Against Japanism

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-Huma

Outro Music: Parabola Divanorium by Paraj Bhatt

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Kota sits down with a Palestinian-Japanese journalist Shigenobu May to talk about Palestine.

May is the daughter of Shigenobu Fusako, a former member of the Japanese Red Army and a political prisoner in Japan. She is currently based in Lebanon, and since Lebanon is a country underdeveloped by imperialism, the availability of electricity and internet connectivity are very limited. As a result, I interviewed her on two separate occasions and combined them into one episode. 

In the first segment of this interview recorded in June 24, we begin our conversation by discussing how her experience growing up in the Palestinian refugee camps shaped her views of Israel, US imperialism, and Palestinian human rights, including the right to resist. We critically examine the myths that Israel is a peace-loving country and that it is the “only democracy in the Middle East” despite the increasing international recognition to the contrary that it is a highly militarized settler colonial apartheid state that has violently murdered, displaced, and segregated the indigenous Palestinian people since its creation in 1948 remembered by Palestinians as al-Nakba (the Catastrophe). 

In the second segment of this interview recorded in July 21, we focus on the history of Japan-Israel relations, beginning in the 1930s when some officials within the Japanese state influenced by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an anti-Semitic text that associates Jewish people with money and other conspiracy theories) sought to settle Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in the territories occupied by Japan in a belief that they will bring financial support to Japanese imperialism. After World War II, Japan was one of the first countries to recognize Israel and maintain friendly relations with it until the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and the Arab states’ oil embargo led to an economic crisis in Japan. This led Japan to take a more cautious approach as a “neutral” party and maintain diplomatic relations with both Israel and the Arab states, as well as Iran. However, Japan moved toward rapprochement with Israel in 2014 and this led to increased economic, technological, and military cooperation between the two states, making Japan’s claim to neutrality in the so called “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” increasingly dubious. 

We then discuss the history of solidarity between the Japanese left and the Palestinian struggle starting in the 1970s when Fusako traveled to Lebanon to cooperate with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.  However, after the Lod Airport Massacre in which three members of the Japanese Red Army allegedly opened fire and killed twenty six civilians, the subsequent repression forced the Shigenobu family and other members of the JRA underground.  We discuss the misconceptions surrounding this incident and the change in the orientation of Japanese solidarity with Palestine towards a more legal and humanitarian direction led by NGOs, as well as the present day social movements such as the BDS movement. We also discuss the international dimension of the Palestinian struggle, the accusation of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian activists, the media representation of Palestine, and the role of social media in pro-Palestinian activism.

Intro song:  Cielo by Huma-Huma

Interlude song: Palestine [Freestyle] by MC Abdul

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Kota is joined by Chelsea Szendi Schieder to discuss her latest book Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left.

Women in the Japanese New Left played a vital role in building up the militant student movement against Japan’s new capitalist education system and its complicity with the US imperialist aggression in Southeast Asia. However, the gender dynamic and patriarchal tendencies within the movement undermined their effort and led to the movement’s demise. This weakness was further compounded by the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of revolutionary women as vulnerable, ridiculous, or threatening, while silencing their own voices and political convictions. 

We discuss the case of Kanba Michiko, a 22 year old student activist who died on June 15, 1960 during the mass protest against the US-Japan Security Treaty. Despite her own philosophical outlook as a dialectical materialist and political commitment as a revolutionary communist, she was portrayed by the media as a passive victim of police violence or innocent bystander, as a “maiden sacrifice for postwar democracy.” 

Another important figure of this period was Tokoro Mitsuko, an activist and theorist who critiqued the masculinism she saw as inherent in capitalism. As an alternative, she proposed the logic of care and nurturing, and horizontalism and “endless debate” as a form of direct democracy that reflects this supposedly feminine logic.  While Tokoro’s characterization of this logic as “women’s logic” is undeniably essentialist, her philosophy was a product of its time when women’s work was devalued not only by Japan’s revitalized capitalist economy, but also within the student movement itself where women performed most of the care work such as cooking and cleaning, while men took the leadership positions and engaged in militant confrontations with the police. We discuss this tension within the framework of the debate between prefigurative and instrumental politics and the question of gendered division of labour within the leftist spaces today. 

We then move on to discuss the patriarchal tendencies within the Japanese New Left’s cultural production such as the valorization of the figure of “Mama” as a de-politicizing figure and the popularity of yakuza films among the student militants, as well as the use of sexual violence as a political allegory in the films of Oshima Nagisa and Wakamatsu Koji. 

