let us live! empowerment and the rhetoric of life in the japanese precarity movement

Let Us Live! Empowerment and the Rhetoric of Life

in the Japanese Precarity Movement

Carl Cassegard

In 2004, a new sort of May Day demonstration made its appearance in Japan: colorful street parties with dancing demonstrators slowly following a truck blasting out music on high volume. Fanciful costumes added to the visual impact of these “sound demonstrations” (saundo demo), which take their inspiration both from older Japanese precedents and foreign move-ments such as Reclaim the Streets.1 The oldest and probably best known of these May Day events, the Freedom and Survival May Day ( Jiyû to seizon no mêdê), has been arranged annually in Tokyo since 2004 by the General Freeter Union (Furîtâ Zenpan Rôdô Kumiai or Furîtâ Rôso for short). The demonstrators are mainly freeters — young men and women without regu-lar employment.2 Recent years have evinced a greater variation among par-ticipants, who also include older workers, day laborers, the homeless, self- proclaimed NEET (Not in Employment, Education, or Training), and even

positions 22:1 doi 10.1215/10679847-2383849Copyright 2014 by Duke University Press

positions 22:1 Winter 2014 42

oppositional Diet members. The demonstrators call themselves the “pre-cariat” (purekariâto), a term intended to cover the entire spectrum of work-ers with “precarious” — insecure, casualized, or irregular — employment conditions, which has expanded in pace with the deregulation of the labor market in Japan since the mid- 1990s.3 Together with the participants of sim-ilar manifestations around Japan, these groups are often referred to as the “precarity movement” or “antipoverty” (han- hinkon) movement.

With its use of performances, art, music, and dancing, the precarity movement shares many traits with what sociologists such as Môri Yoshitaka have called “new cultural movements.” In contrast to the widespread image of the student sects of the 1960s and 1970s and other earlier forms of radical activism in Japan, the new cultural movements are said to be characterized by an open and loose network- structure, ideological diversity, more egalitar-ian and individualist forms of organization, and a conspicuous use of art, pop culture, performances, and fun.4

However, as the example of the “New Year Dispatch Worker Village” — a tent- village set up by activists in Hibiya Park in late December 2008 for dispatch workers axed after the onset of the recent global economic crisis — makes clear, issues of culture or self- expression are today often overshad-owed by a more materialist concern, namely, the resurgence of poverty in today’s society.5 Furthermore, what disappears from view if the precarity movement in Japan is explained simply as a reflection of the rise of “new cultural movements” is that it is the product of a shift within a broader cur-rent of freeter activism toward a more confrontational stance emphasizing public protest. To be sure, this rising prominence of material concerns and public confrontations has not meant that freeter activists have returned to the fold of the established labor movement. They emphasize their common-ality not so much with regular full- time workers as with other marginalized groups such as homeless people, immigrants, NEET, social withdrawers, and the mentally disabled. This realignment of solidarity toward groups marginal to the established labor movement points to the importance of the conceptual work performed in recent years, in which a new way of framing the worker is created, centering on the coinage “precariat” or through terms such as lost generation or working poor. Refusing to identify either with the traditional working class or with middle- class citizens or a “vanguard” of

Cassegard ❘ Let Us Live! 43

university students, there is little or no sense of commonality with the older labor movement, the citizen movements, or the student sects of the 1960s and 1970s.6

The precarity movement, then, intriguingly combines a cultural orien-tation with a keen sense of material deprivation and a will to reach out to other marginalized groups in society. Both of these aspects were prepared in freeter activism for more than a decade before the emergence of the precar-ity movement proper and point to the importance of paying due attention to the process of working through the “negative” legacy of the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s — the traumatic and lingering legacy of political fail-ure, sectarian infighting, and dogmatism, which had to be addressed by any new movement aspiring to renew the spirit of protest.7 This legacy has been crucial to the precarity movement in many ways. While the new cultural movements are often presented as having overcome that legacy, features such as loose networklike organizations and the playful use of art or culture were certainly not absent in earlier radical movements.8 The reluctance of many activists today to publicly identify with or recognize such precedents suggests that the legacy still functions in public consciousness much like a trauma, circumscribing an essentially ambivalent object that is denied even as it is repeated.9 Such ambiguity may well be a trait of all recovery. Arguing that repetitions are far more than mere symptoms, Slavoj Žižek claims that recoveries from traumatic failures refer to a utopian spark that in retrospect is felt to be given a second chance, but which for this reason must appear in a guise untainted by the earlier failure. To repeat a failed revolution is therefore not to repeat what the revolutionaries did but what they failed to do, their missed opportunities.10 Repetitions can facilitate a conscious work-ing through of the trauma since they imply an acting on reality that may gradually cure the sense of powerlessness.

The aim of this article is to understand the mixture of culture, mate-rial concerns, and confrontation in today’s precarity activism from the point of view of how it relates itself to this trauma. What exactly is the relation between the desire for cultural expression and economic concerns in the precarity movement? A related question concerns the element of protest and confrontation in the movement. While aiming for social change, its goal is also to empower individuals by having fun and resuscitating “life” here and


now. What is the balance here, and how are these two aims interrelated in the movement? I will answer these questions by focusing on the tension in the movement’s discourse between “life” and “survival” or, in other words, between the emphasis on fun and living here and now on the one hand and the concern about precarization and impoverishment on the other. I will also pay attention to the category of the “precariat,” which is sugges-tive since it connotes not only rebelliousness and political agency but also, simultaneously, marginalized or subaltern people in need of recovery and empowerment. These inquiries will enable me to throw light on the overall question: what role have such articulations played in shaping a new form of activism attractive to those disillusioned with what they perceive as older or more established forms of political activism?

From Dame- ren to the Precarity Movement

Retrospectively, we can see that the so- called “bubble years” of the late eighties and early nineties was a fertile period of experimentation in which new forms of protest and organization were tried out among young people outside the established Leftist sects.11 These new directions came to be sym-bolized by Dame- ren, the “league of good- for- nothings,” a group that was formed in 1992 by Pepe Hasegawa (1966 – ) and Kaminaga Kôichi (1967 – ). Dame- ren is already well- known, and I will limit myself to pointing out four features that helped it lay the groundwork of a new departure for sub-sequent freeter activism.12 Firstly, it played an important role in the shed-ding of the negative image associated with Leftist political activism by its use of irreverent humor and inventive tactics, and by its use of terms such as dame (good- for- nothing) to grope for a new possible constituency of a social movement. A person who is “dame” can, for instance, be someone who is unable or unwilling to work, who is not good at communicating with oth-ers, who lacks friends or partners, or who is generally a person lacking the “skills” and merits needed to be a “winner” in mainstream society. While the early participants in the movements used the word ironically to refer to themselves as well as to people in marginalized positions such as sexual minorities or homeless people, it soon came to function as a magnet for social withdrawers and people with depressions or other mental problems.


The word dame thus played an important role in clearing the way for a new category or even a new subject of dissent in Japan that was clearly different from the “workers,” “citizens,” or “minorities” of older movements.

