 2012 to gradually phase out nuclear power until the 2030s but after the elections in December, the new government under Abe Shinzō quickly announced that it would not feel bound by the pledge. Comparing the demonstrations of the summer of 2012 to the mass protests of the Arab Spring, some commentators talked of a “Hydrangea Revolution” (Yang 2012), but a year later much steam has gone out of the movement and many activists have turned to other issues. After the huge “Goodbye nuclear power” rally in Yoyogi Park in July 2012, at which Amamiya Karin was one of the speakers, she looked back on the pain she had felt when she thought she was powerless: These last few years, as I got engaged in the problems of inequality and poverty and met people with the know-how to concretely change society, I realised that we human beings are not as powerless as I thought. Actually there are many things we can do. From then on, it was as if a fresh wind had entered my life [daibu kazetōshi ga yoku natta]. Above all, I no longer accuse myself as much as before of being powerless and unable to do anything (Amamiya 2012).

Regardless of outcome, the anti-nuclear protests show that demonstrating has become a widely accepted way of expressing discontent and that oppositional languages have come into being that are no longer regarded as discredited. This in itself is an important outcome of the freeter activism that has developed in recent decades and the processes of recovery which it has helped set in motion.

APPENDIX ONE

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF KEY EVENTS AND MAJOR ORGANISATIONS Dates indicate when organisations were formed or major events held that are mentioned in the text. Year

Formation of organisations

Major campaigns and events

1981 San’ya dispute league [Sōgidan] 1983 Peace Boat Late 1980s Radical youth movements against nuclear power, emperor system and “controlled education” 1987 Hokke no kai [Atka mackerel society] Aki no arashi [Autumn storm] (dissolved 1991) 1989 Uma no hone [Horse’s bone] (dissolves into Aki no arashi 1990) 1992 Inoken [Shibuya and Harajuku association for winning life and rights] (transforms into Nojiren [Shibuya Free Association for the Right to Housing and Well-being of the Homeless] in 1998) Dameren [League of goodfor-nothings] (ceases activities around 2002) Awaji Platz (Continued)

254

appendix one

(Cont.)

Year

Formation of organisations

1993 1994

New Start Shinjuku renrakukai [Shinjuku Coordination Association]

1995–1998 1995–1999 1995 1996 1998

2000

2001–2004 2001

2002 2003

Kamagasaki Patrol Society for preserving the squalor of Hōsei [Hōsei no binbō kusasa o mamoru kai] (ceases activities 2001) New Start Kansai Metropolitan Youth Union [Shutoken seinen yunion] NAM [New Associationist Movement] (dissolved 2003)

Peace Walk The great pauper rebellion [Binbōnin daihanran shūdan] Moyai World Peace Now [WPN] Korosuna [Do not kill] Against Street Control [ASC] (dissolved 2004) The Rabble Etc [Uzōmuzō sono ta] (active until 2005) Comrades’ Association of Nagai Park [Nagai kōen nakama no kai]

Major campaigns and events

Shinjuku cardboard village art “Sea of fire” demonstrations in Kyoto “Kinji House” squat-house

Anti-war protests against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

chronological table of key events and major organisations255 (Cont.)

Year

2004–2005 2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Formation of organisations

Major campaigns and events

Café Enoaru opens in Yoyogi Park

The precarity movement emerges General Freeter Union [Furītā The first freeter May Day zenpan rōdō kumiai] and the held in Tokyo network PAFF [Part-timer, Arbeiter, Freeter & Foreign worker] Anti-war Anti-government Action [Hansen hanseifu kōdō] (transforms into Anti-war Livelihood [Hansen seikatsu] in 2006) The Amateur Riot [Shirōto no ran] Union Bochibochi Slow Work Ishigaki Café at Kyoto University Freeter Union Fukuoka (FUF) 246 Conference of Expressive Artists [246 Hyōgensha kaigi] Kōenji NEET Union Anti-Poverty Campaign Union Extasy The Nagai Park struggle, with theatre on eviction day Hunger strikes at Ritsumeikan and Kyoto Seika universities Anti-G8 mobilisations at time of G8 summit in Tōyako, Hokkaido First NEET demonstration (Continued)

256

appendix one

(Cont.)

Year

2008–2009

Formation of organisations KUMASO (dissolved 2012)

2008–2010 2009 Union Socosoco 2010 2011–

Major campaigns and events New Year Dispatch Village [Toshikoshi haken-mura] Miyashita Park struggle AIR’s occupation of Miyashita Park First NEETopia Anti-nuclear mobilisation in the wake of the 3/11 “triple disaster”

APPENDIX TWO

INTERVIEWS List of Interviews Referred To in the Book: Asato, Ken (co-founder of General Freeter Union) Endō, Reiko (hunger strike at Ritsumeikan University) Hasegawa, Pepe (co-founder of Dameren) Hirasawa, Gō (film critic) Inoue, Yuzuru (script writer of “Waking up from the dream”) Kaminaga, Kōichi (co-founder of Dameren) Kanehagi, Atsushi (founder of Kamagasaki Patrol) Miyazawa, Naoto (founder of Hokke no kai) Morioka, Shingō (“Sea of fire” arranger) Nakagiri, Kōsuke (founder of Comrade’s Association of Nagai Park) Nakamura, Ken (first chairman of Union Bochibochi) Nakazawa, Takaharu (“Sea of fire” DJ) Nishijima, Akira (chairman of New Start Kansai) Ogawa, Tetsuo (central activist in 246 Conference, AIR) Take, Jun’ichirō (cardboard village artist) Tanaka, Toshihide (director of Awaji Platz) Yabu, Shirō (writer, co-founder of several activist groups) Yamada, Shirō (arranger of protests against “blacklisting”) Yamamoto, Yohane (manga artist)

12 February 2008, 24 February 2008 (mail interviews) 19 July 2007, 29 April 2010 1 October 2009 29 September 2009 23 July 2011 13 May 2010 12 July 2011 26 December 2009 15 August 2010 (mail interview) 11 July 2011 15 June 2005, 31 July 2007 27 June 2010, 29 July 2010 18 July 2007 12 May 2010 2 August 2011 31 July 2007 30 September 2009 24 September 2009 29 September 2009

258

appendix two

A – Kyoto-based activist B – Former member of Aki no arashi C – Former member of Aki no arashi D – Former participant in Dameren E – Board member, General Freeter Union F – Kyoto-based activist G –Kyoto-based activist H – Kyoto-based activist I – Kyoto-based activist J – Participant in Nagai Park Struggle K –Participant in Nagai Park Struggle L – Participant in Nagai Park Struggle M – Participant in Nagai Park Struggle N – Member of Union Bochibochi O – Support staff at New Start P – Participant in Miyashita Park Struggle Q – Support Staff at New Start R – Support Staff at New Start Kansai S – Former participant in Dameren T – Board member, General Freeter Union U – Member, General Freeter Union V – Participant in Red Sprechchor W – Former participant in Dameren X – Former participant in Dameren Y – Former participant in Dameren Z – Participant in Nojiren A1 – Participant in Nojiren B1 Activist in homeless movement, Osaka C1 Activist in homeless movement, Osaka D1 Activist in homeless movement, Osaka

24 September 2009 29 September 2009 29 September 2009 12 May 2010 7 August 2007 23 July 2011 20 August 2009 24 September 2009, 19 March 2010 27 June 2010, 29 July 2010 25 July 2011 10 July 2011 10 July 2011 17 July 2011 27 March 2010 11 July 2007 10 January 2011 3 August 2007, 3 August 2007 (mail interview) 6 July 2007 1 October 2009 10 July 2007 10 July 2007 16 December 2012 21 June 2010 12 May 2010 7 April 2010 (mail interview) 12 May 2010 8 March 2010 4 August 2007 4 August 2007 6 August 2007

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aida, Makoto (2008) “Tokyo no āto?” (The art of Tokyo), part I & II, Real Tokyo, 30 January & 13 February; http://www.realtokyo.co.jp/docs/ja/column/40nen/bn/40nen_063/; http:// www.realtokyo.co.jp/docs/ja/column/40nen/bn/40nen_064/; accessed 28 March 2010. —— et al. (2008) “Aozora zatsudankai” (Idle talk meeting under the blue sky), BT Bijutsu techō 60(907) (May): 84–95. Akagi, Tomohiro (2007) “‘Maruyama Masao’ o hippatakitai – 31 sai furītā. Kibō wa, sensō” (I want to slap ‘Maruyama Masao’: 31 year old freeter, my hope is war), Ronza 1: 53–59. Akai Sprechchor (2011) “Akai shupurehikōru desu”, 17 November 2011; http://red-sprechchor .cocolog-nifty.com/; accessed 30 April 2012. Akane, Saburo & Shibata, Hiromi (2003) Zenkyōto, Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004) “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma”, pp. 1–30, in Alexander, J.C. et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. —— & Elizabeth Butler Breese (eds) (2011) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Amamiya, Karin (2006a) “Demo da, demo da, mō sugu demo da!” (Demonstration coming soon), Sugoi ikikata, blog entry 1 August 2006; http://www.sanctuarybooks.jp/sugoi/ blog/. (accessed 11 January 2007). —— (2006b) “Ikizurasa to purekariāto” (Hardship of living and precariat); PAFF homepage, http://a.sanpal.co.jp/paff/information/20060719.html, accessed 11 January 2007. —— (2006c) “Subarashiki Furītā rōsō” (Marvellous General Freeter Unon), Sugoi ikikata, blog entry 3 July 2006; http://www.sanctuarybooks.jp/sugoi/blog/index.php?e=41 (accessed 25 November 2012). —— (2007a) Ikisasero! Nanminka suru wakamonotachi (Let us live! The refugeization of young people), Tokyo: Ōta shuppan. —— (2007b) “Ikuzurasa to purekariāto” (The difficulty of living and the precariat), Furītāzu furī, Vol. 01: 58–69. —— (2007c) “‘Binbō’ o sakate ni hangeki ga hajimatta – Uyoku o hete, sukkari sakeika shita watashi” (The counter-attack with ‘poverty’ turned against the adversary: I’ve left the right and utterly turned to the left), Ronza 4 (April): 35–40. —— (2009a) Purekariāto no yūutsu (The gloom of the precariat), Tokyo: Kōdansha. —— (2009b) ‘Ikiru’ tame ni hangeki suru zo! (We will counter-attack for the sake of ‘living’), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. —— (2009c) “Union Ekusutashī, mukigen sutoraiki ni totsunyū!!” (Union Extasy dives into unlimited strike), Magazine 9, blog entry 25 February 2009; http://www.magazine9.jp/ karin/090225/; accessed 6 May 2009. —— (2010) Hangeki karuchā – Purekariāto no yutaka na sekai (Counter-attack culture: the rich world of the precariat), Tokyo: Kadokawa gakugei shuppan. —— (2012) “17 man nin ga shūketsu! ‘Sayonara genpatsu 10 man nin shūkai’” (170,000 gather! The “Goodbye Nuclear Power 100,000 gathering”), Amamiya Karin ga yuku No. 237, blog entry 18 July 2012; http://www.magazine9.jp/karin/120718/; accessed 18 July 2012). —— & Kobayashi, Yoshinori (2007) “Shinjuku, manga kissa tanbô”, Ronza 7: 38–46. —— & Oguma, Eiji (2007) “War or union – kibō wa, kumiai?!” (War or union: does hope reside in unions?!), Studio Voice, Vol. 380 (August): 36–38. Amin, Ash (ed.) (1994) Post-Fordism: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

260

bibliography

Amino, Yoshihiko (1996) Muen-Kugai-Raku: Nihon chūsei no jiyū to heiwa (Muen, Kugai, Raku: Freedom and Peace in Medieval Japan), Tokyo: Heibonsha. Anderson, Nels (1962 [1923]) The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ando, Takemasa (2013) “Transforming ‘Everydayness’: Japanese New Left Movements and the Meaning of their Direct Action”, Japanese Studies 33(1): 1–18. Aoki, Hideo (2006) Japan’s Underclass: Day Laborers and the Homeless, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —— (2006) On Revolution, London: Penguin Books. Arimura, Sen (2007) Saikaryū hōmuresu mura kara Nihon o mireba (Watching Japan from the homeless village at the bottom of society), Tokyo: Tōshindō. Arita, Eriko (2012) “Citizens’ groups propel rising wave of antinuclear activism”, Japan Times Online, 3 August, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20120819x1.html (accessed 28 November 2012). Asada, Asada (2000) “‘J kaiki’ no yukue” (The future of the ‘return to J’), pp. 58–59, Voice 267, March. Asahi Shimbun “Rosuto jenerēsyon” reporter team (ed.) (2007) Rosuto jenerēshon – samayou 2000 man nin (Lost generation: 20 million roaming), Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha. Asano, Shirō & Futagami, Nōki (2006) “The ‘Integrated Community’: Toward the Transformation of the Hikikomori Archipelago Japan”, Japan Focus, October, http:// japanfocus.org/products/topdf/2239 (accessed 11 October 2006). Asato, Ken & Takahashi, Ryōhei (2005) “Furītā zenpan rōdō kumiai ni tsuite no arekore to shi” (This and that and a poem about the General Freeter Union), Gendai shisō 33(1): 96–101. —— & Takahashi, Ryōhei (2008a) “Furītā zenpan rōdō kumiai ni tsuite no arekore to megamakkubāgā” (This and that about the General Freeter Union and a mega McBurger), interview by Hashiguchi Shōji, PACE Vol. 3 (no pagenumbers since the manuscript was made available by e-mail). —— & Takahashi, Ryōhei (2008b) “Hataraku? Hatarakanai? – Dakara sonna mon shōtenka sunnattsuu no” (Work or not work? But I’m telling you not to focus on such things), interview by Hashiguchi Shōji, PACE, Vol. 4: 74–82. Asplund, Johan (1987) Det sociala livets elementära former (The elementary forms of social life), Göteborg: Korpen. Assmann, Stephanie & Maslow, Sebastian Maslow (2010) “Dispatched and Displaced: Rethinking Employment and Welfare Protection in Japan”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 15–310, 12 April. Avenell, Simon (2009) “Civil Society and the New Civic Movements in Contemporary Japan: Convergence, Collaboration, and Transformation”, The Journal of Japanese Studies 35(2): 247–283. —— (2010) Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan, Berkeley, University of California Press. —— (2012) “From Kobe to Tōhoku: the potential and the peril of a volunteer infrastructure”, pp. 53–77, in Jeff Kingston (ed.) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11, London: Routledge. Awaji Platz (n.d.) Text on homepage; www15.ocn.ne.jp/~fs-sola/fsjc/awaji_plats.html (accessed 11 January 2007). Bakunin, Mikhail (1977) The Confession of Mikhail Bakunin with the Marginal Comments of Tsar Nicholas I, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Beckwith, Karen (2008) “Mobilization after Loss? Social Movements and the Effects of Losing”, paper presented at the annual meeting of the APSA 2008 Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts; http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p279716_index.html (accessed 15 April 2013).

