Against Japanism
Against Japanism
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This podcast seeks to challenge the commonly held assumptions about Japan as harmonious, homogeneous, and traditional by recasting its history as a history of conflict and change, as the history of class struggles, from anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and intersectional perspectives.
Available episodes
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May 17, 2023
The People vs. G7 w/ Migrante Japan
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)Support the show
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Apr 25, 2023
Caste Oppression and the Buraku Liberation Movement w/ Buraku Stories
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) Support the show
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Jan 10, 2023
Nikkei Organizing w/ Miya Sommers, J Town Action & Solidarity, and Nikkei Uprising
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
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Sep 24, 2022
Anti-Obituary: Abe Shinzo w/ Deprogramming Imperialism
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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Aug 15, 2022
The Agrarian Question and Class Contradictions in Okinawa w/ Wendy Matsumura
Wendy Matsumura, a historian and the author of The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labour, and Theorizations of Community joins the show to discuss the history of Okinawa through a historical materialist perspective.
We focus primarily on the history of agrarian class struggles in pre-WWII Okinawa, and how the perception of Okinawa as a culturally distinct space and exotic hinterland is closely tied to the uneven development of capitalism in Japan through the colonization of territories such as Korea, Taiwan, the Ainu Mosir, and the Ryukyu Kingdom, as well as the preservation of pre-capitalist social relations in the countryside. We discuss how the Okinawan bourgeoisie, workers, and peasants struggled against this semi-feudal colonial rule and for competing visions of autonomy.
We also discuss how the mass migration of working class Okinawans overseas and the subsequent formation of diasporic Okinawan communities shaped their politics and experience of the wartime atrocities, and how the US occupation continued the capitalist enclosure of agricultural lands. We conclude our discussion by talking about the limits of coalition politics in post-WWII Okinawa, and the importance of a global perspective in critiquing and opposing militarism and capitalist imperialism.
See the full script of my introduction here. Read Wendy's work on post-WWII Okinawa here.
Intro:
The Internationale (Uchinaaguchi)
Cielo by Huma-Huma
Outro:
Parabola Divanorium by Paraj Bhat
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Jul 8, 2022
The Anti-Vietnam War Movement and the Red Army Faction w/ Alex Finn Macartney
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 Dénudés
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May 27, 2022
Mlitant Labour Unionism and State Repression in Kansai w/ David McNeil
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
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May 20, 2022
The History of Revolutionary Feminism and Women's Liberation Movement in Japan w/ Setsu Shigematsu
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
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Mar 9, 2022
Revolution Goes East: The Impact of the Russian Revolution in Japan w/ Tatiana Linkhoeva
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
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Feb 15, 2022
On Intermediary Exploitation w/ Ken Kawashima [Patreon Preview]
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.
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Feb 11, 2022
The History of Filipino Migration to Japan w/ Migrante Japan
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 refer…
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Jan 21, 2022
The Proletarian Gamble: Uno Kōzō's Theory of Crisis & Korean Workers in Interwar Japan w/ Ken Kawashima
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. Sin…
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Nov 9, 2021
Ghost in the Machine: The Emperor System & Anti-Revolutionary Thought Policing in Interwar Japan w/ Max Ward
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 govern…
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Sep 2, 2021
Solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance w/ May Shigenobu
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 s…
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Jul 12, 2021
Women in the Japanese New Left w/ Chelsea Szendi Schieder
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…
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May 4, 2021
The History of Marxism in Japan w/ Gavin Walker - Part 2
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 revolutio…
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Apr 20, 2021
The History of Marxism in Japan w/ Gavin Walker - Part 1
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 fr…
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Apr 17, 2021
A Fundraising Appeal from Pato-chan
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 p…
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Apr 11, 2021
Translating the Japanese Ideology: The Anti-Fascist Philosophy of Tosaka Jun w/ Robert Stolz - Part 2
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…
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Apr 3, 2021
Translating the Japanese Ideology: The Anti-Fascist Philosophy of Tosaka Jun w/ Robert Stolz - Part 1
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 (…
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Mar 23, 2021
Orientalism and Reactionary Ideologies in Video Games w/ Kazuma Hashimoto and Andrew Kiya
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-pol…
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Mar 21, 2021
Introduction to the Against Japanism Podcast
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 th…
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