A second significant feature was its rejection of the Japanese work ethic, its questioning of the value of work to the sense of fulfillment in life, and its advocacy of dropping out in order to relax and “simply live.” A third related point concerned the notions of “protest” and “place.” Rather than public protest or confrontation, Dame- ren engaged in creating alternative spaces, such as Akane near Waseda University. Fourthly, Dame- ren helped redefine the role of social movements toward that of furthering the recovery of the various “dame” people it attracted. Its record in furthering recovery was mixed, but it did take important steps toward making recovery a cen-tral movement task, such as establishing forums or networks free from the pressures of surrounding society, where “victims” themselves could jointly grope for solutions.13

Dame- ren is no longer active, but it is regarded as an important pioneer of the precarity movement.14 When precarity activists refer to Dame- ren as an inspiration today, however, the emphasis usually is not on dropping out but on confronting authorities and calling for social change, as in the follow-ing slogan: “A May Day for good- for- nothings (dame na yatsu) is coming, a May Day linking together unemployed and overworked, a DaMayDay!”15 To understand why this more combative aspect of the freeter movement has come to the fore, we need to pay attention to the changes that have wrought Japanese society since the onset of the “postbubble” recession in the 1990s. Along with the rise of youth unemployment and the shift on a mass scale to flexible, disposable labor, the term freeter underwent a change of meaning. As the term first appeared in the latter half of the 1980s it tended to desig-nate an independent- minded and perhaps somewhat spoiled young person who put greater value on freedom than money. With the rise of unemploy-ment and the flexibilization of work during the 1990s, it increasingly took on the meaning of cheap and disposable labor lacking the rights and privi-leges of regular employees. With this trend, the jargon of Dame- ren, which advocated the hippielike idea of volitionally dropping out of regular work, unavoidably took on a dated quality.16 Instead, in the new stratum of work-ing poor and young flexible workers, a movement protesting the impover-


ishment and insecurity of life began to take form. This was the birth of the precarity movement.

The General Freeter Union and the Concept of the “Precariat”

The General Freeter Union was born in 2004 out of the network for irregu-lar workers called PAFF (Part- timer, Arbeiter, Freeter, and Foreign worker) and is the most well- known of the many small unions that make up the precarity movement today.17 Despite its name, it welcomes any kind of indi-vidual member: not only freeters but also regular employees, unemployed, or other forms of irregular workers.

The union’s activities were initially modest, with much energy being poured into associating, debating, setting up study circles, and arranging the annual Freedom and Survival May Day. Since 2006, it has been pouring energy into working for the empowerment of workers by protesting against abuses, negotiating on their behalf, supporting them through counseling and information about labor rights, and influencing public opinion through the mass media. It also frequently allies with other groups to protest war, sexism, environmental destruction, racism, and the treatment of other mar-ginalized groups such as immigrants, the homeless, NEET, or social with-drawers. Today Shimizu Naoko, one of the union’s joint representatives, describes labor counseling and “expressive activities” such as sound demon-strations as “the twin wheels of our activities.”18 Another significant devel-opment after 2006 has been the spread of similar unions to other cities in Japan, a process in which the General Freeter Union often provided support. As the result of these developments, large- scale coordinated actions, such as the nationwide Precariat May Days that started in 2008 or the Anti G8 actions in 2008, have become possible.19

The union’s origins lie in the idea — originating in its founder, the poet Asato Ken (aka Tokuda Miguel) — of a union that would organize the entire “lower stratum” (kasô) of impoverished people in Japan, from home-less people and day laborers to freeters and the unemployed.20 Since 2006, it has used the term precariat for this target group, a term encompassing all people forced to endure insecure living conditions. The term precari-ato or precariat, which is derived from precario (precarity) and proletariato


(proletariat), is said to have originated as street graffiti in Italy in 2003 and gained wide popularity throughout the EuroMayDays beginning in 2004. Cross- cutting traditional class boundaries, it includes “chain workers” as well as “brain workers,” freelancers as well as manufacturing temps. Unlike similar terms, such flex worker, the term carries strong connotations of polit-ical agency: “The precariat is to postindustrialism as the proletariat was to industrialism: the nonpacified social subject.”21In Japan, the media activ-ist Sakurada Kazuya seems to have been the first to popularize the term, through events at the NPO Remo at Festival Gate in Osaka in 2005.22 It gained wide currency when the journal Impaction produced a special issue on the precariat in spring 2006.23 Soon afterwards, it was picked up by the General Freeter Union, which used it for the Freedom and Survival May Day, its first appearance in a street demonstration in Japan.

As Settsu Tadashi, a former board member of the union, points out, part of the attraction of the word is that it derives from the worker movement itself, not from the corporate world or researchers: “The word ‘precariat’ differs from, for example, the word ‘multitude, since it didn’t come into being as an academic term but was born from anonymous wall graffiti.”24 The term was also attractive since it put something into words that until then had not been clearly articulated — an awareness among marginalized or disadvantaged people that their plight, far from being their own fault, was a product of neoliberal labor- market policies. The term’s electrifying effect can be gauged from how Amamiya Karin, a charismatic front fig-ure in the precarity movement and prolific writer who has probably done more than anyone else to popularize the term in Japan, describes how she encountered it. The first time she saw it, in an announcement for the 2006 Freedom and Survival May Day, she “had the feeling of having discovered something extraordinary, a big exit, a way to break out.”25 Encountering the word helped her sort things out in her mind and turned her into a pre-cariat activist. “I finally sensed that I had caught a glimpse of what I had been hunting for, an exit from the ‘difficulty of living’ of young people, and received an immense shock.”26

Let us have a look at how the term is used by the General Freeter Union. A standard explanation in its publications is that it means “people who are forced to a condition of uncertainty,” including freeters, dispatch and con-


tract workers, as well as unemployed and NEETs.27 This usage is close to what we find in the EuroMayDay, but in actual usage among activists in Japan, the word tends to become broader and more inclusive, encompass-ing the mentally and physically disabled, social withdrawers, wrist cutters, the homeless, overworked regular workers, and even owners of small shops. The adoption of the term precariat in Japan can be understood as a response to the felt need among activists for some overarching or bridging category or possible basis for alliance among such groups. As the DJ Noiz, a member of the union, says, “I have the feeling that the concept ‘precariat’ as used by us in the Freedom and Survival May Days is different from the European concept. We’ve interpreted it our own way, adding elements like mentally handicapped who are neither working nor regarded as part of the neoliberal labor market — so we’ve expanded the concept.”28 A good example of this wide definition is Amamiya’s announcement of a sound demonstration in 2006: “You to whom living is hard, freeters, NEETs, social withdrawers, paupers, working poor, workers on the verge of death from overwork, temp workers, illegal overstayers, regular employees without insurance, you who long for suicide, all kinds of addicts, all you with physical or mental handi-caps, wrist cutters, or in other words: all members of the precariat — let’s roll out on the street and demonstrate!.”29 In this passage, the “precariat” practi-cally merges with what Dame- ren used to refer to as “dame.” The affinity between the two concepts is also pointed out by Settsu: “To those who com-plain that they don’t understand the foreign word ‘precariat’ (‘Why not use a Japanese word?’), I usually reply that ten years ago there was a movement unique to Japan called Dame- ren.”30

It should be noted that precariat is not the only term used in the precar-ity movement. Some groups, such as DaMayDay in Matsumoto, stick with terms such as good- for- nothing or loser. Union Bochibochi in the Kansai region prefers the simple term pauper (binbô): “After all, ‘precariat’ isn’t eas-ily understood by Japanese people, but if you say ‘pauper’ we realize at once what [it] means.”31 The term pauper is also used with glee by other groups, such as the Great Pauper Rebellion (Binbônin Daihanran) in Kôenji in Tokyo or the Union Extasy in Kyoto. Other terms used by activists are rab-ble (uzômuzô), desperados (narazumono), and unstable poor ( fuantei hinmin), all connoting lowly social status as well as a heterogeneous composition.32


Common to these terms is, firstly, a self- deprecating humor lacking in the official or academic terminology. Secondly, the terms stress material and social deprivation and imply identification with the underdog. Thirdly, they imply rebelliousness. When activists use terms such as loser, they are at the same time signaling their rejection of the value judgments ordinarily associ-ated with the word. Denigrating terms are taken over, but only to be turned into objects of polemical affirmation. It is not the notion of a respectable working class that provides the source of identification here but rather that of an unruly, despised lumpen proletariat.

