Neoliberalism and Global Cinema

The Rise of Collectives and the Redefinition of Labor, Life, and Representation in Neoliberal Japan

Sharon Hayashi

In his landmark essay, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Pierre Bourdieu defined neoliberalism as the deregulation of financial markets to stimulate and protect corporations, where “all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market” are called into question.¹ Neoliberalism as understood by Bourdieu is a term that references the ongoing delegation of responsibility for health care, education, and general welfare to the individual by states and corporations in the era of globalization. Under the veiled discourse of the “free market”—or individual “freedom of choice”—public services are eradicated and public spaces eliminated.

After the collapse of the speculative bubble economy in the early 1990s the Japanese government spent sixty-five trillion yen on six economic stimulus plans in an attempt to resuscitate the flagging economy. By the mid-1990s, however, a decisive shift towards easing and eliminating government regulation in order to promote corporate growth replaced the strategy of mobilizing funds for public works.² The administration of Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto (1996–1998) embarked on a program of six major reforms carrying out deregulatory measures in the fiscal structure, social welfare system, financial system, public administration, economic structure, and education system. Hashimoto invoked the rhetoric of freedom to offload what up to that moment had been responsibilities of the state and corporations onto citizens.³ While deregulating the financial system and loosening labor laws, Hashimoto warned the effects of this new freedom would entail “the suffering and endurance of population.” Under the banner of “individual freedom of choice” (kojin no sentaku no jiyū) and “personal responsibility” (jiko sekinin) the burden of the recession was off-loaded onto individual citizens.⁴ Society was divided into winners (kachigumi) and losers (makegumi), which isolated ‘losers’ and made them responsible for their own predicament. Poverty was viewed as the result of bad decisions or a lifestyle choice on the part of an individual rather than as a direct consequence of a global market based on capitalist accumulation and the deregulation of the labor market.

Neoliberal rhetoric found a convenient scapegoat in the figure of the freeter. In the late 1980s freelancers who chose to remain outside of the corporate system and continued to work part-time after graduating from college were labeled freeters (furītā from the English free and German arbeiter). In 1991 the Ministry of Labor first classified freeters as parttime workers between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four years, who were unmarried women and men and who expected to hold their jobs for less than five years. The “free” in freeters denoted a certain freedom from the rigors and expectations of enterprise society. As labor laws have been systematically loosened to benefit companies wanting to replace their full-time regular workers with less expensive temporary employees, being a parttime laborer has lost its countercultural stance and is for the most part no longer a choice. The “free” in freeters has come tosignify the freedom of employers to pick workers from a rising pool of freelance workers for jobs that are increasingly contract-based and without the benefits of lifetime employment. By the mid-1990s even though it was no longer possible for many youth entering the job market to find increasingly scarce full-time positions, freeters were castigated for their reluctance to work hard and their so-called “decision” to pursue careers outside of corporate Japan Inc.

Freeters who came of age in recessionary Japan received the derogatory moniker of the “lost generation (rosu gene).”⁵ Their lack of work ethic and counterproductive lifestyles were viewed as further perpetuating the financial crisis. Those unable to support themselves on part-time wages who lived with their parents were immediately labeled “parasite singles.” Likewise the subcultural youth forms associated with freeters that appeared during the decade were denigrated as mindless forms of consumerism and often isolated as the cause for youth violence. Gross exaggerations in the press of the phenomenon of compensated dating (enjo kosai), the exchange of sexual favors for brand-name goods by young girls, signaled the moral laxity of youth. Likewise, otaku culture was blamed as the motivating force behind crimes such as the gruesome mutilation of four young girls by Tsutomu Miyazaki in 1998–1999 when the criminal’s penchant for girls’ comics, Lolita complex (rori con) animation, and soft-core porn magazines was discovered.⁶

In addition to blaming youth for contributing to the recession and the downfall of social values, the lost generation narrative also propagated a false understanding of the causes of the recession itself. In this misguided narrative the 1990s are considered a “lost decade” because neoliberal reforms were not properly implemented after the end of the speculative bubble, thereby delaying economic recovery and causing stagnation through the 1990s. The charismatic figure of Prime Minister Jun’ichirō Koizumi (2001–2006) was cast as the central protagonist of this narrative, and his carefully cultivated image of a political maverick largely formulated a positive spin on neoliberalism as a dynamic American-style economic reform against the wishes of a largely inflexible and outdated Japanese political and corporate establishment.⁷ Although Koizumi’s flagship neoliberal project of privatizing the world’s largest bank, the Japan Postal Savings system, did not even begin to take effect until after he left office in 2007, Koizumi was immediately heralded as a neoliberal savior of the Japanese economy when the economy showed slight signs of recovery in 2003.⁸ The Koizumi-as-neoliberal-savior-of-the-lost-decade narrative, however, eclipses a global and historical understanding of monetary policies that created the speculative bubble in the late 1980s and the ever-widening income gap in Japan today.

