Lovable Anarchism: Campus Protest in Japan From the 1990s to Today

Abstract

This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990's. Japan's so-called freeter movements (movements of young men and women lack-ing regular employment) are often said to have emerged as young people shifted their base of activism from campuses to the 'street'. However, campuses have continued to play a role in activism. Although the radical student organisations of the New Left have waned, new movements are forming among students and pre-carious university employees in response to neoliberalization trends in society and the precarization of their conditions. This transformation has gone hand in hand with a shift of action repertoire towards forms of direct action such as squatting, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and opening "cafés". In this paper I focus on the develop-ment of campus protest in Kyoto from the mid-1990s until today to shed light on the following questions: How have campus-based activists responded to the ne-oliberalization of Japanese universities? What motivates them to use art or art-like forms of direct action and how are these activities related to space? I investigate the notions of space towards which activists have been oriented since the 1990's, focusing on three notions: official public space, counter-space and no-man's-land. These conceptions of space, I argue, are needed to account for the various forms campus protest has taken since the 1990s.

Keywords

• Campus protest
• Japan
• precarity
• direct action
• space
• counter-space