We talk about the role of political violence in bringing about social change and how its misuse and mass policing that sought to establish grassroots community relations led to the New Left’s alienation from the masses and its subsequent demise. We address the question of how the Japanese left can overcome the negative legacy of inter-sectarian violence, and the gruesome internal purge of the United Red Army that seems to have discredited the leftwing militancy altogether. We specifically discuss the figure of Nagata Hiroko who was portrayed by the media in sexist terms as dangerous and irrational, and blamed for this intra-organizational violence more than her male comrades. 

We conclude our interview by discussing what the ascendancy of bourgeois feminism reflected in the state-led initiatives such as “womenomics" catered towards upper and middle class Japanese women, and Japan’s neocolonial policy in the Global South and its exploitative immigration policy mean for feminism in Japan today, as well as the possibility of working class and non-Japanese women emerging as a revolutionary subject of their own. 

Send your feedback, criticism, & inquiries to [email protected] 

Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma

Outro Music: Parabola Divanorium by Paraj Bhatt   

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Against Japanism presents Part 2 of an interview with Dr. Gavin Walker about the history of Marxism in Japan, focusing on the postwar period starting in the late 1940s.  

First, we discuss the reason behind the Japanese Communist Party’s re-emergence as a mass party in the immediate postwar period. As mentioned in Part 1, in the 1920s and 30s, the JCP was a member of the Communist International or the Comintern (also known as the Third International) headquartered in the Soviet Union. Throughout its existence, members of the Comintern, who were representatives from communist parties from around the world, debated the meaning of fascism and how communists should respond to this rising far right movement. 

As capitalism went into a series of crises during this period, they initially adapted a position that capitalism was in its final days and revolution was inevitable, and saw reformist social democracy as the primary enemy of the working class blocking the path to proletarian revolution. This was called the thesis on social fascism, equating social democracy and fascism as two sides of the same coin. However, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power and the subsequent anti-communist repression in Germany, the Comintern shifted its anti-fascist strategy to seeking broad based alliance with non-communist forces. This period of the Comintern’s existence is known as the Popular Front period. 

While this debate was also taking place in Japan, it was cut short due to the intense state repression culminating in the Com Academy Incident of 1936 and the Popular Front Incident of 1937 (The former was a mass arrest of the Koza-ha Marxists and the latter the Rono-ha despite its renunciation of the Comintern and underground organizing). It was not until the 1945-1947 when the Japanese left experienced a brief moment of relative freedom under the US-led Allied Occupation that the JCP was really able to put the Popular Front policy into practice in the form of “democratic people’s front” (which was however largely rejected by its rival Socialist Party of Japan controlled by right wing social democrats). 

Seeing the resurgence of militant labour movement in Japan and confronted with the spectre of communism in Asia, the US reversed its previous de-fascisization policy to turn Japan into a bastion of anti-communism. In doing so, they severely restricted civil liberties and workers’ rights on the pretext that social movements and labour unions are a hotbed of communist organizing, while releasing the wartime fascist leaders from prison and restoring them to power. Once again driven underground, the JCP turned to armed struggle in 1951. 

We discuss how the Chinese Revolution and Maoism influenced the JCP of this period and the Japanese New Left, and how the JCP’s abandonment of armed struggle in 1955 and subsequent turn to reformism shaped the political landscape of the 1960s and 70s. We also discuss how the postwar Japanese left grappled with the questions of nationalism and internationalism. Finally, we conclude our interview by discussing how we can study and write history differently, not to idealize or trivialize the past, but to critique the present in the service of class struggle and revolution. 

Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma

Outro Music: Parabola

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In this two part series, Kota sits down with Gavin Walker to discuss the history of Marxism in Japan.  Instead of simply narrating the facts of this history chronologically, we focus on particular theoretical and political questions that animated the Japanese communist movement before and after the Second World War. 

We begin our conversation by discussing what the history of Marxism in Japan tells us about “Japan” as represented by the Eurocentric and Orientalist conception of the world, and the importance of the national question, the ways in which Marxists address issues related to nationhood, nationalism, and internationalism.

We then zoom in on the debate on Japanese capitalism during the 1930s that divided the Japanese communist movement between the Koza-ha (Lecture Faction) and the Rono-ha (Labour Farmer Faction). 

This debate was centred around the question of what the Meiji Restoration of 1868 meant for the development of capitalism in Japan, specifically the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and whether capitalism in Japan during the 1930s was sufficiently developed to pave the way for a socialist revolution. 