There is something paradoxical and ambiguous about these names, which appear to be able to include almost anyone — in line with the polemic principle that all will adopt the name of the most despised or marginal-ized. We may recall Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that politics is quintessen-tially about “improper” names or “misnomers.” The political act par excel-lence is what he calls subjectivation, an act whereby subaltern groups make themselves visible by polemically rejecting given identities, often in favor of new categories that appear unreasonable, “impossible,” or paradoxical. Conversely, politics dies whenever groups submit to given, unambiguous categories, through what he calls “identification.”33 When demonstrators call themselves the “precariat” or “good- for- nothings” or “paupers,” terms whose very ambiguity signals antagonism, this is an example of subjectiva-tion. Freeters or day laborers may be submissive, but the precariat or the rabble are not.

“Life” and “Survival” in the Precarity Movement

In the early 1960s, Raoul Vaneigem provided a classical formulation of the desire for a full and nonalienated life in the slogan that “up to now surviv-ing has prevented us from living.”34 Surviving means conforming to roles in mainstream society such as working and consuming in return for material rewards and social status. Dame- ren typically rejected such survival in favor of dropping out in order to pursue a freer and more fulfilling life through what they called “simply living” (tada ikiru koto). Dropping out would cer-tainly mean a lowering of one’s standard of living, but the spare time, they argued, could be used for imagination and — to quote Kaminaga — for


“reading, watching movies, listening to music or losing oneself in thought, looking at grass moving in the wind or listening to raindrops falling.”35 Something of this attitude remains in the precarity movement, but here the issue of “survival” — expressed in the demands for material sustenance: give us food and give us money! — has emerged as a major issue, resulting in a tension between “survival” and “life” as two directions or tendencies coexist-ing uneasily in the movement’s discourse.

For instance, Amamiya’s slogan “Let us live (Ikisasero)!,” which since 2006 has been used in the Freedom and Survival May Days and which is also the title of one of her best- selling books, seems to incorporate both meanings. The book abounds with examples that make it clear that the slogan is both about survival and living. “The theme of the struggle is simply ‘survival’. It is ‘let us live!’. Hand over the money we need to live! Let us eat!.”36 Her closing words are forceful: “What I want to say is simply: let us live! Simply living, who can live a decent life in a country where even that is threat-ened? Let us live! If possible without dying from overwork, without becom-ing homeless, without committing suicide, and, if possible, happily.”37 Life should be more than mere survival, but in order to live we need the money to survive — that appears to be Amamiya’s message. What is perhaps most striking about these passages is the unwillingness to give up on either “sur-vival” or “life.” Settsu brings out the potentially conflicting nature of these two slogans: “To ‘survive’ is important, but we must ask about the content of life too. . . . The problem is if life is worth living or not, and what we are calling for is ‘Let us live a life worth living!’.”38

There is a tendency to view the precarity movement as a response to eco-nomic or material changes in society, but as these statements make evident, it is at the same time driven by a longing for “life” that by far transcends a mere taming of neoliberalism. This is why freeter activism will hardly van-ish even if the economic conditions of freeters improve. Freeter activism was a rebellion among freeters against mainstream life and the boredom of a life dictated by work and material wealth even before it became a movement among the “working poor.” That being said, the appeal for “survival” is undeniably forcefully present in the precarity movement. Clearly, a tension remains between the emphasis on survival and life.39


Within the statements and proposals put forward by the precarity move-ment we can, broadly speaking, identify two groups. Firstly, we find appeals and protests directed to authorities and employers and emphasizing “sur-vival.” These include putting forth demands for higher wages and better working conditions and calling for a “basic income” as a way of guarantee-ing the minimal means of survival for everybody.40 We can note that there is hardly any nostalgia for “life- time” employments in these demands. The demand is for flexibility to be combined with basic social security: flexibility without precarity. As one activist put it, “I don’t mind if I have an insecure job as long as I can lead a secure life.”41

In the second group, we find an emphasis on “living,” expressed in the advocacy of constructing arenas or situations for alternative life here and now. These proposals are not oriented toward public authorities but rely on the direct initiatives of concerned people themselves. Below I will dis-tinguish between two forms of valorizing “life” in the precarity movement that correspond to these two tendencies: a weak variant in which the dream of “simply living” is maintained but wedded to calls for material “survival,” and a stronger or more emphatic notion celebrating the direct blossoming out of “life” in struggles and creative activity.

The Dream of Simply Living

Echoes of Dame- ren’s ideal of “simply living” can still be heard in the Gen-eral Freeter Union, but now in a context that gives it a significantly differ-ent meaning. A good text in which to listen to these echoes is PAFF’s 2005 proclamation, “Unpatriotic Declaration for Not Raising the Human Ability of the Young.” The title is a travesty of a declaration issued by Keidanren (the Federation of Economic Organizations) the same year, which PAFF denounces for blaming the young for their “lack of eagerness to work,” when in reality their harsh situation is caused by business elites such as the Keidanren itself.42

PAFF’s argument here is one that has become common in the precarity movement. Protests are directed not just at neoliberal deregulation but also at the tendency to put the blame for young people’s precarious situation


on their own idleness or unwillingness to lead a conventional life. Against such arguments, activists usually emphasize that the problem has social, not individual, causes. The working hours of freeters are often as long as or longer than those of regular employees. Many freeters do not wish for anything else but regular work, but they are unable to find it because of the systematic shift toward a freeter- based economy. However, PAFF’s declara-tion stands out by its explicit argument that what is wrong with the notion of “self- responsibility” is not that young people are not lazy. To be sure, it goes without saying that it is absurd to claim that freeters have themselves to blame, but the remedy is not a return to full employment. What is wrong is rather the work- centrist conviction as such, and what is needed is a greater tolerance for alternative ways of living, for the “idea of living pure and sim-ple”: “Human beings are more than labor power. Life should be something richer, with things like talking and laughing with friends, watching movies, reading books, listening to music, traveling and loving. Such things are not necessarily earned by labor. We don’t remember being asked to live with no blanks left outside work. We freeters are forced to long working hours to feed ourselves thanks to our cheap wages. And you have the nerve to tell us to work more!”43

This rejection of work- centrism is also foregrounded in the Freedom and Survival May Days, during which placards and megaphones are used to raise an array of slogans such as “Regular job holders are losers too,” “Life is more than making a living,” and “We won’t kill ourselves by overworking.” As these quotations make clear, what the precarity movement calls for is not a restoration of the defunct “Japanese model,” but a new form of life in which simply living will be possible without precarity. What PAFF is driv-ing at is a defense of the right to be lazy, of the reasonableness of not work-ing so hard, and of the idea of a society in which “simply living” is possible. As in Dame- ren, there is a criticism of the hard work ethic of Japan and an affirmation of a more relaxed life. Unlike to the members of Dame- ren, however, social circumstances are now portrayed as preventing such living, which therefore recedes into a dream or utopian image of what would be possible in a better society. To Dame- ren, “simply living” was a heterotopia rather than a utopia, something that could be realized in the right places here and now by dropping out. To PAFF, by contrast, the only way to real-


ize the dream is by social change. The ideal of “simply living” therefore goes hand in hand, not with dropping out, but with street demonstrations and appeals to the authorities.

The Blossoming of Life in the Midst of Revolution: Yabu Shirô and Matsumoto Hajime

In the precarity movement, the attempt to reconnect to and resuscitate “life” comes to the fore in still another guise — one that has shed the pastoral quiet of “simply living” and that must be realized in the midst of struggle itself.44 Below, I will exemplify one variant of this attempt by Yabu Shirô (1971 – ) and another by Matsumoto Hajime (1974 – ).

Yabu is a well- known autonomist writer with a background in the Dame- ren circles. He was one of the founding members of the General Freeter Union and for many years ran a small bar in Shinjuku called Jacobin. Despite his active role in many of the early sound demonstrations in Japan, he is far from viewing them as any kind of plea or appeal emitted to politi-cians or the larger public. A street demonstration is not an attempt to com-municate, much less a protest. It is an act of autonomous life, of reclaiming life, and refusing to be influenced by the norms of mainstream society. It has to do with being true to one’s desires, to having fun and being alive every minute. To him, a demonstration or a strike is above all an end in itself, and only secondarily a means to achieve some purpose.

