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Against Japanism

Against Japanism
Against Japanism
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  • Remembering Kazuo Ishikawa and the Sayama Incident w/ Miho Kim
    Miho Kim joins the show to discuss the life of Kazuo Ishikawa, the Japanese criminal (in)justice system, and the Buraku Liberation Movement. Kazuo was a man of the outcaste Buraku origin who was falsely accused of murdering a female high school student in 1963 when he was 24, a case known as the Sayama Incident. Following Kazuo’s arrest, the police lied to him and pressured him to confess to a crime he did not commit. As a result, the prosecutors sentenced him to death and then to a commuted life sentence until they conditionally released him in 1994.After the release, Kazuo continued to maintain his innocence and fought for a re-trial of his case until his last breath, supported by his family and allies including the Buraku Liberation League. However, the prosecutors repeatedly denied Kazuo’s appeal and refused to disclose evidence to his defense lawyers, which is a flagrant violation of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights which Japan is part of. Miho is a friend of the show and a mutual friend of Kazuo’s and mine. You may recall her from one of the Instagram Live sessions we did last year to commemorate the Kanto Massacre. We discuss what Kazuo’s life and death teach us about the history of the Buraku liberation struggle, as well as the characteristics and historical origin of the contemporary Japanese state. We focus specifically on the judiciary and its notoriously punitive prosecution with a staggering conviction rate of 99.9% known as the Hostage Justice system. We also discuss the steadfastness of Kazuo’s and the broader Buraku community in resisting the Japanese state, and the importance of international solidarity. We discuss how Kazuo’s case has brought the Buraku people together with other oppressed communities in Japan, including non-Buraku Japanese people who were also wrongly prosecuted by the Japanese state, as well as Yuri Kochiyama and members of the Nikkei/Japanese diaspora.Miho is also the facilitator of the Nikkei Decolonization Tour, an educational tour of Japan through a progressive and community-based perspective, and she is going to tell us about how we can participate in the project, learn from the people, and support the people’s struggles in Japan. Long time listeners of this podcast may know that this is not the first time we cover the topic of the Buraku Liberation Movement. We did an episode in April 2023 with Niki Lau of Buraku Stories to do a deep dive on the history of the struggle so please be sure to check that out also. As always, thank you all for listening to the podcast! We will return soon with more regular episodes, but we’re hoping to cover more news items like this in the future, so please stay tuned.Intro: Cielo by Huma HumaOutro: Liberation's Twilight by the Buraku Liberation League (English translation in the comments)Support the show
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  • Happyend w/ Neo Sora
    This episode contains spoilers of Happyend.Neo Sora joins the show to discuss filmmaking and radical politics.Neo is a Japanese-American filmmaker and Palestine solidarity activist based in Tokyo. His latest film Happyend was premiered at last year's Venice International Film Festive and Toronto International Film Festival, and is currently showing in theaters across Japan (The film is expected to hit theatres outside of Japan in 2025. Look out for screenings in your area such as this one in Amsterdam).However, unlike most of the popular Japanese content circulating outside of Japan, such as the Attack on Titan manga & anime series discussed in the previous episode, the politics of Happyend is revolutionary and pro-people.The film's plot revolves around the personal friendship between two characters Koh and Yuta who struggle over their differences on how they view the world around them, as well as their collective struggle with their schoolmates against the Repressive and Ideological States Apparatuses of Japanese imperialism represented by their school, police, and digital surveillance.In this episode, we discuss Neo's politicization in the 2010s following the Triple Disaster of March 11, 2011 and how his political development is tied to his artistic development as a filmmaker. We discuss his cinematic influence and the history of radical cinema in Japan and beyond, and the importance of seishun eiga (films involving youth and secondary school students) to the narrative arc of Happyend and its possibility as a conveyer of radical politics, and much much more!Intro: Cielo by Huma HumaMidtro 1: HAPPYEND Theme (Opening) by Lia Ouyang RusliMidtro 2: LOVE Theme Phone Piano Sketch by Lia Ouyang RusliOutro: The Eat Shit Song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu (The video is a different but better version with English subtitles)Support the show
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  • Attack on Titan: An Imperialist Propaganda w/ Kazuma Hashimoto
    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 HumaOutro: 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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  • Vietnamese Migrant Workers and the Legacy of "Technical Internship" Program w/ Le Phuong Anh
    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 HumaOutro: ImmiGang II by Moment Joon Support the show
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  • Multipolarity or Anti-Imperialism? w/ Politics in Command
    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: MontageFascism and Eurasianism as Blowback - Grant Scott Fellows Fanshen: Class, Women's Liberation, and Crit-Self-Crit - Politics in CommandChina: From Commune to Capitalism - Politics in Command ft. Zhun Xu The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989 - William HintonRethinking Socialism: What is Socialist Transition?  - Deng-Yuan Hsu and Pao-Yu Ching Intro: Cielo by Huma HumaMidtro: Mount Tai by Space BabyOutro: ibeinthecar by Space BabySupport the show
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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.
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