On the one hand, the Koza-ha held that the fascistic nature of the Japanese state  was a product of the remnants of feudalism that persisted in the countryside after the Meiji Restoration and held back the development of capitalism in Japan. Thus, they argued for a two stage revolution in which the completion of a bourgeois democratic revolution (including the abolition of the emperor system) precedes the socialist revolution. On the other hand, the Rono-ha argued that capitalism was fully matured by then, and hence what Japan needed was a one stage socialist revolution. We also discuss the theory of Uno Kozo who came out of the Rono-ha tradition, but charted an independent path in the postwar period and made a retrospective contribution to this debate. 

While both Koza-ha and Rono-ha produced a vast amount of literature about Japanese society, and contributed to the dominance of Marxism among Japanese intellectuals that persisted into the postwar period, both were relatively silent about the role of imperialism and colonialism in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Japan. We delve into the question of why this was the case and the link between the rapid development of capitalism in Japan, and the colonization of the Ainu homelands and the Ryukyu Kingdom, as well as Korea, Taiwan, South Pacific Islands, and northeastern China.

We conclude the first part of this interview by discussing how this debate on Japanese capitalism influenced the strategies and tactics of the Japanese communist movement in the prewar period, as well as the role of arts and culture in popularizing Marxism. 

Part 2 will cover topics such as the impact of the Chinese Revolution and Maoism on the Japanese left, and the questions of nationalism and internationalism in postwar Japan.

Gavin Walker is Associate Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016) and the forthcoming Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux Éditeur, 2021), the editor of The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), and The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (Verso, 2020) as well as editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). He is widely published in critical theory, social and political thought, modern intellectual history, and Marxist theory. Among other projects, he is now writing a short book on the national question. 

Follow this podcast on Twitter & Instagram @againstjapanismpodcast

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Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma

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This mini-episode features a message from Pat (also known as Pato-chan), a trans woman from the Philippines and a former migrant detainee living in Japan, who is raising funds to support herself during her "provisional release"  (Karihoumen in Japanese) which prohibits her from working and accessing healthcare. Donate here or here.  Sign this petition to defeat the "Immigration Law Revision Bill." 

CW: Transphobia, racism, death, suicide

Pat came to Japan in January 2015. Although she became undocumented, Pat continued to live in Japan, working at a bento shop. In July 2019, she was arrested by a police officer who stopped her on the street and detained by the Immigration Services Agency of Japan (also known as the Nyukan) until she was granted provisional release in October 2020. She fears that if she gets deported, she will face more discrimination as a trans person in the Philippines than in Japan.  Her fear is well-founded. The Philippine government under Rodrigo Duterte has yet to pass the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Expression (SOGIE) Equality Bill and continues to crack down on LGBTQ+ activists.  Last September, Duterte pardoned a US Marine Scott Pemberton who was convicted for murdering Jennifer Laude, a trans Filipina in 2014, indicating the Philippine government’s utter disregard for trans rights. 

During her incarceration, Pat was treated inhumanely by the Nyukan. They kept her in solitary confinement, and denied her access to healthcare and proper dosage of hormone. They also called her derogatory names for trans and queer people. In response, a group of activists in Japan and abroad came together to organize a campaign to demand her release.  However, while this international campaign did prove successful, hundreds of other migrant detainees are still behind bars, deprived of their basic rights and dignity as human beings. At least 16 detainees have been reported to have died since 2007. On March 6, 2021, a 33 year old woman from Sri Lanka died at the hands of the Nyukan. 

What Pat is experiencing is shared by many other working class migrants who are victimized by the unjust immigration system. Japan is also responsible for creating the very conditions in which people from poorer nations are forced to migrate in search of work or to escape from war, repression, and discrimination. Japan openly supports repressive regimes like Turkey under Erdogan committing genocide against the Kurds, Israel displacing Palestinians from their homeland, and the Duterte regime of the Philippines criminalizing activists and condoning violence against LGBTQ+ people, through its Military Industrial Complex, and through its close collaboration with US imperialism causing wars and proxy-wars globally, Meanwhile, Japanese corporations continue to profit from cheap raw materials and labour power extracted from the Global South, aiding the systematic underdevelopment of these countries for the benefits of itself and other countries of the Global North. 

So while it's crucially important to campaign against the exploitative, exclusionary, and punitive Japanese immigration system, our criticism needs to be filtered through materialist class analysis and an understanding of the international situation, specifically the world system of capitalist imperialism as the root cause of mass migration and displacement. 

Special thanks to Pat for sharing her stories!

Outro Music: Solidarity Forever by Er

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In the second part of an interview with Robert Stolz, we continue our conversation about the affinity between fascism and liberalism, as well as the difference between idealist and materialist philosophies theorized by Tosaka Jun in his book The Japanese Ideology from 1935. 