bibliography261 Benford, Robert D. (2002) “Controlling Narratives and Narratives as Control within Social Movements”, pp. 53–78, in Joseph E. Davis (ed.) Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements, Albany: State University of New York Press. Benjamin, Walter (1985) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London: Verso. Berger, James (1999) After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boggs, Carl (1977–1978) “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Worker’s Control”, Radical America Nr 6 (Winter): 99–122. Boltanksi, Luc & Chiapello, Eve (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso. Bouissou, Jean-Marie (2000) “Ambiguous Revival: A Study of Some ‘New Civic Movements’ in Japan”, The Pacific Review 13(3): 335–366. Bourdieu, Pierre (2001) Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Branagan, Marty (2007) “The Last Laugh: Humour in Community Activism”, Community Development Journal 42(4): 470–481. Breines, Wini (1982) Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962–1968: The Great Refusal, New York Praeger Publishers. —— (1989) “Community and Organization: The New Left and Michels’ ‘Iron Law’”, Social Problems 27(4): 419–429. Brinton, Mary C. (2010) “Social Class and Economic Life Chances in Post-industrial Japan: The ‘Lost Generation’”, pp. 114–134, in David H. Slater & Hiroshi Ishida (eds) Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting and Strategies, London: Routledge. —— (2011) Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caillois, Roger (2001) Man and the Sacred, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Caruth, Cathy (1995) “Trauma and Experience: Introduction”, pp. 3–13, in Caruth, C. (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. —— (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cassegård, Carl (2007a) Shock and Naturalization in Contemporary Japanese Literature, Folkestone: Global Oriental. —— (2007b) “Exteriority and Transcritique: Karatani Kôjin and the Impact of the 90’s”, Japanese Studies 27(1): 1–18. —— (2008) “From Withdrawal to Resistance: The Rhetoric of Exit from Yoshimoto Takaaki to Karatani Kojin”, Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal, 4 March, http://japanfocus.org/ products/details/2684. —— (2010) “Japan’s Lost Decade and Its Two Recoveries: On Sawaragi Noi, Japanese Neopop and Anti-war Activism”, pp. 39–60, in Nina Cornyetz & Keith Vincent (eds) Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, London: Routledge. —— (2011) “Public Space in Recent Japanese Political Thought and Activism: From the Rivers and Lakes to Miyashita Park”, Japanese Studies 31(3): 405–422. —— (2012) “Play and Empowerment: The Role of Alternative Space in Social Movements”, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 12(1); http://www.japanesestudies. org.uk/ejcjs/vol12/iss1/cassegard.html. Chan, Jennifer (ed.) (2008) Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education, Stanford: Stanford University Press. CHANCE! (2001) “Peace Parade”; http://worldpeace.s29.coreserver.jp/www.give-peace-a -chance.jp/news/20011210/ (accessed 17 July 2012). Chanin, Clifford (1998) “Voice of the People: The Development of NGOs in Japan”, paper presented at the Japan-America Society of Washington, D.D. Conference, Civil Society in Japan and America: A Comparative View (available at: www.us-japan.org/dc/civil/ cspaper.chanin, accessed 17 August 2004). Chiavacci, David (2008) “From Class Struggle to General Middle-Class Society to Divided Society: Societal Models of Inequality in Postwar Japan”, Social Science Japan Journal 11(1): 5–27.

262

bibliography

Chim↑Pom (2012) Geijutsu jikkōhan Chim↑Pom (Art perpetrators Chim↑Pom), Tokyo: Asahi shuppansha. Chiruru (2007) “Watashi wa hiyatoi haken shika dekimasen – Viva jibun” (Day labour dispatch work is all I can do – Viva me), Furītāzu furī, Vol. 01: 170–186. Chō (2007) “Ima, ‘watashitachi’ ga deatte” (Now we met), pp. 153–162, in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Clark, Tim (2003) “Online Anti-war Activism Gains Momentum in Japan”, Japan Media Review, posted 3 April 2003; www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1049353263p.php (accessed 2 June 2004) Collins, Randall (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (2012) “Entering and Leaving the Tunnel of Violence: Micro-sociological Dynamics of Emotional Entrainment in Violent Interactions”, Current Sociology 61(2): 132–151. Couto, Richard A. (1993) “Narrative, Free Space, and Political Leadership in Social Movements”, The Journal of Politics 55(1): 57–79. DADA (1999) “‘Namakemono kyōsantō datsuryoku-ha’ sengen” (The sloth communist relaxation faction manifesto), p. 33, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Dahlberg, Lincoln (2003) “The Habermasian Public Sphere: Taking Difference Seriously?”, Theory and Society 34: 111–136. DaMayDay executive committee (2006) Announcement of the “DaMayDay” demonstration on 1 May 2006 in Matsumoto; http://acclaim.nomasters.com/informations/index .html (accessed 17 May 2008). Donkey Kōgu Jr (2007) “Kikankō yaru mae ni yonde oke” (Read this before becoming temp worker), Furītāzu furī (Freeter’s Free), Vol. 01: 122–137. Doron, Gil (2007a) “Dead Zones, Outdoor Rooms and the Architecture of Transgression”, pp. 210–230, in Karen A. Franck & Quentin Stevens (eds) Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, London: Routledge. —— (2007b) “…badlands, blank space, border vacuums, brown fields, conceptual Nevada, Dead Zones…”, field: a free journal for architecture 1(1): 10–23. —— (2008) “‘…those marvellous empty zones on the edge of our cities’: Heterotopia and the ‘Dead Zone’”, pp. 203–214, in Michiel Dehaene & Lieven De Cauter (eds) Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, London: Routledge. Drury, John & Reicher, Steve (2005) “Explaining Enduring Empowerment: A Comparative Study of Collective Action and Psychological Outcomes”, European Journal of Social Psychology 35: 35–58. Dunleavy, Patrick & Margetts, Helen & Bastow, Simon & Tinkler, Jane (2006)”New Public Management is Dead: Long Live Digital-era Governance”, Journal of public administration research and theory 16 (3): 467–494. Eckersall, Peter (2006) Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960–2000, Leiden: Brill. Egon (2003a) “Kinkyū kikō: Hansen undō ‘Korosu na’ no yobikake” (Urgent contribution: the appeal of Korosuna), Web Dengei, www.indierom.com/dengei/society/korosuna/ korosuna.htm (accessed 28 June 2006). —— (2003b) “3.21 ‘Korosu na’ demo hōkoku” (A report of Korosuna’s demonstration on 21 March), Web Dengei, http://www.indierom.com/dengei/society/korosuna/korosuna2 .htm (accessed on 23 October 2006). Eguchi, Satoshi (2007) “Nagai kōen de okotta koto” (What happened in Nagai Park), pp. 117–120, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Endō, Reiko (2009) “Daigaku shokuin no koyō nengen mondai”, from Union Extasy’s blog, posted 1 May 2009: http://extasy07.exblog.jp/ (accessed 6 July 2009). Epstein, Barbara (1991) Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s, Berkeley: University of California Press. Erikson, Kai (1976) Everything in Its Path, New York: Simon & Schuster.

bibliography263 Esaman (2009) “Chiiki undō o koete tsunagaru – P8 kara umareta rentai” (Transcending local movements and connecting – the solidarity born out of P8), pp. 160–168, in Shimizu, Naoko & Sono, Ryōta (eds) Furītā rōso no seizon handobukku: Tsunagaru, kaeru, sekai o tsukuru, Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten. Evans, Sara M. & Boyte, Harry C. (1992) Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Eyerman, Ron (2001) Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2004) “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity”, pp. 60–111, in Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (2011) “Intellectuals and Cultural Trauma”, European Journal of Social Theory 14(4): 453–467. —— (2013) “Social Theory and Trauma”, Acta Sociologica 56(1): 41–53. —— & Jamison, Andrew (1991) Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach, Cambridge: Polity Press. Faure, Bernard (2011) “From Bodhidharma to Daruma: The Hidden Life of a Zen Patriarch”, Japan Review 23: 45–71. FN (2007) “Shiensha no minasama to watashi” (All supporters and I), p. 41, in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Foti, Alex (2004a) “Precarious Lexicon”, pp. 18–20, Greenpepper Magazine (special issue: Precarity) 2 (Amsterdam, Greenpepper Project). —— (2004b) “Mayday Mayday! Euro Flexworkers, Time To Get a Move On!”, http:// lipmagazine.org/ccarlsson/archives/2004/11/precog_chainwor.html (15 August 2006). Franck, Karen A. & Stevens, Quentin (2007) “Tying Down Loose Space”, pp. 1–34, in Karen A. Franck & Quentin Stevens (eds) Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, London: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy (1992) “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, pp. 109–42, in Calhoun, Craig (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Freedom & Survival May Day committee (2006) “Jiyū to seizon no mēdē 06 – Purekariāto no takurami no tame ni” (Freedom and Survival May Day 06 – For the conspiracy of the precariat”, demonstration announcement dated 9 April, http://www.geocities.jp/ precari5/main.html (accessed 21 November 2012). Freud, Sigmund (1990) Art and Literature (tr. under the general editorship of J. Strachey), London: Penguin Books. —— (1991) On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (tr. under the general editorship of J. Strachey), London: Penguin Books. FUF (Freeter Union Fukuoka) (2008) Appeal to the “Gogatsubyō matsuri” demonstration on 1 May 2008; http://fufukuoka.web.fc2.com/mayday.html; accessed 12 May 2008). Fujimuro, Reiji (2007) “Nagai kōen tentomura” (The tent village of Nagai Park), pp. 172–181, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (editing committee of the collected records) (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Fukase, Eiichirō (2005) “Danbōru ni egaku yume: ‘Kūhaku no yūtopia’ to shite no geijutsu jichiku o meguru danshō”, pp. 54–55, in Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyūkai (ed.), Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyū, Kamio, Saitama: Swamp publications. Fukuda, Kazuya (1994) Nihonjin de aru to iu koto (Being Japanese), Tokyo: Takagi shobō. Furītā zenpan rōdō kumiai (2010) “Miyashita kōen o meguru seimei” (Statement about Miyashita Park), published 1 June 2010; http://d.hatena.ne.jp/spiders_nest/20100601 (accessed 23 November 2012). Furlong, Andy (2008) “The Japanese Hikikomori Phenomenon: Acute Social Withdrawal among Young People”, The Sociological Review 56(2): 309–325.

264

bibliography

Futagami, Nōki (2005) Kibō no nīto: Genba kara no messēji (The NEET of hope: a message from the actual place), Tokyo: Tōyō keizai shinō-sha. Futatsugi, Shin (2005) “Matsuri no yoha wa mada tsuzuku: Demo… DEMO… Saundo demo” (The after-effects of the festival continue: But… DEMO… sound demonstration), pp. 152–166, in De Musik Inter (ed.) Oto no chikara: ‘Sutorīto’ senkyohen, Tokyo: Imupakuto shuppankai. —— (2008) “Kimyō na en wa, itsumo rojō de tsunagaru: 2003 nen ikō no Tōkyō no rojō to undō ni tsuite no oboegaki” (Strange fates always meet in the street: memorandum concerning the street and movements in Tokyo since 2003), VOL No. 03: 182–188. —— & Matsumoto, Hajime (eds) (2008) Shirōto no ran (The amateur riot), Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha. Gamson, William A. (1996) “Safe Spaces and Social Movements”, Perspectives on Social Problems, Vol. 8: 27–38. —— (2007) “Bystanders, Public Opinion, and the Media”, pp. 242–261, in David Snow et al. (eds) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Oxford: Blackwell publishing. Garon, Sheldon (2003) “From Meiji to Heisei: The State and Civil Society in Japan”, pp. 42–62, in Schwartz, Frank J. & Pharr, Susan J. (eds) The State of Civil Society in Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaventa, John (1980) Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gekidan Paniku (2007) “Yume ga sametara” (Waking up from the dream), pp. 22–32, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Genda, Yuji (2005a) A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity: The New Reality Facing Japanese Youth, Tokyo: LTCB International Library Trust, International House of Japan. —— (2005b) “The ‘NEET’ Problem in Japan”, Social Science Japan 32(September): 3–5. —— & Maganuma, Mie (2006) NEET – Furita demo naku shitsugyōsha demo naku (NEET – Neither freeter nor unemployed.), Tokyo: Gentōsha. Gill, Rosalind & Pratt, Andy (2008) “In the Social Factory?: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work”, Theory, Culture & Society 25(1): 1–30. Gill, Tom (2001) Men of Uncertainty: The Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan, Albany: State University of New York Press. —— (2004) “Preface”, Shidai shakaigaku No. 5: 3–5. Goffman, Erving (1963) Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, New York: The Free Press. Goldfinch, Shaun (2004) “Examining the National University Corporation Plan and University Reform in Japan: Lessons from Higher Education Reform in New Zealand”, The Journal of Finance and Management in Colleges and Universities, No. 1: 231–261. Gonoi, Ikuo (2012a) “Demo” to wa nani ka (What is a demonstration?), Tokyo: NHL shuppan. —— (2012b) “Feminisation of Japanese Social Movement: A Study of the Fancy Approach as ‘Kawaii Direct Action’”, paper presented at the 10th East Asian Sociologists Japan Conference, Sophia University, 22–23 November. Goodman, David G. (1988) Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods, Armonk: M.E.Sharpe Inc. Goodman, Roger & Imoto, Yuki & Toivonen, Tuukka (eds) (2012) A Sociology of Japanese Youth: From Returnees to NEETs, London: Routledge. Grapefruit (2005) “Furītā no tame no kaikyū tōsō junbian” (Proposal for the preparation of a class struggle for freeters), Jōkyō 6(2):110–114. Groos, Karl (1898) The Play of Animals, New York: Appleton (available on Mead Project: http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Groos/Groos_1898/Groos_1898_toc.html). Guattari, Félix (2007) “The Proliferation of Margins”, pp. 108–111, in Autonomia: Post Political Writings, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

bibliography265 Guyonnet, Emilie (2011) “Young Japanese Temporary Workers Create Their Own Unions”, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 16 No 4, 18 April; http://japanfocus.org/-Emilie -Guyonnet/3518 (accessed 18 April 2011). Habermas, Jürgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. —— (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Haine, W. Scott (1996) The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789–1914, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Hall, Kenji (2010) “How the homeless are fighting Nike in Shibuya’s Miyashita Park”, CNN Tokyo, 12 May 2010, http://www.cnngo.com/tokyo/play/brawl-over-miyashita-park -shibuya-snares-nike-565070 (accessed 15 May 2010). Hanawa. Machiko & Tsukushi Takehiko & Cazman (2008) “World Peace Now”, pp. 152–157, in Chan, Jennifer (ed) Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Haraguchi, Takeshi (2005) “Toshi kūkan no bakkan: Tennōji kōen aozora karaoke saikō” (The reconquest of urban space: A reconsideration of the Tennōji Park Blue Sky Karaoke), pp. 6–25, in De Musik Inter (ed.) Oto no chikara: ‘Sutorīto’ senkyohen, Tokyo: Imupakuto shuppankai. —— (2006) “Shūkyaku toshi no bōryoku” (The violence of a city attractive to visitors), Vol 01 (Spring): 152–157. Harootunian, Harry D. (2000) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harvey, David (2006) The Limits to Capital, London: Verso. Hasegawa, Chiko (2007) “Tomeru koto ga dekinai nara” (Because we can’t stop it), pp. 163– 170, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Hasegawa, Kenji (2003) “In Search of a New Radical Left: The Rise and Fall of the Anpo Bund, 1955–1960”, Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 3(1): 75–92. Hasegawa, Koichi (2002) “The Organizaton and Activation of the Civil Sector: Rapid Development during the ‘Lost Decade’”, Social Science Japan (April): 5–7. Hasegawa, Miki (2006) “We are not Garbage!”: The Homeless Movement in Tokyo, 1994–2002, London: Routledge. Hasegawa, Pepe (2008) “Sōdai na tēma ni ‘tanoshiku’ idomitsuzukeru koto wa kanō ka?” (Is it possible to keep on challenging the grand theme ‘enjoyably’?”, Han No. 1 (October): 85–89. —— & Kaminaga, Kōichi (1996) “Dame no kenshō”, anonymous interview with Kaminaga Kōichi & Pepe Hasegawa, Roketto 1: 4–33. —— & Kaminaga, Kōichi (2000) Dameren no ‘hatarakanaide ikiru ni wa?! (Dameren on how to live without working), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. —— & Kaminaga, Kōichi & Kyūkyoku, Kyūtarō (1999) “Dame hisutorī” (Dame history), pp. 156–213, in Dame-ren (eds) Dame! (No good!), Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsho. Hasei, Manabu & Kaneshiro, Ryūichi & Tanaka, Toshihide (2005) ‘Matsu’ o yameru toki: ‘Shakaiteki hikikomori’ e no shisen (When one quits ‘waiting’: a view on ‘social withdrawers’), Kobe: Sairosha. Hashiguchi, Shōji (2008) “Jakunen hiseiki rōdōsha o chūshin to shita rōdō kumiai undō no katsudō to ichizuke” (The activities and position of labour unions centered on young irregular workers), presentation at Fukushi shakaigakkai (Conference on welfare sociology), Sophia University, 7 June 2008. —— (2011) Wakamono no rōdō undō – ‘Hatarakasero’ to ‘hatarakanai zo’ no shakaigaku (The youth labour movement: the sociology of ‘give us work’ and ‘we won’t work’), Tokyo: Seikatsu shoin. Hayashi, Sharon & McKnight, Anne (2005) “Good-bye Kitty, Hello War: The Tactics of Spectacle and New Youth Movements in Urban Japan”, pp. 87–113, positions 13:1.

