Notes from the Japanese Archipelago
SABU KOHSO
In recent years, we have had reasons to be inspired by the increasing synchronicity and resonance of struggles and uprisings across the planet. At their height, it seems that they recognize and enhance each other, ultimately assuming a life of their own. As history consistently teaches us, there is rarely a happy ending for regime change in any single country; however, on the global scale, there is a sense of irreversibility to the revolutionary impetus. People are rising up more frequently, widely, and intensely; both the simultaneity and reverberations of uprisings are growing more dense and extensive.
The lives of planetary commoners are currently threatened on three key fronts of contemporary governance: debt (economic), violence (sociopolitical), and pollution (environmental). Collectively, we are reaching the limits of tolerance and staging confrontations with the global network of power—whose invisible nexus is gradually revealed by the struggle itself. One might say that the eros effect, as conceived by George Katsiaficas, is now in motion.
According to Katsiaficas, the eros effect is both the name of a phenomenon and a means of perceiving it. In the following pages, I use the eros effect as an “analytical tool”1 for considering three phases of Japan’s postwar struggles, from the uprisings of the 1960s (Japan’s ’68) to the anti-globalization movement at the turn of the century to our current post-Fukushima reality. Throughout, I highlight (1) the discrepancy between organizing and spontaneity, (2) the historical emergence of globally connected struggles and uprisings, and (3) the autonomy of body and life as strongholds of planetary revolution. In these instances—all of which are characterized more by difficulty than by glory—eros works in a twofold manner: As unprecedented crises become the main battleground, they also unleash an as-yet-unknown potency, which is discovered through the dynamics of struggle itself.
Katsiaficas developed his conceptualization of the eros effect from his association with Herbert Marcuse, and especially from the latter’s Eros and Civilization.2 Here, I would like to draw upon another philosophical lineage: that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I believe this additional frame of reference can help to clarify the status of the eros effect, especially in an age when life, confronted by all-out war on multiple fronts, must be interpreted extensively in its multiple dimensions. In his response during an interview, Katsiaficas confirms the importance of this lineage in terms of its “focus on micro-dynamic[s]” that “came out of the New Left’s desire to change everyday life.” At the same time, however, he also confirmed his commitment to dialectics, arguing that
it enables us to see that what currently exists isn’t everything. … Looking at historical processes and locating the negation of everything that came before is the essence of dialectics. If we lose sight of this dynamic process, if we just focus on what’s immediately tangible, then we are left with a theory that basically says, “what you see is what you get.” It makes revolutionary social transformation very difficult to imagine.3
These philosophies belong respectively to the different and even conflicting ontologies of dialectics and immanence, but they share the strategy of attempting to reconcile Marx and Freud. Ultimately, each tradition attempts to grasp human liberation beyond “politics” in its narrow conventional sense, and it is this touching point that I wish to highlight throughout this chapter.
In anticipation of 1968, Eros and Civilization set the tone for contemporary uprisings, which are characterized by the conflict of the life-principle against both alienated labor and the superego, both of which underwrite family, society, and civilization itself. It is important to note that the Marcuse-Katsiaficas lineage places primary importance on the transindividual or collective dimensions of instinct, emotion, and unconscious as potentially revolutionary forces.
In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was written shortly after the experience of ’68 and targeted the Freudian tendency to confine the libido within the family triangle (Mother, Father, and me).4 According to Deleuze and Guattari, this Freudian tendency helps to reproduce capitalist social relations it could otherwise have contributed to unsettling. Deleuze and Guattari sought to counter this by affirming the creative and subversive power of desire. By following this insight, I aim to consider eros from the microscopic view of the “desiring-machine” to detect phases within which affect (or the power of body/mind) produces a spectrum of collective emotions and actions of varying intensities. To be clear, neither eros nor desire is free from capture. Both can succumb to the morality and reterritorialization5 of capitalism and nationalism; indeed, they can even be made into their weapon.6
Katsiaficas explains the dynamic of mutually enhancing, life-affirming assemblages of uprisings in the following way:
It’s not simply a chain reaction, not just that A causes B which causes C. Events erupt simultaneously at multiple points and mutually amplify each other. They produce feedback loops with multiple iterations. To put it in terms of a mathematical analysis, we could say that diffusion and the circulation of struggles describe the process of movement development geometrically, while the eros effect describes these same developments in terms of calculus.7
In what follows, I would like to follow two coexisting and overlapping paths that I believe correspond to “geometry” and “calculus.” On one hand, my objective is to be a cartographer who maps struggles and uprisings as they develop and spread spatially and temporally. On the other hand, my aim is to be a weather forecaster who tries to anticipate how the atmosphere of struggle might create unexpected turbulences across multiple territories simultaneously. Of necessity, such “climatology” pays attention to planetary conditions, including climate and topography; human traffic such as migration, transportation, and communication; movement of capital; production of infrastructure, institutions, and machines; and creation of ideals. The objective of such attentiveness is to grasp the germination of revolutionary assemblages.
Let me recount a story of defeat and revelation. I was part of the group No G8! Action that organized a series of anti-G8 projects across Japan. These protests were to coincide with the main meetings scheduled to take place from July 7 to 9, 2008, at Lake Toya, Hokkaido. These meetings were to be preceded by a number of preparatory meetings of ministers that began earlier in different cities. The entire event became a battle between the state of Japan and “us” over space. For its part, the state was determined to control the national territory to protect the global powers that had assembled to impose an uneven flow of capital to the detriment of local subsistence. Our objective, meanwhile, was to create a global flow of activists and movements that would make the Japanese archipelago part of the planetary circulation of anticapitalist struggles.
