Protests and Counter Protests: Differences in Anti-racism and Anti-nuclear Collective Action in Post-disaster Japan

• In Event: 505 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Social Change, Protest, and Civil Society

Abstract

The growing trend of anti-Korean and anti-foreigner hate speech in Japan has increasingly attracted national and international attention as well as inspired an emerging anti-racism counter movement. However, most scholarly research on the politics of hate speech has neglected to investigate how such anti-racism discourse fits into the wider scope of Japanese social movements and, particularly, the revival of anti-nuclear activism. This paper, which is situated within my ongoing research on anti-racism and anti-nuclear social movements in Japan, explores how anti-nuclear activism after the 2011 nuclear disaster has contributed toward the emergence of anti-racism movements, particularly by renewing interest in the issue of human rights within Japanese civil society. Importantly, despite sharing similar points of origins and overlapping ideologies, these movements function separately and independently. This paper suggests that the tensions between these movements can clarify the complicated, and often contradictory, politics of human rights that have been intensified since 2011. My discussion focuses on the different organizational strategies employed by these organizations and, specifically, their disparate protesting repertoires, framing narratives, and use of social media. I argue that these organizational strategies shed light on how these movements differently define and negotiate external threats such as right-wing pressure and police surveillance. This paper is based on data collected over five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo and Osaka in 2014.

Author

• Vivian Giboung Shaw, University of Texas-Austin