266

bibliography

Hibino, Makoto (2009) “Creating Fairness for All: A Look at Internal Power Relations within Social Movements”, Japonesia Review, No. 6: 40–51. Higashijima, Makoto (2000) Kōkyōken no rekishiteki sōzō – Kōko no shisō e (The historical construction of the public sphere: towards the idea of rivers and lakes), Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku shuppansha. —— (2002) “Kō wa paburikku ka?” (Is ‘kō’ the ‘public’?), pp. 37–48, in Sasaki, Takeshi & Kim, Tae-Chang (eds) Kōkyō tetsugaku, Vol. 3: Nihon ni okeru kō to shi, Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai (University of Tokyo Press). Higuchi, Akihiko (2005) “Jiko konturōru to iu yūtopia” (The utopia of self-control), Slow Learner (blog), entry for 14 June 2005, http://slowlearner.oops.jp/blog/archives/2005/06/ index.html (accessed 20 December 2006). —— (2006) “Shakaiteki nettowāku to furītā-nīto – wakamono wa shakaiteki ni haijo sarete iru no ka” (Social networks and freeter-NEET: Are young people socially excluded?), pp. 49–74, in Tarōmaru, Hiroshi (ed.) Furītā to nīto no shakaigaku, Kyoto: Sekai shisō-sha. Higuchi, Daiji (2011) “Mix of old and new hit the streets for June 11 demonstrations”, Asahi Shimbun, Asia & Japan Watch 23 June 2011; http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/ fukushima/AJ201106231944 (accessed 28 November 2012). Hirai, Gen (2005) Mikkī Mausu no puroretaria sengen (Mickey Mouse’s proletarian manifesto), Tokyo: Ōta shuppan. —— (2010) Ai to nikumi no Shinjuku – Hankei ichikiro no Nihon kindaishi (Shinjuku of love and hatred: A one kilometer radius history of modern Japan), Tokyo: Chikuma shinsho. Hirasawa, Gō (2009) “Rekishiteki tenkanten ‘68 nen’ būmu – Atarashii sekai no mosaku ima koso” (The boom of interest in the historical turning point “1968”: Now is the time for groping for a new world), Asahi Shimbun (evening edition, Tokyo), 29 August, p. 8. —— (2010) “Hajime ni”, pp. 7–11, in Yomota Inuhiko & Hirasawa Gō & (eds) 1968 nen bunkaron, Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha. —— & Yomota Inuhiko (eds) (2010) 1968 nen bunkaron, Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha. Hirschman, Albert O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. —— (1985) Shifting Involvements: Private Interests and Public Action, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hommerich, Carola (2012) “The Advent of Vulnerability: Japan’s Free Fall through its Porous Safety Net”, Japan Forum 24(2): 205–232. Honda, Yuki (2007) “Seijimondai to shite no wakamono” (Youth as a political issue), Studio Voice, Vol. 380 (August): 40–42. —— & Hirai, Hideyuki (2007) “Wakamono ni miru genjitsu/Wakamono ga miru genjitsu” (The reality seen in/by young people), pp. 13–42, in Honda, Yuki (ed.) Wakamono no rōdō to seikatsu sekai, Tokyo: Daigetsu shobō. Horiguchi, Sachiko (2012) “Hikikomori: How Private Isolation Caught the Public Eye”, pp. 122–138, in Roger Goodman & Yuki Imoto & Tuukka Toivonen (eds) A Sociology of Japanese Youth: From Returnees to NEETs, London: Routledge. Hosotani, Minoru (1999) “‘Dame’ no mondaikei to ‘kokoro’ no mondaikei” (The lineages of the problems of ‘good-for-nothing’ and ‘the heart’), p. 289, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Huizinga, Johan (1955) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: The Beacon Press. Hyde, Lewis (2010) Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ichimura, Misako (2006a) Dear Kikuchisan – Burū tento mura to chokorēto (Dear Kikuchisan: The blue tent village and chocolate), Kyoto: Kyōtotto shuppan. —— (2006b) “Dokidoki nojukuseikatsu” (How thrilling, the life of the homeless), Gendai shisō 34(9): 168–175. —— (2008) “Korosu shimin – Kareeraisu de tsunagari ikikaere!” (Citizens who kill – connect and revive by curry rice), Rosujene No. 2: 58–65.

bibliography267 —— (2009) “Sukima ni nejikomi, guwatto hiraku” (Screwing into interstices, open up), pp. 70–81, in Koronos geijutsu sōsho henshū iinkai (ed.) Āto poriteikusu, Tokyo: Ronsōsha. Ichino, Yoshiya (2006) “Hikikomori” no “shakairiron” – “Hikikomori” no kanzenrikai no tame ni (A social theory of social withdrawal: For the sake of comletely understanding social withdrawal), Tokyo: Shinpūsha. —— (2007) “Hikikomori dantai e no ketsubetsu sengen” (Declaration of break with withdrawer group), yoshiya3578 no nikki (blog), entry for 7 March 2007; http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ yoshiya3578/20070307 (accessed 3 July 2012). —— (2009) “Moshi ‘ikite itai’ to sura omoenaku nattara – Boku no hikikomori taiken kara” (When you don’t even want to live: From my social withdrawer experience), pp. 86–93, in Shimizu, Naoko & Sono, Ryōta (eds) Furītā rōso no seizon handobukku: Tsunagaru, kaeru, sekai o tsukuru, Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten. Igarashi, Yoshikuni (2000) Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (2007) “Dead Bodies and Living Guns: The United Red Army and Its Deadly Pursuit of Revolution, 1971–1972”, Japanese Studies 27(2): 119–137. Ikegami, Eiko (2005) Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ikuta, Takeshi (2001a) “Furītā wa nojukuseikatsuka suru?” (Will the freeters become rough sleepers?), paper written 7 February 2001, http://www1.odn.ne.jp/~cex38710/2001.2.7.htm (accessed 9 March 2007). —— (2001b) “Furītā ni mirai wa nai?” (Don’t freeters have a future), paper written 6 March 2001, http://www1.odn.ne.jp/~cex38710/2001.3.6.htm (accessed 9 March 2007). —— (2005) “Nojukusha shūgeki”-ron (On ‘the attacks on rough sleepers’), Kyoto: Jinbunshoin. —— (2007) “Furītā – nīto – hōmuresu: Posuto kōgyōka Nihon shakai no wakamono rōdō kazoku jendā” (Freeters – NEET – homeless: The work, family and gender of young people in postindustrial Japanese society), Furītāzu furī, Vol. 01: 202–281. —— (2009) “Ettō to toshikoshi hakenmura” (The winter struggle and the Dispatch Worker’s Village), pp. 86–89, in Utsunomiya, Kenji & Yuasa, Makoto (eds) Hakenmura: Nani ga towarete iru no ka, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. IlCommonz (2010) “CNN ‘Miyashita kōen repōto’ to ‘yojiteki seiji’”, Irukomonzu no futa, blog entry 15 May 2010, http://illcomm.exblog.jp/11117645/ (accessed 24 May 2010). Imaizumi, Mari (2009) “Hikikomori nīto sapōto no genba kara”, pp. 33–35, in Kyōseigata keizai suishin fōramu (ed.) Dare mo kiranai, wakenai keizai – Jidai o kaeru shakaiteki kigyō, Tokyo: Dōjidaisha. Inaba, Tsuyoshi (2005) “Inaba-san ni kiku” (Asking Mr Inaba), http://kenkyukai.cardboard -house-painting.jp/?eid=211275; accessed 15 January 2010. —— (2009a) “‘Haushingu pua’ to ha nani ka” (What is “housing poor”?), Ortā, No. 5–6 (May-June): 22–23. —— (2009b) Haushingu pua (Housing poor), Yamabuki shoten. Inoue, Masaya 2 (2008a) “Neguri/denguri”, Unagi e no tabi, blog entry 14 April 2008; http:// eel.seesaa.net/article/93232390.html (accessed 2 October 2012). —— (2008b) “Rōdō to ekusutashī” (Union Estasy relay essay No. 2), Peace Media, September-October; http://peacemedia.jp/writers/ue0808.html (accessed 2 August 2012). —— (2009) “Kaneko kantoku no otōsan no koto, shoshite suto no koto” (On director Kaneko’s father and the strike), Union Estasy relay essay No. 5, Peace Media, MarchApril, http://peacemedia.jp/writers/ue0903.html (accessed 30 November 2012). —— & Kasagi, Jō (2005) “Ishigaki Kafe! Fyūchā pōvera! (Ishigaki Café! Future povera), Kyōto Daigaku Shinbun 16 October 2005 & 1 November 2005 (heep://ishigakicafe.hp .infoseek.co.jp/dialogue.html; 28 June 2006). —— & Ogawa, Kyōhei (2009) “Rōdō ni yorokobi o! ‘Yunion ekusutashī’ no tatakai” (Ecstasy to work: the struggle of Union Extasy), interview by Hosono Hidetarō, Ortā, No. 5–6 (May-June): 36–41.

268

bibliography

Inui, Akio (2005) “Why Freeters and NEET are Misunderstood: Recognizing the New Precarious Conditions of Japanese Youth”, Social Work and Society 3(2): 244–251. Ishiguro, Kuniko (2008) “Japanese Employment in Transformation: The Growing Number of Non-Regular Workers”, Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal, 22 December; http:// www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2008/Ishiguro.html (accessed 3 February 2009). Itō, Kimio (2006) “Sei Purekario no kōrin: Itaria ni okeru purekariāto undo o megutte” (The advent of St Precario: on the precariate movement in Italy), Impaction 151: 10–18. Ivy, Marilyn (2005) “In/Comparable Horrors: Total War and the Japanese Thing”, Boundary 2, 32(2): 137–149. Iwata, Masami & Nishizawa, Akihiko (eds) (2008) Poverty and Social Welfare in Japan, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Jacobs, Jane (1992) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Vintage Books. Johnson, Chalmers (1982) MITI and the Japanese Miracle, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jong (2005) “May Day in Tokyo, Dead Streets Resurrected”, Indymedia, posted 9 May 2005; http://japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/2186/index.php (accessed 18 May 2005). Juris, Jeffrey S. (2008) “Performing Politics: Image, Embodiment, and Affective Solidarity during Anti-corporate Globalization Protests”, Ethnography 9(1): 61–97. Kaminaga, Kōichi (1993) “Wāku to raifu” (Work and life), Ningen kaihō, No 1 (October): 12–13. —— (1999a) “Dameren sengen!” (Dameren manifesto), pp. 2–8, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. —— (1999b) “Kokoro mondai to dameren” (Problems of the heart and Dame-ren), pp. 264–267, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. —— (2001) “Dameren-teki furītā-kō” (Dameren-like freeter thought), interview, http:// web.archive.org/web/20030609141127/http://www.nhk.or.jp/debate/th/j/01/skj/j01skj _kmng.htm; accessed 7 April 2010. —— (2008) “Intabyū” (Interview), Orutā, No. 9–10 (September-October): 38–41. —— et al. (1993) “Shinpojiamu ‘wāku to raifu’” (Symposium “Work and Life”), Ningen Kaihō No. 1 (October): 1–6. —— et al. (2000) “Datsuryoku no sokojikara o megutte (On the latent power of relaxing), Kino hyōron, Vol. 31 (March): 12–36. Kanazu, Masanori (2004) “Eviction of Homeless People in Osaka-Kita”, report posted on Kamagasaki Patrol’s homepage 1 January 2004, http://kamapat.seesaa.net/ article/1529214.htm#more (accessed 10 January 2007). Kanehagi, Atsushi (1999) “Imadoki haimin rettō – Yoseba rojō to furītā no deau tokoro” (Discarding people in today’s archipelago: the meeting point of yoseba and freeters), Tsubute 21: 37–46. Kanō, Hoko et al. (1997) “Hoiku ni hito ga yatte kuru: ‘Chinbotsu kazoku’ kyōdō hoiku no kokoromi” (People come to take care of children: the attempt at shared child upbringing through the “sinking family”), Gendai Shisō 25(5): 195–207. Karatani, Kōjin (1989) “One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries”, pp. 259–72, in Miyoshi, M. & Harootunian, H.D. (eds.) Postmodernism and Japan, Durham: Duke University Press. —— (1993) Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Durham: Duke University Press. —— (1997) “Japan is interesting because Japan is not interesting”, lecture delievered in March 1997, reproduced on Karatani Forum: www.karataniforum.org/jlecture.html (accessed on 19 November 2002). —— (2012a) “Demo de shakai wa kawaru” (Society will change through demonstrations), pp. 64–77, in Genpatsu to demo – soshite minshushugi (Nuclear power and demonstrations – and democracy), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. —— (2012b) “Kishikaiken de no hatsugen” (Statement at the press conference), pp. 159– 161, in Genpatsu to demo – soshite minshushugi (Nuclear power and demonstrations – and democracy), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Kasagi, Jō (2006) “Ishigaki kafe – Yūgiteki jissen no kūkan” (Ishigaki Café: a space of playful praxis), Prospectus (Kyoto University, Dept. of Philosophy), No. 9: 59–68; also available

bibliography269 on: http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/phil/prospectus/index.html (accessed 6 February 2008). Kasai, Kazuaki (1999) Shinjuku hōmuresu funsenki (A Record of the Homeless Struggle in Shinjuku), Tokyo: Gendaikikakushitsu. Kashima, Jūichi (2003) “‘Uma no hone’ no koro” (The time of ‘Uma no hone’), Part 1, La Nigreco No. 9: 9–15. —— (2004a) “‘Uma no hone’ no koro” (The time of ‘Uma no hone’), Part 2, La Nigreco No. 10: 158–169. —— (2004b) “‘Shōdō’ to shite no anakizumu” (Anarchism as impulse), Gendai shisō 32(6): 171–174. —— (2009) “X dē kara rojō kaihō e: Hantennōsei zenkoku kojin kyōtō ‘Aki no arashi’ o furikaeru” (From X-day to street liberation: Looking back on Aki no arashi, the nationwide individual struggle against the emperor system), Impaction 170 (August): 100–104. —— & Toyama, Kōichi (1997) “80nendai kōhan no seinen undo, samazama na jikken”, Gendai shisō 25(5): 188–127. Katō, Chiaki (2012) Nojuku nyūmon (Introduction to homelessness), Tokyo: Sōshisha. Katsiaficas, Georgy (1989) “The Eros Effect”, paper prepared for presentation at the 1989 American Sociological Association National Meetings in San Francisco, http://www .eroseffect.com/articles/eroseffectpaper.PDF; accessed 14 March 2010. Kawahito, Rie (2007) “2007 nen 2 gatsu 4–5 nichi no repōto. Atashi to tentomura”, pp. 43–50, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (editing committee of the collected records) (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Kawakami, Yoshimi (2007) Watashi wa rentaru onēsan (I’m an older sister for hire), Tokyo: Shinmeisha. Kawazoe, Makoto & Yuasa, Makoto (2007) “Hinkon ni tachimukau shakaiteki nettowāku no keisei o!” (Construct a social network for confronting poverty), Gekkan tōkyō No. 4: 3–15. —— & Yuasa, Makoto (2008) “Action Against Poverty: Japan’s Working Poor Under Attack”, Japan Focus, March; http://www.japanfocus.org/-M_-Kawazoe/2710 (accessed 5 July 2012). Kayama, Rika (2002) Puchinashionarizumu shōkōgun: wakamonotachi no nipponshugi (The petit-nationalisme syndrome: the Japonisme of the young), Tokyo: Chūō Kōron shinsha. —— et al. (1999) “Dame wa sherutâ ka” (Is Dame a shelter?), pp. 303–16, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Kindstrand, Love (2010) “‘Our Actions Make the Park’: (Re-)discovering Public Space in Miyashita Park”, paper presented at the conference “Alternative Politics: Youth, Media, Performance and Activism in Urban Japan”, Institute of Comparative Culture, Sophia University, Tokyo, 10 July 2010. —— (2011) “The Politicization of Precarity: Anti-Nuke Protests in Japan since the Great Tohoku Earthquake”, Hot Spots: 3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan, Cultural Anthropology, July, http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/421. —— (2012) “Ghosts against Nike-ification: Spaces of Representation in Tokyo’s Miyashita Park”, master thesis, submitted 31 July 2012, Sophia University, Graduate Program of Global Studies. Kingston, Jeff (2004) Japan’s Quiet Transformation: Civil Society and Social Change in the 21st Century, New York: RoutledgeCurzon. - (2012) “Japan’s Nuclear Village”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 37, No. 1, 10 September. —— (ed.) (2012) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11, London: Routledge. Kinoshita, Chigaya (2011) “And the word ‘parade’ disappeared”, Japan Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus, 27 December 2011, http://www.jfissures.org/2011/12/27/and-the -word-“parade”-disappeared/. (accessed 13 August 2012).

