Azumi Tamura. Post-Fukushima Activism (Routledge 2018)
This review was first published in Interface: a journal for and about social movements, vol. 11, no 2, pp. 110–13, <https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Interface-11-2-reviews-1.pdf>.
Azumi Tamura. Post-Fukushima Activism: Politics and Knowledge in the Age of Precarity. New York: Routledge, 2018. (210 pp. Hardback £105).
Azumi Tamura’s Post-Fukushima Activism: Politics and Knowledge in the Age of Precarity is a rich study of urban social movements in Tokyo in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March, 2011. For Tamura, activism in the metropolis has changed fundamentally since the disaster, hence her use of the term “post-Fukushima activism.”
Her account focuses primarily on the anti-nuclear movement, but also addresses subsequent movements against the Abe government’s attempts at Constitutional reform, intended to normalise growing militarisation in Japan, and a raft of draconian national security laws. Tamura’s treatment of these movements stands out from many other monographs in the field, thanks in large part to her deep engagement with contemporary political theory. She rejects dispassionate, academic approaches to the study of social change, seeking instead in both her fieldwork and her theoretical speculation to become a part of the “we” that speaks through the movement.
Post-Fukushima Activism surveys a number of competing strands of political thought, from liberalism and feminist care ethics to post-workerist and post-anarchist thought. Tamura takes seriously liberal claims about the need for universalism but recognises the powerful critiques from postmodern thought which have demonstrated the instability of universal categories.
In the age of precarity, she insists, “we need a new political imaginary using what we have now: vulnerable bodies, emotions and desires” (59). While skilfully discoursing upon a theoretical tradition drawn mainly from English and European-language sources, she integrates this discussion with the cultural and intellectual history of Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. A particularly upsetting and powerful voice, which serves as a foil for Tamura’s argument throughout the book, is that of Akagi Tomohiro. Akagi is a young precarious worker who wrote a notorious essay in 2007 in which he claimed that his only hope for social change in Japan was a war which could completely disrupt the existing order. Tamura treats Akagi’s claim seriously, in all of its violence and despair, as an extreme expression of a wider sense of hopelessness and an internalised violence in neoliberal Japan.
Post-Fukushima Activism is based on two main periods of fieldwork conducted with the anti-nuclear movement in Tokyo in 2012, as well as follow-up interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. Tamura interviewed 146 protesters. While she initially categorised her research subjects as either independent activists, demonstration organisers or demonstration participants, as her fieldwork progressed she largely abandoned these categories as they became increasingly unstable.
This responsiveness to the fieldwork is evident throughout the book’s substantive empirical chapters, where she encounters the shifts in the mood and vibrancy of the movement over time. While staying faithful to her interview subjects’ own words, Tamura brings them into conversation with the post-anarchist and post-workerist ideas she interrogates throughout the book. Chapter Three is organised around the idea of the “dissolved subject”, which explains the way protesters in an age of precarity engage in movements as ambiguous and highly individualised subjects without necessarily producing a stable collective identity.
Tamura describes how the production of subjectivity in the movement emerges through an emotional and ethical engagement with the issue of nuclear power and this affective dimension serves as a critique of scientific rationalism. There is an emphasis in the movement on the politics of life, not in terms of a particular lifestyle (kurashi) but as a raw life force (inochi), which is threatened in the context of a risk society.
Later in the book, Tamura analyses the structure of Tokyo’s anti-nuclear movement using the notion of “resonant bodies,” through which different activist groupings and protest events expressed different political and strategic orientations. The protesters at the Kanteimae, the prime minister’s official residence, organised some of the largest protests in 2012. These protesters tended towards a hegemonic understanding of power and thus they conceived of their own actions in terms of a counter-hegemonic struggle.
On the other hand, the more anarchic members of Nuclear Free Suginami, had a more decentralised view of politics and saw themselves as an uzomuzo, a rabble or multitude. They focused on taking creative and spontaneous actions without attempting to build and maintain an organisational form. Yet despite these differences in orientation Tamura finds that there was a continual cross-over and overlap between the bodies of the protesters in different political moments. She describes this composition of the movement using the notion of “resonating bodies.”
