Against Japanism

This episode contains spoilers of the Attack on Titan series.

Kazuma Hashimoto returns to the show to discuss Attack on Titan, a popular manga and anime series created by Hajime Isayama.

This is the first installment of a mini-series on art and politics, where we will critically analyze the role of art in promoting Japanese imperialism and how we can revolutionize art in service of the people.

Kazuma is a media critic, translator, and journalist. He authored many articles including “Attack on Titan Couldn’t Escape Controversy in the End: Looking at the Legacy the Manga Leaves Behind” published by Polygon in 2021.

The Attack on Titan franchise received critical attention for tweets posted by a now private Twitter account that allegedly belonged to Isayama, which glorified Japanese imperialism and the colonization of Korea prior to the end of WWII. While Isayama’s association with the Twitter account is not empirically proven, he has expressed admiration for historical figures and events in his blog that indicates his conservative political leanings.

In this episode, however, rather than focusing on Isayama’s own political views, we focus primarily on the form and content of the franchise itself, and how they function as a conveyor of bourgeois ideology. 

We talk about how the post-apocalyptic sci-fi genre reinforces the social anxiety caused by the crisis of capitalism and the role of music in the emotional appeal of the series. We dissect the reactionary narrative of the series, specifically its colonial and pro-war messaging, as well as a pessimistic view of humanity it puts forward. We discuss what it means to consume this content during Japan’s turn to re-militarization and complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and how film and arts can either reproduce the bourgeois ideology or challenge it by appropriating these art forms for the liberation of the working class and oppressed peoples.

We recorded this interview in December 2023 shortly after the conclusion of the anime series, but what this franchise represents and stands for remains relevant to this day and the franchise itself is not going away as the final episode is getting a theatrical release this November.

Intro: Cielo by Huma Huma

Outro: 歴史 history by Danny Jin (The video includes an English translation of the lyrics in the description)

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Maya and Kota sit down with Le Phuong Anh to talk about the struggle of Vietnamese migrant workers and international students in Japan.

Anh is a PhD student at the graduate school of Asia Pacific Studies at Waseda University, whose research interest is in Migration Studies and international student mobility, as well as Vietnamese middle skill migrant workers in Japan. She is the co-author of Against the ‘Japanese Dream’: Vietnamese Student Workers in Japan published in Asian Labour Review in December 2022.

According to Japan’s Ministry of Labour, as of 2023, Vietnamese workers constituted 25% of all migrant workforce in Japan totaling two million, the highest number on record. They constitute 51.8% of a group of migrants working under a visa called the Technical Internship program. Anh specifically highlights the experience of so-called “Technical Interns' ' who are misleadingly categorized as “interns,' ' but in practice are imported and exploited as the source of cheap labour.

We also discuss the plight of Vietnamese international students who are in a relatively less precarious position than the technical interns, but still experience downward class mobility due to indebtedness and having to cover the cost of living and tuition fees for profit driven private language schools. We discuss the intersection between migrant and reproductive justice issues through the case of Le Thi Tuy Lin, a Vietnamese woman and technical intern who was criminalized and acquitted for abandoning her stillborn twins, and other topics as such as the media’s role in enabling anti-migrant, anti-Vietnamese racism, and the root cause of forced labour migration. We conclude our discussion by talking about how migrants and their supporters are fighting back against migrant exploitation and Japan’s unjust migration policies.

UPDATE:

In February, the Japanese government announced it is ending the Technical Internship program and replacing it with a new program whereby workers will be conditionally allowed to switch jobs after two years of their arrival. Under the new program, workers will be allowed to apply for Specified Skill Workers (SSW) Type 1 Visa, which allows workers to stay in Japan for five years, and SSW Type 2  Visa, which allows workers to stay in Japan indefinitely and bring their families. 

This is an important victory and a product of tireless campaigning and mobilizing that migrant rights organizations undertook to bring light to this issue and fight for migrant justice. However, the fight is not over yet and it’s too early to tell if the announced change will actually be codified into law and protect the workers from abuse within the two years they will not be allowed to change their employers. Furthermore, the Japanese government is currently proposing a bill to make it easier to revoke permanent residency of migrants if they fail to pay taxes and social insurance security premiums, or become convicted of a crime for up to one year of imprisonment. This would effectively render permanent residency meaningless.

More importantly, as long as Japan remains capitalist and an imperialist nation complicit in the underdevelopment of colonial and semi-colonial nations through the World Bank, IMF, and the US-led wars as we’re currently witnessing in Palestine, there will always be migrants and refugees coming to Japan, and capitalists seeking super-profit though the exploitation of cheap migrant labour. In other words, unless imperialism as the root cause of forced migration is addressed, there will never be genuine migrant justice in the Global North.

