@UChicago doctoral candidate. Political legitimacy and performance, ethics and aesthetics of direct action in contemporary Japan. Supervisors: William Mazzarella, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Michael Fisch
Disasters and Social Crisis in Contemporary Japan: Political, Religious, and Cultural Responses (Ed. Mark Mullins and Koichi Nakano), Palgrave Macmillan., 2015
Disasters and Social Crisis in Contemporary Japan: Political, Religious, and Cultural Responses (Ed. Mark Mullins and Koichi Nakano), Palgrave Macmillan., 2015
"In the aftermath of the 3.11 disaster, tens of thousands have taken to the streets in protest ag... more "In the aftermath of the 3.11 disaster, tens of thousands have taken to the streets in protest against corrupt politicians, a genocidal energy industry, and the structural violence of the capitalist state. A new generation of protesters are excavating and resuscitating a marginalized legacy of street politics in Japan.
Our course will seize on this opportunity to explore alternative trajectories of urban history in the geographical context of Tokyo. This journey, guided by a theoretical understanding of the politics of everyday life and the social production of space, will take place within the contested urbanity that is at once both the stage for, and the stakes of, contentious street politics.
Our course attempts to bring together the theoretical and methodological concerns of urban anthropology, critical geography and the history of social movements with an eclectic potpourri of activist literature and digital media. Our mission is to collectively sketch an alternative history of social space in urban Japan through the metaphor of the street as a space for public culture. We will read the Tokyo's spectacular facades as mediatized surfaces, interrogate the dreams, desires and conflicts projected on them, and ask what happened when they went dark after the triple disaster. But we will also look beyond these seductive surfaces at the mechanisms of violence and exclusion inherent to the production of capitalist space.
Alongside and together with contemporary activist voices, students will be able to read and "rediscover", through the post-3.11 experience, a history of contested space and urban contentious politics in modern Tokyo. Starting off in the trauma of disaster, we will explore a series of moments and movements in Japan’s history of urban protest, systematically acquiring the necessary tools to understand this history. Finally, we return to a discussion of the post-3.11 moment as biopolitical event."
"As epitomized by reggae icon Rankin’ Taxi’s anti- nuclear anthem ”You Can’t See It, And You Can’... more "As epitomized by reggae icon Rankin’ Taxi’s anti- nuclear anthem ”You Can’t See It, And You Can’t Smell It,” the language of protest after Fukushima is replete with technological imagery. But just as attempts at communication with the riot police officers enclosing, prodding and hitting demonstrators means submitting to what Toni Morrison calls a “dead language ... content to admire its own paralysis,” submitting to technocratic discourse is not without dangers.
As an affective-cognitive dispositif, the constant, collective reinvention of a language of protest is clearly the locus of the anti-nuclear movement’s many-hued attempts to compose an ”adsorbative” commonality. In this sense, the disjunction between such constitutive struggles and protesters’ reliance on a politically anesthetized, techno-scientific nomenclature remains a particularly troubling obstacle.
Relying on imitation and irony as methods of interrogation, protesters are often forced to negotiate what Rancière would have called the tension between the sensible and the sayable; the unwillingness to divorce activist discourse from technocratic nomenclature being but one indicator of this potentiality. By contrast, Matsumoto Hajime of the Amateur’s Riot has consistently refused to submit, insisting on a simplistic, almost puerile vocabulary of pure affect. Echoing concurrent complaints on the ”indecipherability” of demands voiced within the Occupy Wall Street movement, external commentary on Matsumoto’s playful soliloquies range from the curious to the concerned.
Through Matsumoto’s affective appeals to the ”rhetorical communities” of counterculture and Amamiya Karin's primal scream of multitudinous desire, we thus find ourselves back at the beginning of this paper, the pages and paragraphs through which T's initial utterance of fervent desire continues to resonate: ”We wanted people to do politics; I mean, we wanted them to do democracy. We needed a space where people could give voice to their concerns”. The search for words and actions that, in Rancière’s own words, ”exceed the function of rigid designation”, and the struggle for spaces deemed necessary to continue that search, therefore promise to remain constitutive to Japan’s diverse assemblages of anti-nuclear activists (excerpt from presentation draft)."
In the spring of 2010, dozens of volunteers, activists, artists and archivists converged on a dil... more In the spring of 2010, dozens of volunteers, activists, artists and archivists converged on a dilapidated public park in central Shibuya, the capital of Japan’s retail consumer culture. Mobilizing through online social media, they had gathered to stop the construction of “Nike Park,” a semi-private extreme-sports experience. As the “Artists in Residence,” the occupants challenged both local authorities and commercial interests with a radically different vision of urban public space that, evolving through six months of occupation, transformed Miyashita Park into a celebration of alternative visions of globalization and the organization of urban commons; pathways to which were actualized in a struggle for spatial representation, in and through the multiplicity of its engaged participants. In this article, I use Turner’s concept of ritual to trace the discourse of occupation, its political imageries and the source of its symbolic energy to the liminal capacities inherent in the margins of an increasingly regimented urban landscape. I consider the campaign against Nike-ification of Miyashita Park as a spatiotemporal plateau of protest culture that predates and informs more recent attempts to appropriate "public" space, and construct spaces of representation from which to imagine, enact and coordinate responses to the hegemony of abstract space, and construct viable "futures in the present"
The 2010 occupation of Shibuya's Miyashita Park was a denunciation of exclusionary urban redevelo... more The 2010 occupation of Shibuya's Miyashita Park was a denunciation of exclusionary urban redevelopment and the commercialization of public space. It was also a six-month celebration of alternative visions of globalization and the organization of urban commons. This paper examines how the campaign against “Nike-ification” of Miyashita Park came to understand itself as spatiotemporal plateau in a globally distributed culture of protest.
