Against Japanism

Kota joins an online forum “Nikkei Organizing: A Community Discussion on Organizing Strategy and Developing Revolutionary Movements” held via Zoom on November 13, 2022.The event was hosted and moderated by Miya Sommers from Nikkei Resisters as part of her Master’s thesis project, and joined by representatives of two other US-based organizations: Zen and Henry from J-Town Action and Solidarity, and Anne and Cori from Nikkei Uprising. The event was also inspired by James Boggs' 1974 speech "Think Dialectically, Not Biologically," as well as Kwame Ture's distinction between organizing and mobilizing.Other topics include: Japaneseness and cultural nationalism in Nikkei communities, how Japanese imperialism affects Nikkei identity, opposing anti-Blackness and the Prison Industrial Complex, Maoism and the Mass Line,  and the role of the petty bourgeoisie in gentrification.On the Japanese state's global reach and settler nationalism, see Jane Komori's work here. Shout out to Canada-Philippine Solidarity Organization, Japanese Canadians for Social Justice, and Young Japanese Canadians of Toronto. Intro:  Cielo by Huma-Huma Outro:  Organizing Steadily by Power StruggleSupport the show

Alisa and Hye Sung from Deprogramming Imperialism join the show to discuss Abe's legacy and his ties to the Unification Church, and review everything that's transpired since his assassination by Yamagami Tetsuya in July before the unpopular state funeral this Tuesday on September 27, 2022. We discuss the UC's activities in Japan, Korea, Philippines, Nepal, Soviet Union, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Kenya, as well as its syncretic religious fascism, fetishization of the bourgeois family, and reactionary gender practice against women and LGBTQ+ people. Many thanks to my Patrons for supporting this project! Special thanks to the Patrons in the  Eighth Route Army tier and above: Mugni, Waver, Kristin Lin, Joe Ma, Drew Harrison, Shaun S, Aidan, and Andy. (Re)sources: Faith and Capital - Ex-Moonie Anti-Imperialism: Unification Church and the Assassination of Shinzo AbeNodutbol for Korean Community DevelopmentKoreaarchive The Peace ReportThe Abe Legacy: A Compendium Why people are opposed to Abe's state funeral Intro: Cicelo by Huma-HumaOutro: Bathing Abe by Moment BastetSupport the show

Alex Finn Marcartney joins Kota to talk about the history of the anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan and the legacy of the Red Army Faction or the Sekigun-ha, the mother organization of the Japanese Red Army and the United Red Army we previously discussed in this podcast. In this episode, we discuss...1) Japan’s role in the Vietnam War and the significance of Okinawa as a “keystone” for the US-Japanese imperialism in the Cold War as 2022 marks the 50th year since its so-called “reversion” from the US to Japan. 2) Some of the watershed events in the Japanese Long Sixties such as a student protest at Haneda Airport to prevent Prime Minister Sato Eisaku’s visit to the US, and how these events radicalized the anti-Vietnam War movement from a citizens-led pacifist anti-war movement to a students and workers-led militant anti-imperialist movement, although the distinction between these two forms of struggle was not clear cut. 3) The meaning of and the discourse surrounding the Yodogo Incident where a group of young militants from the Sekigun-ha hijacked a plane and went to the DPRK, and ask whether the event was simply a farce or a productive lesson for revolutionary movements. 4) The emergence of the Sekigun-ha within the context of the broader mass opposition to the Vietnam War. We specifically highlight its theories of the World Proletarian Revolutionary War and the International Base Area, as well as how it conceptualized political violence. Throughout our discussion of the Yodogo Group and the Sekigun-ha, we highlight the importance of understanding the theory and ideology of these revolutionary organizations as they are, before criticizing and passing judgment on them, while the mainstream media do just that by pathologizing them along gendered and racialized lines. 5) How the Sekigun-ha in Japan and the Red Army Faction in West Germany influenced each other, and how these two societies’ relationship with US imperialism through NATO and ANPO aided the parallel existence and solidarity between these two organizations.6) What the history of the Red Armies and the militant Global Sixties tell us about the National Question and internationalism.Intro: Cielo by Huma-Huma Outro:  Enter the Mirror by Les Rallizes DénudésDonate on GoGetFunding.  Support the show

