“We Are Already Living Together”
Race, Collective Struggle, and the Reawakened Nation in Post-3/11 Japan
The headquarters of the Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO) is only a short walk from the heart of downtown Osaka, but since it is flanked by two rivers, it can feel like an island. It is already dark by six o’clock, and people are beginning to queue up behind a barricade formed by traffic cones. Standing in the unlit space in front of the building, a man holds a microphone, tapping his feet to the beat of a drum. He leans backward, shouting upward toward employees who are working overtime in their offices many floors up. Genpatsu/hantai! Genpatsu/iranai! (We oppose nukes! We don’t need nukes!) The organizers (who refer to themselves as “staff”) take turns in leading the five-beat syncopated political chants—a call-and-response that has by that point become familiar as a rhythm repeated at demonstrations across the country. The lights are on in the upper levels of the building, but the activists below are shrouded in shadows.
By the end of 2015, TwitNoNukesOsaka—thus named for the organization’s use of social media to call people to action—will have ended its biweekly Friday protest in front of KEPCO. At this moment in January of the same year, however, TwitNoNukesOsaka is still the largest antinuclear rally on the block, boasting approximately two hundred regular protestors. Just around the corner are two other smaller demonstrations. Alighting from the bridge, the first rally that comes into view is one organized by a communist labor association and that comprises mostly men in their sixties and seventies. They have installed a kotatsu—a low, heated table covered with a blanket—to keep themselves warm during the winter. At the end of the block is a corner-side rally, which is slightly better attended and is a mix of around twenty women and men ranging in age from their thirties to seventies. Colorful antinuclear banners decorate the sidewalk, and protestors are seen taking turns at the microphone. This evening, two American passersby, a young couple from New York, have been pressured to deliver speeches. Perhaps as a placating gesture, they offer broad words of sympathy for Fukushima, concerns about safety, and admiration for protestors. Haruki, a half-Japanese, half-Southeast Asian labor activist, interprets their remarks into Japanese. As the corner-side rally comes to a close, Morimoto, a cheerful-looking woman in her sixties, offers some closing remarks, which are addressed to “all of you at Kansai Electric Power Company.” Referring to the couple’s speeches, she expresses to KEPCO that not just the Japanese but also Americans and other people from around the world are worried about nuclear energy as a global problem.
T and his friends are busy packing up megaphones, collecting donations, and distributing flyers for upcoming events when Haruki takes me over to meet him. I have been chatting with Haruki about the spatial arrangement of the three rallies on the block when he tells me about a friend who is apparently far wiser on the subject. This friend turns out to be T, an activist who runs the Twitter account @antifa_osk. Both T and I are surprised as we recognize each other from a run-in a few months prior that took place after an antiracism demonstration in Tsuruhashi, Osaka’s Koreatown. Sandwiched within a longer conversation about racism and human rights, T had mentioned being involved in the antinuclear movement but had downplayed his role. He is, in fact, one of the original founders of TwitNoNukesOsaka.
“We are the government,” T says pointedly. The statement, bare and declarative, is a correction. I have recently heard people outside the movement criticize activists as “anti-government,” citing the plethora of signs, pictures, and chanting from demonstrations against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Inverting this criticism, T rejects the idea that social movement actors are “anti-government.” It is the people, rather than the state, who are the source of democratic power and legitimacy.
Activists frequently refer to having been awakened (mezamerareta) after March 11, 2011 (from here onward referred to as “3/11”), when the country suffered a devastating triple disaster of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. On one hand, narrating activists’ individual motivations for seeking out protesting spaces, awakening is often understood as a collective experience—rousing an apathetic populace into political consciousness. As an unending and unresolved disaster, 3/11 ignited intense feelings of urgency among even “ordinary” Japanese people by dually exposing the myth of safe nuclear energy and the state’s failure to protect its own citizens. The state, in this context, includes the Abe administration and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), as well as other institutional entities viewed as similarly compromised and untrustworthy—from the National Police Agency to the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). The rebirth of social movements—exemplified in the drama of screaming megaphones, thermal energy of thousands of bodies squeezed together at city parks and in city streets, and through heartbeat-accelerating music of sound trucks—has been referred to as the “hydrangea revolution” (ajisai kakumei) (Slater et al. 2012; Yang 2012). Yet beyond demanding recognition from the state in the form of representation and policy changes, post-3/11 movements aspire toward a new nation—a collective struggle born out of the trauma of disaster.