The bubble can best be understood as a form of “financial engineering” (zaiteku) or “stock market Keynesianism” that was deliberately created to avoid an economic downturn when the yen was revalued.⁹ Around the time of the Plaza Accord in 1985 Japan was forced by the U.S. and other members of the G7 to reduce its massive trade surplus with North Ameirca by raising the value of the yen against the dollar. The shifting of U.S. debt onto the Japanese economy resulted in a strong yen that ended the expansion of Japan’s manufacturing-centered export-oriented economy.¹⁰ In order to avoid an inevitable economic downturn, the Ministry of Finance reduced interest rates and encouraged banks and brokerage firms to channel the resulting flood of easy credit to stock and real estate markets. The sharp increase in liquidity and land prices provided the paper wealth that bankrolled corporate investment and consumer spending and kept the economy expanding. When land prices reached astronomical levels, the government tightened monetary policy and began regulating real estate sales, which led to the collapse of the speculative bubble.¹¹ Banks saddled with nonperforming loans were bailed out by the government, but individuals were not. Much like the collapse of the U.S. stock and real estate markets in 2008, the 1990s financial crisis in Japan cannot be understood simply as a national phenomenon but is part and parcel of global capitalism that “has come literally to depend upon historic waves of speculation, carefully nurtured and publically rationalized by state policy makers and regulators.”¹²

How does one counter the “lost generation” narrative of neoliberalism that not only occludes the causes of the recession but uses the rhetoric of personal responsibility to shift the burden of the recession onto the individual? Despite the assault on collective structures that marks the rise of neoliberalism, new political and social collectives have been responding creatively to the deepening financial crisis and to the increasing control and surveillance of public space. The recent resurgence and rethinking of collective action has found its cultural-political expression in the cinema. Three films from 2008–2009 point to the contradictions inherent in the gap between the rhetoric and policies of neoliberalism. Each film interrogates a specific aspect of neoliberalism, either by diverting the rhetorical structure of neoliberalism for other purposes or following neoliberal policies to their logical and contradictory conclusions. Can print and film capitalism be used in the service of the dispossessed? How can the ideology of personal responsibility be turned into a manifesto for individual agency within collective action? How do policies of deregulation become transgressive when applied to non-neoliberal aims? While pointing out the contradictions of neoliberalism, these films attempt to provide new definitions of labor, life, and collectivity for the present moment.

From Exploitation to Playful Exploits

In 2009 filmmaker SABU (Tanaka Hiroyuki) filmed Kani kōsen/The Crab Cannery Ship (2009), a black comic version of a 1929 proletarian novel about the inescapable exploitation of workers on a crab-canning factory ship operating near Soviet waters. Subject neither to international maritime law nor factory regulation, the workers toil in the hellish bowels of a factory ship under a brutal and authoritarian company manager who expects the workers to sacrifice their lives in order to maintain production levels. Given the changed conditions of today’s precarious workers, a proletarian novel written over eighty years ago is an unlikely choice for a film script. How can a novel about exploited workers who toil under brutal conditions together in a factory ship be superimposed on the present situation of a new class of largely dispersed part-time and dispatch workers? And why would a proletarian novel be chosen to serve this purpose?

The film, like recent manga versions of the story, capitalizes on the “Crab Cannery Ship boom” of the previous year that saw sales of Takiji Kobayashi’s proletarian classic novel rise to more than five hundred thousand copies in 2008 alone from an average of five thousand copies a year. The “boom” was the result of a fortuitous convergence of the long-standing efforts of leftists publishers and activists, the sensational attention of the mass media, and the resonance of the novel for irregularly employed dispatch and contract workers who now form over a third of the Japanese workforce.¹³ One of the key players in this revival was the young, rightwing punk-rocker-turned-labor-activist Karin Amamiya, whose book, Let Us Live! The Refuge-ization of Young People, quickly become a manual for understanding the contemporary conditions facing today’s precarious proletariat or precariat (purekariaato from the Italian precario + proletariato).¹⁴ Since the 2007 publication of Let Us Live! the term precariat, originally adopted from European and North American precarity movements to describe the vulnerable position of exploited flexible labor, has gained increasing currency.¹⁵

