Resistance beyond sovereign politics: Petty sovereigns’ disappearance into the world of fiction in post-Fukushima Japan

Introduction

In ‘Indefinite detention’, Judith Butler argues that the key feature of a contemporary version of sovereignty is the emergence of sovereignty, or what she calls ‘anachronistic resurgences’ (Butler, 2004: 66) of sovereignty, within the field of governmentality. To offer a careful reading of the mechanism of sovereign power, Butler focuses on ‘petty sovereigns’, such as officials and bureaucrats with managerial power. Petty sovereigns are produced by and, paradoxically, produce sovereign power. Drawing on the example of the US government’s detention practices, Butler argues that it is through the figure of the petty sovereign that sovereignty is reanimated in the present political context.

Butler situates petty sovereigns at the intersection between governmentality and sovereignty. On the one hand, petty sovereigns are governmentalized subjects in that they are implicated in the administrative functions of the state apparatus. On the other hand, petty sovereigns also act on the power delegated to them, the power that enables petty sovereigns to make ‘unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority’ (Butler, 2004: 56). Using the example of people held at the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Butler argues that, in the present time, sovereignty functions through the power delegated to petty sovereigns. Laws are no longer executed but are used to justify certain policies – in this case, to detain terrorist suspects indefinitely (Butler, 2004: 89). In this regard, law is suspended – or withdrawn from its application because of selective decisions made by petty sovereigns. Thus, as Butler puts it, ‘the state produces, through the act of withdrawal, a law that is no law, a court that is no court, a process that is no process’ (Butler, 2004: 62, emphasis in original).

Here, I want to argue that Butler’s provocative argument may, perhaps inadvertently, point to some possibilities of resistance: possibilities for petty sovereigns to challenge the governmentalized subject position assigned to them. As Butler argues, petty sovereigns use law as a device to rationalize certain policies. What happens when petty sovereigns establish a different relationship with law? How might we understand petty sovereigns’ aspirations to become someone other than the governmentalized subject by refusing to exploit an extralegal dimension of governmentality but, somewhat intuitively, revealing one’s own acts conducted as a ‘petty sovereign’?

In this article, I will examine these questions through a case involving an unnamed Japanese official and two novels written by him: Genpatsu Howaito Auto [Nuclear Plants Whiteout] (Wakasugi, 2013) and Tokyo Burakku Auto [Tokyo Blackout] (Wakasugi, 2014). The author of these novels uses a pseudonym, Retsu Wakasugi, to hide his real identity as an official, presumably from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), which is in charge of nuclear energy policy in Japan. Wakasugi extensively uses classified information related to nuclear energy policy to reveal the rent-seeking behaviour of some METI bureaucrats, politicians and electricity companies. By doing so, he reveals how people with managerial power, such as bureaucrats and politicians, interpret energy-related laws to maximize their own benefit and thus use them as a device to achieve particular policy goals favourable to themselves. ¹

The example of Wakasugi makes a productive intervention into Butler’s notion of petty sovereigns in two ways. First, petty sovereigns may avoid using their discretionary power to suspend law rather than resort to it. While Butler looks at examples that demonstrate how laws are used by petty sovereigns as tactics to justify and achieve particular policy goals (e.g. Butler, 2004), I am interested in cases where governmentalized subjects evade laws altogether. Wakasugi does not use his power as a ‘petty sovereign’. He refuses to exercise the power that allows him to interpret energy-related laws to meet specific policy goals favourable to him. Instead, he writes novels to appeal to the public.

Second, Wakasugi deliberately blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction to establish a distinctive relationship with law. The author’s creation of a fictional character called Retsu Wakasugi allows the nameless petty sovereign to use his personal experience as ‘data’ and present his ‘story’ as ‘reality’. Through this fictional character, the nameless petty sovereign avoids laws that determine what he is allowed to do as a civil servant. The colliding worlds of fiction and non-fiction create a space in which his non-fictional voice (as a bureaucrat) and his fictional one (as Retsu Wakasugi) are intertwined. Where his non-fictional voice begins and his fictional voice ends, and vice versa, remains unclear. In this regard, the nameless petty sovereign escapes the logic of sovereign power. Dismantling the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, he only appears through the contingency of subjectivity. Wakasugi’s case suggests that resistance can be understood not only as concrete actions and moments initiated by a nameable subject but also as uncertainty that is constitutive of the subject-making process itself.

The first section of this article will discuss how Butler’s idea of petty sovereigns can be situated in the existing literature on governmentality. In the subsequent two sections, I will turn to Wakasugi’s novels and examine the ways in which the author rewrites the terms of his own governmentalized subject position. In the final section, I will use Agamben’s idea of ‘whatever being’ to explore some theoretical implications of Wakasugi’s refusal to resort to laws in relation to resistance and sovereign power.

Between governmentality and sovereignty

Taking up the distinction between governmentality and sovereignty drawn by Michel Foucault, Butler argues that this distinction offers a useful way to understand the mechanism of power that characterizes the US government’s Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Butler advances Foucault’s suggestion that governmentality and sovereignty coexist simultaneously, and argues that the Guantánamo ‘new war prison’ embodies ‘the current configuration of state power’ (Butler, 2004: 53). For Butler, the fundamental feature of this contemporary coexistence between governmentality and sovereignty is crystallized in the figure of the petty sovereign. Petty sovereigns are people who are in charge of the running of the government. They include officials in the executive body of the government, such as the president, or middle-ranking and lower-ranking bureaucrats who make day-to-day decisions on the ground, such as ‘the functionaries at Guantanamo or in the Department of State, or … the foreign policy spokespeople for the current US government’ (Butler, 2004: 65).