At regular rallies and large-scale demonstrations alike, in Osaka, Tokyo, and elsewhere, activists refer to the nation through repeated words and phrases in chants, on placards, and over social media: nation (kuni and kokumin), children (kodomo), life (inochi), and the future (mirai). Children, life, and the future not only constitute how the nation reproduces itself but also encapsulate the matters that are the most severely threatened by disasters and state neglect. More than supplying an interpretative frame for producing meaning and articulating political goals (Benford and Snow 2000; Ferree and Merrill 2000), “nation” also underwrites how post-3/11 movements are formed affectively. Following sociologist James Jasper’s (1998) distinctions between emotion and affect, a nation might be understood as the source of many of the “underlying” affects that structure social relations both within and between social movements in Japan. Affect permeates the spatial politics of the protesting crowd, transforming assemblages of people gathered together in front of the prime minister’s official residence (Shushō Kantei) and the National Diet building (Kokkai Gijidō) into a physical representation of the new nation. As activists disentangle their nation from the shadow of the state, affective structures of obligation and social belonging underwrite the ways that activists negotiate dialogical emotions—from love and solidarity to resentment and rage.
Of course, “nationalist affects” within social movements are not unique to Japan. Elsewhere in this book, Kwai-Cheung Lo offers an important theoretical reading of the intermingling of love, hate, and other feelings within Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and other instances of collective action in Asia. As Lo’s discussion shows, activists assert themselves (the “people”) as the nation not simply by hating the state, but through producing alternative sites of and activities for social engagement, ranging from occupation tents to public artworks. Lo underscores how “[b]eing Hong Kong people becomes an object of love,” yet what solidifies this love are the affects embedded within quotidian social relations. Perhaps this is also akin to what Anne Allison (2013: 8, 14) observes as the affective dimensions of social precarity in Japan. Alongside the navigation of disaster and financial marginality, people encounter precarity through ever-widening processes of social alienation—the degeneration into a “relationless society” (muen shakai) where individuals lack places of belonging (ibasho ga nai). At the same time, this narrative of social isolation as emergent vis-à-vis the nation’s past as a “super stable society” (chō antei shakai) (Allison 2013: 10) might also overlook the ways in which social exclusions have been historically embedded within the structure of Japanese society.
Further complicating this picture, activists’ attempts to “reawaken” the nation arise not only as a response to growing social precarity but also as a revision of the problematic modes of exclusion that have historically underwritten the meanings of national belonging. Namely, after 3/11, activists attempted to recapture the political power of the “nation” while reconstructing it as an inclusive space. Disaster is especially important, moreover, because it has historically troubled the boundaries of who is included in or excluded from the nation, a point that I will develop in the following section. Whereas previous disasters had solidified a myth of a monoethnic nation, the new nation after 3/11 seems to look past the “old” criteria of ethnic and cultural similarity as the basis for social belonging.
Instead, activists are explicit about what they see as the new normal. “We are already living together” (Bokura wa mō sude ni issho ni ikiteiru) is a slogan that activists often place on rainbow-colored placards during protests, that they slip into interviews, and that they insert in promotional materials for events. The phrase originated in the 1990s in the context of HIV activism and has been popularized within post-3/11 social movements by LGBT activists, particularly artist Akira the Hustler. Such language explicitly challenges many of the normative, ostensibly false, assumptions that have underwritten the idea of a nation. Whereas previously Japanese-ness had been accepted as politically apathetic (mukanshin) and both socially and racially homogenous, the reimagined nation actively breaks away from these myths. Within this paradigm, what is seen as the legitimate nation, made clear in the aftermath of disaster, is one that is not entrapped in the violent exclusions of the past, but reimagined as multicultural—accepting of racial/ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and foreigners.
