Abstract
This introductory review aims to subject Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan (2013) to wider thinking and practices of autonomy, and to open it up to the book review forum for non-Japanese-speaking readers. First, it should be noted that so-called radical thought in Italy has permeated Japan and the English-speaking world since the publication of Empire in 2000. The translation of this and other key works of this thought has raised awareness of the intellectual and political background of concepts such as operaismo (workerism) and autonomia (autonomy). Further, some of the major concepts emanating from these movements, such as withdrawal, autonomy, refusal, composition, and creativity have penetrated the sphere of influence of some activists and researchers in Japan.
Two famous thinkers from this Italian intellectual circle have visited Japan in recent years: Franco Berardi (alias Bifo) and Toni Negri. During their stay, both tackled the social and political issues of Japanese capitalist society (or ‘precarious Japan’) from their workerist stance.
On first reading Precarious Japan, I immediately recognized frequent references to Berardi’s insights. Allison admits trying to ‘apply what he [Berardi] argues about soul alienation, and resistance […] to the condition of precarity and precariat in twenty-first century Japan’ (p. 16).
This seemed quite a striking idea, because Berardi himself proposed a similar intention after going to Japan to protest against the G8 in 2008. Based on his experiences and discussions with representatives of the Japanese precariat, he subsequently wrote a text about precarious Japan in an appendix to the Japanese edition of his book Dell’innocenza. 1977 (Of innocence. 1977) on the histories of Italian autonomist movements in the 1970s. This appendix is provocatively entitled ‘Hikikomori of the world, unite!’
Hikikomori are mainly young male adults who represent social withdrawal in Precarious Japan. Allison explains that ‘these individuals […] often withdraw and remain in a single room they rarely, if ever, leave. Hikikomori are socially disconnected and detached from human contact: “homeless at home”’ (p. 3). Hikikomori, not only displaced from society but also from their own families, have no place they can call home (ibasho). If their parents do not have enough savings to pay for their sustenance, they are also at risk of becoming homeless or refugee-like (nanminka) in the streets or net cafes.
The impression conveyed by the term hikikomori is of a state of extreme isolation,
inactivity, and pain. From his autonomist perspective, however, Berardi ventures to
consider hikikomori as a form of autonomous subjectivation. ‘The tendency which can be
seen in this kind of behavior [of hikikomori] is that of withdrawal, of retreat, and of
isolation or shut-in because they have nothing to do with the system of competition,
psychological violence, and frustration’ (Berardi, 2010: 263). He then proposes a research
agenda for Japanese as well as Western society: The future is hidden in experience of hikikomori. The most important assignment
[…] is to understand, interpret, and express what is concealed in everyday life
and to transform suffering into subjectivity, consciousness, social solidarity
and political organization. From the point of view of such new subjectivity, if
we want to find out something of new not only for Japan but also for the West
and the Western new generation, we have to understand and interpret the
sensibility and political weakness of the Japanese new generation. (Berardi, 2010:
266–267)
Precarious Japan provides a response to the issues raised by Berardi about precarity in Japan and beyond. The book pays attention to the general socio-historical context of Japan, and to both popular opinions about and influential criticisms of precarity. Paying careful attention to Japanese circumstances, the author attempts to apply Japanese terms and ideas generated by the precarious conditions in Japan—ikizurasa (pain of life), nanminka (refugeeization), ibasho (a space where one feels comfortable), tsunagari (connectedness), fureai (mutual contact), and so forth—to those of the contemporary West, such as those expressed through Italian biopolitics, Judith Butler’s precariousness, and Berardi’s soul at work (or at strike).
More significantly, Precarious Japan is rich with ethnographic descriptions, conveyed, for instance, through diverse encounters and interviews. As a result of her fieldwork in Japan working with hikikomori and other socially disadvantaged people, Allison succeeds in grasping the sensibility and weakness of the young precariat and discovers interesting activist movements trying to produce an alternative sociality that attaches importance to ‘being weak’. According to Allison, these activists are not simply withdrawing in order to be nonsocial, but deliberately in order to make space for creativity, which produces new tsunagari, fureai, and ibasho. Their alternative sociality originates from the communication of individual pain or suffering and the sharing of weakness and precariousness. The processes developed among these people are significantly slow, careful, affective, and corporeal. Undoubtedly, these are not ‘strong’ antagonistic actions; however, they can clearly be perceived as collective and even creative acts to refuse the existing society. In this autonomous way, to echo Berardi again, the Japanese new generation is trying ‘to transform suffering into subjectivity, consciousness, [and] social solidarity’.