For an illustration of what “being true to one’s desire” can mean, we can turn to his reports of two antiwar demonstrations at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the first he expresses his admiration for the demonstra-tion’s truck driver who persisted in driving at a snail’s pace, ignoring pres-sure from the police to drive faster: “He was acting in a dimension apart from the utilitarian question of ‘what will come out of it,’ being true to his desires. What matters is not to try to achieve some result through the dem-onstration. Since dancing in the street is what you really want, you won’t let go of that no matter how much you are being yelled at.”45 In another report, he describes a clash with the riot police in which he is hit, his glasses fly away, and he tumbles to the asphalt, a forest of arms and legs barring his sight: “Through a tiny opening, I caught a glimpse of the gorgeous blue sky. My thoughts leapt out of my skull, merging with the things around me.


Fused with my skin, the cold and distant materials pulsated as if alive. I was the asphalt in front of the station, I was the arrested safety boots, I was the antiwar blue sky — and I could have affirmed the whole world!”46 What matters in a strike or demonstration, then, is not to be successful. Regardless of success, there is no need to seek understanding from people around you if the action is endowed with meaning for you yourself. Yabu continues, “Be careful about whether the action will allow your desire to blossom or not. If you do that you rarely fail. You can walk without maps.”47

His stance is therefore confrontational without being communicative. Public manifestations of “protest” are, paradoxical as it may sound, not voice, not an attempt to get across a message or to engage in dialogue, but a form of withdrawal from public communication. Life can only be secured by rejecting the prevalent views in mainstream society and refusing to be influenced by them:

The desire for empathy is a sign of the life’s decay and approaching death. You cannot live merely by communication and empathy, by doing things together with others. If you’re not able to stare on a tatami mat, on the ceiling, on the back of a sofa, or on the edge of a bath tub and discover part of yourself in it, then life is slipping away from you. Indeed, if you can’t stare intently at the grain of the ceiling without impatience, then you’re not likely to be able to communicate about trifles with others either.48

To Yabu, “free life” ( jiyû na sei) is to be tasted in the midst of the struggle and not to be dreamt of as a faraway goal. While affirming what he calls the “labor movement,” he emphasizes that such a movement should not aim at grabbing power or raising the material standard of life of workers. The movement is to live a life of unconditional “autonomy” here and now, even if it means colliding with the structures of power or the spectacle of ideas and lifestyles in mainstream society. “We are involved in the movement every day . . . gathering in parks, drinking alcohol, tearing away important- looking advertisements, throwing cigarettes on the roadside, shoplifting foodstuffs, unintentionally bilking restaurants — in other words, simply liv-ing a life doing this or that is the movement.”49

While Yabu uses the term labor movement, he has little but contempt for


regular workers and their values and outlook on life. In his eyes, workers are corrupt and imbued with the mechanisms of control, surveying one another and receiving the payment for their collaboration in their salary account. “I don’t want to become such a person and I want to exclude them actively,” he asserts, concluding grimly, “The worker, guilty.”50 This is a militant version of Dame- ren’s rejection of mainstream work: an advocacy of dropping out of work, but in a new guise, coupled to an aggressive rhetoric and public confrontations. The life that is to be achieved through such dropping out is pictured no longer in terms of any idyllic or pastoral “simply living” but as a heightened intensity resulting from the struggle to guard one’s autonomy. “The winner is the one who has the best time,” he concludes. “What is really fun is to go on strike. To regain one’s powers, to yell against the forest.”51

Like Yabu, Matsumoto regularly participates in the Freedom and Sur-vival May Days, in addition to arranging his own usually very boisterous May Day events in the Kôenji district of Tokyo.52 Imitating Dame- ren in creating alternative places or arenas of life to which young people can drop out, he appears to value autonomy as much as Yabu, but rather than shutting out communication, he prefers to rely on the magnetism of fun to attract outsiders to join him in his “revolution.”

He has founded several groups, such the Great Pauper Rebellion (Bin-bônin Daihanran) and Kôenji NEET Union (Kôenji Nîto Kumiai). His base of activity is a shopping arcade near Kôenji station where he and his friends run an expanding number of recycle shops and a café, all aptly named The Amateur Riot (Shirôto No Ran). The shops function as places for gathering, talking, watching films, eating and drinking, and generally arranging a variety of “guerrilla events.” Their ambition in starting the shops, apart from enabling them to make a living, was to create an envi-ronment suited for a typical freeter income, where people could have fun without money.53 As he points out, his strategy for liberation differs from that of most activists in the precarity movement. “They are demanding the improvement of working conditions and social welfare by making appeals to the government and corporations, while I’m instead trying to exit that world as completely as I can.”54

The jargon as well as the emphasis on constructing alternative places is similar to Dame- ren, but there is a difference. More than in Dame- ren,


there is an affirmation of actively occupying parts of and disrupting the flow of surrounding society. Constructing an alternative place is made into much more of a public event and an active challenge to the surrounding society. The street is systematically utilized as a scene for humorous and sometimes wild pranks that call forth associations to artistic happenings or what Hakim Bey calls “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZ). His trade-mark street demonstration involves cooking nabe on the street and invit-ing passers- by such as unemployed youngsters, office workers, students, or homeless: “Let’s call their bluff and start the great insurrection of paupers, multiplying throughout the world! We’ll do what we want to do by creating places for us to be, liberated zones (kaihôku) on the street.”55 Matsumoto has also arranged a great number of seemingly unserious but hugely popular street parties, protesting the removal of illegally parked bicycles or demand-ing zero apartment rent. Many of his demonstrations have become hits on YouTube, such as “We are the three” in 2006 in which he made fun of the police by applying for a demonstration permit and then turning up with an extremely tiny following. In 2007, he campaigned for a position on the local ward assembly, turning the street around the campaign van into a resound-ing street party every evening: “Of course, our aim was to take back the street, not to get an assembly seat.”56

As Matsumoto points out, it would be a mistake to portray him as a pro-ponent of frugal ways to “survive in income gap society” since his real aim is “to create a commotion” and “turn over the world.”57 Revolution is another word that he frequently uses and that reflects his goal of social change. In his usage, however, the word has little to do with the classical image of violent upheavals resulting in the overthrow of state power: “Wouldn’t it already be a revolution if groups like ‘The Great Pauper Rebellion’ sprang up all over the country and joined together? Instead of organizing a movement and trying to change society by confronting it head on, I’m more attracted to the idea of constructing a postrevolutionary world in advance and then just telling everyone: come over here, it’s fun!”58

Matsumoto is clearly aware that a sustainable sphere for living outside the mainstream presupposes some way of combining “life” and “survival.” The Amateur Riot can be seen as an answer to how such a combination might look. He is by no means certain that the answer is viable, since even alterna-


tive forms of survival potentially run counter to “life”: “My greatest anxiety now is how to maintain the balance between the shop’s function as a main-spring of my and the staff’s living, and its function as a base of riots.”59 Nev-ertheless, he feels that things will work out. People should be less anxious about rejecting wage work, since fears about “survival” are often exagger-ated: “Even if things don’t go well, you won’t die. The best and simplest is to cut away the strange things that fetter you in the world. They say you must live a steady and decent life and things like that, but that’s all illusion.”60

