Post-Fukushima Activism: Politics and Knowledge in the Age of Precarity

217 Pages·2018·2.643 MB·English

by  Azumi Tamura

Post- Fukushima Activism
Political disillusionment is widespread in contemporary society. In Japan, the
search for the ‘outside’ of a stagnant reality sometimes leads marginalised young
people to a disastrous image of social change. The Fukushima nuclear disaster
was the realisation of such an image, triggering the largest wave of activism
since the 1960s. The disaster revealed the interconnected nature of contemporary
society. The protesters regretted that their past indifference to politics prefigured
such a catastrophe and became motivated to protest in the streets. They did not
share any totalising ideology or predetermined collective identity. Instead, the
activism provided a space for each body to encounter others who forced them to
feel and think, which also introduced an ethical dimension to their politics.
In this book, Azumi Tamura proposes a concept of politics as a series of
endless experiments based on creative responses to unexpected forces. Instead of
searching for a transcendental reference for politics, she investigates an
immanent force within individuals that motivates them to become involved in
political action. Referencing Deleuzian philosophy, Tamura provides a different
epistemological and ontological approach to social movement studies. She sug-
gests social movements themselves generate knowledge about how one may live
better in a complex society and where our lives are exposed to uncertainty. This
knowledge is neither empirical knowledge, nor normative political theory of
‘how we should live’. Instead, social movements bring affective knowledge into
politics as they offer a space for experimenting with ‘how we might live’. The
encounter with such knowledge galvanizes our desire for ‘how we want to live’
and encourages new experiments.
Azumi Tamura is a visiting researcher at the Institute of International Relations
and Area Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. She received her PhD in
Peace Studies in 2016 from the University of Bradford, UK.
Routledge Innovations in Political Theory
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-I nnovations-in- Political-Theory/book-s eries/IPT
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Contemporary Advances in the Theory of Political Representation
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76 Dignity and Human Rights
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Stephan P. Leher
77 A Conceptual Investigation of Justice
Kyle Johannsen
78 Compromise and Disagreement in Contemporary Political Theory
Christian F. Rostbøll and Theresa Scavenius (eds.)
79 Democratic Political Tragedy in the Postcolony
The Tragedy of Postcoloniality in Michael Manley’s Jamaica and
Nelson Mandela’s South Africa
Greg A. Graham
80 Epistemontology in Spinoza–Marx–Freud–Lacan
The (Bio)Power of Structure
A. Kiarina Kordela
81 Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society
Henrik Kaare Nielsen
82 Post- Fukushima Activism
Politics and Knowledge in the Age of Precarity
Azumi Tamura
Post- Fukushima Activism
Politics and Knowledge in the Age
of Precarity
Azumi Tamura
First published 2018
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Hope in the Battlefield: Political Predicament in Japanese
Society 7
2 Complexity, Power and Radical Political Thought Today 34
3 Dissolved Subjects: Activism and Ethics after Fukushima 63
4 Resonating Bodies: Disaster and Politics of Experiment 92
5 Knowledge and Affect in Post-F ukushima Activism 120
6 Creating Collective ‘Non’-Identity 144
7 Non- Hegemonic Knowledge in the Age of Precarity 172
Conclusion 200
Index 205
Acknowledgements
This book comprises the revision of my PhD thesis The Politics of Disaster and
Their Role in Imagining an Outside: Understanding the Rise of the Post-
Fukushima Anti- Nuclear Movements, submitted to the University of Bradford in
2015. I am grateful to Natalja Mortensen and Maria Landschoot of Routledge
for giving me this wonderful opportunity to publish my research.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all my interviewees in the
post- Fukushima activism. The encounter with their passion and bravery motiv-
ated me to write my PhD, and it was my way of joining them. I am greatly
indebted to Graeme Chesters, my supervisor at the University of Bradford, who
taught me how to explore, instead of giving answers. The revision process also
benefited from many people. Without the support of Akihiko Kimijima of Ritsu-
meikan University, Kaori Hatsumi and Norihiro Nakamura of Nagasaki Univer-
sity, this book would never have been possible. I would also like to thank
Bridget Gevaux and Claire Bell for thoroughly proofreading the manuscript
within a tight schedule.