On the one hand, petty sovereigns are involved in the field of governmentality through their role as the administrative organs of the state. As such, petty sovereigns are firmly situated in ‘a diffuse set of strategies and tactics’ that are used ‘to dispose and order populations, and to produce and reproduce subjects, their practices and beliefs, in relation to specific policy aims’ (Butler, 2004: 52). Petty sovereigns are governmentalized subjects in that they are part of the mechanism that manages populations. In other words, ‘power precedes them’ (Butler, 2004: 62) because power is delegated to petty sovereigns in order to allow them to carry out certain practices and realize specific policy goals. They are ‘instrumentalized, deployed by tactics of power they do not control’ (Butler, 2004: 65).

On the other hand, petty sovereigns are not simply ‘acted on’ by power but also ‘act on’ the power delegated to them (Butler, 2004: 62). Here, Butler highlights the act of making decisions as constitutive of what petty sovereigns do – ‘their acts are judgements’ (Butler, 2004: 65, emphasis added). Butler goes on to point out that discretion lies at the locus of such decisionmaking acts: petty sovereigns make judgements that are arbitrary and unaccountable to any law – and to anyone, for that matter. Their judgements are ‘unconditional in the sense that they are final, not subject to review, and not subject to appeal’ (Butler, 2004: 65, emphasis in original; see also Butler, 2004: 56). In this way, sovereignty is produced by the petty sovereigns’ acts to suspend law, or ‘contorts law to its [state sovereignty’s] own uses’ (Butler, 2004: 57):

Of course, they [petty sovereigns] are not true sovereigns…. Nevertheless, they are constituted, within the constraints of governmentality, as those who will and do decide on who will be detained, and who will not, who may see life outside the prison again and who may not…. They are acted on, but they also act, and their actions are not subject to review by any higher judicial authority. (Butler, 2004: 62)

For Butler, it is this ‘conditioned’ and ‘unconditional’ (Butler, 2004: 65) power of petty sovereigns that is the key aspect of a type of sovereignty animated by the Guantánamo Bay US military prison. As governmentalized subjects and ‘the agency of the functionary’ (Butler, 2004: 65), petty sovereigns make actual decisions about how to use laws to execute specific policies. These decisions are arbitrary and final because they are announced under the name of the ‘sovereign’. In this regard, the petty sovereign’s act of making decisions suspends the rule of law. It is through such an action and as the effect of such an action that a contemporary version of sovereignty emerges in the field of governmentality.

By pointing out the coexistence between governmentality and sovereignty, Butler is concerned about a lawless sovereign power presiding over the matter of life and death of people detained in Guantánamo Bay. Sovereign power is delegated to the governmentalized subject, who enjoys the prerogative to make decisions over matters involving the treatment of detainees:

After all, it will be ‘officials’ who deem suspected terrorists or combatants ‘dangerous’ and it will be ‘officials,’ not representatives of courts bound by law, who ostensibly will review the cases of those detained indefinitely. Similarly, the courts themselves are conceived explicitly as ‘an instrument’ used in the service of national security, the protection of principality, the continuing and augmented exercise of state sovereignty. (Butler, 2004: 95)

The idea of petty sovereigns goes beyond the example of the new war prison in Guantánamo: in a broader sense, it suggests a changing mechanism of the state. As Butler argues, the state is no longer composed of one singular body. Instead, actions carried out under the name of the US government are ‘motivated by a diffuse set of practices and policy aims, deployed in the service of power’ (Butler, 2004: 65). In other words, sovereignty is no longer manifested as a singular form of the state apparatus (Butler, 2004: 53). Instead, sovereignty is performed through ‘a diffuse set of practices and policy aims’ carried out by petty sovereigns (Butler, 2004: 65).

Butler’s idea of petty sovereigns makes a productive intervention into the ways in which possibilities of resistance are discussed in the literature on exception and governmentality. In response to Giorgio Agamben’s account of sovereign power (see, for example, Agamben, 2005), a number of scholars have argued that the decisionism of sovereignty is ‘more messy, layered, and complex than any logical analysis can capture’ (Connolly, 2004: 29). To expatiate on messy operations of sovereign power, some focus on the ways in which the exception is resisted from below, by people whose lives are rendered ‘bare’. As Bigo argues, since power and resistance are undividable, the operation of sovereign power inevitably entails ‘the resistance of the weak and their capacities to continue to be humane and to subvert the illusionary dream of total control’ (Bigo, 2007: 12). The state of exception does not rely on the structure that ensures the prerogative of the sovereign, but emerges ‘from the structuring of the relation to the victim’ (Bigo, 2007: 11). Bigo’s critique of Agamben echoes a rich body of scholarship that investigates a range of strategies to resist the total control of sovereign power in detention centres and refugee camps (e.g. Moulin and Nyers, 2007; Nyers and Rygiel, 2012; Rygiel, 2011).

For others, the operations of sovereign power are messy because the process of decisionmaking is multilayered. Butler’s idea of petty sovereigns contributes to this type of reading: sovereign power is delegated to various actors who make decisions as ‘petty sovereigns’. They are ‘empowered, disciplinary agents’ for their ‘capacity to know’, ‘capacity to control’ and ‘capacity to make a transformational difference’ (Smith, 2009: 125). These actors include ‘private, societal, and business actors, as well as foreign actors’ (Guiraudon and Lahav, 2000: 184). For example, Doty (2009: 15) uses an example of civilian vigilante groups to show how the decision of the sovereign ‘slips from the firm grip of the state and/or elite members of society’ and falls into the hands of private citizens. Similarly, Pratt (2010) shows how border officials working on the ground exercise sovereign power by making decisions to stop and search travellers based on their ‘lucky hunch’ and ‘reasonable suspicion’. Johns argues that the exceptionalism of the Guantánamo camp needs to be understood as ‘a field of decisional possibility and impossibility’ (Johns, 2005: 635) where people working in the camp negotiate their own understandings of law. These studies reflect the recent ‘practice turn’ in security and border studies that examine ‘how actors act and how they give meaning to their actions’ (Côté-Boucher et al., 2014: 197).