If Yabu could experience himself as isolating himself from the surround-ing society in a street demonstration, in Matsumoto we can observe a seem-ingly opposite phenomenon: the creation of alternative arenas reveals itself as a message addressed to society, as “voice.” What they have in common is that both attempt to resist the instrumentalization of life and its subjugation to “survival” in the sense of having to work for the system. Where they do address the problem of survival, they try to do so in terms that leave open the possibility of making a living in some alternative sphere outside the sys-tem of wage work. It may not be a coincidence that they have both expressed an affinity to the Italian autonomia movement or the German Autonomen, movements that also strive for a direct realization of “life” here and now, a realization that can never be achieved by appealing to authorities.61 In both Yabu’s writings, and among the activists of the Amateur Riot, “revolution” is redefined into a process of autonomous activism. Revolutionary activity is neither a stoic self- sacrifice for the organization nor a patient and disciplined reliance on history, but a joyful and creative endeavor premised on the resus-citation of “life” here and now. “If it ain’t fun, it ain’t revolution,” as one of the members of the General Freeter Union says.62

Above, I have presented two tendencies in the precarity movement, both of which carry on part of Dame- ren’s legacy but in different ways. Put sim-ply, the strategy of “simply living” by dropping out branches off into one strand in which the ideal of a relaxed and peaceful “simple life” is retained but turned into a distant dream to be realized only after social conditions guaranteeing “survival” are secured, and another strand in which a fulfilled life is seen as possible here and now but only through revolt or struggle. The former most prominently surfaces in appeals to the authorities, while the latter tends to appear in texts advocating self- supporting alternative net-


works. In the former, we find the clearest rejection of the notion of freeters’ “self- responsibility,” while in the latter we find a tendency not to reject but to accept the idea of self- responsibility as part of one’s freedom and to down-play the portrayal of oneself as a victim.

It should be pointed out that while these two strands represent different directions, they coexist in the same movement. Importantly, both represent a movement away from Dame- ren through their greater emphasis on confron-tation and public protest. Despite the continuities between Dame- ren and the precarity movement, there are clear differences in how they understand the situation of freeters. Not only do we see a greater emphasis on “survival” today. Even among precarity activists anxious to preserve the valorization of “life,” such valorization tends to be expressed in acts of public protest. As we see in the case of Yabu, a street demonstration calling for “survival” can itself be a vehicle for momentarily realizing “life” here and now. Conversely, Matsumoto’s provocative display of liberated life simultaneously functions as a message to the wider society, calling on it to reflect on the sacrifices exacted by the orientation toward “survival.”

Narratives of Recovery

I have argued that the term precariat has helped the precarity movement reach out to groups outside the freeter stratum proper and forge new soli-darities. Indeed, a conspicuous number of NEET and former social with-drawers as well as homeless and handicapped people participate in the pre-carity movement’s demonstrations.63 What is it in the precarity movement that encourages the participation of subaltern groups, that furthers the recovery of their will to associate, and that gives them confidence to protest?

Let us listen to a few voices describing their first contact with and early experience of the precarity movement. Nakamura Ken reports that during a “talk café” in 2005, arranged as a preliminary step to the formation of Union Bochibochi, many participants had expressed relief at discovering that they were not alone and at finding a place where it was possible for them to talk about their anxieties, free from the accusations of “self- responsibility.”64 We can compare this to Amamiya’s account of the people who come to the Gen-eral Freeter Union seeking help:


What they all say is that when they, who had been treated like trash their entire lives, felt that they were recognized as humans for the first time. . . . Unions and movements are thought to have the aim of improving employment conditions or contributing to society, but it’s not just that. . . . Rather than a labor union, this is becoming a survival union where one can regain a place to be and a feeling that life is worth living.65

Settsu agrees that the union is not only a means for struggle but also a place for recovery that has begun to “function as a community, as a place for mutual help and emotional interaction.”66

These voices emphasize the importance of having access to places out-side mainstream society where people can communicate sheltered from the evaluations of this society. However, there are limitations to the degree of empowerment that this strategy can bring about. Interestingly, it is just as easy — if not easier — to find examples of how feelings of empowerment have come about not through exit to shelters but through the experience of public confrontation with adversaries.67 Amamiya writes, “Reclaiming the streets, make a fuss, go wild, sing, expressing which the entire body that you are alive. That’s the only way we can live. Rather than as a movement, I think of this as an extraordinarily rich and luxurious culture. More than anyone else, we who have nothing to lose are probably in a position to dis-seminate an irresponsibly and extremely fun culture.”68

To understand the empowering effect of participating in public demon-strations, let us recall Yabu’s comment about participation in demonstrations being an aim in itself, rather than a means to bring about change in society. In a succinct formulation, Settsu explains that what street demonstrations change are the participants. “In fact, demonstrations won’t bring about any immediate change in the world or society. Rather, what changes is oneself. That’s right. Demonstrations are not for the sake of the future, but for the sake of the present.”69 Takemura Masato, another activist, agrees: “By par-ticipating in demonstrations you meet a lot of interesting people, but above all you meet a new self.”70

How is this change produced? Having access to areas of alternative evalu-ation and discovering that one is not alone is only part of the process of recovery. Amamiya points to a further element in her insistence that discon-


tent must be turned outwards, in anger and protest. Denouncing the notion of “self responsibility” as a device of turning the violence of the system back on the victims, she stresses the need for young people to express and verbal-ize the “irritation that can’t find words,” and this is why she encourages them, stating that “it’s all right for us to be angry. To get angry, to lose our temper and express ourselves in words.”71

We may recall the crucial role Sigmund Freud accords to verbalization in processes of recovery.72 While it would be grossly reductive and unfair to view all the communication going on in the precarity movement solely from the point of view of recovery, verbalization does form a common thread that recurs in most accounts of recovery — those emphasizing the “exit” to a place of like- minded as well as those emphasizing “voice” or the public manifestation of dissent. In the first case, you make contact with others who share your experiences while in the second case, you direct your voice out-wards, to the general public. These two cases indicate two possible forms of verbalization. While the former may appear as an “exit” from the point of view of the general public, both are, at heart, a form of voice — not radically different, but situated on a continuum of publicness.73

Apart from verbalization, the realization that one is not powerless to act back on society, that one is able to turn from being a passive victim into being an active agent, comes forward as an important prerequisite for recov-ery: many union activists stress the importance of the “experience that the reality around us can be changed” or “experience of winning” that freeters can get by participating in successful negotiations with employers.74 What emerges here is the image of unions functioning as instruments not only for securing or defending material guarantees of survival but also for empower-ment and the resurrection of the vital impulses that have been stymied through defeats, setbacks, or failures.

Concluding Reflections

As I have tried to show, today’s precarity activism cannot be understood solely as a response to the economic woes and drastic transformations of Japanese society in the 1990s. The development of new forms of activism that made today’s precarity movement possible was already well on its way


in the nonsect radical circles in the late 1980s before the burst of the “bubble economy.” Today’s precarity movement has inherited many of these early developments, as can be seen in its valorization of “life,” the use of art and popular music in street demonstrations, the preference for loose network-like organization, and the reliance on freeters and other irregular workers as the movement’s main carriers. At the same time, the precarization of employment and increasing poverty in the recent decade have meant that survival has become an acute issue, a fact that certainly makes the more confrontational stance of the precarity movement when compared to prede-cessors such as Dame- ren understandable. The precarity movement is both very cultural in its insistence on living here and now on the one hand, and oriented toward survival and insisting on solidarity with the poor or pre-carious of society on the other. The viewpoint quoted above that those with “nothing to lose” may be in a position to be especially creative and free to use their imagination shows one of the ways in which culture and material concerns are intertwined in the precarity movement. A tension can often be felt between the orientations toward life and survival, but this tension can be creative. As it turns against the precarization of work as well as the increas-ingly obsolete ideal of full- time employment, the precarity movement gropes for possible ways of combining life with survival, for a society in which the freedom of flexibility will be possible without the economic insecurity of precarity, through public demands for basic income and other guarantees of survival and through experiments in alternative spheres for surviving and living. Despite its name, it is concerned as much with cultural expression and living as with precarity.