Amamiya cuts a striking figure in her Gothic Lolita (gosu lori) outfits and possesses a fluency with varied media and subcultural forms—she was the lead singer of a punk rock band, is a recognized writer in several genres, and has become a frequent collaborator on film projects with her partner Yutaka Tsuchiya, the founder of the video collective Video Act.¹⁶ Her fluid negotiation of the normally bounded worlds of the Old Left, the New Left and the New New Left opened up a dialogue between distinct forms of cultural expression that accompany these worlds. In a conversation with established novelist Genichiro Takahashi, published in the progressive daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun on January 9, 2008, Amamiya remarked on the similarly desperate situation of young workers in the contemporary moment to those depicted in Kobayashi’s 1929 Crab Cannery Ship. The resulting chain of print and televised media coverage led not only to the revival of the novel but also to an unprecedented surge in Communist Party membership as over one thousand mostly young precarious workers began to join the party every month.¹⁷ Cleary the present-day precariat found something to identify with in the proletarian narrative. Through the skillful negotiation of various subcultural and mass media forms, print capitalism was deployed in the unlikely service of a proletarian novel that led to the equally unlikely 2009 film remake of the Crab Cannery Ship.

SABU (Tanaka Hiroyuki), who is credited as both director and screenwriter of the 2009 film, took ample liberties with the original in order to update it for the contemporary moment, unafraid of deploying anachronistic shiny vinyl costumes, modern haircuts, and an electronic bullhorn. SABU’s Crab Cannery Ship differs dramatically from the slow, unwinding socialist realist film adaptation of the same novel by Sō Yamamura from 1953 that won the Best Cinematography award at the Mainichi Film Concours. The visually stunning sets of SABU’s 2009 version are indebted more to portrayals of human subjection to the mechanical found in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The factory ship’s oversized machinery dominates the human form, squeezing out every last ounce of the worker’s energy to churn out tiny tins of canned crab. On top of the modernist-style sets, sound plays a much more distinctive role as both the site of abuse and source for possible action. The electronic bullhorn is used to verbally threaten and wear down the workers but when the workers decide to unionize and threaten to strike, electronica steampunk industrial sounds express the workers’ agitation in a kind of aural rather than visual agitprop. Much of the film’s pace is driven by sound rather than the Eisensteinian dialectical montage that one might expect from a Battleship Potemkin–esque narrative of mutiny.¹⁸

Although different in style from the socialist realism of both the novel and the 1953 film version, the 2009 Crab Cannery Ship is unmistakably a narrative of political awakening and organization. The naïve and motley crew of workers drawn from different rural areas of Japan at the start of the film seem unlikely to unionize. In their desperation to escape the hell of factory ship life they allow Kimura, a charismatic fellow worker, to convince them that they will find bourgeois paradise in the afterlife if they hang themselves together. After the nearly fatal prank, Kimura, along with another worker, jumps ship and is picked up by a Russian vessel where he experiences the utopic camaraderie of nonhierarchical worker–boss relations, invited by Russian sailors to eat, drink, and dance to his heart’s content. The taste of Russian utopia, no doubt far from the reality of Russia in either 1929 or 2009, inspires Kimura to decisive action and he returns to the cannery ship to organize the workers into a union that uses the threat of strike to make demands for better working conditions. The foregrounding of Kimura’s actions, as an individual, albeit acting for the benefit of the group, differs from the collective hero of the original novel.¹⁹ SABU’s emphasis on Kimura as a character suggests how he wanted to modify the novel for the present moment. “Rather than class warfare, it’s about how to break free of your current situation, and what you have to become to do that, and that you have to decide that for yourself. I wanted to properly push the importance of making your own decisions to the forefront.”²⁰ The film asserts individual consciousness against the dialectical class consciousness of the original novel, and attempts to turn the isolating and criminalizing neoliberal rhetoric of personal responsibility into a call for individual consciousness within a collective.

SABU’s use of sound in the last scene foregrounds the importance of individual decisiveness for collective action. Kimura’s insurrection fails when the company brings in the Imperial Navy to retake the ship from the mutinying sailor-workers. Emboldened by the military support, the company manager shoots Kimura dead and forces the workers back to their stations. Yet Kimura’s death provides the opportunity for the political awakening of each member of the group. The authoritarian company manager brutally beats one of the weaker workers into unconsciousness. After a moment of silence, a loud mechanical noise from the ship’s bowels awakens the worker and his eyes suddenly jolt open. He struggles to his feet and throws his gloves defiantly to the ground. A comrade helps him stay on his feet as he starts walking decisively towards the company headquarters of the ship. Although he does not speak, the voice-over on the sound track is immediately attributable to him as an internal monologue, “We were wrong. We shouldn’t have chosen a representative. We are all representatives of ourselves.” Had the director chosen to have the character speak the lines out loud to his fellow workers, the character would have become the voice of the group, another Kimura. Yet the line formulated as internal monologue suggests it is an individual decision. He is neither being told what to do nor does he tell others how to act.