I read Butler’s provocation about the resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality as inviting us to also explore possibilities that there may be more than one relationship between governmentalized subjects and law. As Bigo (2007: 15) points out: ‘The moment of decision and who decides about whom [sic] needs to be targeted – or excluded from within or combated as enemy – are the key questions that law can never anticipate.’ If law can never anticipate what petty sovereigns decide and how they act, as Bigo suggests, there may be more than one relationship between governmentalized subjects and law. Therefore I wonder: What if petty sovereigns refuse to use law as a device to advance their interests? What if they refuse to resort to any legal measures to realize particular policy aims? What sorts of resistance might their refusal point to?

In the next two sections, I will examine these questions by drawing on the case of Wakasugi, a METI official, and his novels. To be clear, Butler’s concept of petty sovereigns is developed in a specific context where people held in Guantánamo Bay are subjected to biopolitical conditions. Their life becomes a target of governmental control. Accordingly, petty sovereigns described in Butler’s work take part in practices that represent an intensely naked form of violence. In comparison with Butler, Wakasugi’s case seems to be much less violent and much more serene: it deals with the Japanese bureaucracy, where laws are handled by civilian ministry officials. Despite the differences, however, I read Wakasugi’s novels as fundamentally addressing biopolitical conditions of Fukushima survivors and residents living near nuclear power stations. As Wakasugi shows, under various laws related to nuclear energy, the life of ordinary people becomes a target of governmental rationalities. These laws include the Electricity Business Act, the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness, the Nuclear Accident Child Victims’ Support Law and the Nuclear Damage Compensation Facilitation Corporation Act. Peppered throughout his novels are stories of people who are abandoned and left to die as a result of the government’s decision based on the law. For instance, one character, Kyoko Tamagawa, a former TV news reporter and a researcher on alternative energy, loses her father, who was a dairy farmer from Fukushima. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Tamagawa’s father continued his dairy business because he was unaware that his cows were exposed to radiation. The government’s decision to play down the risk of radiation and its decision about evacuation zones that prevented him from returning to his farm eventually drove Tamagawa’s father to commit suicide at his own farm. The case of Tamagawa’s father corresponds to similar non-fictional cases reported after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (hereafter ‘3/11 disaster’) (see, for example, Asahi Shimbun, 2011). After the disaster, some existing laws were revised and new laws created, to protect both people who were affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster and those who may be affected by similar incidents in the future. Wakasugi’s novels demonstrate that these laws are firmly entrenched in the terrain of biopolitics since they ultimately draw a line between people who are qualified to live and those who are not.

The monster system and the mechanism of governmentality

Once published, Genpatsu Howaito Auto (Wakasugi, 2013) and Tokyo Burakku Auto (Wakasugi, 2014) quickly captured the public imagination with their sensational content and the secrecy surrounding the identity of the author. The books have been featured in different newspapers and TV programmes in Japan, and Genpatsu Howaito Auto was one of the bestselling books of 2013. Set in the post-Fukushima period, the books describe how bureaucrats and politicians interpret laws to maintain the pre-Fukushima nuclear policy in an intact state. Retsu Wakasugi, the author of these two novels, exposes to the public the existence of what he calls ‘the monster system’. The monster system refers to a rent-seeking mechanism established among some METI officials, politicians and people working in the electricity industry. According to Wakasugi, the monster system functions as a powerful machine whereby the electricity industry collects money and uses it to pamper politicians and bureaucrats, who then give preference to the nuclear energy industry in their law-making activities.

In the novels, Wakasugi discusses the monster system that, he argues, controls the direction of national energy policy. The Japanese electricity industry is virtually monopolized by ten electricity giants, each of which controls a particular region of Japan. ² As Wakasugi explains, while electricity supply is practically monopolized by these electricity giants, electricity prices are regulated by the government. The government decides the appropriate electricity rates to be charged to consumers, based on its own calculation on the cost and profit balance of each electricity company. Since the profit is tied to the eventual electricity price charged to consumers, the electricity companies have little incentive to cut costs. If the electricity companies lower the costs of running their businesses, the profit calculated in response to the cost will be lowered by the government. That is, the more money the electricity companies spend in their operations, the higher the government’s projection of prices will be to maintain the cost–profit balance. Wakasugi (2013: 62) argues that consequently the electricity companies deliberately spend roughly 20% more than what is actually required in their operations to induce the government to maintain higher prices. ³ This surplus of 20% generates a pool of money for the electricity companies. According to Wakasugi, some of this extra money is pooled collectively to a mutual aid society (Gojokai in Japanese) that is organized by one or more electricity giants and their client and associate companies. There are several mutual aid societies spread across Japan. Twenty percent of the money reserved to each mutual aid society is further transferred to the industry-wide mutual aid society (Wakasugi, 2013: 65). In the novels, Wakasugi calls the industry-wide mutual aid society Nihon Denryoku Renmei (League of Electric Power Companies in Japan, LEPC). Given the description, Nihon Denryoku Renmei probably refers to Denki Jigyou Rengoukai (Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, FEPC), a voluntary organization organized by the ten electricity giants in Japan.

