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.

This is a collection of original articles on diverse vulnerable populations in Japan in the wake of the new coronavirus pandemic. The effects of COVID-19 are felt differently, with some among us at much greater risk of infection due to preexisting health and welfare conditions. For others, perhaps more than the risk of infection, it is the precautions taken to mitigate the risk for the whole population, such as lockdowns and business closures, that have pulled away the already fragile safety net of state and civil society organization (CSO) support, leading to increased marginalization and social exclusion. The goal of this set of papers is to document the conditions of those that have been most directly affected by the virus and to provide background on the conditions that made them vulnerable in the first place, notably chronic conditions that are brought into more obvious relief in light of emergency measures. Each of the authors had a pre-established relationship with those affected populations and employed various ethnographic approaches, some face to face, others digitally via Zoom interviews and SNS exchanges. In this moment of what appears to be relative calm, we hope that our collection, quickly compiled in an attempt to capture the ever-changing situation, will give some insight into how those most vulnerable are faring in this time of crisis and provide information that will allow us to prepare better before the next wave comes our way.

In the context of the global increase in displaced people, spiking to nearly 80 million in these corona times, Japan has also seen a dramatic increase in the number of applications for refugee asylum since 2010. Despite increasing numbers of applications, Japan has not increased its refugee recognition rate. Unable to return home to sure persecution when rejected, many refugees end up in Japanese detention centers once their visa expires. Like jails, hospitals and detention centers everywhere, detention centers in Japan are crowded and dangerous and unable to protect the detainees inside. Japan has been slower than many other countries to take precautions, including temporary release. This paper outlines some of the policy shifts that have led to this dangerous situation, the conditions of anxiety inside the detention centers themselves in Tokyo and Ibaraki and the problematic situation of "provisional release" of some detainees into a corona-infested Japan without any safety net or protection. We hope to not only point out the immediate danger of infection under COVID-19, but also the larger dynamic of using detention to manage a refugee asylum system that has proven to be ineffective and unjust.

Of the many populations at risk in these corona times, the homeless are among the most vulnerable. Without shelter, having to do without personal protective equipment, often without health insurance and unable to limit contact with strangers, the risk of infection is very high. The emergency measures taken by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government included the closure of many public spaces, indoors and out, depriving them of access to the few spaces of survival. This ethnographic article outlines how an older group of homeless men responded to the risk of infection and inconsistent government efforts to address this issue. Finally, we examine the response of civil society organizations to compensate for weakness of the government's response.

The triple disasters of 11 March 2011 in northeastern Japan have exacerbated existing vulnerabilities and created new ones all over the Tohoku region. In Fukushima, the fear of radiation has been compounded by the perception of the state's failure to provide timely and relevant information to local residents. This lack of information has particularly affected one of the most vulnerable segments of the population, young mothers with children, forcing many to make impossible choices between supporting the economic rebuilding of their communities and protecting their children from the threat of radiation. Based on detailed ethnography and interviews conducted from just weeks after the disaster, this article discusses the ongoing struggle of women to find a place of safety and a voice of protest in the face of local and national efforts to silence their fears.

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).

This paper charts chronologically the different phases since 3.11, showing how social media became involved in each. During the first crucial moments after disaster, individuals texting and tweeting information, and uploading videos, generated huge amounts of first-hand information, from the size and epicenter of the quake to the arrival of the oncoming waters; the identification of dangerous and safe places, routes and contacts; those lost and alive, and those looking for them. What we see here is not only the nearly unprecedented act of appealing to strangers for help, but also the revealing of emotions that rarely if ever is shared in public discourse. Asking for help from strangers is a significant act of trust, maybe even more unusual in Japan than in other societies; offering help is a way to return that trust. In this way, one of the issues that this paper points to is the way that social media as deployed during and after 3.11 has made us rethink the civic sphere in Japan.

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.

Class formation, and its reproduction, is not only an economic fact, but a social and cultural fact as well. To the extent that cultural forms guide the participation and secure the consent of individuals, the perceived legitimacy and the hegemonic force of class formation depends upon the cultural forms deployed in the representation of these mechanisms and their results. Class analysis thus must include not only the charting of stratification (or the articulation of class structure), but also must identify the differential distribution of these cultural forms and the ways in which they are deployed, manipulated and transformed by institutions and individuals at different places in social space in ways that explain and obscure, legitimate and naturalize, these structural differences.