Anti-nuclear Protest in Post-Fukushima Tokyo

Power Struggles

Alexander James Brown, Alexander Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351349499
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the politics of anti-nuclear activism in Tokyo after the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. Analyzing the protests in the context of a longer history of citizen activism in Tokyo, it also situates the movement within the framework of a global struggle for democracy, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.

By examining the anti-nuclear movement at both urban and transnational scales, the book also reveals the complex geography of today's globally connected social movements. It emphasizes the contestation of urban space by anti-nuclear activists in Tokyo and the weaving together of urban and cyber space in their praxis. By focusing on the cultural life of the movement—from its characteristic demonstration style to its blogs, zines and pamphlets—this book communicates activists' voices in their own words. Based on excellent ethnographic research, it concludes that the anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo after the Fukushima disaster have redefined social movement politics for a new era.

Providing an analysis of a unique period in Japan's contemporary urban history from the perspective of eyewitness observations, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Sociology and Japanese Studies in general.

1 Fukushima

The compound earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 2011 occurred in the midst of a broader political, economic and social crisis that can be traced to the early 1990s. At that time, the collapse of an asset-price bubble in stock and real estate markets triggered a period of economic stagnation from which the Japanese economy has never fully recovered. The ten years of stagnant economic growth that followed the collapse of the bubble have come to be known as the ‘lost decade’. More recently, as the Japanese economy remained mired in debt, deflation and stagnant growth, commentators began to speak of a ‘lost twenty years’.

This economic crisis coincided with a growing political crisis. Since 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) dominated the National Diet, Japan’s bicameral legislature, in a structure of power that became known as ‘the 1955 system’.¹ In the 1990s, however, this began to change. In April 1989, LDP Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru (1924–2000) resigned following the introduction of an unpopular consumption tax. His successor, Uno Sōsuke (1922–1998), only lasted a few months in office. The LDP lost more than half of the seats open to contest in the fixed-term upper house elections held in July that year. The party managed to maintain a majority because only half the seats in the House of Councillors are vacated in fixed-term elections, but it retained only three of the 24 seats it had previously held in single-member constituencies. Following this abysmal performance, Uno resigned to be replaced by the third prime minister that year, Kaifu Toshiki. It was a sign of things to come.² In 1993 the LDP lost control of the lower house, signalling the beginning of the end for the 1955 system. For the first time in nearly 50 years a non-LDP coalition government was elected under the leadership of Hosokawa Morihiro. Long periods of instability have been a feature of the political system ever since. Japan had a total of nine prime ministers between 1989 and 2001 as the LDP entered into a number of coalitions with other parties. Tomiko Yoda describes how

the recession of Japan in the 1990s acquired an epochal status as it became increasingly identified with the breakdown of the 1955 system: the growth machine supported by the so-called ‘iron triangle’ (industry, bureaucracy, and single-party politics) as well as by the ethos of harmony and formidable work ethics of a homogeneous and highly disciplined population.³

Arthur Stockwin observes that ‘the political economy of Japan has experienced more extensive change since the early 1990s than at any period since the American-led Occupation between 1945 and 1952’.⁴

Chalmers Johnson’s description of Japan as a ‘capitalist developmental state’ captures the way elite networks spanning both government and private sectors favoured an industrial policy based on collaboration rather than competition.⁵ Japan’s developmentalist policies produced high economic growth and delivered rising living standards for the majority of people during the post-war period. It was these policies of harnessing technical knowledge to capital in the pursuit of economic growth that enabled the development of Japan’s nuclear industry. As Low, Nakayama and Yoshioka observe, the nuclear power industry exemplifies how ‘Japan’s rapid post-war development was, more than anything else, due to the close collaboration between organised business, government and the scientific establishment’.⁶

Many people blame not only the earthquake and tsunami but also the nuclear industry’s entanglement in the structures of the iron triangle for causing the major nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011. Anti-nuclear activists use the term ‘nuclear village’ to describe the network of relationships and interests that unites the utilities that operate nuclear power plants with nuclear regulators, local and national politicians, the bureaucracy and scientists and academics supportive of nuclear power.⁷ A 2012 report by the National Diet’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found that the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was ‘the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties’.⁸ This finding confirmed the suspicions of anti-nuclear activists that the collusive nature of the relationship between members of the nuclear village had undermined safety standards.

While a natural disaster was the proximate cause of the accident at Fukushima, it could not have happened but for a series of political decisions that allowed the nuclear power plant to be built in this seismically unstable location in the first place. Right up until his resignation in June 2012, Katsumata Tsunehiko, who was president of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) at the time of the 3.11 disaster, maintained that the size of the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the accident at Fukushima Daiichi was ‘beyond expectations’ (sōteigai).⁹ Physicist Tsuchida Atsushi contends, however, that

in a country subject to frequent earthquakes like Japan, had the possibility of such events been considered from the start, nuclear reactors would have cost too much to build and they never would have been built. TEPCO therefore made vague assumptions and claimed to be building reactors ‘safely’.¹⁰