As if coming to this moment of political consciousness individually but collectively, each of the workers suddenly leave their work stations and come together to raise the bloodied flag of solidarity—three clearly delineated hands clasped in a circular mechanical bolt. Again the rhythmic steam-press-like sound of the ship accompanies their deliberate action, further emphasized by slow-motion cinematography. Whereas the collective is shown acting together, each of the individuals seems to have made the decision to act on his own, each individual worker coming to this decision in his own mind. Collective action here is shown as the sum of individual decisions to act rather than as a call to act by one leader. The ending suggests a wariness of the political vanguard of the Old and New Left as imagined by the New New Left and proposes a form of collective action that restores agency to the individual. The film ends on a close-up of the bloodstained flag of solidarity as the voice-over continues, “Yes, once more!” depicting the continuing struggle where workers must rise up again and again individually, but together. Clearly this moment of proletarian solidarity speaks to a contemporary precariat but how does the precariousness of today’s situation lead to unionization and the recognition and restoration of rights? How does individual consciousness lead to collective political action?

Although the ideology of postwar enterprise society centered around the white-collar salaryman had always failed to acknowledge the flexible labor of women, students, part-timers, and contract laborers, the number of nonregular workers in the late 1990s still accounted for less than a quarter of Japan’s workforce. The loosening of the 1985 Worker Dispatch Law in 1999, and again in 2004, opened the labor market up to the temporary staffing industry. By 2008 over a third of Japan’s workforce was comprised of nonregular workers. Largely treated as disposable labor (similar to the planned obsolescence of electronic goods), most short-term contract workers and temporary staff do not have recourse to the rights and benefits of full-time workers because of the strident measures set in place by antineoliberal loyalists. Disposable labor’s situation is further exacerbated by the fact that both the corporate and government welfare systems are geared for the full-time lifetime worker. Temporary and short-term contract workers who have not held their jobs for at least a year are ineligible for unemployment benefits and many are laid off before the end of their contracts without penalty for their employers.²¹ The dire plight of temporary workers exacerbated by the weakening of labor laws was only recognized when five hundred unemployed and homeless temporary workers and over sixteen hundred volunteers converged on Hibiya Park in central Tokyo from December 31, 2008, to January 5, 2009, to form the New Year’s Tent Village for Temp Workers (Toshi-koshi haken mura). New labor organizations catering to the specific hardships faced by temporary workers set up support systems for the workers. As a result of this occupation, widespread calls for a more adequate safety net and regulation of corporations forced the government to extend unemployment benefits to those who had worked more than six months and to pressure companies to expand the ranks of its regular employees. Prime Minister Taro Aso urged corporations to go back to a model of full-time workers stating, “Regular employment is best.”²²Whereas the acknowledgment that corporations and the government must play a role in the amelioration of living standards of precarious workers was welcome, Aso’s comment betrayed a nostalgia for enterprise society centered around the postwar ideal of the salaryman.

The New Year’s Tent Village points towards a new trend in labor activism that recognizes the changing reality of labor and the changing face of the laborer, which is much more inclusive than the government’s ideal salaryman or the proletarian working class. Whereas the Communist Party of Japan has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, the ranks of Tent Village and other new labor organizations have been increasingly filled and led by dispossessed youth. The General Freeter Union (Furītā Rōdō Kumiai), which played a central role in the New Year’s Tent Village activities, developed out of PAFF (Part-time, Arbeiter, Foreign Worker, Freeter), an organization whose initials stand for new kinds of laborers left out of many previous unions.²³ The term freeter is now being reclaimed to signify a much more diverse group of irregular workers that include NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), the homeless, the unemployed, and the underemployed.

This younger generation of labor activists has focused its critique on both the government’s neoliberal policies that benefit corporations at the expense of flexible labor and the increased surveillance and privatization of public space along with the ejection of homeless from these spaces. Parks have played a central role in the battle for public space as a free gathering place for the dispossessed and increasingly spatially dispersed workers. Public spaces are increasingly disappearing in the neoliberal landscape of Tokyo. In 2008 over sixteen hectares of land in Tokyo was designated as privately owned and operated “public space” whose management the government had turned over to corporations. In order to defray the costs of public space, municipal governments are privatizing public space. In 2008 Shibuya ward in central Tokyo sold the naming rights of one of the most popular parks in the city for political rallies, Miyashita Park, to the Nike Corporation. In order to shoulder the costs of the construction and maintenance of a planned skater park, an entrance fee to the “public park” will be charged. Since the official announcement of the deal in August 2009 Miyashita Park has been occupied by homeless activists and artists who refuse to allow a neoliberal agenda to determine who constitutes the public and who public parks will serve or exclude. The occupations of both Hibiya Park and Miyashita Park asserted the rights of those normally excluded from public discourse. As a center of political activism, parks not only serve as a refuge for the disenfranchised but also function as important cultural spaces where film screenings and other cultural events are held.