According to Wakasugi, the role of the mutual aid organizations is critical to the prosperity of the electricity giants, their client and associate companies, and the electricity industry itself (Wakasugi, 2013: 63, 65). Each mutual aid society distributes its money in the form of donations to politicians and fellowships and funding to research institutions and universities. The money also covers miscellaneous expenses for meetings – often held in expensive restaurants – between people in the electricity industry, politicians and bureaucrats. The mutual aid societies ensure that the way they spend money is not identified as ‘illegal’. For instance, with regard to donations to politicians, each donation is divided among members of each mutual aid society. Each member company’s donation is calculated so that the divided sum of the donation stays below the limit at which donations would have to be declared publicly. The structure and legal status of the mutual aid societies also make it difficult to trace the flow of money. The mutual aid societies are not registered as corporate entities and instead exist as voluntary organizations. This voluntary status allows them to operate with little public scrutiny (Wakasugi, 2013: 65). Since the mutual aid society is a an organization where a company joins ‘voluntarily’, the money distributed through the mutual aid societies is merely understood as money that each member company willingly spends on the basis of ‘recommendations’ made by the mutual aid organizations.

Wakasugi’s books describe, in various situations, how the monster system functions as a mechanism of governmentality for people in the decisionmaking process, including politicians and bureaucrats. One of the key persons in Wakasugi’s novels is a senior-ranking METI official called Naohumi Himura, the director-general for natural resources and energy policy. The Agency for Natural Resources and Energy Policy is an actual agency within the METI that oversees energy policies and related laws. The character of Himura is believed to be modelled on Takaya Imai, a METI official, the former director-general for natural resources and energy policy and currently the executive secretary to the prime minister, Shinzo Abe. ⁴ Like Himura, Imai played a key role in advocating the importance of nuclear energy and developing post-Fukushima nuclear policies that justify the reopening of nuclear power stations. Wakasugi explains that Himura’s position is critical because his agency is at the forefront of ‘promoting nuclear power’ within the METI.

As a result of the 3/11 disaster, the public has become increasingly critical of the ways in which the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) handles the Fukushima disaster aftermath as well as dependence on nuclear energy in general (Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, 2012: 1). In the light of this public mood following the 3/11 disaster, the Japanese government has proposed to reform the electric power system in three stages: to ‘secure the stable supply of electricity’; to ‘suppress electricity rates to the maximum extent possible’; and to ‘expand electricity choices for consumers and business opportunities’. ⁵ The gist of these policies is to change the electricity industry, effectively monopolized by ten electricity giants, by letting other companies join so as to allow open competition. For Himura, however, the electric reform bill is merely ‘a means to reactivate nuclear power plants’ (Wakasugi, 2013: 82). As an expert on national energy policy, Himura knows that open competition in the electricity industry is economically profitable for consumers. At the same time, ‘as a realist’, Himura is also aware that the monster system will never disappear no matter what:

Since the current political system depends on the rent provided by the electricity companies … just as drug users demand drugs, politicians and local communities will eventually start demanding their shares again. (Wakasugi, 2013: 82)

By controlling the particularities of legislative aspects of the electric power system reform bill, Himura believes that he and his colleagues have the ultimate power to decide the details of the framework on the electric reform so that the actual competition within the industry remains restricted:

The extent to which alternative energy increases its sales depends on the discretionary decisions made by the ten existing electricity giants and the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy…. We can control [the development of the alternative energy industry] by controlling the details of the system [of the reform bill]. (Wakasugi, 2013: 130–131)

While informing readers of the existence of the monster system and the way in which it governs how politicians and bureaucrats behave, Wakasugi also reveals to the public that the law-making process of the ongoing (non-fictional) reforms on the Electricity Business Act (Denki Jigyou Hou) is embedded into the monster system. As Wakasugi (2014: 154–155) explains, all bills submitted from the Cabinet to ordinary sessions of the Japanese Diet are determined at a meeting between directors of ministries who are in charge of the examination of relevant bills and directors-general of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau (Naikaku Housei Kyoku), the section that collects proposals for new bills from the ministries. ⁶ The latter invites the former to discuss how well prepared the bills are and to decide which bills will be submitted to the Diet as ‘A bills’ – bills that are ready to be passed as laws – and which ones as ‘C bills’ – bills that are not ready to be passed. The results of these meetings are reported to the senior executive meeting within the Cabinet Legislation Bureau; and, with the approval of this meeting, the final decision is made by the government. Depending on whether bills are categorized as ‘A’ or ‘C’, the priority of discussing the bills at the Diet and within the Legislation Bureau changes (Wakasugi, 2014: 155). Hence the reputation of the director of each ministry depends on whether they can get their own ministries’ bills categorized as ‘A’ (Wakasugi, 2014: 155).

In Wakasugi’s books, the bill to reform the Electricity Business Act is drafted and submitted to the Diet under careful coordination between the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, the METI and the ruling party. The reform bill is originally submitted as a ‘C bill’ as a result of the ‘political decision’ surrounding the bill. A director from the METI informs the Legislation Bureau that some electricity companies are lobbying hard to pressure the ruling party to ensure that the reform bill is presented together with the reactivation of nuclear power plants (Wakasugi, 2014: 157–158). On the basis of this information, the Legislation Bureau reports to the Cabinet that the reform bill needs to be categorized as ‘C’ because some details are yet to be decided. While delaying the submission of the bill to the Diet, the METI official Himura and politicians from the ruling party who are backed by the electricity industry discuss how to add a phrase to the electric reform bill to ensure the promotion of nuclear energy, so that the wishes of the energy industry can be reflected in the bill. The politicians pressure Himura to either include the phrase about the promotion of nuclear energy in the bill or to create a so-called Programme Law that promises priority for nuclear energy. ⁷ Himura, however, suggests adding a phrase about nuclear energy to the law as a supplementary resolution (futai ketsugi), since the wording of the resolution ‘is nothing related to the Cabinet Legislation Bureau and politicians have freedom’ to play with the exact wording of the supplementary resolution (Wakasugi, 2014: 167–168). In response, one politician informs Himura of the customary practice that supplementary resolutions need to be unanimously agreed upon by all parties. In the end, they all agree to include a phrase about the promotion of nuclear energy as a supplementary provision (fusoku) to the main bill. This is because, unlike supplementary resolutions, supplementary provisions can be added without the agreement of all parties.