David McNeil joins Kota to discuss militant labour unionism and state repression in the Kansai region of southwestern Japan. We specifically discuss the struggle of truck drivers who work for small-to-medium ready-mix concrete companies, and whose job is to take dry concrete, water it, and deliver the wet concrete to various construction sites managed by large construction companies. They are organized by the Kansai Regional Ready-Mix Branch known as Kan’nama Shibu or Kan’nama, which is part of a larger national union called All-Japan Construction and Transport Solidarity Union known as Rentai. Unlike the rest of labour unions in Japan, the Kan’nama uses the method of industrial unionism to organize all workers in the same industry into the same union, as opposed to company unionism that only organizes workers in the same company and is hence more pliant towards the bosses. Since its establishment in 1965, members of Kan’nama have struggled militantly to counter the super-exploitation of their labour power and improve their substandard working conditions. The Kan’nama has also pursued a strategy of class alliance with their small-to-medium employers against large construction companies by organizing them into a cooperative to minimize competition and prevent them from beating the price of wet concrete down, which would negatively affect the workers’ wages, as well as the quality of the concrete and the safety of buildings in which it is used to built.However, the Kan’nama’s militant industrial unionism and attempt at unifying their employers against large construction companies have met intense police repression and mass arrest of its members. Since 2018, 81 members of the union have been arrested on legally dubious charges including the union’s co-founder Take Kenichi who was detained for 641 days without trial. The union’s strategic alliance with the bosses also seems to have backfired as they hired yakuzas and even neo-Nazis as their mercenaries to attack the union and terrorize its members. David argues that a repression of this scale could not have happened spontaneously without a centralized coordination from Tokyo. We discuss who really made the decision to crack down on the Kan’nama and the class interests behind it. We also discuss why mainstream journalists have largely turned a blind eye to this struggle and what it tells us about the state of journalism in Japan.We conclude our discussion by talking about how the union has fought back against the repression and the ways in which we can support them, as well as what this struggle tells us about contemporary Japanese society and the world at large. Intro: Cielo by Huma-Huma Outro: The Internationale by Ōe Tetsuhiro  Donate on GoGetFunding. Support the show

Setsu Shigematsu joins Kota to discuss the history of revolutionary feminism and women's liberation movement in Japan.We first discuss the history of feminists in pre-WWII Japan such as Kanno Sugako & Kaneko Fumiko who critiqued the family system and its link with the emperor system, as well as the reality of Japanese imperialism today, its oppression of non-Japanese women and its relation with US imperialism.  We then discuss the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s known as Ūman Ribu. Unlike the previous feminist movements in Japan that referred to women as fujin as in “lady” or more neutrally as josei, the Ribu used the term onna which is less bourgeois than fujin and more erotic than josei. The term onna thus signified the movement’s opposition to the respectability politics of bourgeois feminism and its particular position on sexual liberation that centred women’s sexuality, contrary to how men in the late 60s New Left understood “free sex” as free access to women’s bodies.The term also represented the movement’s militant stance against the family system that constrained women’s sexuality and reproductive freedom. Like the prewar radical feminists, the Ribu saw the connection between the hetero-patriarchal institution of family and Japanese imperialism, between the marriage system represented in the idealized figure of Japanese women as Good Wife, Wise Mother and the colonial prostitution such as the “comfort women” system during WWII.  In order to put their politics into practice, the Ribu established communes across Japan including in Hokkaido and Okinawa to live and raise children together. However, while they may have been successful in challenging patriarchy and hetero-normativity, their avowed anti-imperialist politics did not always align with their action that reproduced the colonial dynamic with the local women they were working with.We discuss the Ribu’s perspective on violence and solidarity with women who kill their children. While the movement did not advocate for violence against children, it challenged the dominant narrative that placed the blame on the women instead of the patriarchal society that drove them to commit such crimes. For them, these events showed the necessity of reproductive justice and society where women want to raise children. They were also in solidarity with women involved in the United Red Army which is known for the Asama Sanso Incident and killing its own members in 1972. While the Ribu did not condone the URA's killings, they were sympathetic towards its women members such as Toyama Mieko who was punished for her feminine outlook and Nagata Hiroko who was demonized by the media for her leadership role in the killings disproportionately to her male comrades. The Ribu's critical support for these women drew the ire of the Japanese state and became the target of police surveillance and repression.Finally, we situate the legacy of Fusako Shigenobu in the history of revolutionary feminism in Japan. Shigenobu is a former leader of the Japanese Red Army and political prisoner scheduled to be released from prison on May 28, 2022. To conclude this episode, we discuss how her internationalist commitment to the Palestinian people challenged both Japanese imperialism and the patriarchal family system it’s founded on, as well as what her experience tells us about the role of women in political violence and armed struggle.Intro: Cielo by Huma-Huma Outro: Leila's Ballad by Panta & Takumi Kikuchi Donate on GoGetFunding.Support the show