Similarly, empowering participants and resurrecting “life” are as central to the precarity movement as protest and social change. To grasp the relation between these two aims, we need to look at how the movement relates not only to the sources of discontent in the surrounding society but also to the sphere of experienced powerlessness and isolation. In order to visualize this web of relations, we can make use of three interlocking circles (see fig. 1).

Generally speaking, the activities of social movements (C) are not exhausted in challenges and confrontations directed at the ills of surround-ing society (A). The more people react to setbacks and frustrations by with-drawing into a world of experienced isolation and powerlessness (B), the


more pressing for social movements the task becomes of addressing their empowerment. Arguably, that movements had to devote a great part of their energy to this second task was an important part of what occurred in Japan as a reaction to the setbacks and defeats suffered by radical protest movements during the 1970s. One result was that newer movements such as Dame- ren largely chose to forego public confrontations in favor of a less vis-ible building of alternatives and downplaying internal solidarity in favor of a looser networklike structure, thereby offering up alternatives not only to the mainstream social order but also to the forced or self- chosen confinement in a purely private life. Such networks do not merely function as shelters, but also as pathways for people to flexibly try out in order to regulate their process of recovery and level of commitment.

What has happened with the shift toward more protest- oriented activism in the precarity movement is not that the channel from B to C is forgotten, but that a front is opened up again for protests along the relation A – C. As I have suggested, there is good reason for this development, since empower-ment in the sense of a full recovery often requires a renewed interaction with society in which the sense of powerlessness can be cured. The realiza-tion among participants that they are capable of exerting pressure on society

Figure 1


is often a crucial element in furthering their sense of empowerment. Con-versely, the recovery of protest has been helped by the empowerment of indi-vidual participants. Protest would not have returned so forcefully if it had not been able to mobilize and create channels of participation for individu-als and groups who feel alienated from more established forms of political participation. One important conclusion is that devoting time and energy to furthering empowerment does not imply a turning away from protest. It may be the very precondition for the resuscitation of protest. The tripar-tite figure helps us understand the diversity of the precarity movement’s activities: the attempt to appeal to and recruit the support of traumatized, nonsocial, and marginalized groups; its attempt to build and enlarge an alternative public sphere; and its protests against mainstream society. These three seemingly disparate kinds of activity are, I suggest, interlocking parts typical of movements that aspire to further empowerment.

Notes

A previous version of this essay was presented at the conference “Alternative Politics: Youth, Media, Performance, and Activism in Urban Japan” at Sophia University in 2010. I am grateful for all the comments made on this occasion as well as for comments made by col-leagues in Gothenburg and Kyoto and by the anonymous referees of this journal. I am also grateful to everyone who agreed to be interviewed and, for funding, to the Swedish School of Advanced Asia- Pacific Studies, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Swedish Research Council.

1. For brief histories of “sound- demonstrations” in Japan, see Shin Futatsugi, “Kimyô na en wa, itsumo rojô de tsunagaru: 2003 nen ikô no Tôkyô no rojô to undô ni tsuite no oboegaki” (“Strange Fates Always Meet in the Street: Memorandum Concerning the Street and Move-ments in Tokyo since 2003”), VOL 3 (July 2008): 182 – 88; Noiz [pseud.], “Saundodemo shikô: Hito wa donchan sawagi no naka ni shakai henkaku no yume o miru ka” (“Reflections on the History of Sound Demonstrations: Do People Dream of Social Change in the Midst of a Rave?”), Anakizumu (Anarchism) 12 (August 2009): 3 – 34.

2. The term freeter was coined in 1987 by a recruitment magazine and is derived from free and Arbeiter. It is commonly used for young people making their living as temporary, part- time, or dispatch workers, often working in the service industry but increasingly also in factories and construction. See Reiko Kosugi, “Furîtâ to wa dare ka” (“Who Is the Freeter”), Gendai shisô (Contemporary Thought) 33, no. 1 (2005): 60 – 73.


3. Such conditions are referred to by the word precarity. For a discussion about that concept, see Brett Nielson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Excep-tion,” Theory, Culture, and Society 25, no. 1 (2008): 51 – 72.

4. Môri Yoshitaka, “Culture = Politics: The Emergence of New Cultural Forms of Protest in the Age of Freeter,” Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2005): 17 – 29; Môri Yoshitaka, Sutorîto no shisô: Tenkanki to shite no 1990 nendai (Street Thought: The 1990s as Turning Point) (Tokyo: NHK Bukkusu, 2009).

5. For presentations of the village, see Tôru Shinoda, “Which Side Are You On?: Hakenmura and the Working Poor as a Tipping Point in Japanese Labor Politics,” Asia- Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 14 – 3 – 09 (April 4, 2009); Kenji Utsunomiya and Makoto Yuasa, eds., Haken-mura: Nani ga towarete iru no ka (The Dispatch Worker Village: What Is Being Questioned?) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009). Môri stresses that the village was also a cultural phenom-enon, “a performance to make the problem visible” (Môri, Sutorîto no shisô, 223).

6. This idea is developed in Ken Asato, “Setsuritsu ni mukete no kakunin jikô” (“Points to Confirm before Establishment”), 2003, freeter- union.org/resource/confirmation.html (accessed October 7, 2013); and Ken Asato and Ryôhei Takahashi, “Furîtâ zenpan rôdô kumiai ni tsuite no arekore to shi” (“This and That and a Poem about the General Freeter Union”), Gendai shisô 33, no. 1 (2005): 96 – 101.

7. For the traumatic impact of the defeat of the radical movements of the 1960s in Japan and the bitter aftertaste it left among many participants, see Eiji Oguma, 1968: Hanran no shûen to sono isan (The End of the Uprising and Its Legacy) (Tokyo: Shin’yôsha, 2009), 794 – 866; and Carl Cassegard, Youth Movements, Trauma, and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan (Leiden: Global Oriental, 2013), 31 – 37.

8. For elements of play in the radical movements of the 1960s, see Shûhei Kosaka, Shisô to shite no Zenkyôtô sedai (The Zenkyôtô Generation as Thought) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2006), 110; Noi Sawaragi, Sensô to banpaku (World Wars and World Fairs) (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 2005), 216 – 44; Hidemi Suga, 1968 nen (The Year 1968) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2006), 68n.

9. Concerning the applicability of using psychoanalytic concepts in cultural analysis, see Cassegard, Youth Movements, 12 – 21.

10. Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates (London: Verso, 2002), 310.11. See Sabu Kohso, “Angelus Novus in Millennial Japan,” in Japan after Japan: Social and

Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Haroo-tunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), who provides a useful prehistory of the precarity movement.

12. For presentations of Dame- ren, see Kohso, “Angelus Novus”; Môri, “Culture = Politics.”13. For assessments and critical reflections regarding the success, failure, or limitations of

these attempts, see Minoru Hosotani, “ ‘Dame’ no mondaikei to ‘kokoro’ no mondaikei” (“The Lineages of the Problems of ‘Good- for- Nothing’ and ‘The Heart’ ”), in Dameren


sengen! (Dame- ren Manifesto!) (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1999), 289; Kyûtarô Kyûkyoku, “Sekai o shinkan sasenakatta mikka kan no yô ni” (“Like Three Days That Didn’t Shake the World”), VOL 1 (Spring 2006): 167 – 70. Discussions can also be found in Ningen kaihô (Human Liberation), Dame- ren’s mini- komi, especially no. 9 (October 1997), which is a spe-cial issue on “problems of the heart” (kokoro mondai).

14. The General Freeter Union originated in nonsect radical circles close to Dame- ren in which founding members such as Asato and Yabu Shirô participated, and its first office was located in Dame- ren’s old stronghold Akane (Asato, interview with author, February 24, 2008; Shirô Yabu, interview with author, September 30, 2009). Nowadays, Pepe Hasegawa himself is a union member and regularly participates in the War Resister’s Festa, which is arranged annually by the union in Tokyo.