Japanese activists were relative latecomers to the global justice movement; the majority did not have much experience or knowledge of the antiauthoritarian organizing and direct action that had emerged along with the new cycle of struggle. Prior to this encounter, being radical meant being associated with the militarism of the New Left and its dark legacy of intra-sectarian violence. To create a new current beginning in 2007, some anticapitalists associated with the No G8! Action info tour traveled to Asia, Europe, and North America to recruit participants and learn from the global network of anticapitalist radicals. Meanwhile, back in Japan, others prepared facilities for visitors in various cities and created camps near Lake Toya in Hokkaido, the Summit site. As a result, a good number of foreign activists and intellectuals were able to travel to Japan, share their skills and knowledge, and participate in actions against the G8.
Despite these efforts, however, the result was a miserable defeat. We merely learned that we had been at least considered a serious threat by the state of Japan, indicated by the excessive police presence, which had been dispatched from all prefectures. In every action, the police outnumbered demonstrators. Stop-and-frisk operations targeted all “suspicious-looking” people (whether local or foreigner). Every key organizer was tailed by security personnel around the clock, and a number of foreigners were refused entry or given permission only for a limited stay. Others were interrogated for long hours. Some homeless people were taken to police stations solely for the sake of keeping the city neat.
In contrast, a spontaneous riot that took place before all the planned protests managed to totally overwhelm the security forces. On June 13, 2008, the very day the finance ministers’ meeting took place in Osaka as part of the Summit, a riot erupted in Kamagasaki, an inner-city neighborhood of day laborers in Osaka. The riot erupted because a worker had been beaten by police in the precinct. Although the local union made an official claim opposing the arrest and abuse,8 they were ignored by the police. This triggered the uprising, which continued for five days.9
On the main street, the workers and the riot squad confronted each other in a repeated skirmish of offense and defense. To prevent the disturbance from spreading, the police immediately blockaded the neighborhood. On the second day, they introduced water cannons to suppress the crowd. Fending off the attack, the crowd launched counteroffensives for as long as possible. After several workers (including a union leader) were arrested, the insurgency wound down. Kamagasaki returned to the everyday realities of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness. Reporting almost nothing about the uprising, the mass media instead praised the ongoing “success” of the G8.
Since the 1990s, the labor market for day laborers in Japan has continued to shrink. As a result, Kamagasaki has become a city characterized by unemployment and homelessness. Meanwhile, those workers who managed to secure employment faced increasing insecurity as a result of neoliberal reforms. This was the context in which the riot took place. Many young precarious workers came to join the battle of their older comrades. According to one local activist, the riot meant that local workers had “rediscovered a place to express their own fury in Kamagasaki, the sanctuary of riots, that inscribes the history of militant struggle. While the older workers and the younger precariats confronted the riot squad together, the method of expressing fury was bequeathed from one generation to another.”10 This was a new alliance, connecting different generations, cultures, and neighborhoods.
Although it was unplanned, the riot turned out to be the most powerful action in all the anti-G8 protests. The bitter lesson for movement organizers was that all our planned actions fatally lacked the intensity, mobility, and endurance of the spontaneous rebellion. Meanwhile, across the Japan Sea, a huge mobilization of Candlelight Demos was taking place in Korea.11 Tens of thousands of people took over public squares in Seoul, protesting the Korean government’s reversal of a ban of US beef imports. In contrast to these two uprisings, our planned anti-summit actions failed to develop strong reverberations. Confronted by police capable of preventing fissures in social space from resonating with one another, the state ensured that our actions did not become an event.
The discrepancy between the success of our planned actions and the spontaneous riots can be understood by considering various dichotomies, including: construction and becoming, reason and emotion, and petit bourgeois and proletariat as well as mass and crowd. In the end, however, each of these led to the micro difference between the “existential territories” and “corporeal flows” of the day laborers themselves.
In major industrial cities in postwar Japan, there are inner-city areas populated by day laborers called yoseba, which translates roughly as “recruitment places.” These include Sanya in Tokyo, Kotobuki-cho in Yokohama, Sasajima in Nagoya, and Kamagasaki in Osaka. Historically, a red-light district can always be found nearby. Most of the residents work at day jobs in construction, docks, road repairing, heavy industries, and nuclear power plants. They represent the most informal and lowest-paid working force. Often, they are without a permanent address, social security, and health insurance. Many are not registered to vote. They make up Marx’s so-called “relative surplus population” who built the infrastructure for Japan’s “postwar democracy” regime. Ethnically, their numbers include not only Japanese but also resident Koreans and other minorities. In the red-light district, there are women from throughout the Asian continent. All told, they embody the trans-Asiatic underclass, living in Japan but excluded from civil society.
In yoseba, labor brokers are mostly yakuza gangsters who gouge the slim earnings of day workers and sex workers alike. Hand in hand with local police, they violently oppress workers’ cries for better working and living conditions. This is the forefront of the class struggle—the space where periodic uprisings have taken place, as many as twenty-four times in the postwar period, mainly at Sanya and Kamagasaki. As the thinker and organizer of yoseba, Funamoto Shuji has emphasized that these “fluid underclass workers” have existential power precisely in their precarious status; their mobility, invisibility, solidarity, and militant networks stretch across the Japanese archipelago and beyond.12 These are the generative conditions that allow for the emergence of the eros effect. According to Funamoto:
Yoseba such as Kamagasaki and Sanya exist in various forms in all cities across Japan, from the Northern tip of Hokkaido to the Southern islands of Okinawa. … Now in Hokkaido: the monopoly capital is expropriating the land for constructing the Eastern Industrial Complex around Tomakomai, and more and more peasants are turned into under-class laborers; at Usu in the Date region, Ainu fishermen are rising up against the construction of a thermal power plant for sending electricity to the Complex. Now in Okinawa: with the unspoken slogan “men are for low wage labor commodity, women are for sexual commodity,” the Japanese Imperialism is expropriating land for constructing a CTS (Central Terminal Station including oil storage tanks and refineries) and the Oceanic Exposition; these projects are unequivocally turning the peasants into underclass laborers. In fact more and more peasants in Okinawa who can no longer survive by producing sugarcane are forced to migrate to Japan for subsistence. Now in South Korea: due to the importation of Japanese capital after the Treaty on the Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, the economy of agricultural communities is ruined and more and more people are forced to stow away by boat to come to Japan.13
As Funamoto makes clear, these people are both excluded from Japanese civil society and free from its confines; they belong to a planetary territoriality divergent from that of the Japanese nation-state. Living under conditions of extreme crises, they embody both the fragility and the power of the life-principles. In Japan and East Asia, they are the primary attractor and conveyor of eros effect turbulence.