Tatiana Linkhoeva joins the show to discuss her book Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism. Some members of the Japanese ruling class reacted to the Russian Revolution with skepticism and hostility, culminating in the Siberian Expedition. Others saw opportunities in recognizing the Soviet Union and pursuing diplomatic relations, partly influenced by the popularity of Russian literature at the time and by the notion that the revolution will modernize Russia. However, as the communist movement in Japan gained traction and anti-colonial struggles threatened the stability of Japan imperialism, the anti-Soviet faction in the military and the bureaucracy won out, paving the way for the rise of fascism. We discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution inspired Japanese anarchists such as Osugi Sakae who were some of the first Japanese radicals to establish contacts with the Comintern, and part of the global network of Japanese revolutionaries building solidarity with other Asian revolutionaries and smuggling radical literature into Japan. They saw the revolution as an anarchist revolution and Lenin as an anarchist who wanted to abolish the state. However, as the Bolsheviks consolidated state power and used violence to suppress the anarchists, their views of the revolution soured, culminating in the Anarchist-Bolshevik Debate. They became increasingly hostile towards organizational centralization and resorted to individuals acts of terrorism. Osugi even supported the Siberian Expedition. Some drifted further right, while others converted to communism and continued to support the revolution. We discuss the legacy of Yamakawa Hitoshi who co-authored the JCP’s founding document and later formed the Rono Faction of Japanese Marxists. While the previous scholarship saw the Bukharin Thesis of 1922 as its first document, Dr. Linkhoeva builds on the work of Kato Tetsuro who discovered that this thesis, which famously called for the abolition of the emperor system, was actually written in 1924 and did not arrive in Japan until 1928. This makes the 1922 program the first document and betrays the image of the early JCP as an outsider organization controlled by the Comintern, as well as the claim that the JCP had been anti-emperor since its inception. However, her closer look at Yamakawa’s thought reveals that he adapted the Eurocentric and developmentalist view of world history in which Japan was seen as advanced as western European countries and hence has more revolutionary potential than its colonies, evinced in the JCP's contradictory claim that it supports the Korean struggle for independence, but Koreans are too nationalist and thus ideologically backward. This Japan-centric position significantly diverged from the Comitern’s later critique of Japan as an imperialist country, as well as the defense of the Soviet Union and support for the Chinese Revolution as its strategic priorities. This view was adopted by the Koza-ha Marxists loyal to the Comintern and as such Yamakawa did not participate in the Koza-ha-led re-constitution of the JCP in 1925. Following the re-constitution, the party actively engaged in solidarity work with the Chinese Revolution through the Anti-Imperialist League. However, this work was made difficult by the Peace Preservation Law of 1928 and nearly impossible after the Manchurian Incident of 1931.  We conclude the interview by discussing the lessons of this history for the left today and the importance of international solidarity. Intro: Cielo by Huma-Huma Outro: Parabola Divanorium by Paraj Bhatt Donate on GoGetFunding. Support the show