Similarly, post-3/11 social movements aim at transcending traditional political categorizations, specifically turning away from the leftist movements that had historically dominated antinuclear, antidiscrimination, and other progressive causes. At the same time that disaster provides a catalyst for joining movements, the post-disaster nation functions as a social space that is inclusive of a variety of political and social orientations—including self-avowed “rightists” as well as individuals typically oriented outside of typical left versus right politics (Amamiya and Beck 2010; Shibuichi 2016). Not surprisingly, however, this nation-based strategy has come under critique by Japan’s New Left, a political contingent that had dominated state-resisting movements since the 1960s and 1970s and that continues to reject the nation as an illegitimate foundation for organizing for social rights.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the disaster—as well as activists’ attempts to pitch the reawakened nation as multicultural—has posed a significant threat to xenophobic, ultranationalist ideologies from groups such as the Citizens’ Association to Oppose Special Rights for Residents Koreans (Zainichitokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai, referred to from here as Zaitokukai). While Zaitokukai has become infamous for staging abusive hate speech demonstrations against Zainichi Koreans, the group has targeted a wide range of victims, including Chinese, refugee seekers, hibakusha (survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as other radiation disasters), and protestors. Hate speech groups such as Zaitokukai as well as antidiscrimination organizations’ hate speech groups date back to before 2011; however, the frequency of hate speech incidents seems to have first risen sharply in the post-disaster period. According to a report that they released in March of 2016, the Ministry of Justice counted 1,152 hate speech rallies between April 2012 and September 2015 (Hōmusho 33). Likewise, the main thrust of Japan’s nationwide anti-hate speech movement erupted in the post-disaster period. It was in 2013 when prominent activists within the antinuclear community took to social media to urge people to counterprotest hate speech, leading to the formation of the Counter Racism Action Collective (C.R.A.C.). At the end of 2014, Japan’s Supreme Court upheld a local ruling holding Zaitokukai responsible for ¥12 million in damages as punishment for a series of incidents in 2009 and 2010 during which the organization visited a Korean elementary school in Kyoto and physically intimidated and verbally abused students (Yamaguchi 2013; Kyodo 2014). More recently, in January 2016, the city of Osaka passed Japan’s first city-level ordinance against hate speech and a nationwide ban was passed in May 2016. Despite these legal and legislative victories, however, hate speech activities continue both in physical spaces and online.
Outside of the antiracism movement per se, the intersections of hate speech and activists’ broader efforts to resist the state are encapsulated in an exchange on one Saturday afternoon in Osaka. Seven of us have just finished a frigid 2 hours gathered outside of Osaka Station protesting the construction of new military bases in Okinawa. Noa, a nineteen-year-old college student from Okinawa, is lamenting the food she has just eaten. “Mō tabe chatan” (“I already ate the whole thing.”) She has just learned from our companions, two antinuclear activists, Takeru and Yumi, that our meal was likely tainted with radiation. The rumor is that this restaurant, a cheap national chain, cuts costs by sourcing its vegetables from Fukushima. Instantly, I comprehend the hidden significance of the orders that Takeru and Yuki had placed at the start of the meal—coffee, and nothing to eat. Yet while at once parsing through rumors and alternative sources of information alike, the activists are also muddling over Zaitokukai. I find myself confused. Why would an organization fixated on weeding out foreigners also target antinuclear social movements? As Takeru explains how ultranationalists see antinuclear protestors as “anti-Japan,” Noa interrupts with a scoffing noise. “How can they call that [protesting] anti-Japanese?”
Drawing on this complex terrain, the remainder of this chapter explores why disaster becomes the catalyst for reimagining the nation while drawing on ethnographic data to elaborate on how activists attempt to perform this reimagining through affective negotiations. Focusing on antinuclear and antiracism movements, this chapter follows a new wave of post-3/11 activists who are simultaneously attempting to recuperate the power of the nation and rework the modalities of exclusion that are laid at the center of this political imaginary in Japan. What does it mean, for instance, to define membership in the nation not on the basis of racial/ethnic status but through the seemingly communal experiences of disaster, living together, and political solidarity? How is authentic Japanese-ness rewritten when the protestor, committed to advocating for the will and future of the nation, is held up as a model citizen? In exploring the affective transactions underlying these themes, I find that reimagining the nation has also unearthed complex and contradictory imaginings of community and home, social obligations, and protections. While on the one hand bearing the joyful promise of new communities, such tensions are also often experienced ambivalently, emotionally, and through the body. While my larger project entails a 24-month ethnography of mobilization in Tokyo and Osaka, this chapter curates a series of small yet revealing moments taken primarily from my time in West Japan (Osaka) within the space of two years, 2014 to 2016.