270

bibliography

—— (2012) “July 2012”, Japan Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus, 12 August 2012, http:// www.jfissures.org/2012/08/12/july-2012/ (accessed 13 August 2012). Kirokushū henshū iinkai (editing committee of the collected records) (ed.) (2007a) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku (Ties will last despite all: the record of the substitute execution by administration of the tent village of Nagai Park), Tokyo: Birejji puresu. —— (ed.) (2007b) Nagai kōen tentomura. Gyōsei daishikkō made no kirokushū – Chūkan hōkokuban, July 2007, report available in the archive of Nagai kōen nakama no kai (Comrades’ Association of Nagai Park) at Oshiteriya in Osaka. Kitada, Akihiro (2005) Warau Nihon no ‘nashonarizumu’ (The ‘nationalism’ of derisively laughing Japan), Tokyo: NHK bukkusu. Kitagawa, Yukihiko (2008) “Poverty and the Social Exclusion of Single Men”, pp. 210–225, in Iwata, Masami & Nishizawa, Akihiko (eds) Poverty and Social Welfare in Japan, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Kleres, Jochen (2005) “The Entanglements of Shame: An Emotion Perspective on Social Movement Demobilization”, pp. 170–188, in Flam, Helena & King, Debra (eds) Emotions and Social Movements, London: Routledge. Kobayashi, Ichirō (2001) “Pìsu parēdo o oete” (After the peace parade); http://world peace. s29.coreserver.jp/www.give-peace-a-chance.jp/news/20011210/ (accessed 17 July 2012). Kogawa, Tetsuo (1987) Supēsu o ikiru shisō (Thought living in space), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. —— (1988) “New Trends in Japanese Popular Culture”, pp. 54–66, in Yoshio Sugimoto & Gavan McCormack (eds) The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1993) “Free Radio in Japan: The Mini FM Boom”, Semiotext(e), Vol. 6, No. 16, Issue 1: 90–96. Kohso, Sabu (2006) “Angelus Novus in Millennial Japan”, pp. 415–438, in Tomiko Yoda & Harry Harootunian (eds) Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, Durham: Duke University Press. Komaru, Tomoe (2007) “Chii de mo naku, okane de mo naku, toriaezu, kotatsu” (Neither status nor money, let’s start with a kotatsu), Ronza 4 (April): 41–44. Konishi, Makoto (2000) Shinsayoku to sono saisei e no michi (The new left and the road to its revival), Tokyo: Shakai hihyōsha. Koopmans, Ruud & Olzak, Susan (2004) “Discursive Opportunities and the Evolution of Right-Wing Violence in Germany”, American Journal of Sociology 110(1): 198–230. Kosaka, Shūhei (2006) Shisō to shite no Zenkyōtō sedai (The Zenkyōtō generation as thought), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Kosugi, Reiko (2005a) “The Problems of Freeters and ‘NEETs’ under the Recovering Economy”, Social Science Japan 32 (September): 6–7. —— (2005b) “Furītā to wa dare ka” (Who is the freeter), Gendai shisō 33(1): 60–73. —— (2008) Escape from Work: Freelancing Youth and the Challenge to Corporate Japan, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Kotani, Satoshi (2004) “Why are Japanese youth today so passive?”, pp. 31–46, in Gordon Matthews & Bruce White (eds) Japan’s Changing Generations: Are Young People Creating a New Society?, Oxon: Routledge. Kubi Takeo & Yaba Tetsugō (2009) “Saundo demo” (Sound-demo), 17 April 2009; http:// d.hatena.ne.jp/posada/20090424. Kurakazu, Shigeru (2005) “1995 kara/e no yobigoe” (The call from/to 1995), Gendai shisō 33(12): 73–91. Kurita, Ryōko (2008) “Freeter’s Free Memorandum”; http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Freet­ersFree/ 20080504; accessed 12 May 2008). Kuroda, Kaori (2003) “Japan-based Non-governmental Organizations in Pursuit of Human Security”, Japan Forum 15 (2): 227–250.

bibliography271 Kyūkyoku, Kyūtarō (1997a) “Kare jishin ni yoru Kyūkyoku Kyūtarō” (Kyūkyoku Kyūtarō by himself), Ningen kaihō No. 9 (Oct.): 84–88. —— (1997b) “Mure ni naru beshi” (We ought to form crowds”, Gendai Shisō 25(5): 128–143. —— (2004) “Naze ka, soko ni” (There, for some reason), Gendai shisō 32(6): 162–174. —— (2006) “Sekai o shinkan sasenakatta mikka kan no yō ni” (Like three days that didn’t shake the world), Vol 01 (Spring): 167–170. —— & Bunpuku Engels (1994) “Namake kyōsanshugisha sengen” (The communist manifesto of laziness), Ningen kaihō No. 4: 50–51. Laclau, Ernesto & Mouffe, Chantal (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1996) Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (2004) Rhythmanalys: Space, Time and Everyday Life, New York: Continuum. Lofland, Lyn H. (1973) A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space, New York: Basic Books, Inc. —— (1998) The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory, New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Makino, Sachiko (2007) pp. 113–114, contribution to “Nagai kōen tentomura. Gyōsei daishikkō made no kirokushū” editorial committee (ed.) Nagai kōen tentomura. Gyōsei daishikkō made no kirokushū – Chūkan hōkokuban, July 2007, report available in the archive of Nagai kōen nakama no kai (Comrades’ Association of Nagai Park) at Oshiteriya in Osaka. Malinas, David A. (2004) “Voices from the Underground: Homeless Peopke’s Social Movement in Japan, The 1994–1996 Shinjuku Case Study”, Shidai shakaigaku No. 5: 43–50. Matsumoto, Hajime (2001) “Binbōnin sengen” (Pauper manifest), Binbōnin Shimbun, 15 December No. 1096, http://www.jimmin.com/2001b/page_136.htm. —— (2007) “‘Binbōnin’ tachi no tamariba to ‘ran’ no kyoten keisei” (The formation of a gathering place for ‘paupers’ and a base for ‘riots’), interview conducted by Noiz and Yoshimura Masaaki, Anakizumu, No. 9 (May): 49–66. —— (2008a) Binbōnin no gyakushū: Tada de ikiru hōhō (The counter attack of the paupers: how to live for free), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. —— (2008b) Binbōnin daihanran – Ikinikui yo no naka to tanoshiku tatakau hōhō (The great pauper rebellion: How to struggle against a hard world while having fun), Tokyo: Asupekuto. —— (2008c) “Omoshirosa o mamoru” (Defending fun), interview by Isshoku Kōki, Gendai shisō 36(1): 194–200. —— (2009) “No 10 Kyoto ni tatekomori sakusen” (No 10 Barricading oneself in Kyoto), Matsumoto Hajime no nobinobi daisakusen, Magazine 9-jō; entry 10 June 2009; http:// www.magazine9.jp/matsumoto/090610/ (accessed 26 November 2009). —— & Oda, Masanori (2008) “G8 sōdō o furikaeru” (Looking back on the G8 upheaval), Orutā (Alter), No. 9–10: 2–6. MC Kasurippa (2010) “Naiki pāku wa haikyo ni naru darō” (Nike Park will turn into ruins), Part 1 of Naiki no yoru series, homepage of AIR, published 2 November 2010; http:// airmiyashitapark.info/wordpress/ (accessed 24 November 2012). McAdam, Doug (2003) “Beyond Structural Analysis: Toward a More Dynamic Understanding of Social Movements”, pp. 281–298, in Mario Diani & Doug McAdam (eds) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— & Tarrow, Sidney & Tilly, Charles (2001) Dynamics of Contention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDonald, Kevin (2002) “From Solidarity to Fluidarity: Social Movements beyond ‘Collective Identity’—The Case of Globalization Conflicts”, Social Movement Studies 1(2): 109–128.

272

bibliography

—— (2006) Global Movements: Action and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. McNeill, David (2009) “Rumpus on Campus: Prestigious University in Tokyo Has Become a Battleground in a War over Freedom of Political Expression”, Japan Times Online, 9 June, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20090609zg.html (accessed 18 August 2009). Melucci, Alberto (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —— (1996) Challenging Codes: Collective action in the information age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michiba, Chikanobu (2005) Senryō to heiwa – ‘Sengo’ to iu keiken (Occupation and peace: the experience of the ‘postwar), Tokyo: Seidosha. Miles, Malcolm (2008) Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Settlements, London: Routledge. Miller, Aaron L. & Toivonen, Tuukka (2010) “To Discipline or Accommodate? On the Rehabilitation of Japanese ‘Problem Youth’”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 22-6-10, 31 May 2010, http://japanfocus.org/-Aaron-Miller/3368 (accessed 1 October 2011). Mitchell, Don (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, New York: The Guilford Press. Mitsu, Takeshi (1995) Piriodo kara no shuppatsu (Departure from Period), Tokyo: Inpakuto shuppankai. Miura, Atsushi (2005) Karyū shakai – Arata na kaisō shūdan no shutsugen (Lower stratum society: the appearance of a new social stratum), Tokyo: Kōbunsha shinsho. Miyadai, Shinji (2002) Enkō kara tennō e (From assisted dating to the emperor), Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha. Miyaji, Gō (2006) “‘Kafe Komonzu’ Kaiten shite hantoshi tachimashita!”, Surōwāku No. 1 (April): 2–5. Miyazawa, Naoto (2011a) “1988 nen, naze genpatsu wa tomaranakatta ka” (Why didn’t nuclear power stop in 1988?), http://lea-h.sakura.ne.jp/m/m-m/m-mhidari.html; accessed 14 May 2012. —— (2011b) “Nani ga kanō ka – ‘Jigyakuteki’ saha to ‘tabatsuteki’ uyoku o norikoe, kokusaishugiteki anakizumu to chiiki conmyūnshugi e no radikarizumu no tame no oboegaki” (What is possible? Memorandum for an anarchism and local communalism overcoming the ‘masochistic’ left and the ‘extrapunitive’ right), Derukui No. 1 (February) (no page numbers since the manuscript was made available by e-mail). Mizushima, Hiroaki (2007) Netto kafe nanmin to hinkon Nippon (Net café refugees and poverty-Japan), Nihon terebi hōsōmō. Momoyama, Geppei (Peko) (1995) “Dameren wa dame ja nai. Ka? Hontō ni dame na hito no tachiba kara”, Ningen kaihō No. 5 (March): 37–45. Mōri, Yoshitaka (2003) Bunka = seiji: gurōbarizēshon jidai no kūkan hanran (Culture = politics: the revolt of space in the age of globalization), Tokyo: Getsuyōsha. —— (2005a) “Culture = Politics: the Emergence of New Cultural Forms of Protest in the Age of Freeter”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6(1): 17–29. —— (2005b) “Taikōteki 90 nendai” (The oppositional 90s), Gendai shisō 33(12): 119–133. —— (2007) “Sutorīto ga sayoku o torikaesu” (The street reclaims the left), Ronza 4 (April): 45–50. —— (2009a) Sutorīto no shisō – Tenkanki to shite no 1990 nendai (Street thought: the 1990s as turning point), Tokyo: NHK Bukkusu. —— (2009b) “Kōkotsu no kumiai? Yunion ekusutashō at Kyoto daigaku” (The cunning union? Union Extasy at Kyoto University), Hajimete no DiY, vol 42, http://wwwx.fujitv .co.jp/zoo/blog/index.jsp?cid=191&tid=45 (accessed 1 February 2010). —— (2012) “Minshushugi o sukuidasu koto” (Saving democracy), pp. 41–43, in in Genpatsu to demo – soshite minshushugi (Nuclear power and demonstrations – and democracy), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Murakami, Akane (2006) “Jendā to furītā-nīto – Seibetsu yakuwari bungyō wa wakamono no shūgyō ni dō eikyō suru no ka” (Gender and freeter-NEET: How does the sexual

