Episodes
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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)Support the show
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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 JoonSupport the show
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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 BabySupport the show
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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 KidsSupport the show
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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 PairSupport the show
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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）Support the show
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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)Support the show
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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)Support the show
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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 StruggleSupport the show
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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 BastetSupport the show
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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 BhatSupport the show
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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 DénudésDonate on GoGetFunding.
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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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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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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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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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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 referred to as "Japayuki-san” after “Karayuki-san” referring to Japanese girls and women from poor agrarian communities trafficked abroad to serve as sex workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
We discuss the amendment to Japan’s Nationality Act in 2009 which allowed the children of Filipina migrant workers and Japanese men to claim Japanese citizenship. This was a victory for these families, as well as the Filipino and Japanese human rights organizations which fought on their behalf, and led to the proliferation of intermediary organizations which assist them in obtaining Japanese citizenship and family-related long term visas. However, while these organizations are often registered as non-profits or foundations, some of them act as for-profit labour brokers recruiting them as workers and matching them with their prospective employers in Japan. Moreover, since these recruitment agencies are not properly regulated by authorities in Japan or the Philippines, this has created a loophole in which the recruiters and their local managers act as the agents of intermediary exploitation by charging these migrants exorbitant fees and often deducting them from their salaries, causing them to accumulate debt and forcing these single mothers into poverty, as well as other instances of abuse.
We discuss how Japan’s strict and exclusionary immigration policies criminalize migrants through the cases of two women: Loida Quindoy, a Flipina migrant who was deported after 30 years in Japan, as well as Pat (or Pato-chan), a trans Filipina who was subjected to transphobic harassment and various human rights violations by the Nyukan.
We conclude the interview by discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic affected Filipino migrants in Japan, and the solutions to semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism in the Philippines, as well as the current campaigns and initiatives that Migrate Japan is working on.Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma
Outro Music: Anong Kleseng Bayani
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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. Since labour power is the only commodity that can produce value, as much as the workers are reliant on wage for their subsistence, capitalism is equally reliant on the continuous commodification of their labor power for its survival. However, capitalism’s drive toward infinite growth meets its own barrier as the supply of labour power of human beings cannot be increased at will to meet the demands of expanding production. As a result, capitalist production comes to a stand-still. Uno therefore calls the commodification of labour power the fundamental contradiction of capitalism or its Archille’s Heel.
Since capitalism is unable to readily produce human beings as things, it creates what Marx called relative surplus populations, a mass of unemployed workers considered surplus or excessive in relation to capitalist production, whom it can bring back into production once the cycle re-enters the phase of prosperity and capitalism resumes its expansion...in theory. However, while this repetition indicates the inevitability of crisis under capitalism, the ways in which the crisis happens changed with the development of capitalism from liberalism to imperialism. Under imperialism, capitalism no longer follows the clearly demarcated phases, but stagnates in the chronic state of depression and relies on the pool of chronically unemployed surplus populations, often located in (semi-)colonized countries.
In the second half of this interview, we apply Uno’s Theory of Crisis to the historical stage of imperialism and the concrete struggle of Korean workers in the interwar period, who jumped out of the flying pan of agrarian poverty in the Korean countryside into the fire of post-WWI industrial recession and the Great Depression. We discuss the book’s title “Proletarian Gamble," how the struggle of Korean workers was intertwined with their struggle as tenants, how the rise in unemployment during the post-war recession and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as well as the Korean Independence Movement in 1919 led to the reorganization of policing in the Japanese Empire. We conclude our interview by discussing how the struggle of Korean workers continued during and after WWII, and the struggle of migrants in Japan today and what this history tells us about capitalism and the necessity of communism.
Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma
Outro Music: Flying Pan by Sugar Brown
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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
Outro song:Support the show
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