Contemporary antidiscrimination activists deliberately frame hate speech as a problem of “racism”—in their own words, reishizimu and jinshu sabetsu—generally favoring this term over related categories such as ethnicity (minzoku) and human rights (jinken). This word choice, however, does not necessarily mean that the concept of “racism” has been widely accepted among broader Japanese publics. As Yuko Kawai (2015) points out, many Japanese dismiss racism as a “Western” problem. Yet misunderstandings about the meanings of race and racism are not limited to the geographic context of Japan or East Asia. Since widely rejecting scientific and physiognomic typologies of race, even well-reputed critical race scholars have encountered roadblocks in clearly delineating race from other forms of social categorization (Banton 1998). For instance, although “ethnicity” is often used interchangeably with “race,” the former is often seen as solidifying the idea of the nation—through mutual languages, ancestral histories, and cultural identities (Fenton 1996; Banton 1998). In contrast, “race,” frequently situated in bodily differences but very often not, functions to sharpen the lines of exclusion. At the same time, ethnicity is embedded within an assimilatory framework that reifies the privileges of the majority while stigmatizing differences as “a voluntaristic normative identification process, or as a form of culture” (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993: 4). Moreover, such beliefs often justify social, economic, and political disparities between groups as shaped through “cultural” differences rather than as instituted through power relations.
Looking more closely at the rhetoric of hate speech, however, it becomes evident that domestic anxieties about minorities are not limited to cases where groups “fail” to integrate into Japanese society but the inverse takes place. When organizations such as Zaitokukai accuse antinuclear and antiracism activists that they are not “real Japanese,” they are not simply provoking a debate about patriotism. These accusations, in fact, are often quite literal: many ultranationalists apparently believing that post-3/11 movements are composed of intrusive foreigners who “pose” as Japanese. In other words, the racial logic of ultranationalism is predicated both in the fear that minorities blend in too well and in the belief that regardless of cultural performances, certain groups remain fundamentally and immutably distinct from “real Japanese.” Ironically, as Koichi Iwabuchi outlines in his discussion of “introverted jingoism,” ultranationalists are themselves resorting to clandestine tactics while operating outside of established norms by engaging in highly offensive behaviors as members of hate speech groups. Despite the attention given to hate speech demonstrations occurring in physical spaces, the vast majority of abuse and harassment occurs in digital spaces. Such contradictions point to the uneven structures by which majority populations are able to name threats to the nation while they remain anonymous.
While articulating the boundaries of the nation (Gilroy 2002), race also serves to delimit the channels by which groups of people are able to access political, social, and civil rights. Wendy Brown (2008: 62) points out that citizenship operates as an uneven framework for assimilation, with minority groups’ “racial distinctiveness” preventing their participation in a nation that is imagined as homogenous. Race, citizenship, and nation are inextricably linked by being embedded within interwoven matrices of legal structures and cultural production (Lowe 1997). In Japan, the population of Zainichi Koreans includes groups that voluntarily migrated or were forced to migrate to the country in the earlier part of the twentieth century while Korea was under colonial occupation. Despite the fact that Zainichi Koreans today were born in Japan and have had family residing in the country since the early twentieth century, they are not eligible for automatic birthright citizenship because their ethnic origins relegate them to a “foreign” status (Weiner 2009; Kashiwazaki 2013; Morris-Suzuki 2015). This legal structure maintains the ideological myth of Japanese as an ethnically homogenous monoculture, despite the fact that Japan now has large racial/ethnic minority populations living in its urban centers (Weiner 1989; Kibe 2006; Chapman 2007; Lie 2008; Weiner 2009). Contestations over race and citizenship rights can be seen as a motivation, with ultranationalists predicating much of their platform on a misreading of structural privileges and marginalization. In the case of Zaitokukai, a hatred of unearned “privileges” granted to certain groups by the state—and the connected sin of identifying as a victim for the purpose of accessing public benefits—enables the organization to target victims from a variety of groups, from Zainichi Koreans to survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Racism is simultaneously durable and flexible, which is evident in its strategic fluctuations alongside Japan’s emergence as a modern nation. Following the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty in 1910, Koreans became citizens of the Empire of Japan. During this period of imperialism, Japan began deploying the language of “imperial multiethnicity” (Lie 2008), an ideology that rhetorically included colonized subjects into social membership, even espousing a version of pan-Asian racialization. The defeat of Japan in World War II led to the supplanting of the framework of imperial multiethnicity with “a counter-ideology of monoethnic Japan” (Lie 2008). At that point, Japanese academics applied Western typologies of race to distinguish ethnic Japanese from minority groups through phenotypic markers, such as skin color and bone structure, as well as cultural markers, such as “personality, and cultural products” (Kawai 2015: 28; see also Weiner 1995), constituting a form of “cultural nationalism” (Yoshino 1992).