As Wakasugi points out, bureaucracy is driven by a two-tier system of interests: the pursuit of national interest and the pursuit of each bureaucrat’s personal interests. Bureaucrats are not only motivated to work for the national interest but also driven by a desire to be promoted within the bureaucracy, to get higher salaries and to ensure their retirement posts (Wakasugi, 2014: 82–83). The monster system feeds into this logic to ensure the promotion of particular METI officials who are groomed and entertained by the electricity giants and who, in return, support the existing nuclear energy policy.

Bypassing law

Wakasugi’s books have caught public attention not only because of their sensational revelation of the monster system but also because they were written by a serving member of the civil service, presumably a senior METI official. The author uses a pseudonym, Retsu Wakasugi, to hide his own identity. The only information available about the author is that he is a graduate of the law department at the University of Tokyo and currently working as a civil servant at one of the ministries in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, where central government functions are concentrated. Wakasugi constructs a story based on information only available to bureaucrats who closely work with nuclear energy policy. In this regard, the books serve as a valuable source of information usually unavailable to both the public and journalists.

Wakasugi acknowledges that, as a bureaucrat, he has a limited capacity to change Japan’s nuclear energy policy. When asked whether he is against the reactivation of nuclear power plants, he responds as follows:

Emotionally I am against, but probably there will be no option but to reactivate under the current Abe administration. This [reactivation] is no longer about [what] bureaucrats [can or cannot do], but [the reopening of nuclear power plants] is decided as a political choice; so I think there is no room left [to change such a choice].

He continues: ‘After all, bureaucrats are governed by politics, under the parliamentary democratic system; so [the question is] to what extent [bureaucrats] can act within such a system of governance’ (cited in Gendai Business, 20 February 2015).

Wakasugi’s realization that he is a mere cog in a gigantic machine echoes Huysmans’ (2001: 375) observation about ‘sovereign moments’ when petty sovereigns make decisions. Huysmans argues that nodes of decisionmaking are dispersed and diffused, and ‘decisions with gravity … are difficult to find’ (Huysmans, 2001: 380). In other words, the petty sovereigns’ relationship to biopower is determined not so much by what each petty sovereign directly does to manage populations. Rather, the relationship is already implicated in the governmentalized mechanism, where it remains unclear how precisely each petty sovereign’s action is connected to the biopolitical conditions of populations. As Wakasugi describes, the post-Fukushima nuclear energy policy in Japan is shaped by different politicians and bureaucrats, each of whom has a stake in the protection of the nuclear energy industry. They make decisions based on their ethics, political beliefs and calculations about their own careers. Their decisions are also made within a specific context of departmental, ministerial or party politics. As a petty sovereign, Wakasugi might have been able to use his managerial power to engage in a tactful and delicate bureaucratic war to create policies that are favourable to him, such as the reform of the electricity industry or the creation of a progressive energy policy that is less dependent on nuclear energy. Yet his involvement in the decisionmaking process is limited precisely because nodes of decisionmaking are dispersed and diffused. Furthermore, these nodes are firmly embedded into the monster system. If he is regarded as being against nuclear energy within the METI, he risks jeopardizing his career – and possibly losing his job. In one masked interview, Wakasugi shares a non-fictional story in which his colleague was instantly removed from the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy once he started to work seriously on the reform of the electricity industry (Mainichi Shimbun, 2013).

Crucially, Wakasugi escapes into the fictional world, which allows him to refuse to rationalize the governmental authority that perpetuates the monster system. He uses his civil service position to collect information only available to bureaucrats and disclose it to the public. By doing so, Wakasugi ultimately relies on the voice of the people. The fictional world offers a refuge for the nameless petty sovereign because law fails to seize him there. By writing novels, Wakasugi avoids laws that determine the political capacities of what he can do as a petty sovereign. As a bureaucrat, he abides by the National Civil Service Law that binds civil servants to keep official secrets. Writing fiction, however, allows Wakasugi to tell ‘something I see and hear directly … and indirectly’ (Tokyo Shimbun, 2013):

The reality is that we are slowly but surely moving toward the reactivation of nuclear power plants. Meanwhile I know how cunning the electricity industry is, and that Prime Minister Abe’s statement ‘Japanese nuclear power is the safest in the world’ is a lie. I am a public servant. So it can be argued that I get this information through the taxpayer’s money. Of course, as a civil servant, I am bound by obligation to keep official secrets. So, by using the form of a novel, I wanted to ask: ‘Everyone, is it OK to move toward the reactivation of nuclear energy power plants?’ (Mainichi Shimbun, 2013)