Tokachi Tsuchiya screened his first feature documentary Futsū na shigoto ga shitai/A Normal Life, Please (2008) at the New Year’s Tent Village in Hibiya Park. The film documents the exploitation of a thirty-year-old cement truck driver, Nobukazu Kaikura, who is forced to work an average of 552 hours a month without receiving overtime pay or social insurance. Originally hired by a union as a cameraman to document the harassment of the cement truck driver, Tsuchiya was so outraged by what he witnessed that he felt compelled to make a film exposing the system of subcontracting by the Sumitomo Osaka Cement Company that led to the inhuman conditions Kaikura faced.

In one of many interviews that show Kaikura driving his cement truck, he relates how he and many of his fellow drivers accepted their exploitation as “just the way things are” before realizing their rights. They never questioned the fact that in a worsening economy, the costs would be passed down through the subcontracting chain. They also had no choice but to accept the dangers of the job given the lack of regulation over the industry. The fact that fatalities occurred when drivers were forced by the commission system and threat of firing into working while sick and into overloading their trucks beyond safety limits was seen as an accepted practice that could not be changed. One interview with a safety official confirms the government’s tacit acceptance of the situation when he admits that although safety load limits exist, the final decision on load limits rests with companies, thereby rendering safety regulations completely ineffectual.

Despite the dangerous working conditions and low pay Kaikura only approaches the union when the sub-subcontracted firm that employs him switches from an all commission system of payment to an amortization system that places the entire burden of fuel costs, truck leases, and repairs on individual drivers. Although the regulation of the industry is lax, firms subcontracted by well-known companies are even less bound by labor laws and regulations. When this new illegal system is imposed on drivers, making even bare subsistence impossible, the over-exhausted and underpaid Kaikura turns to the Solidarity Union of Construction and Transport Workers of Japan (Rentai Union) in order to be able to survive. Like many workers he is both reluctant to lose his job and is oblivious to his rights.

Although not physically beaten as the factory workers in the Crab Cannery Ship, Kaikura is consistently subjected to abuse and threats by his employer. He is so physically exhausted by his job he develops Crohn’s disease and must be hospitalized. Kaikura is compelled to quit the union once after being offered a small sum of money but later rejoins the union when he realizes it is the only means for him to stop his abusive employer. The stress from threatening visits to his home by company thugs partially contributes to his mother’s death. The firm’s thugs even disrupt his mother’s funeral where they physically assault Kaikura, the union leaders supporting him, and the filmmaker.

Tsuchiya edits the footage he shoots into a compelling and sympathetic narrative but the footage also has direct legal consequences. Footage of the funeral assault is turned over to the police and used to press charges against the sub-subcontracted firm. When the parent company refuses to take responsibility for the actions of the sub-subcontracted firm that employs Kaikura and refuses to speak with union leaders, the union and the filmmaker set up a screening of the funeral footage, projecting it onto a large mobile screen stretched out in front of the company headquarters. Afraid of the bad publicity that the “screening” might bring, the parent company relinquishes and agrees to both negotiate with the union while quietly terminating its dealings with the sub-subcontracted firm. The firm is forced to temporarily dissolve, but merely starts up again under a new name. Tsuchiya’s film exposes the structural exploitation of the deregulated subcontracting system and the ways in which it perpetuates itself with tacit governmental approval.

As a direct result of the efforts of the union and the footage shot by the Tsuchiya, Kaikura is compensated and finds a regular job that allows him to lead “a normal life.” The original Japanese title of the film roughly translates as “I want a normal job (futsū na shigoto o shitai).” The English translation, A Normal Life, Please, suggests that a normal life is not possible without a normal job. Here a regular or normal job is not defined as white-collar work but simply as a job where hours worked are compensated, job security is guaranteed, and social insurance is provided. The film uses a discourse of normality to argue for workers’ rights but also for workers’ responsibilities to claim those rights.

Although Kaikura is portrayed sympathetically throughout the film, the director’s first impression of Kaikura is of a spineless and cowardly worker who would soon quit the union when pressured by his bosses. Throughout the filming the director realizes his initial contempt for the truck driver is unfounded and Kaikura proves not only to persevere but goes on to set up a union at his new workplace. The director frames the film as a tale of political consciousness that follows a worker’s discovery of his rights—when Kaikura recognizes his rights to unionize is he able to realize those rights and share them with others.