In the latter part of the twentieth century, labor shortages in Japan spurred on an increase in foreign workers and the state began implementing broader social efforts to promote ethnic diversity under the framework of what Eika Tai (2004: 356) documents as a movement of “multicultural co-living” (tabunka kyōsei). Parallel with government campaigns, the visible reality that many of these migrants had arrived from Southeast Asia, and, thus, differed phenotypically and linguistically from ethnic Japanese, disrupted a dominant image of Japan as a monoethnic nation (Tai 2004). By correlation, areas with large Korean populations began promoting Korean cultural activities and education, such as art, lectures, music, and cuisine. Alongside these efforts, Zainichi Koreans were encouraged to stop “passing” as Japanese and to “assert their ethnic identities” (Eika 2004: 356), a change attributable to the growing influence of universal human rights on Japanese society. Kiyotera Tsutsui and Hwa Ji Shin (2008) point out that human rights discourses enabled Koreans and other minorities to begin rethinking their rights and their relationship to the state. They argue that within this shifting paradigm, Koreans began to recognize discrimination as a violation of their human rights rather than as evidence of their social inferiority.
Disasters have also been historically significant moments for alternately reaffirming and challenging the boundaries of race, nation, and citizenship. Zaitokukai’s extreme beliefs, for instance, are embedded within a long history in which racial/ethnic minorities have been targeted as scapegoats during disasters and other times of social unease. One of the most notable incidents is that of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake, which occurred in the Tokyo area and resulted in the deaths of between 100,000 and 140,000 people (Ryang 2003). Among Japanese people, rumors spread that Koreans were involved in criminal activities after the earthquake, including poisoning wells and setting fire to businesses. Groups of Japanese citizens rioted and killed approximately 6,000 Koreans in Tokyo and Kanagawa, a neighboring prefecture (Ryang 2003). Nearly a century later, such race-based rumors continue to appear on social media. In the hours after a 6.4 earthquake in the southern prefecture of Kumamoto in April 2016, antiracists catalogued dozens of tweets by ultranationalists, once again painting Koreans as culprits behind disasters while explicitly invoking many of the same motifs used during the 1923 massacre. For instance, one Twitter user warned: “Be careful of North Korean’s uprising in Kumamoto” (“Kumamoto de wa chōsenjin no bōdō ni ki wo tsukete kudasai”).
Along with these sorts of “natural” disasters, nuclear disaster has also played an important role in entangling Japanese nationalism within the events of World War II, specifically the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both state and civil actors capitalized on the suffering from the atomic bombings to construct a new national identity built on the notion of collective suffering, opposition to war, and peace. James Orr has famously termed this narrative “victim as hero” (Lim 2010: Orr 2001), which not only served to distance the Japanese nation-state from its wartime imperialism but also reinforced modalities of discrimination. This version of nationalism, premised on Japanese people’s suffering, excluded the experiences of ethnically non-Japanese groups. Many non-Japanese individuals experienced multiple vectors of victimization: violence under Japanese imperialism, which often included forced migration to Japan, exposure to the atomic bombings, restricted access to public welfare and other financial restitution, and finally, exclusion from public commemoration of antinuclear events (Yoneyama 1999; Igarashi 2000; Orr 2001; Lim 2010). At the same time, the political specter of the atomic bombings also reveals the persistent troubles around articulating nationalism since the postwar period. In particular, institutional commemorations of Hiroshima as a city of worldwide peace alongside the global circulations of cultural memory have transformed, if not unevenly, the meanings of the atomic bombings from a national devastation to a universalized trauma.
Examining this longer history helps us to unpack some of the complexities surrounding what Reiko Shindo (2014: 135) describes as a “widespread call for uniting Japan as ‘one’” after 3/11. Disasters, nuclear in particular, are events that encourage deep engagements with the meanings of what is Japan and who are legitimately Japanese, leading to negotiations on who belongs or does not belong to the nation. On one hand, ultranationalists seek to shrink and solidify boundaries of who belongs to the nation, stoking many of the same fearful emotions that were used to justify violence against minorities in the aftermath of disasters. Antinuclear and antiracism activists, on the other hand, are working against these narratives. Yet within these processes of reimagination, activists also seem to be capitalizing on the symbolism of disaster as a collective struggle to remake Japan as a multicultural nation—culturally diverse, yet united through shared visions and affective entanglements. The reliance on this symbolic paradigm offers new possibilities for creating political spaces, yet also leaves unresolved the accompanying contradictions of reconstructing a nation without reckoning with its past.
