再稼働反対！ “Saikadō hantai!” – A Remarkable Demonstration
I’ve arrived in Tokyo at a fascinating time. In previous posts, I’ve mentioned the concerns surrounding condition of Japan’s nuclear reactors, in particular their ability to withstand a disaster of the kind that hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Last summer and fall, the government ordered the shutting down all of Japan’s reactors, until their operators could prove compliance with “stress tests,” thus effectively taking Japan completely off nuclear power for the first time in decades. Although there were concerns over the criteria to be employed in determining compliance with the new government standards, in general this was a popular move with the Japanese people, especially as more and more information became known about the scope of radioactive contamination produced in the wake of the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, and the system of collusion – bordering on corruption – between the nuclear power industry and the government that created the loose safety standards that led to the “unforeseen” catastrophe.
It thus came as a rude awakening to many Japanese when the government of Prime Minister Noda – who had previously seemed to lean toward moving Japan away from nuclear power over the long term –reversed itself in June by giving a green light to Kansai Electric Power Company to restart reactors at its facility in the town of Ohi, Fukui Prefecture. On top of this, many people were outraged by the findings of an official government inquiry into the background of the Fukushima disaster, especially in regard to its vagueness in assigning responsibility for it. Rather than blaming TEPCO, the government itself, or a combination of the two, the report postulated that it was ultimately an innate trust of authority and unwillingness to question its established practices on the part of the Japanese people as a whole that was responsible. Simply put, the problem was culture; not collusion or corruption. One does not need to be a firebrand Japanese nationalist to see how this might be an irksome charge for such a report to make.
Popular anger over the evasiveness, duplicity, and apparent disregard for the popular will on the part of the government has led to the return of mass protest to the Japanese political scene. A mass demonstration in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park on July 16 drew an estimated crowd of 170,000. Perhaps even more remarkable have been the weekly Friday demonstrations in front of the Prime Minister’s residence, which began in April when it first came to light that the government was considering industry requests to permit the reactivation of some reactors. Although initially small in scale, these protest meetings mushroomed in size in June, with the government’s decision on the Ohi plant. On July 20th I was one among a turnout of 90,000.
Here’s some footage I took, starting from the stairs leading up to ground level from the Kokkai Gijidō-mae subway station, which serves the Diet building and surrounding area, including the Prime Minister’s residence.
Had I known what to expect before exiting the train, I would have started shooting much earlier. The first thing that struck me as I walked through the gate and approached the area where the stairwells to the various above ground destinations diverge, was the overwhelming police presence in the station. The demonstration started as 6pm. By the time I arrived at 6:30, the police had formed a foreboding phalanx to prevent people from taking that exit for the Prime Minister’s residence. I was tempted to go back down the stairs and get a shot of them, but I didn’t want to push my luck with Tokyo’s finest, especially since I don’t know what the rules are regarding the filming cops on-duty in Japan. As it turned out, of course, I’d be seeing many, many more police officers that evening. None of them, as it turned out, seemed to mind being on camera.
As you can see from the video, protestors were directed to gather along the sidewalks surrounding the Diet Building by police officers and people who appeared to be members of the network of grassroots organizations that convened the weekly demonstration (more on this group later). The police presence on the streets was slightly less concentrated than it had been in the station, but what really struck me was the complete absence of a sense of tension between the cops and the demonstrators. Officers shouted directions into yellow plastic megaphones to amplify their voices, but their tones were more like those of ushers at some sort of performance – or clerks in a busy department store – than police engaged in trying to maintain order and security while facing a crowd of 90,000: no threats, no tear gas, no brandishing of night sticks. “THE AREA IN FRONT OF THE PRIME MINISTER’S RESIDENCE IS VERY CROWDED AND HAS BEEN CLOSED TO FURTHER ACCESS AT THIS TIME,” an officer stationed right by the exit shouted to passengers emerging from underground. “PLEASE CONTINUE ALONG THE ROUTE TO THE AREA IN FRONT OF THE DIET BUILDING. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”
For its part, the crowd was indeed cooperative. Despite the massive turnout and the narrow spaces along the sidewalk into which all these people found themselves wedged, everyone seemed to be doing their best not only to stay behind that metal pipe barricades that the police had set up along the road, but also made every effort to keep a path open so that people could continued to move along the route.
The crowd was diverse, too: in terms of age, apparently socioeconomic background, and what one might call, for lack of a better term, apparent degree of long-term commitment to causes of this kind. Folks who fit the description of “hard core” anti-nuclear protesters rubbed shoulders with office workers who looked like they had decided to stop by the protest on their way home from work. Women I guessed to be comfortably upper middle class housewives – some with little children in two – stood and chanted slogans along side college-aged youths, some clean cut in appearance, others decidedly scruffy.
Even with such diversity, though, a stroll through the crowd revealed the semblance of a kind of zoning schema – one most likely devised by the organizations that hosted the protest, in cooperation with the police. On one of the corners closest to the front of the Diet Building, I saw a placard among those with protest statements that informed me I was now in the “family section.” Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the same thoroughfare – and about as far way from the Diet Building and the Prime Minister’s residence as any part of the protest could be, a younger and more boisterous group, complete with a drum corps to add power to the chanting, held forth. The police presence in this section was noticeably heavier than in the “family section,” although I still didn’t sense much in the way of tension on either side.