Here, it is important to recall that there were invisible interventions that tacitly empowered this fluid underclass. From a microscopic view, there isn’t a clean-cut division between organizing and spontaneity—both are different phases in the exchange of affect in everyday life, which is the erotic drive (the life-principle). The emergent uprisings of the stormy 1960s were followed by forms of submerged organizing, where radical activism focused more on transforming one’s own form of life and social relations. Some revolutionaries privately moved to yoseba, where they began to organize radical labor movements, including the Kamagasaki Joint Struggle Committee (Kama-kyo-to) established in 1972 and Sanya Dispute Group (Sanya Sogidan) in 1983.14 Their struggles targeted issues related to yoseba, but they also nurtured associations with the struggles of other minorities (resident Koreans, Okinawans, Ainus, and Burakumin)15 as well as militant struggles against Japanese expansionism.16 This has been one of the few social milieus that has continued engendering insurgency post-’68.
There are two ways to recognize Japan’s topographical position vis-à-vis the Asian continent: in one version, it is an insularity while, in the other, it is an archipelago. The territory of the nation-state is conceptually separated by the sea. If we pay closer attention, however, at least three sailable routes become visible. The northern tip of Hokkaido is not far from the Russian island of Sakhalin. Likewise, northern Kyushu is proximate to the southern part of the Korean Peninsula via two islands—Tsushima (Japan) and Jeju (Korea)—while the southern end of Kyushu follows the line of the Ryukyu Islands upward toward Taiwan.
This land-sea configuration is the remnant of the Pliocene epoch, when the Sea of Japan was a mammoth puddle. Diastrophism was thus the primary condition setting the stage for interactions among peoples in the region. Along with geotectonics, another is the climate, with the major wind currents in Asia blowing from the plateaus of Siberia and Mongolia to the Japanese archipelago and facilitating sailing from time immemorial. (It is these very currents that are now depositing radioactive nuclides from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean and pushing them toward the Americas.)
The historian Amino Yoshihiko has stressed the role the archipelago played as a bridge connecting north and south Asia. From this vantage, we can envision the history of the region as a history of peoples’ migrations and exchanges, with Oceanic peoples—including pirates—creating connectivity by fishing, trading, and seizing wealth that was moving in and out of the archipelago. Fighting to maintain autonomy in the face of the dynasties that established the kingdom of Yamato and then feudal Japan, they created a flowing territoriality that could not easily be captured by sovereign power inland. Since then, their activities and sailing routes have been buried in the unconscious of history,17 though the struggles of the trans-Asiatic underclass continually show signs of revitalizing the flowing territoriality.
Japanese history is the process through which the archipelago was condensed into an insular territory. Through this process, it has become a feudal system, a modern nation-state, an empire, and a nation-state again. However, the moment in which we now find ourselves is one of possible decomposition. Uprisings have arisen in interaction with this process; they carry with them the erotic relationality of the archipelagic complexity.
This archipelagic Japan echoes Édouard Glissant’s “geophilosophical” concept of “Creolization” in which the totality of the world is marked by an irreducible heterogeneity. With this conceptual emphasis derived from his reading of Caribbean history, Glissant introduces a seed of hope by which geographical complexity and relationality might intermingle with the tragic memories of the slave trade and massacres of the indigenous to produce an alternative to all the stratified dimensions of colonial history.18
In the case of Japan, the archipelagic relation is in stark distinction to the dominant relation through which the power of despots created the centralized and hierarchized “mega-machine” apparatus, which inducted mass corporeality into its theocratic system.19 In opposition to this form, innumerable deterritorialized peoples withdrew their bodies and minds from the dominant land/architecture apparatus and traced a line of flight toward the unknown realm of “absolute deterritorialization.”20
These conceptualizations suggest that, even when it is topographically suppressed, archipelagic relationality continues to find expression in people’s bodies and minds as collective memory. Here, it generates new relations in confrontation with rising crises. This could entail the creation of our new relationship with the earth. We don’t really know what kinds of social relations we can create by discovering new territories and flows; this is still open.
Japanese modernity began with the Meiji Restoration in 1867, which ousted the Tokugawa Shogunite and established an absolute monarchy with the aggressive modernization policy called “rich nation, strong troops (fu-koku, kyo-hei).” Forces became concentrated around the worship of the emperor as living god; alien Buddhism was rejected in favor of native Shinto; the ideology of De-Asianization spread21 as the new emperor incorporated aspects of Western civilization to distinguish Japan from other Asian nations, which had been colonized by the West. The policy also produced an extremely introverted mentality, wherein both the West and Asia became objects of either worship or disdain. In this way, Japan became a nation marked by physical and conceptual insularity, a condition that continues to ground the master narrative of today’s status quo.
Among the samurai in the Tokugawa period (1600–1867), individual life existed only as sacrifice for the ever-lasting life of clans; in modernity, this life came to be captured by the eternity of the nation. Succeeding the heritage of the fanatical Samurai code such as honorary suicide (seppuku), modern nationalism reinvented a culture of sacrificial death—an erotization of the dying body—that persisted through the sanctification of suicide corps during the wars and continues to find expression through the “Eat and Support Fukushima” campaign today.22 It is this thanatos-inflected nationalism that has been the main obstacle preventing the people from nurturing autonomy and cultivating their own life-principles through self-determined, mass political actions similar to those that took place during the Paris Commune and the Gwangju Uprising.23
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Japan began to transform itself from an insular country to an empire, stretching its military-industrial apparatus into the continent. It joined the circle of Euro-American predators dividing and devouring the flesh of Qing China. Through its victories in the Sino-Japan War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japan War (1904–1905), as well as through the annexation of Korea (1910), Japan accelerated its imperialist expansion.