The perimeter around Tsuruhashi Station is a pulsing maze of narrow alleys, contiguous stands crowded and laid out with kimchi, fresh fish, and dried foods. It is December 2014, the evening of an end-of-the-year party (bōnenkai) for members of the antiracism counter movement based in West Japan. The party has not yet started. Instead, I am following Masa, a tall man topped off with a gray fedora whom I have met just minutes earlier. Having been asked by a mutual friend to help me, he is sharing his umbrella while hurriedly leading me toward a counterprotest. Several Zaitokukai members have arrived in the ethnic Korean neighborhood of Tsuruhashi and are attempting to stage a hate speech demonstration. Although the party had been announced several weeks ago, C.R.A.C. West, the satellite of the nationwide antiracism group based in Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, had tweeted just a few days prior about a change in plans. Eating and drinking would happen as originally planned, but not before facing off against hate speech demonstrators.
“That hate bastard Kawahigashi has updated the schedule. On the exact day of our end of the year party in Tsuruhashi, right?” The tweet is sent days earlier and repeated the day before. It contains a link to the calendar page of Team Kansai Sakura, the outpost of Zaitokukai for West Japan, as well as an event flyer for the bōnenkai. Featured in this flyer is a photo from a hate speech demonstration earlier in the month in Kyoto, capturing the counterracism activists standing atop a bridge after they had successfully chased Zaitokukai out of the downtown area of Gion. Against a background of a blue sky, empty except for a blazing white sun, the thirty antiracism activists are dark silhouettes. Seemingly standing guard yet with a slight punk-like slouch, the activists look proud, if not intimidating. The tweet ends with a hashtag, #12/28TsuruhashiPeace (#12/28TsuruhashiAnnei).
Masa does not talk much, instead frequently glancing at his phone for updates. We have emerged onto a hazy back street behind the station when suddenly a police squad appears, seemingly out of nowhere. The officers run past us, their silver rain ponchos reflective under the street lamps. We follow suit, reentering the train station where we end up near the turnstiles, crammed into a small space in front of a mobile phone shop. The police are attempting to wrestle apart some hate speech demonstrators and antiracism counter activists as the surrounding crowd cheers on repeatedly and in unison, “Kaerō! Kaerō!” (“Go home! Go home!”)
When antiracism activists demand that hate speech demonstrators, “go home,” they are at once inverting the words of hate speech and rearticulating the meanings of home in Japan. Zaitokukai frequently deploy the language of “home” in speech and in signs: “chōsenjin kaere!” (“Go home, North Koreans!”). Yet Tsuruhashi and other neighborhoods targeted by Zaitokukai are often the literal homes for Zainichi Korean and other minorities who have formed communities in these spaces over generations. There is, in fact, some overlap between residents of the neighborhood and antiracism protestors. Unlike many other cities (including Tokyo), antiracism protestors involved with C.R.A.C. West are roughly half split between Zainichi Koreans and ethnic Japanese.
The counterprotestors continue to give chase through the streets. The crowd knots together in front of a building with a set of brick stairs. We continue running down the block. The more daring protestors cross into traffic and are immediately pushed back by police officers. The other half is following from the sidewalk. A group of boys passing by on bicycles, all looking to be under the age of eleven and with gazes entranced, seem to be relishing the commotion. An hour from our start, counterdemonstrators have successfully cornered the Zaitokukai members up a hill several blocks away from the station. At the point, the crowd unknotted, I can see that there are only three Zaitokukai demonstrators. The three Zaitokukai members give up and indeed, go home.
It is now time for the party, and forty activists climb the stairs to a second-floor-level room in a Korean restaurant that has been reserved for the group. It is a typical setup for a Japanese drinking party, a tatami room sparsely decorated with long and low wooden tables. The room is brightly lit. I sit down randomly and end up next to a member of Japan’s Upper House, a celebrated guest who has come down from Tokyo for the occasion. To my right is a second-year senior high school student. Her father has brought her to the demonstration but he is now seated a few places over from us, at one of the nearby “smoker’s table.”
As the night progresses over several courses, over passed dishes like kimchi and kalbi, more direct reference to the movement’s work permeates the social space of the room, through songs and other forms of play. At a table at the opposite side of the room, a woman with glasses and a chin-length bob leads a round of antiracism calls, adopting the familiar syncopated rhythm of protests. “Reishizimu/hantai!” (“We oppose racism!”), she yells, impersonating a deep, masculine voice. Later, she and another woman emerge from the doorway to the room, dressed in a pink hanbok (a traditional dress from Korea). They are greeted with rousing cheers. A self-proclaimed rapper and the woman next to him perform lyrics from a new song about hate speech. Afterward, he pulls up his phone to show us the Amazon page where his album is for sale.