15. From the announcement of the “DaMayDay” demonstration in Matsumoto on May 1, 2006, Acclaim Collective, www.acclaim.nomasters.com/informations/index.html (accessed Sep-tember 11, 2013).

16. This was recognized rather early by some participants in Dame- ren itself (e.g., Mao [pseud.], “Kaikyûtôsô to shite no Dameren” (“Dame- ren as Class Struggle”), in Dame!, ed. Dame- ren [Tokyo: Kawade Shobô Shinsho, 1999], 251 – 54). For the change in meaning of the word freeter, see Kosugi, “Furîtâ to wa dare ka,” 60 – 62.

17. For presentations of PAFF and the General Freeter Union, see Karin Amamiya, Ikisasero! Nanminka suru wakamonotachi (Let Us Live! The Refugeization of Young People) (Tokyo: Ôta Shuppan, 2007); Asato and Takahashi, “Furîtâ zenpan”; Asato and Takahashi, “Furîtâ zenpan rôdô kumiai ni tsuite no arekore to megamakkubâgâ” (“This and That about the General Freeter Union and a Mega McBurger”), PACE 3 (2008): n.p.; Grapefruit [pseud.], “Furîtâ no tame no kaikyû tôsô junbian” (“Proposal for the Preparation of a Class Struggle for Freeters”), Jôkyô (Situation) 6, no. 2 (2005): 110 – 14.

18. Quoted in Yukiko Hirano, “Yuasa Makoto- san, Kawazoe Makoto- san, Shimizu Naoko- san ga kataru hakengiri mondai to koyô no genjô ni tsuite” (“Yuasa Makoto, Kawazoe Makoto, and Zhimizu Naoko on the Problem of Dispatch Work Dismissals and the Pres-ent Situation of Employment”), JanJan News 6 (February 2009), www.news.janjan.jp/living /0902/0902056856/1.php (accessed February 11, 2009; site discontinued).

19. See Hirano, “Yuasa”; Naoko Shimizu, “Me o sorasazu mitsumesugizu, tasukeau hito no tsunagari” (“Without Averting One’s Eyes or Staring, the Bonds between People Helping Each Other”), Big Issue Japan 67 (March 2007): 16 – 17.

20. Ken Asato, interviews with author, February 12, 2008, and February 24, 2008.21. Alex Foti, “Mayday Mayday! Euro Flexworkers, Time to Get a Move On!,” April 2005,

European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, www.eipcp.net/transversal/0704/foti /en (accessed September 11, 2013).

22. The first time the term was used in Japan was in the 2005 translation of Ronald Dore’s New Forms and Meanings of Work in an Increasingly Globalized World. Sakurada started to


arrange “precarity” events at NPO Remo in June 2005 (e- mail from Kazuya Sakurada to author, July 13, 2007).

23. Kazuya Sakurada, “Purekariâto kyôbô nôto” (“Conspiracy Notes for the Precariat”), Impac-tion 151 (April 2006): 20 – 35.

24. Tadashi Settsu, “ ‘Purekariâto’ ni tsuite” (“On the Precariat”), Bara, mata wa hidamari no neko (Rose, or the cat in the sun), blog entry, September 11, 2006, www.blog.goo.ne.jp /harumi- s_2005/e/3a5c227572637222ce248d2849da85b6 (accessed September 11, 2013). See also Settsu, “Purekariâto sengen” (“Precariat Manifesto”), Anakizumu 9 (May 2007): 16 – 22.

25. Amamiya, Ikisasero!, 16.26. Karin Amamiya, “Ikizurasa to purekariâto” (“Hardship of Living and Precariat”), PAFF, www

.a.sanpal.co.jp/paff/information/20060719.html (accessed January 11, 2007; site discontinued).27. Karin Amamiya, Purekariâto no yûutsu (The Gloom of the Precariat) (Tokyo: Kôdansha,

2009), 1.28. Noiz [pseud.], interview with author, July 10, 2007.29. Karin Amamiya, “Demo da, demo da, mô sugu demo da!” (“Demonstration Coming

Soon”), Sugoi ikikata (Amazing Way of Life) (blog), August 1, 2006, www.sanctuarybooks .jp/sugoi/blog/ (accessed September 11, 2013).

30. Tadashi Settsu, “Purekariâto undô no genjô to kadai” (“The Present Situation and Task of the Precarity Movement”), Labor Net, June 25, 2007, www.labornetjp.orgnews/2007 /1182740436463staff01 (accessed September 3, 2009).

31. Ken Nakamura (founding member of Bochibochi), interview with author, July 31, 2007.32. For discussions of the term precariat in movement circles in relation to other terms such as

people, multitude, have- nots, and junk, see the journals Impaction (no. 151, 2006), People’s Plan (no. 35, 2006), and Anakizumu (no. 9, 2007), which are special issues on the term precariat.

33. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1999), 35 – 39.

34. Raoul Vaneigem, “Basic Banalities (I),” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 93.

35. Kôichi Kaminaga and Pepe Hasegawa, Dameren no ‘hatarakanaide ikiru ni wa (Dameren on How to Live without Working) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2000), 64.

36. Amamiya, Ikisasero!, 10.37. Ibid., 282.38. Tadashi Settsu, “Fesuta de watashi mo kangaeta” (“I Too Was Thinking at the Festi-

val”), Hatena Diary, December 2,2007, www.d.hatena.ne.jp/femmelets/20071202 (accessed September 11, 2013). Other activists express similar reservations about the slogan “Let us live” and propose “Let us live a life of leisure” as an alternative (Hajime Matsumoto and Masanori Oda, “G8 sôdô o furikaeru” [“Looking Back on the G8 Upheaval”], Orutâ 9 – 10 [September−October 2008]: 2 – 6, 4 – 5).

39. The ambivalent attitude toward “survival” in the precarity movement is well captured


by one of the visitors to the 2008 “Anti- Poverty Festa” in Tokyo, who observed that the event was a mix of “antipoverty” and “viva poverty.” See Kyôhei Ogawa, “No Money Life o yutaka ni suru” (“Making No Money Life Rich”) (blog) April 15, 2008, Kyototto Publishing, www.kyototto.com/archives/207 (accessed September 11, 2013). In another telling illustra-tion of the tension, the General Freeter Union had to scrap its slogan “Don’t work — live!” in the 2005 Freedom and Survival May Day when some members objected that many workers were forced into unemployment and actually wanted to work. See Motoaki Yamaguchi et al., “Shin no teikôzukuri no kîwâdo to shite no ‘purekariâto’ ” (“ ‘Precariat’ as a Keyword for Creating Genuine Resistance”), People’s Plan 35 (Summer 2006): 104 – 18, esp. 107).

40. For discussions in Japan on “basic income” and the related idea of “social wage,” see, for instance, the contributions to the journal VOL 2 (2007), a special issue on basic income. The centrality of survival in the precarity movements discourse can also be seen in publications such as Naoko Shimizu and Ryôta Sono, eds., Furîtâ rôso no seizon handobukku (The Sur-vival Handbook of the General Freeter Union) (Tokyo: Ôtsuki Shoten, 2009) or slogans such as “We just want to live. We just want a job,” which were heard in a recent protest event in Shinjuku (Kazuaki Nagata, “Students Stage Rally to Protest Time- Consuming Job- Search ‘Farce’,” Japan Times Online, November 24, 2010, www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/11/24 /national/students- stage- rally- to- protest- time- consuming- job- search- farce/.

41. Nakamura, interview.42. PAFF, “Wakamono no ningenryoku o takamenai hikokumin sengen” (“The Unpatriotic

Movement for Not Raising the Human Ability of the Young”), October 26, 2005, , www .freeter- union.org/resource/statement_20051026.html (accessed September 11, 2013).