Here as elsewhere, the phrase “saikadō hantai!” (roughly, “we oppose reactivation”) rang out in a call and response chant. Other chants followed a similar syllabic pattern: “genpatsu iranai” (“we don’t need nuclear reactors”) and “kodomo mamore” (“protect the children”) being two prominent examples. The rather dense nature of the language – the way the ideographs can pack a lot of meaning into relatively few syllables – probably has something to do with this preference from brevity. It might also just be the rhythm of protest in Japanese; the same way that you can’t go to a protest in America without hearing some permutation of the “hey-hey, ho-ho” chant.
More than the slogans themselves, though, it is the turnout itself that suggests the degree to which people from various backgrounds share a sense of concern for the safety of the reactors in the shadow of widespread mistrust of the government and TEPCO for their handling of the Fukushima crisis, and attempts to conceal the truth of its severity from the public. There is most certainly a spectrum of views on the issue of nuclear power in general represented within this crowd; from those who would accept reactivation if – and only if – solid guarantees that another disaster like Fukushima Daiichi would never be allowed to happen again, to those who claim that such assurance is impossible in Japan – or anywhere, for that matter. But concern for safety and a sense of mistrust have supplied the galvanizing energy for these demonstrations. The situation at Fukushima Daiichi is not the only trigger for such feelings, moreover: a day before the July 20th protest, The Asahi shinbun reported the findings of a commission charged with reevaluating the seismic vulnerability of some of Japan’s nuclear reactors, including the recently reactivated Ohi facility. Many of these – including Ohi – appear to sit atop potentially active fault lines. The report suggests, at the very least, that the review board which initially cleared the sites for these reactors back in the 1980’s heyday of nuclear power development did not do due diligence. It also raises further suspicion of the depth of collusion over the years between the government and the nuclear power industry in Japan.
It is this sense of mistrust – that one’s own government doesn’t have one’s best interests in mind, either because of the self-serving greed of powerful cabals of politicians, bureaucrats, and industry leaders, or because of a state commitment to an ideology of development at all cost – that has brought people out into the streets of Tokyo’s Nagata-chō section. In spite of postwar Japan’s “welfare state” approach to managing society – or perhaps because of it – I have always found Japanese people to have a particularly deep sense of cynicism about how their government works and whom it really works for. This cynicism seems pretty consistent across the political spectrum, and tends to border on a “but what are you gonna do?” kind of fatalism: politicians will always serve their own interests before those of the nation as a whole; those who need help the most won’t get it (or get enough of it); and things are destined to limp along like this forever because, ultimately, that is the nature of Japanese democracy – at least that is the sense of the prevailing sentiment I have gained since I first came to Japan in the mid 1980s. Although this view of politics is by no means wrong, however, like cynicism anywhere it tends to discourage one from trying to change things. That’s why these demonstrations are so remarkable; not since the heyday of the student movement in the late 1960s have crowds this large gathered to protest anything.
Another intriguing feature of the Friday demonstrations, as well as the other anti-nuclear rallies that have taken place since 3/11, is spontaneity of participation. I’ve already mentioned the diversity of the crowd. This seems to be connected to the very personal nature of people’s motives for coming out. The Friday gatherings themselves are the work of the “Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes” (首都圏反原発連合), a collection of thirteen organizations with various aims and orientations – including, according to a story in the July 19 Asahi, at least one right-wing group. But the vast majority of the people who show up probably have no connection to any of these groups. I made a point of asking someone who looked like she might be an organizer about this – a young woman holding a small plastic flag with “guide” written on it, who was urging people to cross the street to relieve the congestion that was building up in that particular area of the demonstration:
“Where have all these people come from? Did the coalition mobilize them?”
“No,” she said, with obvious wonder at the sheer number of people milling around her, “this is just happening – it’s the will of the people. Isn’t it great?”
Local Concerns, Global Frustrations
The anti-nuclear power demonstrations also come at a very interesting time of uptick in political protest across the globe. Movements like the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement in much of the Western hemisphere, and anti-nuclear protests in Japan are in one sense certainly disparate movements arising from concerns specific to each case. These recent Japanese protests do, however, share some interesting features with the Arab Spring in Egypt and Occupy. Historian Oguma Eiji noted this in a lengthy interview in the July 19th edition of the Asahi shinbun (“Seiji o hanasō – intabyū & rupo – kinyōbi no yoru, kanteimae de,” p. 15). If you look at the people who are taking part in these movements, you find that the majority of them are people of fairly high educational background: college students, recent graduates, or folks who graduated from college years ago to join the rank of the middle class. In the case of Egypt, these were the people who felt most frustrated by their lack of a political voice. In Occupy, and now in the Japanese anti-nuclear protests, Oguma sees a similar sense of socioeconomic disenfranchisement at work. As much as the American media has tried to marginalize Occupy as an unwashed collection of stoners, whack-jobs, hand-out seekers, and people so intoxicated on extremist conspiracy theories about the nefarious aims of multinational corporations that they are incapable of reason, the vast majority of participants are so-to-be college graduates or job seekers with a college degree and enormous loans taken to pay for it.