At the end of the evening, one of the party organizers announces a generous omiyage (souvenir) from the restaurant: kimchi, tied up in small plastic bags. The activists, who have just finished a round of protest-style cheers in celebration of the neighborhood, “Tsuruhashi /Anyo! Tsuruhashi/Anyo!” are overjoyed. Here, they mix Japanese and Korean, reference the name of the neighborhood with Anyo, the casual form of “hello” in Korean. Again, they play with the familiar patterns of protest calls, this time riffing on the topic of kimchi—“Kimichi wo/omiyage! Kimchi wo/omiyage!” Next to the stairs is an area set up with a large banner and colorful markers. As attendees leave the party, the organizers ask people to write words of support, encouragement, and congratulations on the banner for the Zainichi Korean students who have just won their lawsuit against Zaitokukai.
Pushing back against ultranationalist attempted encroachments, activists reclaim the meanings of home, and arguably nation, in part through legitimating ethnic ties to neighborhoods such as Tsuruhashi. Here, affect plays a critical role not only in solidifying Zainichi Korean activists’ affinities to their home but also in producing a sense of welcome for allies. Through food, cosplay, and song, activists can experience pleasure and social connection while performing the difficult labor of defending “home.”
Despite the evening’s optimistic vision of a multicultural community brought together and enlivened by its collective struggle, I come to learn of the complexity of these social connections. In the spring of 2016, I am in a café in downtown Osaka with Kaoru, a freelance events designer. Kaoru is a tall man in his forties, whose signature black beret seems to pay homage to revolutionary Marxist Che Guevera. He is a well-known figure within West Japan’s antiracism movement and had also been a staff member of the antinuclear Twitter protest in Osaka until it ultimately disbanded at the end of 2015.
In the café, there is loudly playing American music, Fleetwood Mac, a stark contrast to our quiet, sober conversation. “Your body doesn’t feel good the next day,” Kaoru says. He is talking about the physical consequences of counterprotesting at hate speech demonstrations. There is stress (sutoresu)—a word he repeats a lot—and physical damage incurred from shouting at the top of one’s lungs, from going to face-to-face against racists. His face is weary. Counterdemonstrations, which from the outside seem high energy, even exciting, are draining. “Tanoshiku nai,” he adds (“It’s not fun”).
Still, Kaoru has trouble putting into words how much more stressful the labor of protesting might be for his Zainichi Korean peers. Kaoru is ethnic Japanese. While he does not use the word privilege (tokken) explicitly, he is resolute that his experience of hate speech as a Japanese person is far less burdensome than that encountered by minorities—the actual targets of abuse. For him, it is a lesser harm. I ask him if his Zainichi Koreans friends have ever shared these feelings directly. How do they describe their experiences? Oh no, he says. They would never complain. Voicing their injuries directly would create the unwanted burden of having other people worry on their behalf.
The complex negotiations of connection, obligation, and responsibility underwriting the antiracism movement shape not only the community as a social space but also their politics. The celebratory ethos encapsulated in the previous year’s bōnenkai is, if not rare, elusive. Protestors are not all friends, despite their appearance of coming together as a group. The use of pseudonyms and large-scale social media not only provide a necessary method for individuals who want to protect their identity but also create social barriers. It is common for activists to not know one another by face or by their real names. Nor do activists easily refer to themselves as “members” of a group. Instead, activists are motivated less by a sense of connection through concrete relations and more by an abstract sense of community. As is the case of many protestors, the size of this community seemingly extends beyond the scale of the group and attaches more broadly to the movement at large, even the nation.
What binds together this abstract community, moreover, is less an experience of friendship and more a sense of duty and obligation—to provide help and protection for others without being asked directly and without asking for credit or recognition in return. Like many other antiracism activists, in fact, Kaoru denies that he is an official “member” of C.R.A.C. Consistent with a narrative repeated by multiple activists, he suggests that membership is secondary to his labor. His role, he explains, is to serve as a protector (keibi).
What does it mean to be keibi? Kaoru points to a napkin in front of him on the table. Using his finger, he traces a rectangle that is meant to represent the perimeter of a demonstration. He and his friends all use LINE, a popular social networking application where they are “on call.” They are expected by fellow antiracism activists to show up at events where younger activists will be gathered and where they will likely be vulnerable to Zaitokukai and other ultranationalist organizations. At the center of Kaoru’s illustration are teenaged and college-aged protestors. At the perimeter are Kaoru and his friends, there to block Zaitokukai and other suspicious people from entering. The students themselves are not alerted to this protection, though it remains contested as to what extent they are already aware.
