Slater David

After a disastrous period of New Left political violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, followed by two decades of abeyance, Japan has experienced a renewed era of social movement activity since the 1990s. These new movements explicitly seek to avoid contamination by the earlier period, even when their participants know little about it except for fear perpetuated by media portrayals of senseless violence. We analyze ethnographic accounts of contemporary groups engaged in collective action, ranging from small informal groups in Japan’s invisible civil society; groups trying to mobilize laborers who fall outside Japan’s traditional enterprise unions; and groups reviving and revitalizing older movement networks to deal with new threats; to new right-wing challengers and their counter-movements; and those making innovative use of cultural resources. They all seek alternatives to earlier social movements that engaged in political violence, by creating very different organizational structures and relations to ideology, relying on social media for communication, and developing new forms of collective action. They foreground cultural and expressive repertoires, and seek to establish the movement as a place of personal and social belonging. As was true of the New Left social movements in the mid-20th century, these new groups are closely attuned to movement developments around the world, even as they craft their responses to specific historical conditions in Japan.

The 3.11 disasters forced upon anthropologists in Japan a series of questions about our own relevance and the relevance of our discipline to the world around us: how can we contribute to both an amelioration and an understanding of the pain suffered by so many so close to home? Will this contribution be "anthropological" and if so, in what way? This research note outlines the efforts of our project, Voices from Tohoku, to address these problems through direct action in the form of volunteer work and through the creation of a data base of oral narratives collected on video from different communities all over the affected region - the two primary components of a "public anthropology" as we see them. The resulting product is called "The Archive of Hope" (tohokukaranokoe.org).

Radiation as a sort of contagion is doing a number of things here in Japan?some old and familiar; others quite new. Ritual pollution is well-known here in Japan, pointing back to a time of seriated spaces and disciplinary boundaries (of insides and outsides in uchi/soto, of fronts and backs in omote and ura), where govermentality and subjectification were both coherent and effective processes; to a time when Mary Douglas and Takeo Doi could show us how transgression across these boundaries was dangerous and dirty, and thus to be avoided; back to a time when paranoid states sought to manage populations and extract surplus through such boundedness; where liminality was stigmatized and paradigms were stable enough to allow us to obscure the contradictions between capital and politics.