Post-Fukushima Activism goes on to criticise academic theorising about social movements, noting the tendency to analyse movements on liberal rationalist grounds in an effort to produce objective knowledge about movements from the outside. Tamura eschews attempts “to establish a general model about” post-Fukushima activism and instead ponders what the movement can tell us about what it means to generate and bear knowledge about social change.
Fieldwork was instrumental in changing her own positionality, from that of an outside observer to one of engaged participant while remaining focused on “what I could do as a researcher to make a contribution to my society” (127). She proposes thinking about the action of post-Fukushima activists in terms of an “anarchic subjectivity,” a concept she argues can be applied both to the majoritarian-oriented Kanteimae protesters, with their emphasis on confronting hegemonic power, and the multitude-type movements such as Nuclear Free Suginami.
Many activists move seamlessly between the two movements and are able to separate the different roles they play in different instantiations of activism. “Rather than behaving as a consistent self, they change the presentation of themselves according to what they connect with and what they want to achieve” (131), she explains, in an ontology Tamura compares with the rhizomatic worldview described by Deleuze and Guattari.
The contingency of lives and struggles in the movement produces forms of knowledge which are embodied and situation dependent. Tamura found that activists show little interest in ideological consistency, adopting a pragmatic approach to particular issues and strategies. The knowledge generated through their struggles is not rationalistic but affective. It is based on emotional responses to an overwhelming disaster and does not seek a transcendent position from which to have perfect knowledge, as in Rawl’s concept of the veil of ignorance, but is instead “an attitude or a mode to live with uncertainty” (138).
Direct, embodied engagement with the movement is important in the transmission of this knowledge because it is based less on linguistic arguments than on an opening to possibilities of highly contingent situations. Tamura is conscious that in the era of “alternative facts” and “post-truth”, some liberal theorists have attempted to buttress rational truth as generally shared and accepted truths collapse. However, she argues that this strategy is dangerous and invites further backlash given the widespread rejection of liberal ethics. Tamura suggests instead that an embodied and affective knowledge is needed, one which values “the encounter with a particular body and create[s] new expression [sic] together with it, and pass it to other bodies as a form of affect” (140).
In the final chapter, Tamura integrates her fieldwork observations with her theoretical framework by focussing on two concepts: the creation of collective “non-identity” and non-hegemonic knowledge.
She asks: if the identities of the protesters are “dissolved” in the movement, then what kind of “collective identity” emerges? Drawing once again on Deleuze and the philosophy of assemblage, Tamura describes an ontology devoid of separate, individual agency, where “lines” converge in heterogeneous assemblages in which “each individual takes intentional action, but the outcome of accumulated individual actions as the assemblage would be unintentional to each of them” (152).
Vulnerable bodies, which are already interpolated in relations with otherness, interact as expressions of desire, without a clear self-other distinction. Rejecting the politics of recognition, Tamura maintains that protesters affirm life without necessarily seeking recognition within existing structures of power. Rather than demanding human rights from the state, they express their desire for dignity through their actions.
In interrogating the epistemological implications of the dissolved subjects and resonant bodies she found in her fieldwork, Tamura analyses the literature on science and risk and makes an argument about the relationship between ethics and knowledge in the case of nuclear power. While scientific knowledge attempts to impose order on a chaotic reality in which observers are themselves intertwined, when disaster strikes, reality talks back and reveals itself as ultimately unknowable. In this context, she argues, it is not possible to make an ethical defence of nuclear energy without obfuscating risk’s ultimate unknowability.
Post-Fukushima Activism is bold in its theoretical ambition and yet grounded in a deep engagement with the movement and the debates between movement participants as well as other researchers. Tamura’s contribution is an interesting and valuable one not only to the literature on protest culture in Japan, but to the broader intellectual debate on social movement activism in an increasingly precarious age.