In this presentation, I revisit the contested nature of urban public space and the “lure of binar... more In this presentation, I revisit the contested nature of urban public space and the “lure of binarism” in its contemporary conceptualizations, using examples from my ongoing study of the movement against "Nike-ification" of urban commons in Shibuya, Tokyo.
Recently, young people have been out on the Tokyo streets and in the mass media in opposition to ... more Recently, young people have been out on the Tokyo streets and in the mass media in opposition to Prime Minister Abe’s efforts to pass the State Secrecy Acts, the “reinterpretation” of Article 9 of the Constitutions and the Security Bills. None have garnered more interest or exerted more influence than SEALDs, Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy. They are worthy of attention for various reasons, but we should note at the start they are the first college-based social movement in 50 years to have drawn such attention in their efforts to directly address the Japanese government’s policy. They are speaking out in favor of constitutional democracy, due process and respect for popular opinion; for peace in Asia and social equality within Japan.
This paper charts chronologically the different phases since 3.11, showing how social media becam... more This paper charts chronologically the different phases since 3.11, showing how social media became involved in each. During the first crucial moments after disaster, individuals texting and tweeting information, and uploading videos, generated huge amounts of first-hand information, from the size and epicenter of the quake to the arrival of the oncoming waters; the identification of dangerous and safe places, routes and contacts; those lost and alive, and those looking for them. What we see here is not only the nearly unprecedented act of appealing to strangers for help, but also the revealing of emotions that rarely if ever is shared in public discourse. Asking for help from strangers is a significant act of trust, maybe even more unusual in Japan than in other societies; offering help is a way to return that trust. In this way, one of the issues that this paper points to is the way that social media as deployed during and after 3.11 has made us rethink the nature and efficacy of the civic sphere in Japan.
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Our course will seize on this opportunity to explore alternative trajectories of urban history in the geographical context of Tokyo. This journey, guided by a theoretical understanding of the politics of everyday life and the social production of space, will take place within the contested urbanity that is at once both the stage for, and the stakes of, contentious street politics.
Our course attempts to bring together the theoretical and methodological concerns of urban anthropology, critical geography and the history of social movements with an eclectic potpourri of activist literature and digital media. Our mission is to collectively sketch an alternative history of social space in urban Japan through the metaphor of the street as a space for public culture. We will read the Tokyo's spectacular facades as mediatized surfaces, interrogate the dreams, desires and conflicts projected on them, and ask what happened when they went dark after the triple disaster. But we will also look beyond these seductive surfaces at the mechanisms of violence and exclusion inherent to the production of capitalist space.
Alongside and together with contemporary activist voices, students will be able to read and "rediscover", through the post-3.11 experience, a history of contested space and urban contentious politics in modern Tokyo. Starting off in the trauma of disaster, we will explore a series of moments and movements in Japan’s history of urban protest, systematically acquiring the necessary tools to understand this history. Finally, we return to a discussion of the post-3.11 moment as biopolitical event."
As an affective-cognitive dispositif, the constant, collective reinvention of a language of protest is clearly the locus of the anti-nuclear movement’s many-hued attempts to compose an ”adsorbative” commonality. In this sense, the disjunction between such constitutive struggles and protesters’ reliance on a politically anesthetized, techno-scientific nomenclature remains a particularly troubling obstacle.
Relying on imitation and irony as methods of interrogation, protesters are often forced to negotiate what Rancière would have called the tension between the sensible and the sayable; the unwillingness to divorce activist discourse from technocratic nomenclature being but one indicator of this potentiality. By contrast, Matsumoto Hajime of the Amateur’s Riot has consistently refused to submit, insisting on a simplistic, almost puerile vocabulary of pure affect. Echoing concurrent complaints on the ”indecipherability” of demands voiced within the Occupy Wall Street movement, external commentary on Matsumoto’s playful soliloquies range from the curious to the concerned.
Through Matsumoto’s affective appeals to the ”rhetorical communities” of counterculture and Amamiya Karin's primal scream of multitudinous desire, we thus find ourselves back at the beginning of this paper, the pages and paragraphs through which T's initial utterance of fervent desire continues to resonate: ”We wanted people to do politics; I mean, we wanted them to do democracy. We needed a space where people could give voice to their concerns”. The search for words and actions that, in Rancière’s own words, ”exceed the function of rigid designation”, and the struggle for spaces deemed necessary to continue that search, therefore promise to remain constitutive to Japan’s diverse assemblages of anti-nuclear activists (excerpt from presentation draft)."