Wakasugi gathers information based on what he sees and hears every day at work. Not all of his information can be proven with hard evidence, whatever that might be. Fictional writing has salvaged him, though. It has allowed him to carefully narrate a story about the reality when evidence is lacking to substantiate his story as ‘reality’. Writing about fictional international relations, Park-Kang (2015: 362) argues that fictional writing can be a useful tool when we deal with ‘lack of data and contingency surrounding it’. It is useful because, in the case of fiction, the author’s personal experience can be incorporated into his or her analysis as a ‘credible’ source. It can be argued, therefore, that Wakasugi uses his personal experience as ‘data’ to fill in the gap between evidence and lack of evidence. Wakasugi explains why he opted for the form of a novel to reveal the information as follows:

To me, after the Fukushima nuclear incident, a range of information is reported [to the public] sporadically, but these news reports needed to be supported by evidence; so only a tiny segment of the real truth came out eventually. Truth exists even when one cannot obtain evidence: a real picture also lies elsewhere. Since I know this real picture, which takes place every day [at work], which I see and hear, and which is left in my memory in my day-to-day interactions [with my colleagues], I have merely transferred this information into my books. (Gendai Business, 2015, emphasis added)

Using the author’s own experience as a bureaucrat as ‘data’, Wakasugi’s novels deftly blur the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. In his books, Wakasugi mixes fictional characters, who are based on actual characters, with non-fictional events. He also includes actual news clips (e.g. Wakasugi, 2014: 20–22, 64–65, 78–79) and non-fictional characters (e.g. Wakasugi, 2013: 187–191) in his supposedly fictional story. Presenting reality in the form of fiction, his books paradoxically remind readers that Wakasugi’s story is in essence non-fictional.

To collect information and use his experience as ‘data’, Wakasugi also avoids another law – the Whistleblower Protection Act, enacted in 2004 – to hide his real identity. Unlike whistleblower-protection laws in other countries, the Japanese law requires whistleblowers to publicly identify themselves if they are to use the Protection Act (Tsuban, 2015: 25). As Wakasugi explains, ‘I would like to keep the public informed of the reality’. To do so, he argues, he wants to remain anonymous. If he reveals his identity, he is no longer able to collect information as freely as possible and as much as he would like (Tokyo Shimbun, 2013): ‘The reason why I remain in bureaucracy and hide my identity is to keep collecting information’ (Mainichi Shimbun, 2013).

Thus, instead of appealing to the Whistleblower Protection Act, the nameless bureaucrat creates a fictional character called Retsu Wakasugi. It is through the voice of Wakasugi that this nameless civil servant discloses the existence of the monster system and how post-Fukushima nuclear energy policies are created to keep the system alive.

Furthermore, as a petty sovereign himself, Wakasugi is acutely aware of the discretionary power used by bureaucrats to interpret laws. His novels describe various situations where the Japanese government uses laws to incriminate bureaucrats and politicians who pose threats to the survival of the monster system. For example, Wakasugi introduces a character, Kiyohiko Izuta, a governor of Niisaki (meaning ‘New Cape’) prefecture which houses a currently-closed-down nuclear power station. Izuta refuses to reactivate the power station because of its poor safety standards. To remove him from power, pro-nuclear lobbyists work with the Public Prosecutors Office to create a fabricated corruption scandal. Given the similarities in the name and career background, ‘Kiyohiko Izuta’ probably refers to Hirohiko Izumida, the governor of Niigata (meaning ‘New Lagoon’) prefecture (from October 2004 to October 2016), where the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station is located. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear station is one of the three nuclear power plants owned by TEPCO. ⁸ After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Izumida continuously refuses to approve TEPCO’s plan to reactivate the Kashizawaki-Kariwa plant, arguing that the nuclear safety standards of TEPCO and the government, including their evacuation plan, was hurriedly created for the primary purpose of reopening nuclear power plants as soon as possible (Mainichi Shimbun, 2016). With the story of Izuta’s arrest, Wakasugi seems to warn anti-nuclear activists of what the government is capable of: ‘The government and Public Prosecutors Office act with one heart and mind’ (Wakasugi, 2013: 191). In his writing, Wakasugi also uses a non-fictional event involving Atsuko Muraki, a senior bureaucrat from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, along with other similar cases (Wakasugi, 2013: 187–191), to show how the Public Prosecutors Office can interpret laws for political purposes.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Wakasugi’s refusal to use the Whistleblower Protection Act parallels what several bureaucrats do in his story. Albeit in different ways, these bureaucrats all challenge the monster system without resorting to the Protection Act: they leak information to the public and appeal to the voice of the people. For example, at one point in the story, Yasushi Morishita, director of the Nuclear Emergency Preparedness Division of the Secretariat of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, encourages Tatsuya Higashida, chief official of the Preparedness Division, to ‘change the world’ by disclosing to the public a classified document about the government’s contingency plan in the event of a nuclear power plant disaster (Wakasugi, 2014: 267–269). He reminds Higashida of the non-fictional ‘19-trillion-yen receipt’ incident that took place in 2004, when a group of young METI officials leaked to the media that the total cost of a nuclear fuel recycling facility was an eye-popping 19 trillion yen. Considering that the Japanese government’s budget for the 2016 fiscal year is 96.7 trillion yen, the size of the total cost associated with the nuclear fuel recycling facility is indeed remarkable. Based on the classified information, some METI officials created a 25-page PowerPoint document and sent it to various news agencies (Oshika, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2014d). ⁹ Higashida eventually leaks the document, which further fuels the public’s anger toward the METI and the electricity companies.