Intro: Cielo by Huma Huma

Outro: ImmiGang II by Moment Joon 

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Kota sits down with J from Politics in Command to discuss "multipolarity," a discourse which sees the existence of multiple superpowers as a positive development from the unipolar world dominated by the United States. 

We ask whether the politics of multipolarity is genuinely anti-imperialist or revisionist, an abandonment of revolutionary principles for reformism and class collaborationism. 

We critically analyze the overlaps between the reactionary ideology of Aleksandr Dugin and pseudo-Marxist theoretical assumptions made by Ben Norton, one of the most vocal advocates of multipolarity, which posit the nation, not the working class, as the subject of anti-imperialism. 

We discuss Norton’s assertion that China is still a socialist country and the assumption that socialism equals the development of productive forces and state ownership of the economy.

We discuss how, beneath the veneer of optimism supposedly heralded by the rise of China and Russia, the discourse of multipolarity is deeply pessimistic, as it tacitly accepts that there are no truly revolutionary alternatives to capitalism.

We conclude our discussion by talking about what a principled anti-revisionism would look like in practice, and what we can learn from revolutionary movements that are continuing to struggle in spite of the intensifying inter-imperialist competition.

Sources:

World military spending reaches all-time high of $2.24 trillion - Al Jazeera (April 24, 2023)

Multipolarism is not Anti-Imperialism! - The Revolutionary Communists, Norway (RK)

The Foundations of Aleksandr Dugin's Geopolitics: Montage
Fascism and Eurasianism as Blowback - Grant Scott Fellows

Fanshen: Class, Women's Liberation, and Crit-Self-Crit - Politics in Command

China: From Commune to Capitalism - Politics in Command ft. Zhun Xu

The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989 - William Hinton

Rethinking Socialism: What is Socialist Transition?  - Deng-Yuan Hsu and Pao-Yu Ching

Intro: Cielo by Huma Huma

Midtro: Mount Tai by Space Baby

Outro: ibeinthecar by Space Baby

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Felix a.k.a. Marxist Disco joins the show to discuss the wave of urban redevelopment happening in Japan right now.

There are more than 200 buildings planned just in the Tokyo area including Japan’s tallest skyscraper on record, despite the chronic recession and stagnant growth rate the country has been experiencing since the 1990s. To make sense of this contradiction, we critically engage with Marxist geographer David Harvey’s work, particularly his theory of "spatial fix," and of the urban as the site of social reproduction and revolutionary class struggle. 

In the first segment of this interview, we discuss the proposed redevelopment of Jingu Gaien as an entry point to the history of capitalist urban development in post-WWII Japan.

A seemingly unlikely alliance of environmentalists, conservative politicians, and urban planners has coalesced in opposition to the project. However, the middle class leadership of the opposition movement has focused primarily on the cutting down of ginkgo trees and the aesthetic of urban redevelopment, rather than a systematic critique of capitalist urbanization as a form of class warfare against poor, working class, and unhoused residents of Tokyo such as shown in the removal of a tent city in Miyashita Park in Shibuya.

In the second segment of this interview, we zoom in on the question of social reproduction and the class character of urban development in postwar Japan through the history of public housing projects known as Danchi. 

We discuss the peasant resistance to the construction of danchis in the 50s, their role in the reproduction of the white colour work force and the gendered division of labour during the 60s & 70s, and the mystification of the middle class as an ideal subject of the Japanese nation, as well as how the demographic change in recent decades has made danchis a symbol of social decay and a target of far right attacks. We rely extensively on journalist Yasuda Koichi’s book “Danchi to Imin (Danchi and Immigrants)” for this segment, as well as other materials sourced by Felix in his research project.

In the third segment, we discuss how the depopulation of the Japanese countryside and the collapse of housing prices there have led to the “I Turn” phenomena of urban-to-rural migration, aided by an idealization of the countryside as the repository of authentic Japaneseness by young middle class Japanese urbanites and Western Japanophiles alike, as well as the effect of imperialism on the changing class composition of the Japanese agriculture.

We conclude our discussion by talking about the limits and the possibilities of anti-capitalist struggles and urban-based social movements in Japan and beyond.

Read the full episode description here.

Intro: Cielo by Huma Huma

Outro: E.N.T by Green Kids

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Alex from the BeruBara Tag Boom joins the show to discuss the history and politics of an all-women musical theater based in Western Japan known as the Takarazuka Revue. 

We discuss the class politics of the Takarazuka Revue, particularly its ties to an Osaka-based private railway corporation called the Hankyu Corporation (now a subsidiary of the Hankyu Hanshin Toho Group), the development of railway infrastructure and the suburbanization of Osaka in the early twentieth century that created the revue’s petty bourgeois or middle class audience base, as well as their children as a pool of future Takarazuka actors.