The first significant uprisings in twentieth-century Asia followed the 1917 Revolution in Russia. These included the 1918 Rice Riot in Japan, the 1919 March 1st movement in Korea, and the May 4th movement in China. When the Russian Revolution broke out, the Japanese government intended to intervene militarily to take advantage of the instability. In expectation of the war, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries cornered the rice market, causing the price to rise by 200 percent. Angered by the price hike, approximately one million people joined the riot across the country. The military was mobilized to put it down. The biggest series of insurrections in Japanese modern history lasted fifty days. The following year, 1919, the March 1st movement took place in Korea. Participants demanded self-determination and an end to Japan’s domination. Later that year, the May 4th movement broke out in China as youth and intellectuals led boycotts of Japanese products. The significance of this chain of events is that it suggests that people’s recognition that the Japanese presence constituted “imperialism” was shared transnationally. The Japanese government thus confronted resistance across East Asia. Affected by the Rice Riot, the Japanese democratization movement (the so-called Taisho Democracy) had been growing since 1918. Anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist struggles, which centered on wars, political oppressions, and the labor disputes of coal miners and the urban proletariat, began to spread.
In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake hit a large area including the Tokyo metropolis. This caused a hundred thousand deaths and innumerable missing persons. In the wake of the disaster, vigilantes, military officers, and police forces captured and massacred many resident ethnic Koreans and Chinese, along with socialists, labor activists, and anarchists. The disaster initiated the wholehearted urbanization of Tokyo, which in turn coincided with the state’s move toward emperor fascism and Asian invasion. In 1925, the Maintenance of Public Order Act was passed to suppress all opposition. The economy was hit by the tremendous sum of bad credit created by the earthquake, and then by the global depression of 1929. In 1930, Japan rushed headlong into total war with China. The ultimate goal was expressed through the state’s “Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” project (of 1940), whose objective was “to liberate East and South East Asia from the colonial domination of the Western Countries and construct a new world order under Japan’s leadership.”24 Ultimately, the entirety of Asia and the Pacific were to be divided into an economic bloc (Japan, the Republic of China, and Japan’s puppet state, Manchukuo), a natural resource zone (South East Asia), and a national defense zone (the South Pacific).
In 1945, Japan’s unconditional surrender was realized by multiple forces: in the official history, Japan was defeated by the “Allied Forces” in a number of major military confrontations; however, it is important to note that Japan’s logistical life lines stretching across the Asian continent were consistently attacked and drained by the guerrilla campaigns of people’s armies in all fronts from north to south. From the standpoint of the people’s armies, defeating Japan was part of their revolution that had continued since the late 1910s. But the dominant power in the Pacific was now the United States, which introduced a new, mobile, and flexible geopolitics. It signaled the advent of the network empire connected by island territories (i.e., as opposed to the more conventional empire based on permanent occupation of a vast continental territory). This was made possible through superior land, marine, and air force mobility, as well as by the proliferation of nuclear warheads.25 With the contemporaneous emergence of the modern information network, this period signaled the beginning of the age of what some have called the cybernetic mega-machine.26
What is considered by some to be the first global revolution took place in response to the peak of the world’s totalization. The reverberating series of uprisings called ’68 realized unprecedented synchronicity. It involved not only concentrated exchanges among peoples from varied locations and social milieus, but also involved shared experiences of insurrection. To confront one network of global domination, the Japanese masses decomposed into an unnamable crowd capable of becoming almost anyone.
In terms of causality, the eros effect in Japan’s ’68 emerged for several reasons, which some might associate with the attributes of postmodernity (e.g., global connectivity of cities and the information network, the cultural logic of heterogeneity, the society of spectacle, a relative weakening of patriarchal hierarchy). Certainly, the advent of mass-media society had a lot to do with it. However, the attractor for the turbulence was primarily the friction and unevenness of these developments vis-à-vis the planetary body. The hot wind of struggle had long blown from the countryside or the ghetto; however, beginning from the mid-1950s, it gradually became visible in the metropolis, too.
In 1954, less than ten years after the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear attacks, a Japanese tuna fishing boat (the Lucky Dragon Five) with twenty-three crew members was affected by nuclear fallout from the US thermonuclear device test at Bikini Atoll. At the height of the Cold War, the strategy of nuclear deterrence had begun to reach an intolerable level for the people of Japan. This triggered a large mobilization against nuclear weapons and US military hegemony. It would be Japan’s first nationwide citizens’ movement led by women.
During this time, the common enemy faced by the people of East Asia came to be recognized as US imperialism and all the region’s proxy governments. The first Asia-African Conference at Bandung in 1955 did much to advance this understanding. The revolutionary winds from China, the Korean Peninsula, and Indo-China were circulating a guerrilla war against the US regular army equipped with superior weapons and transferring the eros effect to students, labor, and other oppositional movements in Japan. Internally, another current was streaming from northern Kyushu, where the Miike miners had been on strike against restructuring and layoffs during the 1950s.27
In March/April 1960, there was a wave of uprisings across Korea initiated by high school and university students against the vice-presidential election, which had been manipulated by the pro-US ruling power. That June, the first mass insurgency in postwar Japan took place against the US/Japan Security Treaty (aka, Ampo) destined to align the country with US security interests for the following decade. Students, workers, and citizens broke into the National Diet Building, the very symbol of Japan’s postwar constitution, and stayed there until the treaty automatically went into effect on June 19th.28 Although the Korean and Japanese uprisings didn’t have an ostensible connection, their reverberating coimplication could be seen through people’s affinity and their identification of US imperialism as a common enemy. It is also important to note that there were approximately 650,000 resident Koreans in Japan at that time due to Japan’s coercive pre-WWII labor migration policies and the flood of exiles from the Korean War.