In this preview of a patron-exclusive episode, Ken Kawashima discusses intermediary exploitation (中間搾取, chūkan sakushu) as a form of capitalist exploitation that indirectly exploits the labour power of workers through various intermediaries such as sub-contractors, labour brokers, and temp agencies who pinch a portion of the workers' wage as fees for finding work, providing housing, tools, and other "services."  This form of exploitation has served as a control mechanism to discipline a mass of unemployed or semi-employed workers whom Marx referred to as a relative surplus population or the reserve army of labour such as the Korean peasants in the interwar period who migrated to Japan in search of wage labour. Since these migrants were rarely able to find long-term employment in factories with Japanese workers, they were funneled into the construction industry through the day labour market, and were forced to rely on these intermediaries to find work. The existence of surplus populations has become a chronic feature of capitalism in the stage of imperialism afflicted by permanent crisis, particularly acute in colonized and semi-colonized countries in the Global South. This points to the necessity to re-think the concept of the proletariat from the position of having to sell their labour power, and include workers outside of the factory system as part of the proletariat.Listen to the full episode by subscribing to the Kanikōsen tier or above. Donate to Against Japanism Research Fund. Support the show

Kota is joined by Roger Raymundo of Migrante Japan, a regional chapter of Migrante International, a global alliance of grassroots migrant organizations of overseas Filipinos and their families.We begin our conversation with Roger’s own story of migration from the Philippines to Japan, and how the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during WWII affected his life, as well as the semi-colonization and semi-feudalization of the Philippines by imperialist countries such as Japan as the root cause of poverty and the subsequent mass migration. We then discuss the specific history of Filipino migration to Japan starting in the 1960s with the Marcos dictatorship and the creation of the Labour Export Policy which institutionalized the mass migration of Filipino workers as OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) to Japan. Many of these workers were women funneled into precarious employment in the red-light district as “entertainers,” as dancers, singers, hostesses, and sex workers often referred to as "Japayuki-san” after “Karayuki-san” referring to Japanese girls and women from poor agrarian communities trafficked abroad to serve as sex workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.We discuss the amendment to Japan’s Nationality Act in 2009 which allowed the children of Filipina migrant workers and Japanese men to claim Japanese citizenship. This was a victory for these families, as well as the Filipino and Japanese human rights organizations which fought on their behalf, and led to the proliferation of intermediary organizations which assist them in obtaining Japanese citizenship and family-related long term visas. However, while these organizations are often registered as non-profits or foundations, some of them act as for-profit labour brokers recruiting them as workers and matching them with their prospective employers in Japan. Moreover, since these recruitment agencies are not properly regulated by authorities in Japan or the Philippines, this has created a loophole in which the recruiters and their local managers act as the agents of intermediary exploitation by charging these migrants exorbitant fees and often deducting them from their salaries, causing them to accumulate debt and forcing these single mothers into poverty, as well as other instances of abuse.We discuss how Japan’s strict and exclusionary immigration policies criminalize migrants through the cases of two women: Loida Quindoy, a Flipina migrant who was deported after 30 years in Japan, as well as Pat (or Pato-chan), a trans Filipina who was subjected to transphobic harassment and various human rights violations by the Nyukan. We conclude the interview by discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic affected Filipino migrants in Japan, and the solutions to semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism in the Philippines, as well as the current campaigns and initiatives that Migrate Japan is working on.Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-HumaOutro Music: Anong Kleseng Bayani Donate to GoGetFunding.Support the show