Some new organizations that are more political than the hikikoromi and wish to intervene directly in the system are the post-3/11 antinuclear movements. Such movements spread in Tokyo and other places in response to the explosion of the reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Interestingly, many of these movements tend to be managed not by political parties and unions but by non-institutional groups and ordinary people, among which diverse ‘mamas’ have been moving into action to try to protect their children from radiation exposure. A protest called Friday’s Demonstration, for instance, is held in front of the prime minister’s office each week. It was to one of these demonstrations that one of the authors of Empire suddenly turned up one day.
Toni Negri, finally succeeded to cross the Japanese border in April 2013, despite the fact that, incredibly, his entrance had continued, de facto, to be refused by the Japanese authorities since 2008. While being deeply impressed by the democratic nature of the Japanese antinuclear movements, in a conference at Tokyo he said about the sovereign power of the nuclear state: ‘Here the modern sovereignty becomes the postmodern biopower. Dominance marks bodies of subjects […] giving [subjects] the alternative of ruled living or non-living, of danger or death. With the nuclear state the mortal risk of war was introduced into the ontology of life’ (Negri, 2014: 90–91).
Here it is worthwhile thinking about the possibility to organize societies and politics in alternative modes in terms of the Japanese nuclear state from an operaista and autonomist perspective. According to Negri, the new global form of sovereignty called Empire is ‘a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xii). In other words, the ‘non-place’ (or omnipresence) is essentially specific to spatiality of imperial sovereignty. Nuclear power can be seen as a metaphor for this sovereignty in Japan: (potential) non-place of radiation exposure. Radioactivity will continue to crucially affect land, sea, and air. Furthermore, it will diffuse uninterrupted through the extended, complicated, and entangled socio-spatial relations of contemporary life, until it engulfs our lives. The uncontrollable necropolitics of sovereignty can thus be seen to be insidiously infiltrating life.
If this is the case, how can there be an alternative of autonomy? How else is it possible to refuse, withdraw, and retreat from the non-place of radiation exposure? Where can we escape to when intangible, invisible, and odorless radioactivity totally is engulfing the environment and all life within it?
Today, it seems that many Japanese people do not want to face such a reality because they wish for ordinary life, even if only the appearance of ordinary life, to be restored as quickly as possible. Feelings of uneasiness and excessive defense mechanisms are leading to a desire for distracting nationalistic spectacles, such as territorial disputes with neighboring countries and the wish for Tokyo to host the Olympics. As various specialists and technocrats of the nuclear state have repeated, the Japanese Prime Minister, who is pushing to export nuclear power technology, is trying to affirm to the world that the situation in Japan is under control; Fukushima never has and never will do any damage to Tokyo.
We may say that such hegemonic behavior, shared by most people, will be a kind of withdrawal in a negative sense. It represents a withdrawal from the reality of the potential for a catastrophic radioactive contamination of the whole of Japan. This retreat into spectacles of aggression, masculinity, and nationalism, motivated by fear is, thus, completely different from the autonomous withdrawal described in Precarious Japan.
Allison was already writing Precarious Japan at the time of the Fukushima disaster and, consequently, only the last chapter (based on her experience as a volunteer in Tōhoku region) is devoted to it. The fallout from 3/11 may now have even more implications for Allison’s thoughts about precarious Japan. It is disputable whether any terms and concepts conceived before 3/11 are adequate to explain the current conditions of Fukushima and Japan engulfed in radioactive contamination. It may be clear that Japan’s precarious conditions are long-standing and have, for instance, been developing dramatically in the Tōhoku region for sometime. However, whether just the word ‘precarious’ is adequate to describe the present, unprecedented reality, is something that should, perhaps, be left open. If one were to appropriate and amplify the problematics outlined by Allison, one emergent assignment for precarious and radioactive Japan is the need to create new, more appropriate words, ideas, and poetics with which to express the conditions of our lives. Another assignment is to generate experimental practices that give us the autonomous withdrawals. How can we escape?