Version imprimableSince the 1980s, the Japanese social movement (taken here as a set of activist movements) has been fragmented, sectoralised, often rooted in local realities, but without any ability for national action. Will the current crisis allow a new convergence of multifaceted resistance and the rebirth of a combative struggle offering alternatives across the archipelago as was the case for the last time in the years 1960-1970? It is a vital question.
While Japan emerged as the first non-Western imperialist power and was for a long time the second biggest economy in the world (today the third biggest, behind the United States and China), following its defeat in the Second World War, it was integrated in a subordinate position into the geostrategic schemas of the United States in East Asia.
From 1945, the labour movement was propelled by the Sanbetsu, linked to the Japanese Communist Party (CCP), but social radicalization was blocked as early as 1947 with an aborted general strike. With the beginning of the Cold War, anti-Communist repression and the Korean conflict, it was after 1950 the socialist Sohyo union federation that came to dominate the left of the trade union movement. A decade later, a new wave of radicalization took shape, this time around the military escalation of the United States in Indochina. But it was again defeated in the second half of the 1970s.
The legacy of the 1960s
Radicalism and defeat profoundly marked the social movements emerging from this period.
Trade unions
The Sohyo federation was especially strong in the public sector while the very right wing unions linked to the Domei were generally the only ones only able to operate in the large private companies. At the turn of the 1990s, the Sohyo and the Domei gave way to a single federation, Rengo (Japanese Trade Union Confederation, JTUC). This merge was carried out for the benefit of the right. The unions related to the JCP, Zenroren (National Confederation of trade unions NCTU), the socialist left and the far left formed their own federations, which were very much smaller, like Zenrokyo (National Trade Unions Council, NTUC, with some 130,000 members) or the National Inter-professional Union of Workers (NUGW).
Politics
During the Sino-Soviet conflict, the JCP declared itself pro-Peking and then “neutral”, which delayed the formation of Maoist organizations. Thus in the early 1960s, the new left was mostly of Trotskyite or Luxemburgist origin. Very combative, the Japanese radical left was regarded as one of the glories of the anti-imperialist wave of youth around the world. Unfortunately, while weakened by the decline of struggles and subjected to constant police harassment, it saw some of its main organizations engage in fratricidal wars (uchigeba). Japanese social democracy has never offered a consistent alternative to the reign of the right. As for the CCP, it mainly has a local implantation. The political left has had only a marginal influence in the Japan of recent decades.
Peasants
Japanese agriculture consists largely of small farms and the right has always sought an electoral clientele here. Nevertheless, one of the main struggles of the period was conducted with farmers, from 1966 to 1978, against the construction of the international airport at Narita, north of Tokyo. Resistance to the dispossession of the peasantry, rejection of the authoritarian development model, denunciation of the role played by the Japan in the air war in Indochina, all combined in the spectacular and repeated confrontations of the radical movements with the forces of repression at Sanrizuka.
Women
To a large extent, formal equality of rights was recognized for women in the Constitution of 1947, inspired by the US occupier. Nevertheless, the “second wave”" of feminism was asserted enough early in Japan, during the student radicalization, focusing particularly on fighting for the reality of these rights in the world of work (in connection with the far left) or in support of women in the home, giving rise to varied traditions: socialist feminist eco-feminist and so on, but not to a broad autonomous and unitary movement of women.
Anti-war
Rejecting the previous militarism. pacifism found after the Second World War a real cultural background in Japan. It gave birth in the 1960-70s to a powerful radical, anti-imperialist, movement against the Japanese-US security pact (AMPO). With the decline of national mobilization, resistance continued around the large American bases, particularly in the south of the archipelago, in Okinawa (90,000 demonstrators on April 25, 2010).
Environmental
The importance of the ecological question was notably asserted during the 1970s through public health in the context of poisoning caused by wildcat capitalist development. The best known example is that of “Minamata disease”", from the name of the coastal region fatally polluted by a chemical plant (Chisso) discharging mercury into the sea, against which a long popular struggle was conducted.
In a context of globalization
Japan is probably one of the countries where the cut-off between the activist generation of the 1960-70s (the “years of fire”") and today is the deepest. The continuity of the resistance primarily occurred locally and on many issues: American bases, nuclear plants, social solidarity networks, inter-union networks in industrial areas, environmental protection, lifestyles and so on.
Neo-liberalism
The labour movement proved unable to cope with the neoliberal offensive of the 1990s. Today, the risk is great that the big employers will seize the opportunity of the crisis opened by the tsunami of March 11 and the Fukushima disaster to challenge social rights even more. However, during the period of decline, the radical unions have accumulated a varied experience of organization on a local level whether with citizen’s movements or in the leadership of areas abandoned by the dominant unionism (immigrants, small firms).
Similarly, the peasantry is threatened with virtual disappearance by the opening of borders to free trade in agricultural products. This threat has facilitated closer relations between the Japanese movement Noumiren and Via Campesina at the international level.
International
Other elements of the movement for global justice like People’s Plan Japonesia or Attac have emerged, without taking on the same scale as in other countries. Japan has been the activist host of counter-summits, as at the Hokkaido G8 in July 2008. Japanese organizations participate in global forums as well as Asian networks, but this participation is limited by the language barrier (although young people speak Western languages more than their parents).
Japanese movements play no less a pivotal role in solidarity in Northeast Asia. In defence of Taiwanese or Korean or Taiwanese workers for example (the former colonies). Or in the development of a conception of international security from the point of view of peoples and non-rulers, as at the G8 in Okinawa in 2000.
In a context of humanitarian disasters
Japan is at the meeting point of four tectonic plates and lives in expectation of the great earthquake which will destroy Tokyo. The force 9 earthquake of March 11, 2011, was followed by an exceptional tsunami and disaster in Fukushima. For the time being, the only good news is that Japanese earthquake buildings bore the shock well. The tsunami devastated the coasts and the Japanese population is facing a nuclear disaster comparable to that of Chernobyl in Ukraine (1986).
Nuclear power
Despite the memory of Hiroshima-Nagasaki - the biggest of war crimes, committed by the United States - Japan is like France one of the countries where the (civil) “nuclear consensus” of the elites weighs like lead on society, stifling any challenge. Chernobyl caused a resurgence of the anti-nuclear movement, which has resumed today. This occurs above all locally, including through the resistance of people to the reactivation of closed down reactors, but through citizen protests also, as on April 10 of this year (17,500 demonstrators in Tokyo).
Social
The social consequences of the tsunami (a natural disaster) and Fukushima (a man-made disaster) are devastating: the evacuees are counted in the hundreds of thousands and experience precarity; a number of employees may find themselves without jobs, their businesses have been destroyed or are in the area threatened by radioactivity; farmers and fishers in contaminated localities can no longer produce anything and we do not know to what extent the nuclear crisis will get worse and the radioactivity will spread.
Social movements have learned to act in disaster situations, like the unions of the NTUC during the Kobe earthquake in 1995. But it is the first time since the war that they have had to deal with a situation of crisis of such magnitude. They need our help.
Internationalism
We have known many humanitarian disasters in the world in recent years. After New Orleans in the United States (2005), the Japanese experience today shows that solidarity remains necessary, even when the countries affected are economic powers. Inequalities are magnified in times of crisis and if social movements do not have the means to defend them, it will be the poor who will pay the bill for a disaster for which they are not responsible
We must be able to promote our own concept of humanitarian aid, independent of that of the governments, assistance that responds to the emergency both by sending relief directly to the poor and by raising broader and more sustainable social issues, strengthening organisations which are on the ground, defending the rights of the poorest. Militant solidarity, from social movements to social movements, is indeed for us an internationalist duty