I am grateful to my parents, Mari and Toshiaki Tamura, for their enduring
support, and to Marie Morrow, my other ‘mother’ in the UK, who made my time
in Bradford so enjoyable. I am very fortunate to have friends who believe in my
dream. My thanks especially go to Uan Walton- Norbury, who kindly encour-
aged me from the UK, and Hiroko Mizuta and Hikari Hayashi, for their beautiful
inspirations.
Introduction
We narrow our horizons, we reduce our expectations. Hope goes out of our lives,
hope goes out our work, hope goes out of the way we think. Revolution, even
emancipation, become ridiculous words. Well, of course: we are getting old. But
that is not the problem. The problem is that the young too are old, many of them,
sometimes even older than the old. The problem is that the world is getting old.
(Holloway, 2002, p. 154)
The imaginary of social change has been uncommon in contemporary Japanese
society. The disillusionment of politics is widespread. A sense of powerlessness
is deeply immersed and it seems that no political ideology provides hope in
people’s struggles in life.
In 2007, a 31-year-o ld Japanese part-t ime worker, Tomohiro Akagi, published
an essay claiming that his ‘hope is war’. With his monthly income of 100,000
yen, he is unable to support himself and is living in an ‘unendurable humiliation’
(Akagi, 2007). To him, peace means only the continuation of social stability, in
which he has already become too poor to support even himself. He states that
war is the last resort to bring about change to his miserable condition.
Why war? Why not revolution? Akagi shows no hope for social change
through collective action because he knows that there is no chance to gain
support. He notes that, according to the prevailing norm of Japanese society, it is
his own fault that he is a precarious worker. Although finding a secure job is dif-
ficult in recessionary Japan, society still blames him for his own poverty as being
‘too lazy’ to get a stable job (Akagi, 2007, 2011).
The anti- poverty activist Makoto Yuasa (2008) describes contemporary Japa-
nese society as a ‘sliding-d own society’ (Suberidai- shakai); in other words, once
people drop out of mainstream stability, they simply slip to the bottom. There is
little sympathy or social support for precarious workers. A hope of war shows
how fragmented their struggles in life are and how difficult it is for them to
articulate a hope in politics. For Akagi, war is the only imaginary of social
change, coming from outside like a fate, to destroy the stagnant system.
The desperate hope for an outside also generates another form of violence –
towards the self. The suicide rate in Japan remains high. In 2015, the suicide rate
2 Introduction
was the second worst among eight major industrialised nations at 19.7 per
100,000 population, following Russia at 20.1 per 100,000 population (World
Health Organization, 2017). The government statistics inform that the number of
people committing suicide has declined from over 30,000 people per year in the
period between 1998 and 2011 to just below 22,000 people in 2016. However,
suicide is the biggest cause of death among young people between the age of 15
and 34 (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2017).
One of the most popular books among young Japanese people in the 1990s,
entitled The Complete Manual of Suicide (Tsurumi, 1993), contained a striking
opening remark informing that, since there is no longer a ‘nuclear war’ to
destroy the world, suicide will be our last resort to end the misery of everyday
life. In the 2000s, ‘internet group suicide’ (netto shinju) became a familiar phe-
nomenon in Japanese society, where strangers arranged the plan online, assem-
bled and committed suicide together. They built solidarity not for resistance for
life, but for dying.
Yet, for most young Japanese people today, hopes for an outside of reality
itself have disappeared and, instead, they just give in to reality. A young sociolo-
gist, Noritoshi Furuichi (2011), claimed that, despite the image of a young gen-
eration being precarious and miserable, the majority of them express their
satisfaction with their lives. The title of Furuichi’s work describes his generation
as ‘the happy youth of a desperate country’. They regard the future as hopeless
but are living quite happily in the here and now, never hoping to change it
(Furuichi, 2011).