bibliography273 division of labour influence getting a job among young people?), pp. 75–96, in Tarōmaru, Hiroshi (ed.) Furītā to nīto no shakaigaku, Kyoto: Sekai shisōsha. Murakami, Haruki (1986) Chūgoku yuki no surō bōto (Slow Boat to China), Tokyo: Chūkō bunko. —— (1991) Dansu, dansu, dansu (Dance, Dance, Dance), vol. I, Tokyo: Kōdansha bunko. —— (1993) Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, New York: Vintage. Murakami, Ryū (1998) Coin Locker Babies, Tokyo: Kodansha International. —— (2002) Kibō no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus to the land of hope), Tokyo: Bunshun bunko. —— & Sawa, Takemitsu (2002) “Rannauei Japan – bōsō suru jidai no savaivaru” (Runaway Japan – survival in a runaway world), Intercommunication, No. 41 (Summer): 30–49. Murakami, Takashi (2005) “Earth in my Window”, pp. 98–149, in Murakami Takashi (ed.) (2005) Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, catalog of the exhibition at the Japan Society, New York, 8–24 April 2005, New Haven: Yale University Press. Nabetani, Yoshiko (2007) “Nagai no kiroku / Atashi no naka no kodoku to kibō” (Record of Nagai / My inner loneliness and hope), pp. 62–75, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Nagata, Kazuaki (2010) “Students stage rally to protest time-consuming job-search ‘farce’”, Japan Times Online, 23 November 2010; http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ nn20101123x2.html (accessed 24 November 2010). Nakagawa, Yasuo et al. (2010) “Watashi ga dameren ni tsuite kuikomu 2, 3 no koto – Dameren 2.0 no shatei kyori”, Mirai kairo 1.0 (May). Nakagiri, Kōsuke (2007a) “Ōsaka-shi ni yoru nojukusha no kyōsei haijo ni kōgi suru” (Protest against the forced eviction of homeless carried out by Osaka City), Jōkyō No. 1–2: 225–227. —— (2007b) “Nakama kōen nakama no kai gairyaku to gyōsei daishikkō ni itaru made no nagare”, pp. 6–15, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. —— & Takazawa, Yukio & Ogawa, Tetsuo (2006) “Hōmuresu e no shōtai”, Gendai shisō 34(9): 34–67. Nakama no kai (2007) Appeal on homepage, posted 4 February 2007: http://rootless.org/ nagai/index.php?view=all&cat=6; accessed 3 May 2007. Nakamura, Ken (2006) “Bochibochi o meguru are ya kore ya: Yunion Bochibochi no kessei o megutte” (This and that about Bochibochi: on the formation of the union Bochibochi), Impaction 151: 48–51. —— (2009) “Haken rōdōsha no sōdan madoguchi kara”, pp. 35–38, in Kyōseigata keizai suishin fōramu (ed.) Dare mo kiranai, wakenai keizai – Jidai o kaeru shakaiteki kigyō, Tokyo: Dōjidaisha. Nakamura, Satoshi (1998) Danbōru hausu de miru yume (Dreams dreamt in a cardboard house), Tokyo: Sōshisha. Nakamura Yoshinori (2007) “2007 nen 2 gatsu itsuka, Nagai kōen de mita mono” (What I saw in Nagai Park in on the 5th of February 2007), pp. 211–213, in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. —— et al. (2008) “Zadankai Nagai kōen tentomura no kyōsei haijo o furikaeru” (Discussion: Looking back at the forced eviction of the Nagai Park tent village), Kōbe YWCA Yomawari junbikai: Katsudō hōkoku 3 (1): 32–41. Nasubi (2005) “Organizing Japan’s Urban-Industrial Underclass: Homeless and Day Laborers Forge a New Anti-globalization Alliance”, People’s Plan Japonesia, posted 29 September 2005; www.ppjaponesia.org/modules/tinycontent1/index.php?id=15 (accessed 20 April 2007). Negoro, Yū (2009) “Minna de tsukuru ie” (A house we all build), Ortā, No. 5–6: 42. —— (2010) “Joseitachi no ake no meisei” (Fame of the women’s dawn), Impaction 173: 224–225.

274

bibliography

Neilson, Brett & Rossiter, Ned (2008) “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception”, Theory, Culture & Society 25(1): 51–72. Nesbit, Molly (1992) Atget’s Seven Albums, New Haven: Yale University Press. NHK Supesharu “Wākingu pua” reporter team (ed.) (2007) Wākingu pua: Nihon o mushibamu yamai (Working poor: the sickness undermining Japan), Tokyo: Popurasha. Nishidō, Kōjin (2006) Gekiteki kuronikuru (Dramatic chronicle), Tokyo: Ronsōsha. Nishijima, Akira (2006) “Tabemono rensa” (the food-chain), 5 March 2006, in Magumagu: Nyū sutāto tsūshin Kansai, No. 34, June 2006, mail magazine; blog.mag2.com/m/ log/000138825/107319195?page=1; accessed 15 November 2006). —— (2007) Chokugen kyokugen 2002–2006 (Straight words, crooked words 2002–2006), Tonda: Magumagu. Nīto no ashita (2009) “Nīto no ashita sengen” (Manifesto of NEET’s tomorrow), 12 February 2009; http://d.hatena.ne.jp/asita211/20090212/1234430203 (accessed 16 July 2012). Nitta, Michio (2009) “Evolution of the Japanese Employment Systems in the Lost Decade and After”, Shakai kagaku kenkyū 60(1): 33–42. Noda, Tsutomu & Mita, Itaru & Mizukoshi, Maki (2003) “Dansu to demonsutorēshon” (Dance to demonstration), Gendai shisō 31(7): 93–101. Noe (2007) “Naze, ano toki, ano ba de, Hitori bocchi no yoru o, utaeta no ka?”, pp. 75–104, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Nogiku (2005) “Yoyogi kōen no ōun kafue”, Hōrō otome ekusutora, blog entry 2 December 2005; http://ameblo.jp/hourouotome/entry-10006684565.html (accessed 30 November 2012). Noiz (2009) “‘Saundodemo’ shikō: Hito wa donchan sawagi no naka ni shakai henkaku no yume o miru ka” (Reflections on the history of sound demonstrations: Do people dream of social change in the midst of making a racket?), pp. 3–34, Anakizumu No. 12. Nojiren (1999) “Kessei isshūnen sōkai kichō”, Pikapika No. 5, 25 April, http://www.jca.apc .org/nojukusha/nojiren/pikapika/5/keynote.html (accessed 12 February 2008). Noma, Yasumichi (2012) Kinyō kanteimaei kōgi (The Friday protest in front of the prime minister’s residence), Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha. Obinger, Julia (2008) “Working on the Margins: Japan’s Precariat the Working Poor”, Elec­ tronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 29 February; http://www.japanesestudies .org.uk/discussionpapers/2009/Obinger.html; accessed 23 April 2013. Oda, Masanori (2003) “Mi yo bokura yoninshō fukusū irukomonzu no hata, aratame, korosuna no hata” (Behold, the IlCommonz flag of us, the plural four, correction, the Korosuna flag) Gendai shisō 31(7): 86–92. —— et al. (2005) “Tōkyō saundo demo kaigi” (Meeting about the Tokyo sound demonstrations), pp. 118–143, in De Musik Inter (ed.) Oto no chikara: ‘Sutorīto’ senkyohen, Tokyo: Imupakuto shuppankai. O’Day, Robin (2012) “Japanese Irregular Workers in Protest: Freeters, Precarity, and the Re-articulation of Class”, PhD thesis submitted at the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Graduate Studies (Anthropology), August 2012. O’Donnell, Guillermo (1999) “On the Fruitful Convergences of Hirschman’s Exit Voice, and Loyalty and Shifting Involvements: Reflections from the Recent Argentine Experience, pp. 63–79, in Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization, Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press. Offe, Claus & Heinze, Rolf G. (1992) Beyond Employment: Time, Work and the Informal Economy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ogawa, Akihiro (2013) “Young Precariat at the Forefront: Anti-nuclear Rallies in PostFukushima Japan”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14(2): 317–326. Ogawa, Kyōhei (1997) “Hiroba to akichi: Bonboyāju to kinji no tochū hōkoku” (Square and no-man’s-land: halfway report from the bon voyage to Kinji), Gendai Shisō 25(5): 225–235. —— (2006) “30 nichi” (The thirtieth), Kyototto homepage, http://kyototto.com/ archives/151 (accessed 3 September 2009).

bibliography275 —— (2007) “Nagai kōen no shibai no koto”, pp. 122–125, Kirokushū henshū iinkai(ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. —— (2008) “No Money Life wo yutaka ni suru” (making no-money life rich), Kyototto homepage, http://kyototto.com/archives/207 (accessed 3 September 2009). —— (2009a) “The Kubi Kubi Café at Kyoto University Keeps on Going”, Japonesia Review, No. 6: 100–105. —— (2009b) “Somosomo josei rōdō no sakushu no mondai datta”, text on Union Extasy’s homepage posted 21 February 2009; http://extasy07.exblog.jp/ (accessed 6 July 2009). —— (2009c) “S/N 1995 Kyoto”, Kyototto homepage, 16 January 2009; http://kyototto.com/ archives/594 (accessed 3 September 2009). —— (2009d) “Kubikiri shokuinmura Suto 3.4 nichime Part 2 Doramukanburo hen 2009/2/26”; You Tube; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SZaT-4Y7oQ (accessed 20 November 2012). —— (2010a) “Kyōdai tokeidai-mae de suwarikomi, Kubikubi kafe ichinen to naru” (Sit-in in front of the Kyoto University Clock Tower, one year of Kubikubi Café), Impaction 173 (March): 79–87. —— (2010b) “Gonen de kubi ni hantai shite sutoraiki” (Striking in protest against being fired after five years), Minna no toshokan, No. 395 (March, 3): 28–35. —— (2010c) “Nukadoko ni tsuite” (On nukadoko), the blog of Union Extasy, 19 March 2010; http://extasty07.exblog.jp/12315217/ (accessed 20 March 2010). —— & Ogawa, Tetsuo (1999) “Isōrō raifu” (Freeloader life), pp. 235–248, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. —— & Ogawa, Tetsuo (n.d.) “Mimidare-nikki”, http://naha.cool.ne.jp/kyohe/mimidarenikki .htm (accessed 1 December 2010). Ogawa, Tetsuo (2005a) Kono yō na yarikata de 300 nen no jinsei o ikite iku – Atai no runrun Okinawa hitoritabi (In this way I will live a life of 300 years: My happy travels in Okinawa on my own), Kyoto: Kyototto shuppan. —— (2005b) “Hōmuresu to iu koto” (Being homeless), Hōmuresu bunka, 11 March, http:// yukuri.exblog.jp/; accessed 18 June 2011. —— (2005c) “Mori no naka no seikatsu” (Living in the forest), Hōmuresu bunka, 10 December, http://yukuri.exblog.jp/2345660/; accessed 18 June 2011. —— (2006) “Hōmuresu bunka o kangaeru”, Gendai shisō 34(9): 126–131. —— (2007) “Nagai kōen taizaiki”, pp. 126–132, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. —— (2008) “246 hyōgensha kaigi” (The 246 conference of expressive artists), pp. 148–154, VOL No. 03. —— (2009a) “Hōmuresu bunka no genzai” (Homeless culture today), pp. 44–46, Ortā, No. 5–6 (May-June). —— (2009b) “Motto akichi o! Miyashita kōen ga naiki kōen ni” (More empty land! Miyashita Park will become Niki Park), p. 185, Impaction 170 (August). —— (2009c) “246 hyōgensha kaigi to shūhen no nuranura shita uneune shita shisha no dansu” (The 246 expressive artists conference and the slippery, meandering dance of the dead in the margins), pp. 52–69, in Koronos geijutsu sōsho henshū iinkai (ed.) Āto poriteikusu, Tokyo: Ronsōsha. —— (2010) “Ogawa Tetsuo Miyashita kōen o kataru 2”, interview with Ogawa Tetsuo, Part 2; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKOyqg2DCLg&NR=1; accessed 24 November 2012. —— (2012) “Atorie Wan Tsukamoto Yoshiharu no Miyashita kōen intābyū zenbun hihan” (Critique of the entire text of the interview about Miyashita Park by Tsukamoto Yoshiharu of Atelier Bow Wow), 16 January 2012; https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ice bzxbkweag9f/tukamoto%EF%BC%882012116%EF%BC%89.pdf (accessed 31 May 2012). —— & Take, Jun’ichirō (2007) “Hossoku no aisatsu” (Inauguration greetings), Homepage of 246 Hyōgensha kaigi; http://kaigi246.exblog.jp/i3/ (accessed 19 December 2011).

276

bibliography

—— et al. (2009) “Dai 14-kai 246 hyōgensha kaigi” (The 14th conference of expressive artists), record of discussion held on 18 January 2009; http://kaigi246.exblog.jp/9388665/ (accessed 1 May 2009). Ogihara, Gyorai (1995) “Kakumei ni bakuhatsu wa iranai” (Revolutions don’t need bombs), Ningen kaihō No. 6: 33–34. Oguma, Eiji (2002) “Minshu” to “Aikoku”: Sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (“Sovereignty” and “patriotism”: the nationalism and public sphere of the postwar era), Tokyo: Shinyōsha. —— (2009) 1968: Hanran no shūen to sono isan (The end of the uprising and its legacy), Vol. 2, Tokyo: Shin’yōsha. —— & Ueno, Yōko (2003) ‘Iyashi’ no nasyonarizumu: Kusa no ne hoshuundō no jisshōkenkyū (The nationalism of ‘healing’: an empirical study of the grassroot conservative movement), Tokyo: Keiōgijuku daigaku shuppankai. Ogura, Mushitarō (1999) “Naze, ‘kōryū’ = akuteivizumu ka?” (Why is ‘associating’ activism?), pp. 333–338, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. —— (2006) “Daigaku no haikyo de – 80 nendai no kojinteki keiken” (In the ruins of the university: my personal experience of the 80’s), pp. 114–125, in Suga, H. & Hanasaki, M. (eds) Neoribeka suru kōkyōken – kaimetsu suru daigaku shiminshakai kara no jiritsu, Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Ōhata, Tarō (2007) “Hinkon ni taikō suru ‘tsunagari’ o motomete – NPO hōjin ‘Moyai’”, Gekkan kiroku, 19 October, http://gekkankiroku.cocolog-nifty.com/edit/cat7903757/ index.html (accessed 12 February 2008). O.J. (2007) “Nakama no danketsu” (Solitarity with the comrades), p. 34, in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Oka, Garō (1999) “Okagarō te yū tokoro” (The place called Okagarō), pp. 339–343, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Okamoto, Tarō (1996) Okinawa bunka-ron – Wasurareta Nihon (On Okinawan culture: the forgotten Japan), Tokyo: Chūōkōron shinsha. Olaveson, Tim (2001) “Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner”, Dialectical Anthropology 26: 89–124. Ōsawa, Masachi (2002) “Zettai no hitei e no yokubō” (The desire for an absolute negation), Intercommunication, No. 41(Summer): 60–69. Ostrom, Elinor (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ōsugi, Sakae (1974) “Shinchituujo no sōzō” (The creation of a new order), pp. 240–243, in Ōzawa Masamichi (ed.) Ōsugi Sakae shū (Kindai nihon shisō taikei Vol. 20), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Ōta, Naori (2009) “Haijo sareru mono no hyōgen – Nagai kōen tentomura kara” (The expression of the excluded: from the Nagai Park tent village), Han 2 (April): 114–121. Ōtake, Hideo (2007) Shinsayoku no isan – Nyūrefuto kara posutomodan e (The legacy of the New Left: From the New Left to the postmodern), Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Ōtomo, Rio (2006) “A Girl with the Amoebic Body and her Writing Machine”, paper presented to the 16th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Wollongong 26 June–29 June, http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ASAA/biennial -conference/2006/Otomo-Rio-ASAA2006.pdf (accessed 7 March 2007). Ozaki, Tetsuya (2003) “This war has just begun”, Out of Tokyo 59, www.realtokyo.co.jp/ english/column/ozaki59.htm; (accessed 1 October 2006). Packard, III George R. (1966) Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960, Princeton: Princeton University Press. PAFF (2003a) “Setsuritsu ni mukete no kakunin jikō” (Points to confirm before establishment), http://freeter-union.org/resource/confirmation.html, accessed 11 January 2011. —— (2003b) “Junbikai yobikake-bun”; http://freeter-union.org/resource/call_20030920 .html accessed 11 January 2011.