According to Tosaka, idealist philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Fredrich Nietzsche, and Nishida Kitaro adapt a metaphysical worldview and see history as characterized by stasis and equilibrium where no change, difference, or rupture is conceivable. On the contrary, materialist philosophers such as Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Tosaka Jun see history dialectically as characterized by change and conflict. For dialectical materialists, this change is driven by class struggles and revolutions, where an outcome of the struggles between antagonistic classes such as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the peasants and the landlords, and the colonizers and the colonized nations determines the course of history. This dialectical method of analyzing history is called historical materialism. 

In today's episode, Dr Stolz and I discuss Tosaka's philosophy of time and his particular theorization of dialectical materialism as the philosophy of “here and now” grounded on the principle of "everydayness" which privileges the present as the site of intervention and a potential moment of rupture, as opposed to the idealist philosophy of time grounded on the metaphysics of continuity in which the past determines the present, as well as Tosaka's separation of time into three categories: natural scientific time, psychological time, and historical time.

We also discuss how Tosaka theorizes common sense and custom. A we discussed in Part 1, Tosaka was deeply concerned about the ways in which middle class intellectuals were becoming more and more abstract in their thinking, and turning away from social realities into the world of literature, while Japanist and fascist ideas were gaining popularity among the masses. In response, Tosaka turned to journalism and cultural criticism to bridge the widening gap between academia and the masses, and to popularize Marxism to push back against the rising tide of fascism. 

In this segment of the interview, we return to the topic of the second episode of this podcast about The Ghost of Tsushima and Orientalism in video games with Kazuma Hashimoto and Andrew Kiya, and discuss how the idealized notion of Japaneseness created by Orientalism and Japanism, as the ideologies of Western and Japanese imperialism respectively, have become common sense, that is a deeply ideological notion that appears to be ideologically neutral and self-evidently true. We also discuss how Tosaka theorized the process in which philosophical worldviews such as idealism and materialism become manifested as customs.

Finally, we discuss the significance of Tosaka's tragic death in Nagano Prison in 1945, and his unrepentant commitment to materialism and Marxism that may have influenced it. 

Special thanks to Dr. Robert Stolz who took his time to participate in this interview, as well as to everyone who has listened to this podcast so far. 

Follow this podcast on Twitter & Instagram @againstjapanismpodcast

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Intro Music  Cielo by Huma-Huma

Outro Music:  Parabola Divanorium by Paraj Bhatt  

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In this two part series, Kota is joined by Robert Stolz to discuss the anti-fascist philosophy of Tosaka Jun, a Marxist philosopher and cultural critic active during the 1930s. 

Tosaka is often associated with the Kyoto School, a group of academics who studied together at Kyoto Imperial University, led by his academic advisor Nishida Kitaro, influenced by German idealist philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Some Kyoto School philosophers such as Nishida himself and Miki Kiyoshi actually traveled to Germany to study under Heidegger (who was a Nazi). 

However, as the political tendency of Nishida and other Kyoto School philosophers became increasingly (and somewhat predictably) right wing and supportive of Japan's imperialist ambitions in Asia, Tosaka conversely turned to Marxism and adapted the method of dialectical and historical materialism to advocate for class struggle and scientific socialism.

In 1932, Tosaka co-founded Society for the Study of Materialism (Yuibutsuron kenkyūkai or Yuiken). While Yuiken was mainly an intellectual organization dedicated to studying Marxism, Tosaka's outspoken stance against fascism, capitalism, and imperialism was heavily censored by the Japanese state. As a result, Yuiken was forced to disband and Tosaka was arrested and imprisoned numerous times throughout the 1930s and 40s, until he tragically died in prison in 1945. In spite of the censorship by the state, Tosaka never gave up and wrote prolifically about a variety of topics such as capitalism, fascism, time, space, science, film, fashion, the emperor system and policing. 

Dr. Robert Stolz is a historian of modern Japan at the University of Virginia. He is a co-editor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader. He is also the author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870 - 1950 from Duke University Press. He recently completed a translation of one of Tosaka's books, The Japanese Ideology: A Critique of Japanism, Fascism, Liberalism, and Ideology in Contemporary Japan. 

In this book, Tosaka defines Japanism as the Japanese form of fascism that took the form of feudalism. However, unlike the Koza-ha Marxists who argued that fascism in Japan was a product of feudal remnants in the countryside that held back the development of capitalism, Tosaka took the position that Japan in the 1930s was fully capitalist, specifically monopoly capitalist or imperialist, and that this feudalism was merely an ideology re-deployed by the Japanese bourgeoisie to support capitalism and cover up the class antagonisms that were intensifying in Japan at the time. 