We discuss the contradiction between the apparent queerness of the Takarazuka Revue and the conservative values it promotes, and the role Takarazua has played and continues to play in the reproduction of Japanese capitalism and imperialism since the revue’s founding in the 1910s, through the rise of fascism in the 1930s and WWII, into the post-war period and the present day, and a correlation between the boom and bust cycle of capitalism on the one hand and the Takarazuka Music School’s enrollment rate and the revue’s overall popularity on the other.

We conclude our discussion by asking whether the Takarazuka Revue is fundamentally a reactionary form of art or a potentially liberatory form of art that can convey revolutionary politics.

Follow Alex on Twitter @NOAHs_Savior

Works Mentioned:

Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue by Leonie Stickland

A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914 by Makiko Yamanashi

On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser

Intro:  Cielo by Huma Huma

Outro:  Youth Doesn't Need Roses by the Beauty Pair

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Kota sits down with Talia and Prez from the Minyan to answer the question: Was pre-WWII Japan fascist?

This is the first installment of a multi-part series on the origins, political economy, and culture of Japanese fascism.

Outro: Warszawianka in Japanese (ワルシャワ労働者の歌）

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Roger Raymundo, a member of Migrante Japan and co-host of Radyo Migrante re-joins the show to discuss the imperialist agenda of the upcoming G7 summit in Hiroshima, how it affects the workers, peasants, and migrants from the Global South, and other related topics such as the US-led militarization of the Asia-Pacific region and Japan's "Official Security Assistance" to the Philippines.

We also discuss the latest amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that would make it easier for immigration officials to deport asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, while continuing to accept a very small number of refugees only when it's warranted by foreign policy to score points against geopolitical rivals.

Anti-G7 protest in Shinjuku, Tokyo on May 18 (in Japanese): http://antiwar2017.blog.jp/archives/39536840.html

Demo against the draconian revision of immigration law in Shibuya, Tokyo on May 20 (in Japanese): https://twitter.com/nodetention87/status/1658542986484133888

International Days of Action Against the G7 (May 18-20, 2023): https://twitter.com/ILPS_Official/status/1657682250320986112

Intro: Cielo by Huma Huma

Outro: "Imperyalismo Ibagsak" (Bring down Imperialism)

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Niki from Buraku Stories joins the show to discuss the history of the struggle of a discriminated outcaste people in Japan known as Burakumin. 

The term “Burakumin” originated in the early twentieth century, “Buraku” meaning “village” or “hamlet,” and “min” meaning people. However, the oppression against the Burakumin people originates from the pre-capitalist status hierarchy consolidated during the Tokugawa or Edo Period between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries known as Shinōkōshō. The shinōkōshō designated the four main classes that consisted of the status hierarchy of this period based on their occupations: Shi refers to warriors,  Nō to farmers,  Kō to craftsmen and artisans, and Shō to the merchant class.

Although this was the official, state-sanctioned view of the class system and did not necessarily reflect the actual class composition of Tokugawa society during this time, it had profound implications for those who fell outside and below these four categories such as the ancestors of the Burakumin people who were called “Eta, Hinin, and Others” as their occupations were considered dirty or spiritually impure by the dominant Shinto & Buddhist influenced ruling class ideology. While many Japanese people today are aware of the derogatory nature of the term “Eta Hinin,” the oppression against the Burakumin people continues to this day despite Japan’s transition from feudalism to capitalism, and its international status as a “democratic” nation.

In this episode, we discuss the history of the development of the Burakimin as an oppressed minority group, the oppression they continue to face today not only from the non-Buraku Japanese people as a whole, but also from the reactionaries online and in real life such as J. Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard law professor who is known for his denial of the comfort women issue, and has also targeted the Burakumin people in his lucrative academic career financed by the Mitsubishi Corporation, one of the biggest capitalist monopolies in Japan.

We also discuss the history of the Buraku liberation movement led by militant mass organizations such as Suiheisha (Levellers Society) and the Buraku Liberation League. These organizations have struggled not only against the barbaric status discrimination, but also against the Japanese state’s attempt to diffuse their militancy and divide the community through policies known as Yūwa  (reconciliation) and Dōwa (assimilation).

We conclude the discussion by talking about the state of the Buraku liberation movement today, instances of inter-national and inter-communal solidarity the movement has engaged in, and the important work Niki is doing through Buraku Stories to publicize and educate the English-speaking public about the struggle of this community little known outside of Japan.

Intro: Cielo by HumaHuma

Outro: Liberation Song (Suiheisha Anthem) 

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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 Struggle

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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 Abe

Nodutbol for Korean Community Development

Koreaarchive

The Peace Report

The Abe Legacy: A Compendium

Why people are opposed to Abe's state funeral

Intro: Cicelo by Huma-Huma

Outro: Bathing Abe by Moment Bastet

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