bibliography277 —— (2004) “Kessei shushisho” (Founding Statement), 21 August 2004; http://freeter -union.org/resource/aim.html accessed 11 January 2011. —— (2005) “Wakamono no ningenryoku o takamenai hikokumin sengen” (The unpatriotic movement for not raising the human ability of the young), 26 October 2005, http:// freeter-union.org/resource/statement_20051026.html; accessed 12 February 2008. Paintings on the Cardboard Houses at Shinjuku Underground in Tokyo, Japan 1995–1998 (2005) Tokyo: Swamp Publication. Polletta, Francesca (1998) “Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements”, Qualitative Sociology 21(4):419–446. —— (1999) “‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action”, Theory & Society 28: 1–38. Rancière, Jacques (1992) “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization”, October, Vol. 61 (Summer): 58–64. —— (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (2009) “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge”, Critical Inquiry 36 (1): 1–19. Ribault, Thierry (2010) “Au Japon, la liste noire des étudiants endettés”, Rue89, 7 April 2010; http://www.rue89.com/2010/04/07/au-japon-la-liste-noire-des-etudiants-endettes -146326; accessed 8 April 2010. Ross, Kristin (2002) May ‘68 and its Afterlives, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Saitō, Ikuma (2009) “Hōsei daigaku, gakusei undō daidan’atsu”, Jōkyō 10(6): 195–201. Saitō, Tamaki (2005) ‘Maketa’ kyō no shinjatachi: nīto hikikomori shakairon (Believers of the ‘loser’-religion: a theory of the society of NEET and social withdrawers), Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha. Sakaguchi, Kyōhei (2011) Tokyo 0 en hausu 0 en seikatsu (Tokyo house for zero yen, living for zero yen), Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha. Sakai, Takashi (1997) “Bankoku no inu shokun, danketsu seyo!” (Dogs of the world, unite!), Gendai shisô 25(11): 132–148. —— & Tachibana, Yasuzumi (2006) “Yozora no hoshi o mite”, Gendai shisō 34(9): 31–33. Sakokawa, Naoko (2013) Shinjuku danbôru mura: Sakokawa Naoko shashinshû 1996–1998 (The Shinjuku cardboard village: Naoko Sakokawa photo collection 1996–1998), Tokyo: DU BOOKS. Sakuma, Tomoko (2008) “Education, Empowerment, and Alternatives to Neoliberalism”, pp. 59–63, in Chan, Jennifer (ed.) Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sakurada, Kazuya (2006) “Purekariāto kyōbō nōto” (Conspiracy notes for the precariate), Impaction 151: 20–35. Sasaki-Uemura, Wesley (2001) Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Sasanuma, Hiroshi (2008) Hōmuresu to jiritsu/haijo – Rojō ni ‘kōfuku o yumemiru kenri’ wa aru ka (Homelessness and autonomy/exclusion: Is there a right to dream about happiness on the street?), Tokyo: Daigetsu shobō. Satō, Yoshimichi (2010) “Stability and increasing fluidity in the contemporary Japanese social stratification system”, Contemporary Japan 22: 7–21. Savage, Mike et al. (2013) “A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment”, Sociology 47(2): 219–250. Sawaji, Osamu (2007) “Starting over”, The Japan Journal, January: 6–10. Sawaragi, Noi (1998) Nihon Gendai Bijutsu (Japan Contemporary Art), Tokyo: Shinchōsha. —— (2003a) Kuroi taiyō to akai kani – Okamoto Tarō no Nihon (Black sun and red crab: Okamoto Tarō’s Japan), Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha. —— (2003b) “Konnichi no Hansen undo” (Anti-war movement today), Bijutsu techō, 55(835) (June): 46–53. —— (2005) Sensō to banpaku (World Wars and World Fairs), Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha. Schwartz, Frank J. & Pharr, Susan J. (eds) (2003) The State of Civil Society in Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

278

bibliography

Scott, James C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press. Sennett, Richard (1986) The Fall of Public Man, London: Faber and Faber. Settsu, Tadashi (2006) “Dialogue on Precariat – ‘Purekariāto’ ni tsuite”, blog entry 11 September 2006; http://blog.goo.ne.jp/harumi-s_2005/e/3a5c227572637222ce248d2849 da85b6 (accessed 11 January 2007). —— (2007a) “Precariāto to shite no ayumi” (My life as precarious worker), Queer Linda Diary, entry 7 June 2007, http://d.hatena.ne.jp/femmelets/20070607; accessed 8 July 2007. —— (2007b) “Purekariāto undō no genjō to kadai” (The present situation and task of the precarity movement), Labor Net, http://www.labornetjp.org/news/2007/11827404364 63staff01 (accessed 3 September 2009). —— (2007c) “Fesuta de watashi mo kangaeta” (I too was thinking at the festival), http://d .hatena.ne.jp/femmelets/20071202 (accessed 3 September 2009). SF (2007) Contribution on p. 39 to Kirokushū henshū iinkai (editing committee of the collected records) (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Shiba, Rei (2002) “CHANCE! Intābyū”, interview by Katō Umezō, http://www.loft-prj.co.jp/ interview/0203/05.html; accessed 17 July 2012. Shima Taizō (2005) Yasuda kōdō 1968–1969 (Yasuda auditorium 1968–1969), Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha. Shimizu, Naoko (2007) “Me o sorasazu mitsumesugizu, tasukeau hito no tsunagari – Furītā zenpan rōdō kumiai ni tsudou hitobito” (Without averting one’s eyes or staring, the bonds between people helping each other: the people gathering at the General Freeter Union), The Big Issue Japan, No. 67 (March): 16–17. —— & Sono, Ryōta (eds) (2009) Furītā rōso no seizon handobukku: Tsunagaru, kaeru, sekai o tsukuru (The survival handbook of the General Freeter Union: Connecting, changing, creating the world), Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten. Shinoda, Tōru (2009) “Which Side Are You On?: Hakenmura and the Working Poor as a Tipping Point in Japanese Labor Politics”, Japan Focus: the Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 14–3 -09, 4 April 2009. Shinohara, Masatake (2005) “Mukidashi no toppi na nichijō – Ishigaki kafe to wa nan datta no ka?” (Naked extravagant everyday life: what was Ishigaki café?), pp. 194–204, Gendai shisō 33: 12. Shiokura, Yutaka (2002) Hikikomoru wakamonotachi (Young people who withdraw from society), Tokyo: Asahi bunko. Shirai, Katsumi (2007) “Hatarakitakutemo hatarakenai ningentachi datte iru zo! Bakayarō!” (Hey stupid! People who can’t work even if they want to also exist!), Furītāzu furī, Vol. 01: 79–83. Shiraishi, Yoshiharu (2008) “Gakuhi zero en wa Tōyako samitto kara hajimaru” (Zero yen university fees wil start from the Tōyako summit), VOL, No. 03: 172–173.- & Ōno, Hideshi (eds) (2005) Neoribe gendai seikatsu hihan josetsu (Prolegomena to a critique of contemporary neoliberal life), Tokyo: Shinhyōron. —— & Yabu, Shirō (2005) “Undō / Seiji – Yabu-shi ni iku” (Movement / politics: asking Mr Yabu), pp. 138–179, in Shiraishi, Yoshiharu & Ōno, Hideshi (eds) Neoribe gendai seikatsu hihan josetsu (Prolegomena to a critique of contemporary neoliberal life), Tokyo: Shinhyōron. Shishido, Yūki (2005) “Kyōto Hyakumanben Ishigaki sōdō” (The Kyoto Hyakumanben stonewall disturbance), Impaction 147: 200–202. Schoppa, Leonard (2006) Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Simmel, Georg (1997) “The Sociology of Sociability”, pp. 120–129, in D. Frisby & M. Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture, London: Sage. Slater, David H. (2010) “The ‘New Working Class’ of Urban Japan: Socialization and Contradictions from Middle School to the Labor Market”, pp. 137–169, in David H.

bibliography279 Slater & Hiroshi Ishida (eds) Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting and Strategies, London: Routledge. —— (2011) “Fukushima Women against Nuclear Power: Finding a Voice from Tohoku”, The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 9 November, http://japanfocus.org/events/view/117 (accessed 15 November 2011). —— & Nishimura, Keiko & Kindstrand, Love (2012) “Social media in disaster Japan”, pp. 94–108, in Jeff Kingston (ed.) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11, London: Routledge. Slow Work (n.d.) “Surō wāku tte nani?” (What is slow work?); http://slowwork.org/02whats/ index.html (accessed 20 November 2006). Smits, Gregory (2006) “Shaking up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints”, Journal of Social History 39(4): 1045–1078. de Solà-Morales, Ignatio (1995) “Terrain vague”, pp. 118–123, in Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.) Anyplace, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Sono, Ryōta (2011) Boku ga tôden-mae ni tatta wake (Why I stood in front of TEPCO), Tokyo: San’ichi shobô. Spariosu Mihai I. (1989) Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Squires, Catherine R. (2002) “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Alternative Public Spheres”, Communication Theory 12(4) (November): 446–168. ST (2007) “Nagai no koto” (On Nagai), pp. 36–39, in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. St John, Graham (2004) “Counter-Tribes, Global Protest and Carnivals of Reclamation”, Peace Review 16 (4) (December): 421–428. Standing, Guy (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Strecher, Matthew (1998) “Beyond ‘Pure’ Literature: Mimesis, Formula, and the Postmodern in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki”, The Journal of Asian Studies 57(2): 354–378. Steinhoff, Patricia (2006) “Radical Outcasts versus Three Kinds of Police: Constructing Limits in Japanese Anti-Emperor Protests”, Qualitative Sociology 29(3): 387–408. Suga, Hidemi (2003a) Kakumeiteki na, amari ni kakumeiteki na – “1968 nen no kakumei” shiron (Revolutionary, so revolutionary: a historical discussion of the “revolution of the year 1968”), Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. —— (2003b) JUNK no gyakushū (The counter-attack of junk), Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. —— (2006a) 1968 nen (The year 1968), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. —— (2006b) “Posuto jichi kūkan” (post self-governing space), pp. 7–25, in Suga, H. & Hanasaki, M. (eds) Neoribeka suru kōkyōken – kaimetsu suru daigaku shiminshakai kara no jiritsu (The neoliberalization of the public sphere: autonomy from the collapsing university and civil society), Tokyo: Akashi shoten. —— & Hanasaki, Masanosuke (2006) “Atogaki” (Afterword), pp. 183–188, in Suga, H. & Hanasaki, M. (eds) Neoribeka suru kōkyōken – kaimetsu suru daigaku shiminshakai kara no jiritsu, Tokyo: Akashi shoten. —— (ed.) (2005) Left Alone: Jizoku suru nyû refuto no “68 nen kakumei” (Left alone: the “revolution of 68” of the continuing new left), Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Sugita, Shunsuke (2005) Furītaā ni totte ‘jiyū’ to ha nanika (What is ‘freedom’ for freeters?), Tokyo: Jinbun shoin. —— & et al. (2006) “Neoribe to purekariāto” (Neoliberalism and the precariate), Impaction 151: 52–81. Sugiyama, Noriko (1999) “Arinomama no jibun de iinda / Ima watashi ga fuan ni omou koto” (You’re fine as you are / what worries me now), pp. 270–272, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Suzuki, Hideo (2009) Shinsayoku to rosujene (The new left and the lost generation), Tokyo: Shūeisha.

280

bibliography

Suzuki, Yoshiaki (2007) “‘Sekai rikujō’ no ura de susumu hōmuresu haijo to jūminhyō hakudatsu” (The homeless exclusion and vote stealing going on behind the World Championship in Athletics), Tsukuru 37(9) (September-October): 122–129. Sztompka, Piotr (2004) “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postcommunist Societies”, pp. 155–195, in Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Tachibanaki, Toshiaki (2006) Kakusa shakai – Nani ga mondai na no ka (The income gap society: what is the problem?), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Takahara, Motoaki (2007) “Nihon tokushusei-ron no nijū no isan – Seishain shikō to koyō ryūdōka no jirenma” (The double legacy of the theory of Japanese uniqueness: the dilemma of regular employee orientation and flexibilization of employment), pp. 43–73, in Honda, Yuki (ed.) Wakamono no rōdō to seikatsu sekai, Tokyo: Daigetsu shobō. Takahashi, Atsutosi (2012) “Nītopia sengen” (NEETopia manifesto), Datsuraku No. 1; https:// sites.google.com/site/datsuraku/home/vol1/manifest (accessed 16 July 2012). Takahashi, Ryōhei (2011) comment to blog entry by Noiz, 28 October 2011; blog: Mukofungoj ciuloke; http://mukofungoj.sanpal.co.jp/memorigilo/4677; accessed 14 July 2012). Take Jun’ichirō (1997) “Rojō gaka Take Jun’ichirō ni kiku: Shinjuku eki nishiguchi danbōru hausu mura yori” (Asking street painter Take Jun’ichirō: From the cardboard house village of Shinjuku Station West Exit), interview by Ogura Mushitarō, Gendai Shisō 25(5): 56–64. —— (2004) “Shinjuku Underground Tokyo Japan”, texts starting at http://cardboard -house-painting.jp/mt/index.php?page=1 (accessed 9 May 2011). —— (2005a) “Take Jun’ichirō ni kiku” (Asking Take Jun’ichirō), interview by Ogura Mushitarō, pp. 4–7, in Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyūkai (ed.), Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyū, Kamio, Saitama: Swamp publications. —— (2005b) “Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyūkai” (The Shinjuku cardboard painting research group), pp. 10–13, in Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyūkai (ed.), Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyū, Kamio, Saitama: Swamp publications. —— (2008) “Furatto kōen ni otozureru subete no hitobito e no bōryoku – Miyashita kōen ga naiki pāku ni”, Digital Creators, http://blog.dgcr.com/mt/dgcr/rchives/20081008140100 .html. Takemura, Masato (2008a) “Oashisu purojekuto ni sōgū shite” (Encountering the Oasis project), pp. 14–16, PACE, Vol. 4. —— (2008b) “Shi no umareru basho 2: demo” (The birthplace of poetry 2: demonstrations), Peace Media, Sept-October, http://peacemedia.jp/take/take0808.html#more-156 (accessed 1 September 2009). Tarōmaru, Hiroshi (2006) “Shakai idō to furītā – dare ga furītā ni nariyasui no ka” (Social mobility and freeters: who tend to become freeters?), pp. 30–48, in Tarōmaru, Hiroshi (ed.) Furītā to nīto no shakaigaku, Kyoto: Sekai shisō-sha. —— & Kameyama, Toshirō (2006) “Mondai to giron no wakugumi” (The problem and the frame of discussion), pp. 1–29, in Tarōmaru, Hiroshi (ed.) Furītā to nīto no shakaigaku, Kyoto: Sekai shisō-sha. Tattan (2007) “Haijo ni tachimukau” (Confronting eviction), pp. 151–152, in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Taussig, Michael (1987) Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: The Univesity of Chicago Press. T.H. (2007) contribution on p. 3 of “Nagai kōen tentomura. Gyōsei daishikkō made no kirokushū” editorial committee (ed.) Nagai kōen tentomura. Gyōsei daishikkō made no kirokushū – Chūkan hōkokuban, July 2007, report available in the archive of Nagai kōen nakama no kai (Comrades’ Association of Nagai Park) at Oshiteriya in Osaka. Thörn, Håkan (2012) “In Between Social Engineering and Gentrification: Urban Restructuring, Social Movements, and the Place Politics of Open Space”, Journal of Urban Affairs 34(2): 153–168.