On another level, the screening format reinforces the enlightenment narrative of the film. Whereas the film has shown in mini-theaters and abroad at festivals, most of the screenings across Japan have been at community centers for unions and other local organizations. The director uses the limited distribution of the film—the film has yet to be officially released on DVD or broadcast—as an opportunity to accompany the film to each screening. Tsuchiya hopes that the film will inspire those who are exploited to stand up for themselves and unionize, and views the post-screening discussions as an integral part of the process. The screening of the film held at the New Year’s Tent Village provided an opportunity for workers to discuss their own experiences of exploitation. One dispossessed worker revealed he had worked an average of six hundred hours a month. Tsuchiya’s reaction was one of disbelief—not that the worker had been forced to work twenty hours a day but that he had done nothing about it. For Tsuchiya, the right to collective bargaining guaranteed by the Japanese postwar constitution must be exercised by all individuals who are exploited. Whereas the rhetoric of personal responsibility is used to criminalize poverty, Tsuchiya argues that personal responsibility needs to be recast as individual agency for the collective improvement of labor conditions. Although the system of in-house unions that operates in the interests of corporations rather than workers has dominated the postwar landscape of Japanese labor politics, Tsuchiya believes that labor organization in the present moment must begin with dispersed individuals recognizing and rectifying their situation within collective support networks. He thus ends his film with a “gift to the younger generation,” Chapter III Article 28 of the Japanese postwar constitution in simple white lettering on a black background: “The right to organize collectively, the right to bargain collectively, and the right to act collectively are guaranteed.” Tsuchiya believes that it is only through collective bargaining and organizing among the dispersed contract and dispatch workers who make up a third of Japan’s workface that labor conditions can improve. Inspired by his own involvement with unions and video collectives—the camera he used to film the documentary was bought with the severance pay he received from a video editing companying he worked at for two years—A Normal Life, Please builds upon the political and cultural networks that have sustained political organizing and political video activities in Japan.

Whereas A Normal Life, Please focuses on the exploitation of workers and the possibilities offered by union organizing, Yuki Nakamura’s documentary Shiroto no ran/Amateur Revolt (2008) moves away from exploitation to focus on the playful exploits of the Amateur Revolt collective. In contrast to the desire to live “a normal life,” the members of Amateur Revolt do not want to be determined by their exploitation by corporations. Instead of taking on temp jobs or becoming contract laborers, they have set up a collective of small storefronts in the Kōenji area of Tokyo, carving out a section of an old shopping street where the prolonged recession has made rents affordable. Since the opening of the first electronic recycling shop in 2005 by the founder of the collective, Hajime Matsumoto, over fourteen used clothing and other shops, cafés, and event spaces have been added. Members of the collective are trying to redefine the term freeter to mean “free workers,” who are not necessarily completely free of the economic system, but whose identities and culture are not wholly determined or circumscribed by their relation to economic exploitation.²⁴ Other loose collectives across Japan have been inspired by Amateur Revolt to set up similar shops whose aim is not profit but collective space and enjoyment.²⁵

Inspired by street rave demonstrations that began in 2003 to protest the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Amateur Revolt holds street demonstrations that speak to the concerns of its mainly late twenties to thirties demographic.²⁶ Nakamura’s documentary contains footage of the 2005 “Gimme back my bicycle demonstration,” the 2006 “Make rent free demonstration,” and the 2006 “Anti-tax on secondhand electronics demonstration.” The first demonstration protested the clearing of bicycles and installation of pay parking lots for bicycles in front of train stations that has increased the transportation costs of freeters struggling to live on parttime salaries. The anti-rent demonstration was staged to register a disenchantment with the labor policies of the government that the protesters see as leading directly to the downsized part-time labor force not being able to afford rent. And when the government announced a tax on the sale of recycled electronics, Amateur Revolt lobbied against the tax that directly benefits electronics manufacturers responsible for the planned obsolescence of electronics goods. Although not adverse to a system of taxation, the collective challenges the inequity of taxes that target lower-income segments of the population while benefiting corporations.