The leading force of the anti-Ampo uprising was Zen-gaku-ren (the National Federation of Student Self-Government Associations), which was under the hegemony of a New Left sect called The Communist League (Bund). There are three developments that facilitated Japan’s ’68: the development of the New Left, the nature of the student association, and the new international territorial connections between urban and rural struggles.
The Japan Communist Party (JCP) abandoned the armed revolution and began to shift toward parliamentarism at the sixth national conference in 1955. The Hungary Revolution in 1956 influenced anti-Stalinist revolutionary movements to grow across the world. In Japan, the Trotskyist League was organized in 1957. In 1958, Bund was established by a group of student members of the JCP who felt the need to create a new radical movement. Thereafter, Japan’s New Left began to radicalize and move toward mass mobilization as it passed through innumerable divergences and intra-sectarian conflicts that pitted political ideologies, organizational forms, and intensities of militancy against one another. These included Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Left Communism, anarchism, and nonsectarian radicalism.
In itself, Zen-gaku-ren was not really a political organization. It was a national assembly of the student associations of different universities, which played the role of receptacle for different groups to construct their bases, both financially (the budget for students’ activities) and spatially (university campuses). Nevertheless, it was gradually divided and became fixed by the domination of a few main groups. Then, in 1968, another form of students’ network was established: Zen-kyo-to (All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee), which consciously created more flexible, inclusive, radical, and anarchic connections between university and high school struggles across the nation. Around 1968 and 1969, this new form culminated in a wave of occupations that swept from Hokkaido to Kyushu.
Outside educational institutions, there were four indispensable milieus of convergence: mass culture, urban space, local struggles, and internationalism. By the mid-1960s, American civil rights, Black liberation, and anti–Vietnam War student movements had begun to send signals and energy, which mixed with jazz, blues, rock, and the hippie lifestyle. For young people, these forms dominated the everyday landscape of big cities.
Shinjyuku is one of the busiest commercial centers in Tokyo. Redeveloped as a black market after WWII, it consists of a chaotic and heterotopic mishmash: shopping areas, working-class entertainment, the sex industry, gay and transvestite areas, tiny bars, and progressive culture. This space contributed significantly to the spectacular aspect of Japan’s ’68. It offered a common space for both radical street fights and progressive street music and performance. It was an asylum for revolutionaries.29
Local struggles provided a meeting place for urban radicals and rural people to confront their common enemy. They created new maps of interconnection between different lives and struggles. Most notably, the farmers in Sanrizuka, Chiba Prefecture, rose up and resisted the construction of a new international airport—Narita—between 1966 and 1978. Many individuals and groups joined, sharing everyday life and struggle with the farmers.
Ever since the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, the Okinawan people had been fighting the presence of US military bases. In 1970, a riot erupted in Koza City in response to a car accident caused by a US soldier. The crowd attacked and burned military vehicles and facilities. In 1972, Okinawa was “reverted” to Japan; however, the US bases remained. Its geopolitical status has continued to raise issues concerning the territorial claims of the Japanese state as well as the military strategy of the US network empire. As a result, the island territory has been an important point of convergence for activists and movements across East Asia and the world; it is likely to become even more so in the future.
Internationalism in the period leading up to Japan’s ’68 developed around the anti–Vietnam War movement and as a result of solidarity with Third World revolutions. A popular movement called Be-hei-ren (Citizens’ Alliance for Peace in Vietnam) succeeded in mobilizing the general public for antiwar actions and served as a gateway for young activists to become involved in revolutionary movements. It also instigated an underground operation called JATEC (Japan Technical Committee to Aid Anti-War GIs), which helped US military deserters. Meanwhile, a number of small groups had begun to establish clandestine connections with revolutions taking place around the world. The Japan Red Army, perhaps most famous of the groups, dramatically appeared on the anti-imperialist guerrilla scene to express solidarity with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) during the 1970s.30
The student movement was largely inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China; however, it did not identify with the oppressive regime manipulated by the Gang of Four. Instead, it gravitated toward a new form of everyday revolution in the city. Around that time, one of the main problems of student activism concerned the social status and class identity of students, who were beginning to question the role of education in reproducing class divisions. The slogan “Decomposing Universities” expressed one of the main objectives of the Zen-kyo-to occupations. Educational institutions were to become revolutionary bases. The occupation blocked classes and examinations and encouraged self-motivated discussions, seminars, and cultural activities.
During the later phase of the student movement when university struggles and street protests had fallen into decline following the last large coordinated action against the Ampo Treaty of June 1970, “Decomposing Universities” metamorphosed into “Decomposing the Self.” Practically speaking, this involved destruction of one’s status as a student to become part of the lower stratum of society—the fluid underclass of workers, peasants, and indigenous. Such decomposition was considered a revolutionary education for radicals, who either moved to yoseba to live and work or to the country where they became farmers. In those spaces, they destroyed their privileged social status and built communes as revolutionary bases. This practice of submersion sparked the future prairie fire.
Due to the intensity of intra-sectarian violence during the following decades (causing more than a hundred deaths and several thousand serious injuries), the legacy of Japan’s ‘68 is often cast as a story about the perils of authoritarian vanguardism, dogmatism, hierarchical structure, and gender discrimination. A “thanatos effect” emerged, alienating commoners and youth from the legacy of mass insurgencies and the idea of taking initiative to change the world.31 As a result, activists of subsequent generations came to focus more on coalition building and on issues such as minorities, the environment, and building communities. The molecular revolution in this sense was as important in Japan as it was in the broader global context. In Japan, however, the negative memory resulted in a culture of fear and legalism that suppressed the desire for militancy and creativity.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster has inaugurated an age of irreversible planetary radiation. Radioactive nuclides have been set free to travel across the planet. Inscribed as it will be in the genetic mutation of all life forms, the culpability of the Tokyo Power Electric Company and the Japanese government will never be erased. The half-lives of some nuclides last an astronomical numbers of years;32 their activities are on the nano level and invisible; the way they travel and accumulate is a constantly transforming complexity, far removed from rigid patterns, since they travel with not only atmospheric movements (wind and water currents) but also circulation (transportations and traffic), for as long as their half-lives last.33 The ruling power seeks to nullify the event and subsume all post-Fukushima problems within the normal operations of the capitalist-democratic nation-state. Meanwhile, as the radiation spreads, and in confrontation with government rule, commoners are struggling to live the event and take initiative in managing their own bodies and minds.