Similar to activists’ claims that they are the true government, the logic of protection finds its basis in a critique of the state. The word keibi itself, rather than connoting a commonplace understanding of protecting (mamoru), carries a valence of authority. It is more typically associated with the official work of the police, military, and other personnel of the state. Fittingly, Kaoru and other antiracism protestors criticize police for not only permitting hate speech demonstrators but also being ineffective in preventing abuse and violence against victims. They are frustrated with policing practices that seem to favor protecting ultranationalists over society’s most vulnerable populations and suspicious of state involvements in authorizing these abuses. Kaoru and his peers, thus, assume their right to delineate the true meaning of peace (annei) and public order (chian). They carry this out by merging the work of resistance and protection.
Yet it is the very attempts to subvert this order that exacerbates the affective load shouldered by activists like Kaoru while also producing feelings of isolation. His labor as a protector is not merely in opposition to groups like Zaitokukai but against the state itself. Such activities carry the likelihood of surveillance, if not also a proximity to social and financial precarity. Activists voice their anxieties that their participation in social movements and in activities deemed as “illegitimate” by the mainstream might result in a loss of employment, disrupt their family relationships, and diminish their social standing. Ultimately, such fractures raise a critical question: How is it possible for a self-governing nation that is not recognized by the state and perceived as threatening to survive?
How is living together reimagined in the aftermath of disaster? More than six years later, Japan has yet to fully recover from the material, political, and social impacts of March 11, 2011. Lacking resolution, the political landscape of post-3/11 has been one driven by uncertainty and anger. It has also been driven by the urgent necessity of hope. As large groups of people having become disenchanted with a state that appears unresponsive to their needs, activists have taken up the helm to present a new alternative for governing the nation. In doing so, they have also raised questions about the shape and makeup of the nation itself.
The backdrop to this is an extended history wherein racial politics have inflected the interpretations of disasters themselves as “events” as well as the political and social projects of post-disaster rebuilding. In view of the nation, many of the ideologies underwriting these reconstructions have been problematic, exacerbating existing structures of social exclusion and discrimination. As with the case of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake as well as with hate speech, disasters have often been entwined with the resurgence of violent and oppressive manifestations of nationalism. Disaster—a moment immediately awakening a sleeping populace—is loaded, powerful enough to inspire love or, alternately, hate.
The affects underwriting post-disaster social movements extend, moreover, beyond the emotional categories of love and hate. Rather, it is the nonrepresentational matter of affect that organizes the social entanglements of collective action. Even food—which can become restrictive and punishing for citizens worried about radiation poisoning—can be in other contexts celebratory and solidifying. These affective negotiations do not simply “color” social movements in a broad sense, but permeate the politics through which activists conceptualize the very shape and structure of social belonging and, by extension, the nation.
In focusing on the theme of “living together,” I have suggested that affective transactions form the basis of the new community that activists have been assembling in since 3/11. Namely, that this new wave of activists have recentered the terms of political membership to be based in affective circulations of obligation, mutual protection, and struggle—which not only includes the disaster but also refers to the temporality of protests themselves—as a collective experience. In particular, metaphors of protection have formed an overarching narrative connecting the antinuclear movement to antiracism. As antinuclear politics inspire calls to protect life and the future, it has become clearer to many activists that such benefits have already been denied for many marginalized and vulnerable groups. At the same time, despite the focus of this discussion on antiracism protesting spaces, this attention to the lives of racial/ethnic and social minorities remains marginal both within Japanese society at large and within the “hydrangea revolution” more specifically.
Finally, the question remains as to whether the remaking of the nation, even multicultural, is possible for securing equality and social rights when it is attempted outside the rubrics of the state. This uncertainty is particularly salient given the political impasse of biopolitics and the state. That is, that the protection of life is always ordered according to existing structural hierarchies at the same time that modes of resistance, which might supply alternative modes of protection, are deemed as “illegitimate” and punished. Such issues are not limited to the topography of Japan, nor to the time of disaster. The work to recast the nation as a new “home” for both historically excluded groups and the abandoned majority alike needs and relies on a politics that is not only more than simply “pre-figurative” but also located within a serious reckoning of the past.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Pseudonyms have been used when respondents requested that their names remain private. In other instances, respondents have asked to be identified by their publicly known names or social media accounts.
The research for this project was supported through funding by the National Science Foundation SES Grant #1519206; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (a joint award with the Social Science Research Council); the Japan Foundation, Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America Inc. and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin; and the Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
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