Kota is joined by Ken Kawashima, author of The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan and translator of Theory of Crisis by Japanese Marxist economist Uno Kōzō. We begin the interview by discussing Uno’s methodology in analyzing capitalism called Sandankairon, or three-steps theory. The first step involves elucidating the fundamental principles of capitalism. The second step involves tracing the historical development of capitalism in stages. The third step is the conjectural analysis of capitalism in the present. Through the analysis of fundamental principles, Uno argued that the crisis under capitalism is not an accident, but necessarily built into its cyclical movement through three phases: prosperity, crisis, and depression. Unlike other Marxist theories of crisis which identified its cause in the spheres of production or circulation, Uno argues that the crisis originates in the intersection of production and circulation: the commodification of labour power. Since labour power is the only commodity that can produce value, as much as the workers are reliant on wage for their subsistence, capitalism is equally reliant on the continuous commodification of their labor power for its survival. However, capitalism’s drive toward infinite growth meets its own barrier as the supply of labour power of human beings cannot be increased at will to meet the demands of expanding production. As a result, capitalist production comes to a stand-still. Uno therefore calls the commodification of labour power the fundamental contradiction of capitalism or its Archille’s Heel.Since capitalism is unable to readily produce human beings as things, it creates what Marx called relative surplus populations, a mass of unemployed workers considered surplus or excessive in relation to capitalist production, whom it can bring back into production once the cycle re-enters the phase of prosperity and capitalism resumes its expansion...in theory. However, while this repetition indicates the inevitability of crisis under capitalism, the ways in which the crisis happens changed with the development of capitalism from liberalism to imperialism. Under imperialism, capitalism no longer follows the clearly demarcated phases, but stagnates in the chronic state of depression and relies on the pool of chronically unemployed surplus populations, often located in (semi-)colonized countries.In the second half of this interview, we apply Uno’s Theory of Crisis to the historical stage of imperialism and the concrete struggle of Korean workers in the interwar period, who jumped out of the flying pan of agrarian poverty in the Korean countryside into the fire of post-WWI industrial recession and the Great Depression. We discuss the book’s title “Proletarian Gamble," how the struggle of Korean workers was intertwined with their struggle as tenants, how the rise in unemployment during the post-war recession and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as well as the Korean Independence Movement in 1919 led to the reorganization of policing in the Japanese Empire. We conclude our interview by discussing how the struggle of Korean workers continued during and after WWII, and the struggle of migrants in Japan today and what this history tells us about capitalism and the necessity of communism.Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-HumaOutro Music: Flying Pan by Sugar Brown  Donate to GoGetFunding. Support the show

Kota sits down with Max Ward to discuss his book about the Japanese state’s effort to suppress revolutionary movements and ideologically convert their participants through the Peace Preservation Law in the 1920s & 30s. We begin our interview by discussing the elusive concept of “Kokutai” (national polity or national essence) through a metaphor of Ghost in the Machine, the ideology of imperial sovereignty that animated the Japanese state and its application of the PPL.  While the law was intended to criminalize anybody who sought to “alter the kokutai,” because of the term’s ambiguity,  the legislators and state officials had to interpret it on a case by case basis. The previous scholars have interpreted this ambiguity as a problem that should not have been brought into the legal rationality of the law.  However, Dr. Ward argues that it was this very ambiguity that constituted the logic of imperial sovereignty and imperial ideology which stipulated that Japan shall be governed by “a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.” We then trace the change in the applications of this law from outright suppression of anarchists, communists, and anti-colonial activists to their “rehabilitation” and ideological conversion, known as "Tenkō" (literally "falling over" or "changing direction") where tens of thousands of activists renounced revolutionary politics and declared their support for Japanese imperialism and fascism as loyal imperial subjects, while reinforcing the image of the imperial sovereign’s supposed benevolence towards its wayward subjects.  He challenges the claim that this seemingly benign use of ideology to rehabilitate political criminals suggests a “janus faced” character of the prewar criminal justice system. Rather, it shows that power operates through both coercion and manufacturing of consent, as many converts supposedly chose to convert on their own volition through guidance and assistance by community groups like the Imperial Renovation Society which acted as what Louis Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatuses. By citing a similar program used against a group of Somali American men in the mid-2010's, he argues that how the PPL was applied is by no means unique to Japan, but universal in how power operates through both repression and ideology. We discuss how the notion of “Japanese Spirit” and the supposed uniqueness of Japanese culture were mobilized in the mass conversation of JCP activists.  We ask whether the party grappled sufficiently with the national question, as shown in the conversion of its leaders Sano Manabu & Nabeyama Sadachika into “socialism in one country,” an appropriation of Stalin’s argument for defence of the Soviet Union into a type of national socialism, as well as how some historians reproduced this discourse.  We discuss how the law was applied in the colonies, what its history tells us about the rise of fascism in Japan and its relationship with liberalism, and how the Japanese state sought to popularize tenkō as part of the mass mobilization during WWII We conclude our interview by discussing topics such as how the legacy of thought policing influenced the development of police power in post-WWII Japan, the representation of tenkō in Endo Shusaku’s novel Silence and its film adaptation by Martin Scorsese, the similarity between tenkō and the rightward drift by former leftists today as seen in the online discourse about “red patriotism,” and how the emperor system works in contemporary Japan. Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-HumaOutro Music: Parabola Divanorium by Paraj Bhatt Donate on GoGetFunding.Support the show