Economist Ogura Toshimaru, too, suggests that far from simply being the result of a natural disaster, ‘without the greedy desire for energy necessitated by a faith in economic growth and productivity there would never have been such a disaster’.¹¹ The disaster, as feminist scholar Ulrike Wöhr points out, ‘not only prompted concerns about nuclear power technologies but sparked new enquiries into the political and societal circumstances of Japan’s adopting and promoting this extremely risky business’.¹² Miyadai Shinji, a sociologist and anti-nuclear activist, argues that the real challenge for the anti-nuclear movement is not ‘what to do with nuclear power’, but ‘what to do with a society that cannot stop nuclear power’.¹³ For anti-capitalists like Waizumi Akira, the disaster has the potential to provoke revolutionary change in Japan’s political-economic structure by exposing the existing contradictions of Japanese capitalism: ‘A nuclear power plant has exploded. The deception and madness of late capitalism rises to the surface and revolution begins.’¹⁴

In this chapter, I discuss the background to the case studies of anti-nuclear politics that appear in subsequent chapters. I begin by discussing the perspective of autonomy, a theoretical perspective to which I will refer throughout this book. By applying this perspective to the contested history of nuclear power in Japan, I show how the construction of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant reflected the politics of the capitalist developmental state and how the decline of developmentalism has led to the fragmentation of the nuclear village. Finally, I discuss how the shift to a post-industrial economy has produced the ever more precarious political, social and economic environment to which freeter activists have responded both before and after 3.11.

The perspective of autonomy

Political philosopher Antonio Negri made his first visit to Japan in April 2013 to participate in the symposium ‘Multitude and Power: The World After 3.11’. He spoke alongside leading Japanese scholars including feminist Ueno Chizuko, political theorist Kang Sang-jung, philosopher Ichida Yoshihiko and cultural sociologists Mōri Yoshitaka and Itō Mamoru. As Ueno explained in her address to the symposium, the 2013 visit was only made possible after extensive negotiations between scholars and government officials.¹⁵ In 2008, Japanese intellectuals had tried to organize a similar symposium in the lead-up to the Group of Eight (G8) summit, which was to be held in Japan that year. The visit had to be cancelled at the last minute when organizers failed to obtain an entry visa for Negri.¹⁶ Despite having received assurances that Negri would not require any special visa to visit Japan, three days prior to the symposium organizers were told that he would be required to apply for a visa due to his past convictions associated with the assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists in 1978. Negri was arrested at that time, alongside 1500 leading intellectuals and activists as part of a crackdown against political dissidents in Italy. No connection was ever established between Negri and the Red Brigades. Nevertheless, he spent 17 years in prison for ‘crimes of association’, and many years in exile in France.

Antonio Negri is probably the best-known intellectual within the political tradition Dave Eden terms the ‘perspective of autonomy’.¹⁷ The ‘autonomist’ strand of Marxist thought has two common principles. The first is the so-called ‘Copernican inversion’, first proposed by philosopher Mario Tronti in 1964.¹⁸ In his critique of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the large Italian Communist and Socialist parties, he argued that

we too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.¹⁹

The Copernican inversion challenged revolutionary intellectuals to shift the focus of their analysis from the mechanics of capitalist power to labour’s resistance. This inversion of perspective led the autonomists to develop the idea that labour’s resistance to the imposition of the wage-form is the chief motor that drives the development of the capitalist mode of production.²⁰ Marxists have always been concerned with the relationship between the technical and political organization of work. Marx’s detailed analysis of the organization of work in British factories during the Industrial Revolution, for example, formed the basis for the radical critique contained in his magnum opus, Capital. The autonomists returned to this method, engaging in a theoretical and practical critique of the organization of production in contemporary class societies. In the 1950s, the Italian Communist Party regarded economic growth and technological development as neutral forces. If they could be brought under the political control of the working class, then they could be made to serve its interests. This perspective was widely shared by twentieth-century Marxists. Even Lenin argued that the revolution in Russia could retain bourgeois technical experts and implement modern management practices such as Taylorism without compromising the working-class nature of the revolution.²¹ The autonomists argued against this position, maintaining that changes in the organization of production and the introduction of new technologies were political strategies, motivated by the need of capitalist managers to control the ongoing revolt by workers against the conditions of their labour.

In the 1960s and 1970s Negri’s work focused on the increasingly important role of technology in the manufacturing industry of northern Italy. The autonomists came to recognize that not only the labour of the ‘productive’ workers in the factories but also that of students, the unemployed and housewives contributed to the accumulation of capital. Antonio Negri, who was a leading theorist in the autonomia movement, argued that the process of production now extended beyond the factory walls to encompass processes of consumption, education, housework and even local community life that could become direct or indirect sources of profit. In this ‘social factory’ the ‘social worker’ could encompass any of the diverse positions of productive and reproductive labour. From this theoretical current arose movements demanding ‘wages for students’, ‘wages for the unemployed’ and ‘wages for housework’.²² As Itō Kimio explains, it was for this reason that the revolutionary movement in Italy in the 1970s, including its autonomia current, was able to think beyond the industrial working class, which had previously been the principal agent of revolution in socialist theory, and embrace the agency and power of youth, the unemployed, housewives and foreign workers.²³

While Negri was an important figure in the Italian far left in the 1960s and 1970s and was widely recognized in French intellectual life during his exile there in the 1980s and 1990s, it was not until the publication of his collaborative work Empire with American literary theorist Michael Hardt in 2000 that his thought became wid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Japanese names and terminology
• Introduction
• 1. Fukushima
• 2. Genpatsu Yamero!
• 3. Tokyo Nantoka
• 4. Hiroba
• 5. Yaho village
• 6. The Kantei Mae
• 7. Beyond Fukushima
• Bibliography
• Index