In this way, Wakasugi’s novels point to the possibility where petty sovereigns not only use law to rationalize governmental authority but refuse the very power bestowed upon them to do so. Like these fictional characters, Wakasugi refuses to exercise the sovereign power that allows him to interpret energy-related laws to meet specific policy goals favourable to himself. Instead Wakasugi writes novels to appeal to the public to change nuclear energy policy from the outside, via public pressure. As a bureaucrat, Wakasugi is able to gather information that is hidden from the public. His books are designed to inform the public of the monster system: how politicians and bureaucrats interpret laws to preserve the system. For this purpose, Wakasugi also refuses to use the Whistleblower Protection Act and goes incognito. This enables him to continue collecting information as a bureaucrat.

Slipping into the colliding worlds of fiction and non-fiction

One might argue that Wakasugi takes away from petty sovereigns the discretionary power to interpret law so that people can reclaim the power delegated to petty sovereigns. By revealing to the public what he knows as a petty sovereign, Wakasugi asks people to make a decision on their own, rather than leaving that decision in the hands of petty sovereigns. Civil society is expected to act as a check and balance on governmental authority and counteract if it detects an abuse of power.

I argue that such a reading of Wakasugi’s case not only falls back on the traditional understanding of resistance based on the power-vs-counter-power dichotomy but also assumes the link between resistance and agency. To be sure, petty sovereigns are ‘earthlings’ who are ‘emotionally active, interpretive human agents, capable of rule setting, rule following and rule resistance’ (Smith, 2009: 144–145). For instance, using the example of security devices, Amicelle et al. (2015: 302) argue:

Devices are ‘worked by’ security professionals and social organizations, and vice versa…. If resistance is a polarity of any power relationship, it is also a permanent component of the ongoing production process (i.e. making and usage) of any security device.

However, as Huysmans (2001) argues, it is not enough to merely identify a moment of resistance, manifested as a specific act of a particular petty sovereign – in this case, Wakasugi’s act of writing novels and appealing to the public. Since contemporary securitization practices are extremely diffused among various technologies and actors, there is no single decision that ‘can be identified as being especially significant for creating the exceptional stratifications and discriminations’ (Huysmans, 2001: 380). In other words, for Huysmans, resistance is not about a specific act or moment attributable to a clearly definable subject. Echoing Amoore and De Goede (2008), Huysmans cautiously points out that the focus on an individual’s decisionmaking act may simply reintroduce ‘reading politics as ethics and implementation of statist decisions and status’ rather than ‘read[ing] politically dispersal and processes in which decisions cannot be aggregated into critical moments and sites that rupture a given order’ (Huysmans, 2001: 380, emphasis added).

Taking Huysmans’ call seriously, I contend that Wakasugi’s case is important not so much because he appeals to the public and attempts to ‘resist’ the monster system. After all, his novels did not culminate in the destruction of that system. Rather, Wakasugi’s action is important because it points to the need to think about resistance when there is no clearly identifiable subject. The nameless petty sovereign appears only through the fictional character called Wakasugi. And yet, to create this fictional character, the nameless petty sovereign needs to remain a petty sovereign so that he is able to collect information and reveal his findings through the voice of Wakasugi. Wakasugi’s attempt to ‘resist’ the monster system is significant precisely because his ‘resistance’ is expressed through the voiceless voice of the petty sovereign who only appears at the intersection between fiction and non-fiction.

To explore possibilities of resistance in a context where there is no visible moment of resistance initiated by a clearly definable subject, I turn to Amoore and Hall’s (2013) work. I find their work helpful because they suggest that to effectively contest the grammar of sovereign power, it is necessary to look into the subject-making process. While they acknowledge the importance of resistance initiated by people who experience ‘the suspension of their political life and the reduction of their existence to the bare life of homo sacer’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 95), they point out that it is not enough to make ‘counter identity claims, for such actions merely fight over “where the lines are drawn”’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 96). Using an example of clowns participating in anti-detention campaigns, the authors argue that the clown-fool figure belongs to ‘a space for political action, contestation and resistance that is produced within, and forms an intrinsic part of, sovereign power’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 97). The clowns differ from those who are relegated to the status of homo sacer because the former neither approve nor reject sovereign power. The clowns’ presence signals both idiocy and affirmation of governmental authority (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 100–101).

For Amoore and Hall, understanding resistance in relation to the unknown quality of the clowns is key. Following Edkins and Pin-Fat (2005) (see also Edkins, 2007), Amoore and Hall (2013: 96) argue that sovereign power is founded upon the desire to have full control over the subject-making process. What sovereign power cannot tolerate is the ambiguity of subjects. In this regard, the clowns resist the sovereign politics that draws lines because they fail to have a clearly definable subject status. The clowns’ actions can be construed as playfulness or provocation. This ‘very contingency of the outcome itself’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 97) enables the clowns to slip away from the sovereign power. In this way, Amoore and Hall suggest that resistance can be conceptualized as unknown possibilities of becoming. What the clown might become to the sovereign is unknown and undecided. And it is this uncertainty constitutive of the clown’s subject-making process that Amoore and Hall see as opening up a space for resistance:

The political capacity of the clown, then, lies not in an act that is accomplished or achieved once and for all – to end border controls, or to stop war, or to resist globalization, for example – but instead in a series of oscillating exemplars that gather together otherwise scattered subjects and objects. The political capacity lies not in the actualization of an end goal, then, but in potentiality itself. (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 98)

To be clear, clowns are different from petty sovereigns because the former are ‘abstracted from law, rights and responsibility’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 101) and hence ‘outside the norms and laws that govern those around [them]’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 102). And yet the clowns’ ambiguous relationship with sovereign power overlaps with that of petty sovereigns in that both have ‘troubled proximity of sovereign power’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 97). Both clowns and petty sovereigns take part in the operation of sovereign power, either as legitimate critics – in the case of clowns – or as decisionmakers – in the case of petty sovereigns.