bibliography281 Tilly, Charles (2000) “Spaces of Contention”, pp. 135–159, Mobilization: An International Journal 5(2). Toivonen, Tuukka (2012) “NEETs: The Strategy within the Category”, pp. 139–158, in Roger Goodman & Yuki Imoto & Tuukka Toivonen (eds) A Sociology of Japanese Youth: From Returnees to NEETs, London: Routledge. —— (2013) Japan’s Emerging Youth Policy: Getting Young Adults back to Work, London: Routledge. Toyama, Kōichi (2008) Aoi Mūbumento – Mattaku atarashii 80 nendaishi (The blue movement: a totally new history of the 80s), Tokyo: Sairyūsha. —— (2010) “Garapagosu shotō no tōsō: Amari ni mo nagai no de saigo ni yonda hō ga ii ka mo shirenai ‘maegaki’” (Struggle on the Galapagos: A ‘preface’ so long that perhaps it should be read last), pp. 7–35, in Nakagawa, Fumito, Posuto gakusei undōshi: Hōdai kuroheru hen 1985–1994, Tokyo: Sairyūsha. Tsuji, Shin’ichi (2001) Surō izu byūteifuru – Ososa to shite no bunka (Slow is beautiful: Taking it easy as culture). Tokyo: Heibonsha. Tsumajima, Yōsuke (2007) Contribution on pp. 56–61 in Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Tsumaki, Shingo (2004) “Prefence for Homelessness Categorized as ‘Refusing a Desent Civic Life’: A Critical Perspective”, Shidai shakaigaku No. 5: 21–28. Turner, Victor (1992) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ Publications. —— (2007) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction. Ueda, Kanayo (2006) “Hōmuresu no hyōgen, jiritsu no kokoromi” (Homelessness and expression, an attempt at independence), Gendai shisō 34(9): 222–235. Ueno, Toshiya (1997) “Who is a media activist?”, http://ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/13.htm (accessed 1 February 2003). —— (1999) “Techno-Orientalism and Media Tribalism: On Japanese Animation and Rave Culture”, Third Text 47 (Summer): 95–106. —— et al. (1999) “Dameren wa gurōbaru sutandādo” (Dameren is global standard), pp. 376–89, in Dameren sengen!, Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. —— & Lovink, Geert (2004) “Urban Techno Tribes and the Japanese Recession: An Email Exchange with Toshiya Ueno”, pp. 262–274, in Lovink, Gert (ed.) Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia, Cambridge. Mass.: The MIT Press. Ueyama, Kazuki (2000) “Hikikomori ha kekkyoku ha rōdōmondai da” (The hikikomori are ultimately a problem of labour), Nyūsutāto tsūshin, 20 November, www.ns-kansai.org/ nsk/ronso/ueyama-kazuki.htm (accessed 13 June 2005). —— (2001) ‘Hikikomori’ datta boku kara (From me, a former hikikomori), Tokyo: Kōdansha. —— (2005) “Sayokuteki de nai rentai?” (A non-leftist solidarity?), Freezing Point (blog), entry 24 January 2005; http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ueyamakzk/200500125; accessed 16 November 2006. —— (2006) “Jiyū o ushinau yamai” (An illness depriving you of freedom), Freezing Point (blog), entry 7 June 2006; http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ueyamakzk/200600608; accessed 16 November 2006. Umano, Honesuke (2008) “Binbō, zetsubō, osakimakkura – Nīto, hikikomori, menherā ni totte no rōdō seizon undo” (Poor, desperate, no future: the labour and survival movement from the point of view of NEET, social withdrawers and mentally ill), pp. 83–86, PACE, Vol 4. Umeten (2012) “Shohyō: Watanabe Futoshi ‘Ai to yūmoa no shakai undōron’ Kitaōji shobō, 2012 nen”; Datsuraku No. 2; https://sites.google.com/site/datsuraku/home/vol2/umeten (accessed 16 July 2012). Union Extasy (2007) “Setsuritsu shushisho”, entry on the union blog 29 May 2007, http:// extasy07.exblog.jp/5783427; accessed 6 May 2009.

282

bibliography

Utetsu, Akiko (2009) Tsunagari yururi to – Chiisa na ibasho ‘Saron kafue do Komorebi’ no chosen (Loosely connecting: The challenge of the salong and café de Komorebi), Tokyo: Shizenshoku tsūshinsha. Utsunomiya, Kenji & Yuasa, Makoto (eds) (2009) Hakenmura: Nani ga towarete iru no ka (The Dispatch Worker Village: What is being questioned?), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Van Alphen, Ernst (1997) Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. —— (1999) “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma”, pp. 24–38, Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe & Leo Spitzer (eds) Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover: University Press of New England. Vaneigem, Raoul (1981) “Basic Banalities (I)”, pp. 89–101, in Knabb, Ken (ed. & tr.) Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley: the Bureau of Public Secrets. —— (2001) The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Rebel Press. Voss, Kim (1996) “The Collapse of a Social Movement: The Interplay of Mobilizing Structures, Framing, and Political Opportunities in the Knights of Labor”, pp. 227–258, in Doug McAdam et al. (eds) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watanabe, Futoshi (2006) “Jitaku kafe no bunkateki jikken ni kan suru kiroku” (Record on a cultural experiment of a home-café), Impaction 153: 48–55. —— (2012) Ai to yūmoa no shakai undō-ron – Makkishihonshugi o ikiru tame ni (A love and humour theory of social movements: For the sake of living in late capitalism), Kyoto: Kitaōji shobō. Watanabe, Hiroaki Richard (2012) “Why and how Did Japan Finally Change its Ways? The Politics of Japanese Labour-market Deregulation since the 1990s”, Japan Forum 24(1): 23–50. Watanabe, Hitomi (2007) Tōdai Zenkyōtō (Tokyo University Zenkyōtō), Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Watanabe, Takuya (2007) “Soto kara kiroku shita daishikkō” (An eviction recorded from the outside), pp. 200–206, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Yabu, Shirō (2003a) “Dameren to iu undō” (The movement Dameren), pp. 155–163, in Shiraba, Masashi & Kawasaki, Masaru & Hirakawa, Hideyuki (eds), Haiteku shakai o ikiru, Tokyo: Hokuju shuppan. —— (2003b) “Rojō de torikaese” (Take it back on the street), pp. 46–47, in Noda Tsutomu et al. (eds), No!! War, Tokyo: Kawadeshobō shinsha. —— (2003c) “Nando demo basho o akero! Keisatsuka suru shakai ni kōshite” (Give way no matter how many times! Resisting the policification of society), Tosho Shimb un, 7 June 2003. —— (2006) “(Chiisa na) Seiji ga jūman suru” (Brimming with (small) politics), VOL 01 (Spring): 82–84. —— (2009b) “Hōsei daigaku mondai ni kan suru shokan to teiki” (Impression and problematization concerning the problem of Hōsei university), Jōkyō 10(6) (July): 202–203. —— (2012) Hōshanō o kue to iu nara sonna shakai wa iranai, zero bekureru-ha sengen (I don’t need a society which tells me to eat radiation, the zero becquerel faction manifesto), Tokyo: Shinhyōsha. —— & Yamanote, Midori (2001) Musantaishū shinzui (The essence of the propertyless masses, Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha. —— & Yamanote, Midori (2006) Ai to bōryoku no gendai shisō (The contemporary thought of love and violence), Tokyo: Seidosha. Yamada, Shirō (2008) “Motto momeyō! Goneyō! Aru gakusei no hansuto” (Let’s raise more trouble! Let’s grumble! The hunger strike of a student), VOL, No. 03: 168–171. —— et al. (2010) “Gakusei undō no kanōsei o kangaeru” (Thinking about the possibility of a student movement), Impaction 173: 18–45. Yamaguchi, Keiko (1999) “Mienai machi no kanōsei – Shinjuku de nojuku suru hirori no ‘ojisan’ no katari kara” (The possibility of an invisible town: from the story of an old man

bibliography283 being homeless alone in Shinjuku), pp. 165–198, in Aoki Hideo (ed.) Basho o akero! Yoseba / Hōmuresu no shakaigaku, Tokyo: Shōraisha. —— (2006) “Toshi kūkan no hen’yō to nojukusha: 90 nendai ni okeru Shinjuku-eki nishiguchi chika no jirei yori” (The transformation of urban space and the homeless: From the case of the Shinjuku Station West Exit Underground in the 90s), pp. 56–118, in Kariya Ayumi (ed.) Furachi na kibō: Hōmuresu yoseba o meguru shakaigaku, Kyoto: Shōraisha. Yamaguchi, Motoaki et al. (2006) “Shin no teikōzukuri no kīwādo to shite no ‘purekariāto’” (‘Precariat’ as a keyword for creating genuine resistance), People’s Plan No. 35 (Summer): 104–118. —— et al. (2008) “‘Purekariāto undō genzai’ to ‘60 nendai undō keiken’ no taiwa” (The dialogue between the present precarity movement and the experience of the movements of the 60’s), Jōkyō, No. 9: 52–72. —— et al. (2009) “Ima rōdō no mondai ni mukau tame ni” (For the sake of confronting labour problems today), Jōkyō 10(6): 144–156. Yamamoto, Yohane (1999) Esu / Taiyō wa bokura no teki (Es / The Sun is our enemy), Tokyo: Jitsugyōnonihonsha. —— (2009 [1999]) Markusu gāru (Marx girl), Digital Publisher Zero One Entertainment. Yamamura Takeyū (1997a) “Sabaku no mae ni nani ga atta no ka, machi no ato ni nani ga dekita no ka – Kinji hausu o furikaette” (What existed before the desert, what arose after the city: Looking back at Kinji House), Zankyō tsūshin No. 11; http://zankyo.relove.org/ zankyo/zankyo11/zankyo11.html#anchor470988; accessed 30 November 2009. —— (1997b) “Okujō kaihō” (Roof liberation), Zankyō tsūshin No. 14; http://zankyo.relove .org/zankyo/zankyo14/zankyo14.html; accessed 30 November 2012. Yamane, Yasuhiro (2005) “Shinjuku rearisumu” (Shinjuku realism), pp. 14–25, Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyūkai (ed.), Shinjuku danbōru kaiga kenkyū, Kamio, Saitama: Swamp publications. —— (2010) Letter to author, 15 April 2010). Yamanishi, Mai (2007) “Nagai kōen tentomura to watashi” (The tent village of Nagai Park and I), pp. 191–197, Kirokushū henshū iinkai (ed.) Sore de mo tsunagari wa tsuzuku – Nagai kōen tentomura gyōsei daishikkō no kiroku, Tokyo: Birejji puresu. Yanagisawa, Asobu (2002) “Gendai Nippon no neo-nashonarizumu” (Neo-nationalism in contemporary Japan), Poritiiku, No. 4 (June): 238–247. Yanbe, Yūhei (2010) “Daigaku hiseiki kyōshokuin no ‘ashita no tame ni’” (The ‘for the sake of tomorrow’ of university irregular staff), Impaction 173 (March): 54–59. Yang, Guobin (2000a) “The Liminal Effects of Social Movements: Red Guards and the Transformation of Identity”, Sociological Forum 15(3): 379–406. Yang, Manuel (2012) “Hydrangea Revolution”, Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus, 23 June, http://www.jfissures.org/2012/06/23/hydrangea-revolution/ (accessed 25 June 2012). Yoda, Tomiko (2000) “A Roadmap to Millenial Japan”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 99(4): 629–668. Yonezawa, Akiyoshi (2013) “Challenges for Top Japanese Universities When Establishing a New Global Idenity: Seeking a New Paradigm after ‘World Class’”, pp. 125–143, in Shin, Jung Cheol & Kehm, Barbara M. (eds) Institutionalization of World-Class University in Global Competition, Dordrecht: Springer. Yoshikawa, Hiroshi (2001) Japan’s Lost Decade, Tokyo: The International House of Japan. Yoshimoto, Takaaki (1992) Daijōkyōron – Sekai wa doko e iku no ka (On the greater situation: where is the world moving?), Tokyo: Yudachisha. Yoshioka, Tatsuya (2008) “Experience, Action, and the Floating Peace Village”, pp. 317–322, in Chan, Jennifer (ed.) Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yuasa, Makoto (2008) Hanhinkon: “Suberidai shakai” kara no dasshutsu (Anti-poverty: escaping the slide society), Tokyo: Iwanami. —— (2009a) “Ware wa ika ni shite katsudōka ni narishi ka: Inoken no katsudō de tsukuridasu, jiko sekininron ni damarasenai shimin shakai” (How I became an activist: a civil

284

bibliography

society that won’t be silenced by the talk of self-responsibility), AT Purasu, Vol. 01 (August): 68–78. —— (2009b) “Hakenmura wa nani o toikakete iru no ka” (What did the Dispatch Worker Village put in question?), pp. 2–17, in Utsunomiya, Kenji & Yuasa, Makoto (eds) Hakenmura: Nani ga towarete iru no ka, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. —— (2009c) “Shakai katsudōka o fuyase” (Increase social activists!), Jōkyō 10(6) (July): 19–30. Zolberg, Aristide R. (1972) “Moments of Madness”, Politics & Society 2 (Winter): 183–207. Zwerman, Gilda & Steinhoff, Patricia G. & della Porta, Donatella (2000) “Disappearing Social Movements: Clandestinity in the Cycle of New Left Protest in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Italy”, Mobilization: An International Journal 5(1): 85–104.

INDEX Abe, Shinzō 250 Abstract interaction 188–189, 197–198, 202, 209–213 Against Street Control (ASC) 69–71, 85–86, 116 Akagi, Tomohiro 39 Aki no arashi (The storm of autumn) 21, 45, 47, 48–56, 57n3, 73, 95 Alexander, Jeffrey 16, 21 Alternative space 6, 11, 21–23, 60–62, 181, 186–189, 190–193, 197, 200–201, 208–209, 237–239, 240–244 Definition 22 Amamiya, Karin 39, 47, 66, 80, 93–94, 96–97, 110, 204–207, 251 Amateur Riot (Shirōto no ran) 86, 104–111, 247, 249 Amino, Yoshihiko 78, 172, 243 Ampo struggle 34, 36, 41, 250 Anderson, Nels 242 Angura-style 116, 155 Anti-Capitalist Action (ACA) 101 Anti-controlled education movement (han-kanri kyōiku undō) 48, 51 Anti-emperor system movement (See Aki no arashi; “Sea of Fire” demonstrations) Anti-G8 action 91, 115, 147 Anti-nuclear power movement 3, 42, 48, 244–251 Anti-Poverty Campaign (Han-hinkon nettowāku) 91, 125, 141–143 Anti-poverty movement 80n1, 91, 97, 120, 139–144, 148, 178, 208 Anti-war Anti-government Action (Hansen hanseifu kōdō) 71, 75, 86 Anti-war Livelihood (Hansen seikatsu) 75 Anti-war movement 3, 7, 67–72, 75–78, 85–86, 101–102, 249 Aoki, Hideo 128, 183 Arendt, Hannah 239–240, 243 Art 5, 147, 225–226, 230, 241, 246–247 In homeless activism 126–139, 148, 154–156, 165 Artists-In-Residence (AIR) 121, 122, 168–170, 173, 175–176, 177 Asada, Akira 42 Asama Sansō incident 13, 18, 35 Asato, Ken 86, 87–90, 94n16, 217

Aso, Reihiko 47 Asplund, Johan 212 Aum Shinrikyō 39, 204 Autonomia movement 47, 57, 196 Avenell, Simon 38 Awaji Platz 190–191 Basic income 98 Beckwith, Karen 19–20 Beheiren (Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam) 76–77, 114 Benjamin, Walter 32, 110 Black list association 225 Boltanski, Luc 46, 83, 97 Bracketing 150, 175, 188–189, 198, 208, 210–212, 239–244 Caillois, Roger 210 Campus-based activism 154–155, 215–231 At Dōshisha University 74–75, 218 At Hōsei University 217 At Kyoto Seika University 225–226, 228n2 At Kyoto University 218–223, 226–228 At Ritsumeikan University 224 At Waseda University 72, 217 Caruth, Cathy 14 CHANCE! 68–69, 70, 72 Chiapello, Eve 46, 83, 97 Chim�Pom 246–247 Chiruru 145 Christiania 119–120 Citizen movements (shimin undō) 3, 36, 114 Closure, sense of (heisokukan) 12, 27, 31–33, 37, 40, 115, 127, 233 Collective trauma 6, 8, 11, 12–22, 24, 32, 41–42, 127, 199, 238 Defeat of New Left as 12–13, 15, 33–38, 113–114, 116, 127, 199, 233–235, 237 Definition 14–15 Recovery from 20–25, 41–43, 116, 138, 199, 205, 211, 215, 245, 251 Collins, Randall 134, 151n16 Commons University 195, 198 Communitas 149–152, 166 Community unions 85 Comrades’ Association (Nakama no kai) 129