However, Furuichi fails to see that this little territory of ‘here and now’ is
actually very fragile. Although the unemployment rate is low in Japan, being at
around 3 per cent in recent years (Statistics Bureau of Japan, 2017),1 more and
more full-t ime jobs are replaced with temporary and part-t ime employment.
Those who derail the normal path from school to full- time employment are stuck
with insecure and low- paid jobs with little future prospects. This social insec-
urity puts pressure on those who have a full- time job to cling to it, and they often
undertake extremely long hours of work. The Japanese term karōshi, which
describes death that is attributed to overwork, never ceases to appear in the news.
Are the young Japanese people really ‘satisfied’ with their life, or are they per-
suading themselves that they are happy because they do not know the
alternative?
Living in a complex society, our endeavours for survival often end up further
diminishing our life prospects. In order to secure stability in life, people subju-
gate themselves under the hegemonic power. In Japan, the form of cynicism and
self- subjugation seems to be the predominant reaction to insecurity. Yet, it also
takes another form of reaction such as nationalism and intolerance. The attempt
at eliminating ‘others’ and withdrawing into their own territory is observed in
Trumpism, Brexit and the rise of the anti-i mmigrant parties in Europe.
Withdrawal from the larger, complex, unpredictable web of relationships
takes place in many areas, at different levels; it could be the withdrawal of a
nation- state from the international community, of a local community from the
Introduction 3
state or of an individual from society. It seems that now we are tired of making
commitments in a complex society, as they require us to face uncertainty, which
may threaten our own life. People want to regain sovereignty over their life and
disconnect themselves from unpredictable others.
The problem is that the calls for tolerance and understanding by intellectuals
often sound hollow to those who lead a precarious life and are desperate for
stability. These concepts are already detached from people’s everyday struggles
and cannot bring hope. While political theories cannot provide more embodied
language to affirm the dignity of people’s lives, the attempts at withdrawal have
become widespread in every level of society and have been causing many fault-
lines in social structures.
In most cases, a hope cannot be found inside where people have retreated. In
contemporary Japanese society, people seem to secure their life by submitting
themselves to the oppressive and exploitative authority. Moreover, the world
outside is left unattended; those who have already stepped out of the mainstream
become invisible, fragmented and helpless. Like Akagi, some may dream that
war would destroy the immobilised territory of those who are desperate to secure
their lives.
Indeed, hope has gone out of our lives and the way we think. We desire ful-
filled lives, but the desire does not become a political force to change reality. It
instead leads us either to nihilistic self- accommodation to reality, or violent
destruction of reality. I quoted Holloway’s words because this is actually the
starting point of my research. He starts his theoretical exploration by describing
a sense of hopelessness with the first- person plural ‘we’. We are hopeless. I felt
that this is a very ethical attitude on the part of Holloway, who puts himself into
this sense of disillusionment and tries to overcome political disillusionment from
deep within:
We are flies caught in a spider’s web. We start from a tangled mess, because
there is no other place to start. We cannot start by pretending to stand
outside the dissonance of our own experience, for to do so would be a lie.
[…] We can only try to emancipate ourselves, to move outward, negatively,
critically, from where we are.
(Holloway, 2010, p. 5)
Following Holloway, I began by admitting my disillusionment and framed
my research question: how can we become a political agency of social change
without falling into nihilism? The book pays particular attention to the anti-
nuclear movement after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, caused by
the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. In Akagi’s
imaginary, a disaster is like a war, which deconstructs the immobile order and
brings radical reconfiguration. The Fukushima nuclear disaster indeed mobil-
ised many urban residents who used to be non- political, apathetic or indiffer-
ent to society. Some of them continue to join the protest actions every week,
even in 2018.