It can be argued, therefore, that Wakasugi’s refusal to resort to laws does not merely bring counter-power into the decisionism of the sovereign. Perhaps more importantly, to avoid laws allows Wakasugi to evade the sovereign logic of being itself. By resorting to the world of fiction, the nameless petty sovereign constantly shifts between reality and fiction. The voice of Wakasugi is created through what he is in the non-fictional world, that is, a serving member of the civil service, and what he is in the fictional world, that is, Retsu Wakasugi. The information collected as a bureaucrat is only able to be relayed to the public in the form of fiction. Precisely because Wakasugi’s story takes the form of fiction, it cannot be discredited even when it is not supported by hard evidence. To protect his version of the truth about post-Fukushima national energy policy, the nameless petty sovereign goes incognito. No one is able to catch him, and this enables him to continue collecting information and telling his version of the truth to the public.

Being at the intersection between fiction and non-fiction, the nameless petty sovereign becomes what Agamben calls ‘whatever being’, a being ‘which is neither particular nor general, neither individual nor generic’ (Agamben, 1993: 107). As such, it is ‘a being that does not make any settled claim for identity and recognition’ (Amoore and Hall, 2013: 96). Without any demand for recognition of his own identity, the author of the novels remains ungraspable. His voice is there, but it lacks singularity that can be manifested as a nameable subject. He is neither a bureaucrat nor a fictional character. Indeed he is becoming both at the same time. As such, sovereign power cannot seize him because it cannot draw a line between where the reality – his voice as a bureaucrat – begins and where the fiction – his voice as Wakasugi – begins. Reality and fiction are intertwined with one another and appear in the voice of Wakasugi: he speaks through the contingency of his own subjectivity. In this way, political capacities available to the nameless petty sovereign, and his possibilities of becoming, escape the logic of sovereign power.

To put it differently, the nameless petty sovereign articulates his voice by unmaking the distinction between potentiality and actuality. In her reading of Agamben, Edkins (2007) argues that what lies at the heart of Agamben’s understanding of sovereign power is the control over potentiality. For Agamben, the fundamental activity of sovereign power is to determine what one is (actuality) – zoē or bios – as the condition of what one can be (potentiality). ‘At the limit, pure potentiality and pure actuality are indistinguishable, and the sovereign is precisely this zone of indistinction’ (Agamben, 1995: 47). Edkins argues that Agamben’s idea of whatever being, or a form of life, effectively unmakes the distinction between potentiality and actuality:

The long-standing distinction between potentiality and actuality must be abandoned, and instead potentiality must be conceived as a form of actuality and vice versa. What Agamben proposes is ‘nothing less than thinking ontology and politics beyond every figure of relation, beyond even the limit relation that is the sovereign ban’ [Agamben, 1995: 47]. What he challenges here is what he calls ‘the ontological root of every political power’ [Agamben, 1995: 48]. (Edkins, 2007: 77)

Following this line of thinking, I argue that the critical aspect of Wakasugi’s case is precisely that his act upsets the categorical difference between potentiality and actuality. To write the novels and become Wakasugi (potentiality) is only made possible because of what he is (actuality). The nameless petty sovereign could not have written the novels without the information he obtained and experience he accumulated as a bureaucrat. At the same time, he uses a pseudonym to maintain his professional status as a bureaucrat. To be what he is (actuality) makes sense only because doing so enables him to keep the fictional character, Wakasugi, alive. It is this political capacity of what he can be (potentiality) that sustains his existence as a bureaucrat (actuality). Wakasugi’s act is a radical and creative attempt to open up a way to imagine politics beyond boundaries of being, beyond boundaries of actuality and potentiality.

Conclusion

How can we locate some possibilities to challenge the tightly knit connection between governmentality and sovereignty? In this article, I have revisited Butler’s idea of petty sovereigns and argued that such possibilities can be found at the intersection between fiction and non-fiction. Drawing on the case of Wakasugi and his novels, I have argued that petty sovereigns slip away from both sovereignty and governmentality by building different relationships with law. Wakasugi’s case suggests that possibilities of resistance can be found in the governmental mechanism itself. Instead of exercising managerial power to interpret laws for their own sake, some petty sovereigns avoid resorting to laws altogether. Instead, they utilize their position to collect information only available to civil servants and disclose it to the public. In case of Wakasugi, he writes novels to reveal what he knows and present his version of the truth that is hidden behind the closed doors of law-making. To escape into the world of fiction is critical in this regard. To use his personal experience as ‘data’ and protect his truth, it is necessary for Wakasugi to tell his story in the form of fiction. At the same time, to gather information as a bureaucrat, it is vital for Wakasugi to remain anonymous and resume his role as a petty sovereign. In this way, Wakasugi slips into the colliding worlds of reality and fiction. No one is able to catch him because his subjectivity is articulated in an oscillating movement between potentiality of what he can be and actuality of what he is.

Asked about the possibilities of a ‘second and third Retsu Wakasugi’ emerging, Wakasugi responds as follows: ‘I don’t know. But there are many folks in Kasumigaseki [Japanese bureaucrats] who think that things are horribly wrong’ (Gendai Business, 2015). It might be, then, that the ‘reality’ may not be as bleak as Butler seems to suggest. Butler (2004: 56) laments: ‘petty sovereigns abound, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power’ and with ‘the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority’. Indeed, petty sovereigns abound, ‘reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions’ governed by the monster system. And yet some of them are there secretly escaping from their own power to ‘render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority’. As petty sovereigns make a quiet escape, the very ground that holds sovereign power is dissolving.