In the case of Japan, too, most participants are college students, recent grads languishing in what might be called. “temp staff hell” kinds of jobs, or people in their mid to late 30s and on who feel the shock of the demise of the “middle class life for everyone” promise of the high-growth years. They are frustrated with the inequity they see around them. In the US, it was the bailouts in the wake of the Lehman shock, and the strikingly unrepentant attitude of Wall Street that provided the touchstone. In Japan, it is the strong sense that entrenched political interests within the state, in collusion with vested corporate interests outside of it (although just barely so, in the case of amakudari bureaucrats and politicians turned private sector board officers), have rigged the game of state development in their favor for too long, and in ways that are ultimately detrimental to the well-being of the citizens. The Fukushima disaster became both an emblem of the problem and a touchstone popular dissatisfaction.
Oguma also notes another similarity between these movements: the growth of a population with time on its hands to question that status quo, as well as a sense of frustration with it to urge them to do so. The demise of the mass protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 came as the Japanese government’s “income doubling plan” began to deliver the sense of personal wealth that it promised. Wealth, of course, came at the price of leisure – and it was during these high growth years that the image of the workaholic sarariiman office worker – perhaps never entirely accurate but certainly indicative of something real – became a hegemonic symbol of Japanese middle class life. As long as the raises and promotions kept coming, and families could continue to afford the “my car,” “my home” (and “my wife, my kids”) lifestyle, people saw very little to take to the streets over. Much the same dynamic prevented the student protests of 1968 from finding support among this middle class; it also meant that once the students who took over their campuses and clashed with riot police graduated and joined the white collar work force, their fervor for overthrowing the system succumbed to the desires and demands of a busy, generally upwardly mobile life. One could mention similar dynamics of the relation between perceptions of wealth, time, and orientation toward political action in the recent history of any other industrialized nation.
These dynamics have stopped functioning, in Japan as elsewhere. Whether the momentum that the anti-nuclear movement in Japan has gained over the past few months will continue to build, or whether the government and the electric power industry will ultimately win the day by continuing to turn a deaf ear to the “big noise” of the demonstrations (to borrow the phrase that Prime Minister Noda employed to describe the weekly protests at his doorstep) remains to be seen. My sense, though, is that the momentum will gradually impel the movement to evolve, both in terms of its tactics and its aims – just as Occupy continues to change since eviction from Zucotti Park and its other encampments. The sense of uncertainly caused by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and the exacerbation of frustrations over the political and economic status quo that the government’s apparent disregard of popular concern has exacerbated, aren’t likely to evaporate so rapidly. It takes more than a passing concern to bring 90,000 Japanese out to spend a few hours packed together in the muggy air of an early summer night, especially in a section of Tokyo that is one of the deadest places imaginable on a Friday night.
One last observation of the demonstration is in order, and this is where it differs greatly from Occupy. By agreement with the police, the Friday night protests begin at 6 and end at 8. As 8pm approached, I began to wonder how quickly and peacefully the crowd would disperse. Would any of the groups try to resist and make a stand? Resisting the police is for many demonstrators in protests around the world the very hallmark of what it means to by politically engaged. In postwar Japan as well, the anti-treaty protests in 1960 and numerous student and labor union protests in the late 1960s featured significant clashes with riot police; especially in the latter, demonstrators came out “ready to rumble” in contests that pitted the demonstrators’ brightly painted hard hats, lance-like polls, and Molotov cocktails again the shields, truncheons, fire hoses, and tear gas fusillades of the police. In contrast, though, the only riot gear I saw on the 20th were a few shields leaning rather casually against the legs of the phalanx of officers in the subway station who blocked off the exit to the Prime Minister’s residence. Perhaps this was simply to suggest to those arriving for the demonstration that the cops meant business; once above group, shields gave way to yellow plastic megaphones as the standard police equipment for crowd control.
When 8pm rolled around, the roar of “saikadō hantai” seemed to crumble into the general noise created by thousands of conversations going on at once at such close quarters, and the police now took to their public address loudspeakers to advise people to walk a few blocks away from the Diet Building to use other stations (rather than trying to pack into the closest option), and to thank us for our cooperation – all in the same polite tones of a department store salesperson or hotel reception desk clerk. And people did just that. I followed along with the general drift of the crowds away from the Diet Building, until it dispersed along various streets into the Tokyo night.
Some will scoff at this as just another example of “slavish” Japanese obedience to authority and desire to preserve order for order’s sake, much like the displays of gaman that the foreign press commented upon in the wake of the tsunami with such admiration were also interpreted along cultural essentialist lines. In a case like this, though, there would be more to lose than gain by resisting. What possible point could it have served, anyway, especially when the police chose to meet the crowds with courtesy rather than suspicion or open hostility? The anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo and the Occupy demonstrations employ different tactics in line with different aims, after all. But perhaps the police forces tasked with crowd control elsewhere could learn a lesson from the way the Tokyo police have handled these demonstrations so far.