In contrast to earlier rave demonstrations held strategically across the city and comprised of anonymous crowds, Amateur Revolt protests have all been launched and based in the Kōenji neighborhood. Alongside these larger demonstrations, the film also documents bashop (a contraction of the Japanese ba or place and the English shop), smaller and more frequent occupations of public space for everyday activities like collective dining and drinking. These impromptu gatherings are inspired by 1970s happenings in the neighborhood that drew on ideas of Situationism and critiques of everyday life. In these earlier happenings, the playwrights Rio Kishida and Shūji Terayama worked to disrupt the dominant organization of citysocial space with large-scale street theater pieces like “Knock.” They distributed maps and plotted performances in fifty-five different locations in residential Tokyo, ranging from bathhouses to parks to street corners, and also knocked on people’s doors, in a performance that took place over thirty hours. In contrast to the highly orchestrated Knock performance, bashop gatherings share a sense of temporality with the flashmob—the time and dates of gatherings are circulated on the Internet and through cell phone messages rather than through the post or distribution of flyers.²⁷

Whereas the Situationist aim of disruption and reclamation of everyday space also remains the same, the present focus differs. Amateur Revolt strategically uses smaller-scale protests to foreground the increasing police surveillance and regulation of public spaces. On February 24, 2006, members of the collective held a three-person demonstration. Protests of more than two persons are required by law to be registered with both the city ward office and with police. Although the protesters warned city officials and police of the small size of the demonstration, a van of riot police was sent to keep the protesters in line. The footage of the protest highlights the bureaucratic nature of police surveillance, where undercover police and riot police follow the three protestors along their preprogrammed demonstration route. At one point the three protesters take a break in the park while exasperated police try to give them directives about the proper way to carry out a political demonstration. They angrily chastise the protesters, “You’re not supposed to take a break in the middle of a protest to hang out in the park! You’re supposed to be shouting out slogans for what you believe in! Don’t you know how to protest!” The footage of the protest makes visible the kind of surveillance and regulated political economy we are subject to in our daily lives but it also reveals the underlying norms of what constitutes a protest. This moment in the video exposes what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible,’ a map of how the visible, the intelligible, and the possible are structured.²⁸ In other words, it highlights how perception itself is structured: what can be seen, what can be heard, and what can be done. Whereas public parks are being deregulated and privatized, the activities one can perform in them are being increasingly regulated to comic levels.

In terms of representational politics as well, the collective rejects being represented by a system of official politics that refuses to represent its interests. In order to expose the fallacy of representational politics while reclaiming public space normally reserved for official politics, Amateur Revolt decided to put forward a candidate for the Kōenji ward office in Tokyo in April 2007. Candidates for public office are the only members of society allowed to hold public gatherings in front of train stations in Japan. Given the central importance of train commuting patterns, train stations are one of the main stages of political campaigning. This collective, which had been banned from holding public demonstrations of more than two people without a municipal and police permit, used their entry into official politics to officially demonstrate against the contradictory forms of regulation of public spaces. To run for ward office one need only to put down a minimal down payment of approximately U.S.$15,000, which is returned to the candidate upon reaching a minimum number of votes. In return for its initial investment Amateur Revolt was able to stage sound demonstrations in the form of punk and rap concerts in front of Kōenji station.

The strategic transformation of the train station from simply a backdrop of official campaigns into a stage of political-cultural demonstration is an example of politics as defined by Rancière: “What I consider to be the real emergence of free speech occurs precisely in places that were not supposed to be places for free speech. It always happens in the form of transgression. Politics means precisely this, that you speak at a time and in a place you’re not expected to speak.”³⁰ The staging and filming of a sound demonstration, of dancing and singing rather than speaking in front of the station transgressed the norms of official politics. The footage of these demonstrations exposes who gets to speak and who doesn’t, where one is allowed and not allowed to speak, and who is allowed to speak for others and who is not. Amateur Revolt reveals the inconsistent regulation of everyday space that disadvantages certain segments of the population and challenges the system of artistic and political representation that maintains this system of regulation in place.

Whereas government officials remain nostalgic for the salaryman, Amateur Revolt and young labor activists do not want to return to the defunct “enterprise society” model of sacrificing life for work. Given the shifting parameters of global capitalism, such a return is impossible. Instead, they are proposing new values and lifestyles not formulated on corporate profit, the exploitation of workers, and the equation of wages to happiness. While pointing out the inconsistencies between neoliberal rhetoric and policies that benefit corporations at the expense of the dispossessed, they are attempting to change both the material conditions and the discourses and systems of representation that regulate both public space and the economy. Contesting narratives of neoliberalism that have long blamed the freeter for the economic woes of Japan, these new forms of participatory collectivity are using cinema as a tool of political-cultural expression to redefine what constitutes life, labor, and representation in contemporary Japan.

Notes

1 Pierre Bourdieu, 1998.

2 Atsushi Kusano, 1999, p. 77.

3 Nozomu Shibuya’s trenchant critique of neoliberalism’s ability to mobilize affective labor especially of the family is one of the first and best sustained studies of neoliberalism in Japan; see Shibuya, 2003.