The postdisaster situation has revealed the modus operandi of government and the mass media: abandon the people for the sake of business as usual and the maintenance of social conformity. The ruling power prioritizes the reconstruction of Fukushima to save the Tokyo Metropolis in the interest of the global economy. Circulating the image that Fukushima is controllable, the present Abe administration pushes rearmament (the right of collective defense), information control (the protection of national security law), and new development (the Tokyo Olympics 2020).34 The true lifeline for the status quo is nevertheless in the demography of sustaining laboring and consuming capacity within the mass corporeality facing biological decline: radiation illnesses as well as depopulation. The future Japan will be a clinical society managed by pharmaceutical/energy/weaponry industries and in which people’s health, illness, and death are programmed.
In the meantime, nationalism is enjoying a dramatic return, as made evident by the collective death drive underlying the “Eat and Support Fukushima” campaign. In brief, it is an attempt to solve the crises of local industries nationally by encouraging the consumption of irradiated food products from the region, the logic of which is this: Accept internal radiation and become a national hero! Here, the mass media plays a major role: Although it facilitated the eros effect during the uprisings of the 1960s, it has also produced a society of concentrated fashion—of behavior, way of life, cultural taste, and political idea—that congeals desires and orients them in a unidirectional and paranoiac fashion toward the exclusion of all anomalies.
Today, the main battlegrounds of anticapitalist, anti-statist struggles are the bodies and minds of the people as well as their erotic drive. Will this drive be pushed toward the collective life/death of the nation or toward a totally different territory?
A series of large mobilizations began after the nuclear disaster and resonated across the archipelago. Those mobilizations addressed issues including nukes, rearmament, information control, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and US bases. The level of mobilization is now at its highest point since the 1960s uprisings, thus making it clear that the people are no longer in synch with Japan’s postwar regime. Despite these developments, however, the activists in and around the former NO G8! Action are experiencing big divergences in their orientations to the situation. Internal debates are roughly divided between “those who go North” and “those who go West,” as seen from the geographical position of the Tokyo metropolis. This split reflects the difficult moment of transition.
Those who go North consist of activists determined to go to Fukushima as volunteers to help restore living conditions for the people in the disaster area. There have been attempts by yoseba activists to organize nuclear workers being exposed to radiation in the reactors. Knowing they too are likely irradiated, they support the immediate victims and organize the oppressed workers in nuclear industries. In these practices, we can sense the mutual-aid society that could come into being through the experience of disaster.35 Notwithstanding their importance, however, these interventions—if not coordinated with the struggles of those who go West—are at risk of being appropriated by the state project of tying as many people as possible to the industrial reconstruction of contaminated land through an insular nationalism founded through a collective death drive.
For their part, those who go West are creating new ways of living (e.g., eating habits, social relations, and living environments) in opposition to radiation contamination and the forms of governance that make it a nationally shared condition. They stimulate grassroots efforts to sustain the safety of food and of everyday social reproduction. This new current is largely led by women (or, more generally, those who take care of everyday reproduction of the family), who have begun to investigate the state of contamination and research its effects. They passionately study nuclear and medical sciences in pursuit of managing their own health and life. Many civic centers have appeared at which radiation is monitored and information is exchanged. As such, they stand in radical opposition to the manipulation of information by the government and the mass media as well as the monopolization of knowledge by the specialists.
There are increasing numbers of voluntary evacuees36 who determined to give up living in the polluted northeastern and Kanto regions (including the Tokyo Metropolis) and to migrate to safer regions. In these areas, there are groups of people willing to accept and support the newcomers. In the new environment, some have turned to farming in the country or to hunting in the mountains (especially in northern Kyushu near Fukuoka). New communities of evacuees have appeared in Hokkaido in the north, as well as in Nagoya, Okayama, Fukuoka, and many other places in western and southern Japan. These new voluntary communities are engaged in multiple projects. Some have established new social centers while others organize weekly markets to sell and buy or barter their products and skills. They are also developing a new culture in which reproduction is shared. Houses, jobs, cooking and eating, child care, martial arts, and techniques in general are detached as much as possible from the capitalist and nationalist apparatuses stretching out from Tokyo. Some are also seeking to connect the new communities with the old communes established in the 1960s to learn from their successes and failures.
What is crucial in the current of those who go West is that, while it often involves tragic splits in families, among friends, and within workplaces, it expresses an impetus to decompose the old conformity to create a new, unknown sociality; it is developing new territorialities, and new flows of life and communication in and out of Japan. In my opinion, this current could connect varied struggles and help to stimulate the eros effect.
As an extension of the westward migration, an increasing number of young activists are visiting communes, social centers, and neighborhoods in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Indonesia. People associated with the group “Amateur Riot” are passionately coordinating tours from Japan and elsewhere.37 The group’s efforts mark a humble attempt to revitalize the archipelagic relation in East Asia.
In the new cartography, two points of convergence stand out: Kyushu and Okinawa. In Kyushu, the reactivation of the Sendai Nuclear Plant in the Kagoshima Prefecture has been strongly criticized in light of the spectacular volcanic eruptions that have recently occurred nearby.38 In terms of geographical position and social history, Kyushu is well positioned to become a basis for recreating archipelagic relations, autonomous (if only relatively) from the Tokyo Metropolis and the nation of Japan. In the North, it closely faces the Korean Peninsula; in the South, it is connected with South Asia by the line of Ryukyu Islands. It has more Asiatic population than Eastern Japan. It is also known, since the Edo period, for its history of separatism and rebellion against the central power.