286

index

Comrades’ Association of Nagai Park (Nagai kōen nakama no kai) 153–154, 159, 161, 165 Concrete interaction 188–189, 197, 202, 209–211, 213 Contestation (as dimension of publicness) 239–244 Counter-space 53, 70, 98, 102, 112, 120–121, 126, 136, 149–150, 165–167, 168–169, 171–177, 216, 223, 229–231, 238, 240–241, 243–244, 247, 250 Couto, Richard 22 Cultural activism 46, 57, 118, 122–123, 126, 149, 160–161, 165–167, 168, 177–179, 195, 227, 235–237, 245–247 See also new cultural movements

Futagami, Nōki 192–193 Futatsugi, Shin 69

Dadakan (Itoi Kanji) 77–78, 115 Dairin festival 155, 158, 161, 165 DaMayDay 82–83, 94 Dame (No good-ness) 58–59, 94, 209 Dameren (The league of good-for-nothings) 45, 46, 57–67, 81, 82–84, 87–88, 94, 95, 98, 99–101, 104, 107–108, 111–112, 137, 144, 198, 209 Deleuze, Gilles 78 Direct action 48, 216, 219, 225–226, 230–231, 250 Doron, Gil 119, 121 Drums of Fury (Ikari no doramu) 249

Habermas, Jürgen 23, 53, 117, 239–240, 243 Harvey, David 30 Hasegawa, Pepe 57–58, 64–65, 71, 87, 145 Hashiguchi, Shōji 201 Hatoyama, Yukio 249n3 Higashijima, Makoto 243 Higuchi, Akihiko 190, 197 Hirai, Gen 18, 126, 134–135 Hirasawa, Gō 113, 115–116 Hirose, Jun 109 Hirschman, Albert O. 187n2 History vs. nature 110 Hokke no kai (The Atka mackerel society) 42, 48 Homelessness 88, 117, 123–125, 128, 152, 200 Homeless movement 88, 117–179 Huizinga, Johan 210

ECD 71, 73 Empowerment 6, 11, 22–25, 58, 62–64, 65, 110, 143, 178, 181–182, 185–189, 199–200, 202, 204–213, 231, 238–239, 244 Definition 11, 22–23 Endō, Reiko 224–225, 227, 228, 230 Enoaru, Café 145–146 Erikson, Kai 15 Exit 31, 106–107, 186–187 Eyerman, Ron 14, 21 Fraser, Nancy 186–188, 209, 240, 244 Freedom & Survival May Day 79, 85, 90, 93, 97, 100 Freeters (furītā) 3–4, 28–29, 83, 89, 200 Freeter activism xi, 3–7, 11, 42–43, 45–47, 81–82, 111, 209, 215, 233–239, 245–251 Freeter Union Fukuoka (FUF) 84–86, 202–203 Freeter unions 80, 84–87, 91, 200–207 Freud, Sigmund 14, 32, 135, 205–206 Fukushima, Mizuho 142 Fukushima, nuclear power plant disaster 3, 6, 7, 106, 137, 244

Gaventa, John 17–18 Genda, Yūji 182 General Freeter Union (Furītā zenpan rōdō kumiai) 79, 84–91, 97, 99, 101, 104, 171, 203, 206–208, 216, 247 General Union 224 Goffman, Erwin 241 Gōko (rivers and lakes) 243 Gonoi, Ikuo 250n4 Great Pauper Rebellion (Binbōnin daihanran) 94, 105, 106, 108 Groos, Karl 210 Guattari, Félix 65, 78

Ice age of employment 28, 204 Ichimura, Misako 47, 145–148, 156n20 Ichino, Yoshiya 203–204, 207 Inaba, Tsuyoshi 130, 140 Income gap society 28 Inoken 56, 129–130, 140 Inoue, Masaya 1, 145, 218, 221–223, 226–228 Inoue, Yuzuru 154–155, 163 Instrumental politics / instrumental activism 24, 127, 138–139, 144, 167, 246 Irregular Rhythm Asylum (IRA) 86 Ishigaki Café 2, 221–223, 227, 229–231 Isōrō lifestyle 60–61, 172n27, 220, 221 Jacobs, Jane 241 Kakumeiteki himote dōmei (The revolutionary alliance of unpopular guys) 42 Kamagasaki Patrol 152–154, 159, 165

index287 Kaminaga, Kōichi 46, 57–62, 64–67 Kan, Naoto 142 Kanehagi, Atsushi 152–153 Karatani, Kōjin 31–32, 37, 40, 68, 249n3 Kasagi, Jō 223 Kasai, Kazuaki 128 Kashima, Shūichi 50, 52–54, 56, 61 Kasumigaseki, as movement space 249–250 Keidanren (the Federation of Economic Organisations) 99 Kinji House 2, 218–221, 223, 229, 231 Kinoshita, Chigaya 249 Kobayashi, Ichirō 70 Kobayashi, Yoshinori 42 Kōenji NEET Union (Kōenji nīto kumiai) 105 Kogawa, Tetsuo 47 Kohso, Sabu 53, 65, 217 Koizumi, Jun’ichirō 38 Konishi, Yasuharu 71 Korosuna (Do not kill!) 41, 67, 71, 72, 73, 76–77 Kosugi, Reiko 182 Kotani, Satoshi 34 Kubikubi Café 1–2, 145, 227–228, 230 Kudō, Kiki 67 KUMASO (Kumamoto Labour Survival Union) 203 Kurita, Ryōko 47 Kyoto Union 85 Kyūkyoku, Kyūtarō 58, 65 Lafargue, Paul 57 Lefebvre, Henri 70, 102, 120–121 LETS (Local Economic Trading System) 194–195 Life vs. survival 59, 95–104, 108, 111–113, 122–123, 237 Lofland, Lyn 241 Lost generation 28 Lost decade 12–13, 27–29 Marx, Karl 100 Masuyama, Rena 47 Matsumoto, Hajime 101, 104–111, 207n8, 217, 247–248 McDonald, Kevin 25 Melucci, Alberto 23, 24, 65 Metropolitan Coalition against Nukes  248, 250 Metropolitan Youth Union (Shutoken Seinen Yunion) 84, 85, 141 Michiba, Chikanobu 113 Mitchell, Don 240–241

Mitsu, Takeshi 48–49, 51, 53, 55–56, 129 Miyadai, Shinji 18 Miyashita Park, anti-eviction struggle 117, 121, 122, 126, 136, 139, 167–176, 242–243 Miyazawa, Naoto 42 Momoyama, Pēko 64 Mōri, Yoshitaka 4–5, 25, 29, 126, 135 Moyai 91, 140–141, 177–178, 207–208 Muen (“no-relation”) 78, 172, 243 Murakami, Haruki 31–33, 68 Murakami, Ryū 27, 33 Murakami, Takashi 31 Nabetani, Yoshiko 159, 161, 164 Nagai Park, anti-eviction struggle 117, 125, 126, 128, 139, 149–167, 206 Nagagiri, Kōsuke 153, 157, 161 Nakamura, Ken 73, 86, 87, 94, 98, 201 Nakazawa, Takaharu 74–75 Namazu (giant catfish) 77, 135, 170 Nationalism 40–42 Negoro, Yū 208 NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) 9, 79, 80, 94, 181–185, 190–192, 195–196, 200–203, 211, 238 NEET is jazz 195–196 NEETopia 185, 195–197 Net café refugees 124 New cultural movements 5, 25, 45–47, 126, 164, 218, 247 New Left (shin-sayoku) 2, 3, 11, 12–13, 15, 33–37, 45, 53, 55–56, 57, 76, 78, 113–116, 215, 250 New Start 190–193, 197, 199 New Start Kansai 190–200 New Year Dispatch Village (Toshikoshi haken-mura) 91, 98, 120–121, 122, 142–144, 148, 208 Nikkeiren (Japan Federation of Employer’s Associations) 29 Nishijima, Akira 198 Noda, Yoshihiko 248, 250 Noe 157, 160, 162 Noiz 69, 70, 72 Nojiren 140, 145, 168, 177–178 No-man’s-land 118–122, 130, 136, 139, 144, 147–150, 165–167, 169, 171–178, 216, 220–221, 223, 225, 229, 231, 238, 242–244, 250 No nukes more hearts 248 Oda, Masanori (IllCommonz) 67, 69, 70, 73, 221 O’Donnell, Guillermo 205 Ogawa, Kyōhei 1, 97, 218–221, 226–228, 229

288

index

Ogawa, Tetsuo 144–148, 153, 156n20, 171–172, 175, 220 Oguma, Eiji 38, 83, 113–114 Ogura, Mushitarō 62 Ogura, Toshimaru 47 Okamoto, Tarō 77–77, 114, 247 Ono, Toshihiko 86 Ōsawa Masachi 39 Ōsugi, Sakae 77, 103 Ōta, Naori 154–155, 158–160, 162 Ōta, Ryō 51–52, 56 Ōtake, Hideao 113–114 Ōyake / kō 172, 243 See also public sphere Ozawa, Ichirō 249n3 PAFF (Part-timer, Arbeiter, Freeter & Foreign worker) 87, 90, 99–101 Parades of sexual minorities 72–73 PARC (Pacific Asia Resource Centre) 143 Peaceboat 48 Play 110–111, 127, 173, 188–189, 210–213, 231 Polletta, Francesca 19 Popular culture 42, 73 Post-Fordism 30, 83 Powerlessness xi, 17–18, 22–24, 181, 188–189, 206, 209, 212, 251 Precariat 79, 82, 83, 92–95, 204 Precarity movement 3, 8–9, 65–66, 79–113, 122–123, 200, 207, 209, 215, 236–237 Prefigurative politics / prefigurative activism 24, 107, 123, 127, 137, 138–139, 150, 166–167, 174, 178, 246 Public space 52–53, 112, 120–121, 130, 147–149, 168–169, 171–176, 188, 229, 237, 240–244, 247 Also see counter-space; no-man’s-land Public sphere 11, 23, 53, 70, 98, 112, 117–118,121, 130, 136, 139, 143, 166, 173, 177, 181, 186, 201, 216, 228, 230–231, 237, 239–244, 247, 250 Rabble Etc (Uzōmuzō sono ta) 71, 73, 75, 86 Radical Left Laughter (RLL) 116 Rancière, Jacques 95, 136, 211, 231, 238, 240–241 Rave music 42, 65, 72 Red Sprechchor (Akai shupurehikōru) 245–247 Redwolf, Misao 47, 248 Remo 92 Rengō (The Japanese Trade Union Federation) 141

Saitō, Tamaki 39, 183 Sakurada, Kazuya 92 San’ya Sōgidan 88, 128–129 Sasanuma, Hiroshi 125 Satō, Leo 156n20 Sawaragi, Noi 40–41, 67, 76–78, 114–115 “Sea of Fire” demonstrations 73–75 Seino, Eiichi 71 Self-responsibility argument 38, 42, 99–100, 112, 163, 184, 206, 210, 236 Sennett, Richard 241 Sentōteki rōdōsha kyōkai (The Bathhouselike Workers’ League 101 Settsu, Tadashi 93–94, 97, 205 Shamanic space 131–132 Shii, Kazuo 142 Shimizu, Naoko 47 Shinjuku cardboard village 55, 117, 128 Anti-eviction struggle 117, 125, 126–139, 152 Shinjuku Renrakukai (Shinjuku Coordination Association) 129–130, 138, 139–140, 177–178 Shinjuku’s Left Eye 132–134 Shiraishi, Yoshiharu 225 Simmel, Georg 188–189, 210, 212, 242 Situationists 55, 57, 59, 96, 157, 212 Slater, David 30 Sloth Club (Namakemono kurabu) 192n4 Slow life-ideal 192 Slow Work 194 Smits, Gregory 77 Social withdrawal (hikikomori) 6, 39, 61, 62, 93–94, 181–185, 190, 192–195, 197–203, 207, 238 Society for preserving the squalor of Hōsei (Hōsei no binbōkusasa o mamoru kai) 104, 217 Sono, Ryôta 247 Sound-demos (saundo demo) 41, 49, 50, 69–75, 76, 98, 101–102, 105–106, 109, 202–203, 205, 210, 225, 249 Spariosu, Mihai 127 Standing, Guy 39 Steinhoff, Patricia 38 Strecher, Matthew 33, 35 Subaltern counterpublics 186–188, 244 Subalterns 181, 187, 189, 192, 196, 199–201, 207, 209, 211, 213, 238–239, 242 Suga, Hidemi 81, 113–114 Support groups for withdrawers 183, 185, 190–200 Sztompka, Piotr 16

index289 Takahashi, Atsutoshi 195 Takahashi, Ryōhei 85–86, 101 Takahashi, Yoshiaki 49, 50 Take, Jun’ichirō 130–138, 145, 146, 147, 173 Takemura, Masato 205 Tanaka, Toshihide 191 Taussig, Michael 151–152, 166 Tent plaza (tento hiroba) 245, 249  Tent theatre 154–155 Therapeutical politics / therapeutical activism 24–25, 62, 127, 138–139, 178–179, 209, 238, 246 Toivonen, Tuukka 185 Tōjisha-category 158–160 Tokyo Kanrishoku Union 85 Toyama, Kōichi 48 Trauma (See collective trauma) Tsujimoto, Kiyomi 48 Tsuji, Shin’ichi 192 Tsumajima Yōsuke 159, 161 Turner, Victor 149–152, 166 Twit No Nukes 249 246 Conference of Expressive Artists (246 hyōgensha kaigi) 126, 147–149, 168, 178–179 Ueyama, Kazuki 39–40, 199, 204 Ukai, Satoshi 71 Uma no hone (Horse’s bone) 51 Umano Honesuke 203–204, 207 Umeten 197–198 Union Bochibochi 84–87, 94, 165, 201, 209 Union Extasy 1, 94, 216, 218, 224, 225, 226–228, 230–231 Union Socosoco 228, 230 United Red Army (Rengō sekigun) 13, 35–36 Vacant lots (akichi) 172–173, 175–176, 220 Van Alphen, Ernst 14

Vaneigem, Raoul 59, 96 Viva Poverty 97, 139, 178 Vitalism 53, 59, 95, 101, 103, 235, 238 Voice 6, 102, 187, 199, 202, 205–206, 207, 244 Voss, Kim 19 Warner, Michael 23 Watanabe, Futoshi 195–196 World Peace Now (WPN) 65, 72 World rectification (yonaoshi) 77, 135, 170 Yabu, Shirō 48, 65, 87, 94n16, 101–104, 111, 115, 116, 144, 205, 247n1 Yamada, Shirō 225–226, 228, 230 Yamaguchi, Motoaki 86, 91, 207 Yamamoto, Yohane 53–55 Yamamoto, Yūko 67 Yamamura Takeyū 220 Yamane, Yasuhiro 126, 130, 133–134 Yamanote, Midori 101 Yonaoshi (See world rectification)  Yomota, Inuhiko 115 Yoseba (day labourer recruitment centre) 88, 89, 123–124 Yoshimoto, Takaaki 12 Yoshioka, Tatsuya 48 Yoshizaki, Takewo 130–131, 133, 134 Yuasa, Makoto 140–141, 143–144, 207–208, 247n1 Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Student Self-government Associations) 34, 114 Zenkyōtō (All-Student Joint Struggle Conference) 34–35, 114, 204 Zenrōkyō (The National Trade Union Council) 141 Zenrōren (The National Confederation of Trade Unions) 85, 141