4 Yoshitaka Mōri, 2005, pp. 121–122.

5 Mōri, 2009, pp. 232–240.

6 See Mark Driscoll’s incisive and entertaining analysis of Tsutomu Miyazaki as part of a larger phenomenon of moral coding of freeter culture; Driscoll, 2007, p. 171.

7 The strong governmental control of the economy in Japan, including the intimate arrangement between corporations, banks, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, is often viewed as antithetical to the neoliberal rhetoric of free markets, but rather than view Japan as the exception to the ideology of neoliberalism, David Harvey reminds us that one can examine the local workings of neoliberal policies in Japan as part of the globally intertwined phenomenon, an amalgamation of often contradictory and partial measures that include “the introduction of greater flexibility into labor markets here, a deregulation of financial operations and embrace of monetarism there, a move towards privatization of state-owned sectors somewhere else” (Harvey 2005, p. 87).

8 Koizumi’s pro-American neoliberal rhetoric in the new millennium ironically covered up the massive and early role of the Japanese government in deregulating fiscal policies, practices that would later be emulated by the U.S. In addition to allowing corporations to rationalize the labor force, since the 1970s the Japanese government has deregulated its domestic capital market, allowing large Japanese corporations to raise money through issuing new forms of stocks and bonds, a practice that served as a model for U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. See Driscoll, 2007, pp. 167–168.

9 Driscoll, 2007, p. 167; R. Taggart Murphy, 2009, p. 6; Tomiko Yoda, 2000, p. 631.

10 For a discussion of how currency revaluations have been used to shift U.S. debt to other economies and the increasingly intertwined global economy, see David McNally, 2009, pp. 35–83. In order to keep demand for Japanese products going and to the keep the global capitalist system afloat, Japan was also forced to extend credit to the U.S. Japan underwrote the explosion of the deficit under George W. Bush by covering 77 percent of the U.S. budget deficit during the fiscal year 2004. See Murphy, 2009, p. 8.

11 Yoda, 2000, p. 632.

12 Robert Brenner quoted in Murphy, 2009, p. 6.

13 Norma Field has documented the unlikely revival of the novel’s popularity in her appropriately titled essay, “Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji’s Cannery Ship.”

14 Karin Amamiya, 2007.

15 The currency of the term precariat is reflected in the title of Amamiya’s most recent book, The Depression of the Precariat (2009), which sports a cover illustration of a troubled youngster in front of a foreboding silhouette of a crab cannery ship.

16 Amamiya was the protagonist of Tsuchiya’s New God (1999), a film that documents her turn from rightwing punk rocker to leftwing sympathizer and was his main collaborator on Peep “TV” Show (2003). In contrast to the mainstream media and film industries, Tsuchiya’s films work with and take youth subcultures seriously. For an excellent review of the latter film’s lack of moralism vis-à-vis youth culture, see Anne McKnight, 2010. Tsuchiya is also the producer of Hiroki Iwabuchi’s Sōnan furītā/A Permanent Part-Timer in Distress (2007), a film diary of the Iwabuchi’s time working as a contract laborer on a factory assembly line. A Permanent Part-Timer in Distress epitomizes the DIY aesthetic of recent films about labor and collectives that have multiplied with the increasing availability and affordability of digital recording and editing technology.

17 Until this time the membership of the Japanese Communist Party hovered consistently at around four hundred thousand members.

18 The dialectical structure of Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) embodied by the Odessa Steps sequence mirrors how class consciousness is dialectically created in the film.

19 Mark Downing Roberts, 2010.

20 Don Brown, 2009.

21 Martin Fackler, 2009.

22 Fackler, 2009.

23 A manual published by the union presents various strategies for living but also includes a how-to guide for organizing political demonstrations. See Naoko Shimizu and Ryōta Sono, 2009.

24 Hajime Matsumoto, 2006, p. 160.

25 See Hajime Matsumoto’s (2008) interviews with a spectrum of people who rejected corporate life in order to set up their own spaces that range from the artistic-cultural to the political.

26 Sharon Hayashi and Anne McKnight, 2005, pp. 87–113.

27 Mōri, 2009, pp. 203–204.

28 Jacques Rancière, 2008, p. 12.

29 Whereas Marx’s analysis warned of the dangers of the desire to be represented that led to Bonaparte’s rise, Spivak signals the dangers of French intellectuals who confuse the two notions of representation and end up inadvertently speaking for the masses they depict. Gayatri Spivak, 1988, p. 275.

30 Rancière, 2006.

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