The territory of the Okinawan archipelago stretches beautifully between Kyushu and Taiwan, as if connecting two national territories. The people of Okinawa, who had nurtured their own culture and kingdom, came to be abused and have their land expropriated by Japan (starting with the invasion of Satsuma in 1609) and the United States (after the end of WWII). Now, the consensus of the people—including the governor, Takeshi Onaga—stands in clear opposition to the US/Japanese joint project of relocating the US Marine Corps base in Futenma to the island of Henoko, where construction would destroy a cherished semi-tropical environment. The Okinawan people have a long history of struggle against US military bases, and a rich tradition of direct action at sea, in the mountains, and in the city. The impetus to leave the confines of Japanese and US governance is waiting for the reverberation of struggle among the people in the Japanese Archipelago.
It is clear that we can no longer return to a radiation-free natural environment; we all are exposed to radiation and will increasingly be so in the future, due not only to the irreparable Fukushima Daiichi but also to the persistence of nuclear states around the world that will never abandon nuclear power for energy or weaponry. Facing this dark reality, what is at stake for the life-principle is not purity but autonomy, the political self-determination of our bodies and minds.
Here, it is useful to consider the slogan of a sector of “those who go West,” called the Zero Becquerelists: “We don’t need a society that tells us to eat radiation.”39 In this slogan, one sees a refusal to be a good Japanese and participate in the postnuclear disaster conformism. It is a declaration of their intent to leave the nation-state called Japan. It is a refusal, furthermore, of the processes of abstraction and categorization that seek to naturalize radiation and other contaminants. Finally, it is a call for gaining autonomy in our relationship to life and death: to how we live and die, and how we create our bodies, our social relations, and our environment.
“Those who go West” thus seek to organize the affect (the passion for life and body) that erupted so intensely and broadly after the disaster. This includes: (1) sensitive views concerning everyday reproduction (e.g., food, living environment, and care), (2) affirmation of this ephemeral yet singular life, (3) recognition of one’s life as part of the community and the continuum of the life chain, and (4) creativity for sharing everyday life with others. Such a life is in synch with the preindividual life conceived by Deleuze,40 who imagined it to be in radical opposition to the eternalized life driven by self-interest, programed by capital, and absorbed into the nationalist life/death spectrum.
We can’t know if a reverberation worthy of the name “eros effect” will ever take place in Japan again in our lifetime. If it does, it is clear that the attractor and turbulence won’t come from “political ideologies” but from “ethical truths” shared widely and intensely in the postdisaster world.41 Fukushima is one of the most apocalyptic events that capitalist civilization has ever created. At the same time, it has shown us two ultimate potencies of eros at the end of the world: the autonomy of the life-principle as an end in itself, and the omnipresent territorial connections it could foster on the earth.
1. For reference to the eros effect as an analytical tool, see George Katsiaficas, “The Eros Effect,” 1989, personal website, http://www.eroseffect.com/articles/eroseffectpaper.PDF, 1. More recently, Katsiaficas has questioned this approach, wondering if it is “simply an analytical construction useful for … understanding revolutionary movements or is it also a movement tactic useful in transforming society.” See George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), xxi.
2. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). For their relationship, see George Katsiaficas, “Afterword, Marcuse as an Activist: Reminiscences of His Theory and Practice,” in The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 3, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2005), 192–203.
3. George Katsiaficas, interviewed by AK Thompson, “Remembering May ’68: An Interview with George Katsiaficas,” Upping the Anti 6 (April 2008): n.p., http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/06-remembering-may-68/.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984).
5. In brief, reterritorialization remakes territories (i.e., patterns, relationships, identities, habits, etc.). This is counterposed to deterritorialization, which unmakes territories. Together, territorialization-deterritorialization-reterritorialization constitutes a processual ontology. This should not be confused with dialectics, which is a more linear process. The ontology posed by Deleuze and Guattari is antifoundational and multidirectional. See select passages in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
6. For more on this, see Sabu Kohso, “Mutation of the Triad: Totalitarianism, Fascism, and Nationalism in Japan,” E-Flux Journal 56 (June 2014): n.p., http://www.e-flux.com/journal/mutation-of-the-triad-totalitarianism-fascism-and-nationalism-in-japan.
7. George Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” Radical Philosophy Review, 16, no. 2 (2013): 491–505 (498), doi:10.5840/radphilrev201316238.
8. The union is Kamagasaki Chiiki Godo Rodo Kumiai (Kamagasaki Region Amalgamated Labor Union).
9. The following description of the 2008 riot is based on a report in Japanese by Toshiyuki Morishita, which can be accessed at http://www.gyokokai.org/~gasparo/osakacity/kama_080613.htm.
10. This is a comment by a friend of mine, Takeshi Haraguchi.
11. This protest became known as the “Candlelight Demos” because of the thousands of protestors who were holding lit candles in their hands at night. See “2008 US Beef Protest in South Korea,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_US_beef_protest_in_South_Korea.
12. Funamoto Shuji, Don’t Die by the Roadside in Silence: Posthumous Writings by Funamoto Shuji (Damatte Notare-jinu-na-yo: Funamoto Shuji Iko-shu) (Tokyo: Renga Shobo Shinsha, 1985). See also, Manuel Yang, “Man on Fire: A Plea for ‘Funamoto Shuji Day,’ ” Counterpunch, July 9, 2014, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/09/man-on-fire-2/.
13. Funamoto, Don’t Die by the Roadside, 168–169.
14. Concerning the struggle in Sanya and other yoseba, see the texts concerning the film Yama: Attack to Attack! For film reference, see Sato Mitsuo and Yamaoka Kyoichi, Yama: Attack to Attack! (1986). For texts about the film, see the links at Bordersphere, http://www.bordersphere.com/events/yama2.htm. I should note, too, that the documentary film was independently produced by the local activists of Sanya, Mitsuo Sato and Kyoichi Yamaoka, both of whom were murdered by the local yakuza organization that controls labor recruitment, prostitution, and gambling.