As the subtitle suggests, Tosaka undertakes a critique not only of fascism, but also of liberalism, particularly cultural liberalism which reduces liberalism to a moral attitude and promotes a retreat from social realities into the world of literature and philology, a study of ancient texts. According to Tosaka, as cultural liberals espoused a metaphysical idealist worldview, they became hostile towards historical materialism and Marxism, and hence amenable to Japanism and fascism. Thus, Tosaka argues, liberalism is not only intellectually defenseless against fascism, but reinforces it. 

While Tosaka himself was defeated in his philosophical combat against fascism, his thought remains relevant to this day for those confronting fascism in Japan and worldwide. 

Follow this podcast on Twitter & Instagram @againstjapanismpodcast. 

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Intro Music  Cielo by Huma-Huma

Outro Music:  Parabola Divanoriu

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Kota is joined by Kazuma Hashimoto and Andrew Kiya to discuss the Ghost of Tsushima, its fetishization of the samurai through a misinterpretation of Kurosawa Akira's films, Cyberpunk 2077, how Orientalism and the idealization of Japan in these games (re-packaged and exported abroad through the Japanese state's "Cool Japan" initiative) enable the far right pro-imperialist politics both in ideology and practice. 

We specifically discuss the recent attempt by the Japanese far right to shut down an art exhibit about comfort women in Aichi Prefecture and the campaign to recall its governor through fraudulent means, as well as the online harassment against Kazuma and Andrew themselves. 

Finally, we discuss the possibilities and limits of video games as a medium to promote radical politics under capitalism. 

Follow them on Twitter and Twitch at @JusticeKazzy_ & @wouldhaus

Kazuma's publications:

https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/23/21333631/ghost-of-tsushima-kurosawa-films-samurai-japan-abe-politics

https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/30/22255318/cyberpunk-2077-genre-xenophobia-orientalism

Andrew's publications:

https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/08/06/spectre-of-fascism-ghost-of-tsushima

https://unseenjapan.com/aichi-prefecture-japan-governor-recall-fraud/

Intro Music  Cielo by Huma-Huma

Outro Music:  Parabola Divanorium by Paraj Bhatt

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Warm and militant greetings! 

I'm your host Kota and welcome to the Against Japanism Podcast: Destabilizing Japanese History from the Left! In this introductory episode, I discuss the goals of this podcast and the principles behind it, and preview the upcoming episodes that I have already recorded and will be published here very soon. 

To sum up, this podcast is a study of Japanese history through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism, a history characterized by conflict and change, as opposed to equilibrium and stasis, as the history of class struggles and struggles between the oppressors and the oppressed. 

I discuss what this means in relation to Japanism and the question of Japaneseness that I themed this podcast around, as an ideological byproduct of capitalism, imperialism, and fascism, as well as the histories of resistance and revolutionary movements that have proved it wrong: Japan never was and is not a harmonious and homogeneous society like what Japanists in the West and Japan believe it to be (If it ever was, it was an outcome of a conscious effort by the Japanese state to suppress anarchists, communists, and anti-colonial activists, and is continuously reproduced today through campaigns like "Cool Japan" that create an impression that progressive and revolutionary ideas are foreign to Japan).

Unlike their idealized image of Japan as traditional and unchanging, Japanese history has gone through significant changes such as the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the colonization of the Ryukyu Islands, the Ainu homelands, and Asia without which the growth and maintenance of capitalism in the mainland Japan would have been impossible, the rise of fascism that criminalized revolutionary politics and dashed the hope of a socialist revolution in Japan in the inter-war period., the U.S-led Allied Occupation that restored the fascists like Kishi Nobusuke to power to turn Japan into a bastion of anti-communism in Asia during the Cold War, and the popular and student-led uprisings in the 1960s that challenged the rise of "democratized" post-war Japan as a partner of the US imperialism.

It is still changing today, even though the drivers of this change are still the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed masses. The Japanese state's poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and inhumane treatment of migrants and refugees are just a few examples of this. These are dark times, but seeing online content about activism in Japan makes me hopeful. I hope this podcast can contribute to that conversation and I would be very happy if those of you who speak English and engage with activism in Japan found it helpful. 

If you liked or disliked the episode, please let me know why at [email protected].

Outro Music: The Internationale (Instrumental) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGqMMpMkKXs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale

Song and Struggle: The Internationale - People's World

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/song-and-struggle-the-internationale/

The  Internationale (Japanese Version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyfhs42mdyA

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