43. PAFF, “Wakamono.”44. A predecessor of this lineage of the precarity movement is the famous anarchist Ôsugi

Sakae, who wrote, “The new life will not take its first steps only in some future social order, no matter how close or faraway. The new social order of the future is already now sprouting in each step we are taking of the new life.” See Sakae Ôsugi, “Shinchituujo no sôzô” (“The Creation of a New Order”), in Ôsugi Sakae hyôronshû (Ôsugi Sakae Collected Essays) (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1996), 206.

45. Shirô Yabu, “Nando demo basho o akero! Keisatsuka suru shakai ni kôshite” (“Give Way No Matter How Many Times! Resisting the Policification of Society”), Tosho shimbun (Reading Newspaper), June 7, 2003.

46. Shirô Yabu, “Rojô de torikaese” (“Take It Back on the Street”), in No!! War, ed. Noda Tsu-tomu et al. (Tokyo: Kawadeshobô Shinsha), 47.

47. Shirô Yabu, “Undô/Seiji — Yabu- shi ni kiku” (“Movement/Politics: Asking Mr. Yabu”), interview by Yoshiharu Shiraishi, in Neoribe gendai seikatsu hihan josetsu, ed. Yoshiharu Shiraishi and Hideshi Ôno (Tokyo: Shinhyôron, 2005), 178 – 79.

48. Shirô Yabu and Midori Yamanote, Ai to bôryoku no gendai shisô (The Contemporary Thought of Love and Violence) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2006), 165.


49. Shirô Yabu and Midori Yamanote, Musantaishû shinzui (The Essence of Propertyless Masses) (Tokyo: Kawade Shobô Shinsha, 2001), 45 – 46, 56.

50. Yabu and Yamanote, Ai to bôryoku, 192.51. Yabu, “Undô/Seiji,” 176 – 77.52. For introductions to Matsumoto and his groups, see Asahi shimbun reporter team, ed., Rosuto

jenerêshon: Samayou 2000 man nin (Lost Generation: Twenty Million Roaming) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 2007), 212 – 14; Amamiya, Ikisasero!, 226 – 38; Môri, Sutorîto no shisô, 201 – 7; and Julia Obinger, Aufstand der Amateure! Alternative Lebensstile als Aktivismus in Urbanen Räumen Japans (The Amateur Rebellion! Alternative Lifestyles as Activism in Japan’s Urban Spaces), PhD Dissertation, University of Zürich, 2013.

53. Hajime Matsumoto, Binbônin daihanran: Ikinikui yo no naka to tanoshiku tatakau hôhô (The Great Pauper Rebellion: How to Struggle against a Hard World While Having Fun) (Tokyo: Asupekuto, 2008), 112, 117. He also devotes much of a recent book to introducing ways to get by without having to use much money (Hajime Matsumoto, Binbônin no gyakushû: Tada de ikiru hôhô (The Counter Attack of the Poor: How to Live for Free) [Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 2008]).

54. Matsumoto, Binbônin daihanran, 183 – 84.55. Hajime Matsumoto, “Binbônin sengen” (“Pauper Manifesto”), Binbônin shimbun (Pauper

Newspaper) 1096, December 16, 2001, www.jimmin.com/2001b/page_136.htm (accessed Sep-tember 22, 2013).

56. Matsumoto, Binbônin no gyakushû, 129.57. Hajime Matsumoto, “ ‘Binbônin’ tachi no tamariba to ‘ran’ no kyoten keisei” (“The For-

mation of a Gathering Place for ‘Paupers’ and a Base for ‘Riots’ ”), interview by Noiz and Yoshimura Masaaki, Anakizumu 9 (May 2007): 49 – 66, 50, 66.

58. Quoted in Karin Amamiya, “ ‘Binbô’ o sakate ni hangeki ga hajimatta” (“The Counter- Attack with ‘Poverty’ Turned against the Adversary”), Ronza (Seat of Debate) 4 (April 2007): 35 – 40, 39.

59. Matsumoto, Binbônin daihanran, 119.60. Quoted in Amamiya, Ikisasero!, 235.61. Yabu has devoted much of his writings to discussing and introducing autonomist (and

situationist) thought. A recent example is VOL Lexicon (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2009), which he edited. In recent years, Matsumoto has made several trips to the Autonomen in Berlin (see Matsumoto, Binbônin no gyakushû, 167 – 69, 177 – 79). Incidentally, Dame- ren shared this interest in autonomist thought, and the idea for their hangout Akane was also inspired by a visit to Berlin squathouses (Kyûkyoku, “Sekai o shinkan sasenakatta mikkakan,” 169 – 70).

62. Yoshiya Ichino, “Nîto hikikomori bundan tôchi” (“Divide and Rule NEET and Social Withdrawers”), Mixi (social networking site), October 12, 2006, www.mixi.jp/show_friend .pl?id=2355340 (accessed September 22, 2013).

63. The General Freeter Union actively seeks the participation of these groups in the Freedom


and Survival May Days, and one of their high- profile members, Ichino Yoshiya, is a former social withdrawer. For the participation of homeless people, see Gorô Fujita, “Hinkon NO! Han- haijo age, nojukusha mêdê” (“Homeless May Day, Raising ‘No to Poverty! Against Exclusion’ ”), Impaction 158 (June 2007): 183 – 85.

64. Ken Nakamura, “Bochibochi o meguru are ya kore ya: Yunion Bochibochi no kessei o megutte” (“This and That about Bochibochi: On the Formation of the Union Bochibochi”), Impaction 151 (April 2006): 48 – 51.

65. Karin Amamiya and Eiji Oguma, “War or Union: Kibô wa, kumiai?” (“War or Union: Does Hope Reside in Unions?”), Studio Voice 380 (August 2007): 36 – 38, esp. 38.

66. Tadashi Settsu, Hatena Diary, June 18, 2007, d.hatena.ne.jp/femmelets/20070618.67. For example, Umano claims that what attracted her and other former social withdrawers to

the precarity movement was the prospect of participating in sound demonstrations; Hone-suke Umano, “Binbô, zetsubô, osakimakkura: Nîto, hikikomori, menherâ ni totte no rôdô seizon undo” (“Poor, Desperate, and with No Future: The Labor and Survival Movement from the Point of View of NEET, Social Withdrawers, and Mentally Ill”), PACE 4 (July 2008): 83 – 86.

68. Amamiya, Purekariâto no yûutsu, 145.69. Settsu, “ ‘Purekariâto’ ni tsuite.”70. Masato Takemura, “Shi no umareru basho 2: Demo” (“The Birthplace of Poetry 2: Dem-

onstrations”), Peace Media, September−October 2008, www.peacemedia.jp/take/take0808 .html#more- 156 (accessed September 22, 2013).

71. Amamiya, Ikisasero!, 206.72. Consciously working through and verbalizing a trauma are mentioned by Freud as prereq-

uisites for genuine recovery, but he also points out that repetitions can help the traumatized subject to retrospectively master the trauma by creating distance and familiarity, and by turning oneself from a passive victim into an acting agent. See Sigmund Freud, On Meta-psychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. J. Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 285, 288.

73. My use of the terms exit and voice here is derived from Alfred O. Hirschman. With O’Donnell we could call the first form “horizontal voice” and the second “vertical voice” (Guillermo O’Donnell, “On the Fruitful Convergences of Hirschman’s Exit Voice, and Loy-alty and Shifting Involvements,” in Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999]).

74. Karin Amamiya, “Subarashiki Furîtâ Rôso” (“Marvellous General Freeter Union”), Sugoi Ikikata, July 3, 2006, www.sanctuarybooks.jp/sugoi/blog/index.php?e=41. Nakamura, “Bochi-bochi”; Makoto Kawazoe and Makoto Yuasa, “ ‘Hinkon’ ni tachimukau shakaiteki net-towâku no keisei o!” (“Towards the Establishment of a Social Network Fighting Poverty”), Gekkan tôkyô (Tokyo Monthly) 4 (April 2007): 3 – 15, 10.

let us live! empowerment and the rhetoric of life in the japanese precarity movement

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