15. Burakumin are a type of social outcast that have a long history in Japan. For background, see “Burakumin,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin.
16. The militant group called the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (Higashi Ajia Han-nichi Buso Sensen) attacked a number of targets that had driven Japan’s expansionism before and after WWII, including the emperor system, big enterprises, the police, and nationalist monuments. One of the bomb attacks targeted the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 1974 and killed eight people.
17. Amino Yoshihiko, The Oceanic and Archipelagic Medieval (Umi-to-Retto-no-Chusei) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2013).
18. For “geophilosophy,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), chap. 4. For “Creolization,” see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relations, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
19. Louis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (San Diego: Harcourt, 1967).
20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, chap. 12.
21. This is an idea that the author, educator, and entrepreneur Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) proposed for the national policy.
22. The campaign “Eat and Support Fukushima” (Tabete O-en-shiyo) was instigated by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and it continues today, involving a number of fast-food chains, supermarkets, restaurants, and consumers. It states: “We call for a wide corporation for the campaign, in order to support the reconstruction of the disaster stricken areas by actively consuming food products from the areas.” See the website of the ministry, http://www.maff.go.jp/j/shokusan/eat.
23. The Gwangju Uprising refers to a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, South Korea, from May 18 to 27, 1980. During the insurgency, Gwangju citizens took up arms when local students—who were demonstrating against the Chun Doo-hwan government—were fired upon and massacred by government troops. The uprising can be understood as both an attempt to create an autonomous urban commune and the most dramatic moment in the long struggle of South Koreans against the US-backed dictatorship. Katsiaficas gives much attention to the Gwangju Uprising in Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Vol. 1. See chap. 6, in particular.
24. The statement is taken from the manifesto of the Japanese government, quoted in a Wikipedia entry, https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/大東亜共栄圏.
25. For more on these points, see Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). Particularly helpful chapters include the following: Gabrielle Hecht, “Introduction,” 1–12; and Ruth Oldenziel, “Islands: The United States as a Network Empire,” 13–41.
26. Tiquun, “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” tiquun-jottit.com, http://cybernet.jottit.com.
27. The major strikes at Miike Mines in northern Kyushu took place in 1953 and 1959–1960. But the direct impact of the local opposition upon the New Left—by way of connecting the strikes in the countryside with the anti-US/Japan Security Treaty struggle in Tokyo—was conveyed via the “Circle Village Movement” (Circle Mura Undo), which was organized in 1958 by feminist poet Kazue Morisaki (1927–) and poet/political activist Gan Tanigawa (1923–1995) to connect various struggles of the workers and their communities across Kyushu by way of a DIY publication, Circle Village (Circle Mura).
28. The National Diet Building has since been the main target for many large mobilizations against the government, including the post-Fukushima demonstrations.
29. Hirai Gen, Love and Hate of Shinjyuku (Ai-to-nikushimi-no-Shinjyuku) (Tokyo: Chukuma Shobo, 2010).
30. See the following film: Masao Adachi and Kôji Wakamatsu, Red Army/PFLP Declaration of World War (Wakamatsu Production 1971).
31. It is probably more accurate to describe this “effect” in terms of the “psychic Thermidor.” For Marcuse, this is a psychological condition in which radical consciousness becomes beset by guilt and reverts to its previous state of social conformity. In brief, the concept helps explain why moments of radical activity suddenly disappear. See, for example, Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 90–92; and Katsiaficas, “Afterword, Marcuse as an Activist,” 192–203 (particularly, 200).
32. Among those radioactive nuclides that are often spoken of after Fukushima, there are Caesium-137 (30.17 years), Strontium-90 (28 years), and Plutonium-239 (24,100 years).
33. Maps by Yukio Hayakawa, a geologist, are said to be most trustworthy in terms of detailing the current state of radiation contamination of the Japanese archipelago. See, for instance, the following blog posts: http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2012/09/professor-yukio-hayakawas-radiation.html and http://kipuka.blog70.fc2.com/blog-entry-570.html.
34. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised to the world on September 23, 2013, that the Fukushima nuclear disaster would be resolved before the 2020 Olympics. Isabel Reynolds and Takashi Hirokawa, “Abe Says Fukushima Will Be Resolved before 2020 Olympics,” Bloomberg Business, September 4, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-04/japan-s-abe-says-fukushima-will-be-resolved-before-2020-olympics.
35. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
36. In the record of the Fukushima Prefecture alone, at least 207,000 people were still out of the prefecture by June 2015, according to the report of the Reconstruction Agency of the Japanese Government (see, for instance, http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/topics/main-cat2/sub-cat2-1/20150630_hinansha.pdf). However, since voluntary evacuees include those from the vast area of northeastern Japan (both Tohoku and Kanto regions) to Hokkaido in the further north and Western Japan, there has not been a fixed demographic record. It can be assumed, almost certainly, that the number is increasing slowly and steadily.
37. There is no website for the group in English, but there is a short documentary: Amateur Riot (Submedia 2011), http://www.submedia.tv/amateur-riot.
38. The Sendai Nuclear Power Plant has suspended operations since the Fukushima disaster, but the Kyushu Electric Power Company and the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency have been eager to resume operations. See, for instance, “Sendai Nuclear Power Plant,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendai_Nuclear_Power_Plant. Public opinion in Japan, however, is extremely wary of the plan, due to the accelerating volcanic activity nearby. Elaine Lies, “Volcano Erupts on Remote Japanese Island, Residents Flee by Boat,” Reuters, May 29, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/29/us-japan-volcano-idUSKBN0OE02R20150529.
39. Shiro Yabu and Yoshihiko Ikegami, We Don’t Need a Society That Tells Us to Eat Radiation: Zero-Becquerelist Manifesto (Tokyo: Shin Hyoron, 2012).
40. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001).
41. Comité invisible, À nos amis (Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2014), 45.