Carl Cassegård, Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan (Brill 2013)

This review was first published in Japanese Studies, vol. 37, no 1, 17 May 2017, pp. 140–142

Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan, Carl Cassegård, Leiden: Brill, 2013, xiii, 251 pp. + appendices, bibliography, index, ISBN: 978-9-0042-4591-4 hb, http://www.brill.com/youth-movements-trauma-and-alternative-space-contemporary-japan

Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan is the first major study in English of the new wave of youth social movements that emerged in Japan in the 1990s. They arose in response to issues such as war, social exclusion, job insecurity, homelessness and the privatisation of public space. They developed a characteristic protest style using music, performance and art and a network of activist spaces. Over eight fascinating chapters, Carl Cassegård traces the development of these movements, linking the emergence of new forms of activism to the changing economic and social conditions ushered in by the collapse of the ‘bubble’ economy and the subsequent long recession of the 1990s and 2000s.

After setting out the questions and theories that inform his study in the first two chapters, the remainder of the book is given over to detailed case studies in the development of particular forms of freeter activism. Chapter Three examines the rock and electronic dance-music infused cultural movements that sprang up around Yoyogi Park in the 1980s and fed into the anti-Iraq war movement of the early 2000s. He evokes the desperation and frustration that informed groups such as Dameren, who encouraged freeters and young people struggling with feelings of worthlessness and social exclusion to reject middle class values and embrace their outcast status as ‘dame’ (no good) people. Chapter Four looks at the development of freeter unions and the broader movement around precarious work. Here we find ourselves marching through the streets with May Day protesters as they reinvent a classic trade union protest tradition for a new world of insecure work. In Chapter Five, Cassegård introduces us to the vibrant homeless people’s movements in Japan’s major cities and their connection with underground theatre and art practice. We watch a performance by homeless people and activists in Osaka’s Nagai Park unfold while city officials move in to demolish the homeless encampment where the actors have been taking refuge. Chapter Six continues the discussion of freeter struggles but delves more deeply into the psychological aspects of these movements. We enter the tortured world of young people who have dropped out of social participation and become hikikomori or NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training). By examining the alternative spaces that these young people have created, Cassegård argues for the importance of ‘alternative space’ in the process of recovery. In Chapter Seven, the final case study chapter, the focus shifts to the often neglected role of campus activism in the new wave of youth social movements. Here, activists set up occupied cafes atop stone walls and in university courtyards to protest the neoliberalisation of the universities and the attendant erasure of autonomous student culture from the campus. Finally, in a thoughtful conclusion, Cassegård ties together hia theoretical and empirical explorations to make a number of important claims about the nature of contemporary youth activism in Japan.

Each of Cassegård’s case study features rich, ethnographic thick description that takes us right to the heart of contemporary activist culture in Japan. He draws on interviews, primary documents and artworks to evoke the people, places and events that define each phase of the new youth movements. Each chapter stands on its own as an informative case studies about a particular activist culture or communities. Taken as whole, the book goes much further by engaging with profound theoretical questions about contemporary activist politics in Japan. The starting point for this inquiry is the question of why youth protest, which had apparently subsided following the wave of intense student and anti-war movements of the late 1960s, seemed to suddenly revive in the new millennium. Cassegård uses a framework of trauma and recovery informed by psychoanalytic theory to explain this process of decline and re-emergence. His central claim is that, despite their apparent absence, youth counter-cultural movements did exist during the 1980s and 1990s, but were engaged in a period of internal reflection and rethinking that ultimately burst out once again into open protest against the Iraq war in the early 2000s. Cassegård argues that the twin traumas of neoliberal capitalism and the violence and betrayal of an earlier wave of New Left movements forced disgruntled youth to turn inwards and contemplate the situation in which they found themselves so as to find new means of expressing their anger. This process of recovery involved the creation of new forms of solidarity that, in turn, created pathways to connect often highly personalised struggles with broader political and economic questions. Central to this process was the development of alternative space, one of the key concepts Cassegård employs to understand the importance of activist centres, bookshops and homeless people’s encampments in the youth activist culture. In these alternative spaces, he argues, people who were suffering from the traumatic effects of life under neoliberalism were able to reconceptualise their subjectivity as members of a collective they frequently termed ‘the precariat’ (precarious proletariat).

In discussing the relationship between alternative space, protest and the public sphere, Cassegård engages with notions of the public developed in the writings of writers such as Jurgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser. One of the strengths of this study, however, is the attention the author gives to Japanese voices in the theoretical debates. Thus, as Cassegård describes the stage performance in Nagai Park mentioned above, he stops to survey how participants and other activists understood street theatre as a protest tactic and its relationship to broader debates in the movement. Cassegård shows us the tensions that exist within the movements over questions such as whether it is enough to create alternative spaces within the broader society or whether public protests that place demands on existing political structures are in fact necessary.

This detailed ethnography of contemporary youth activism in Japan can be read as a pre-history to the vibrant anti-nuclear power movement of 2011 and 2012. The narrative of trauma and recovery Cassegård constructs provides an explanation for how such a large-scale movement seemed to emerge out of nowhere. It is perhaps here that a certain weakness creeps into Cassegård’s argument. He tends to accept the narrative that has become popular in activist circles that protest movements disappeared after the late 1970s. This narrative is somewhat ahistorical, however, when we consider the growth of the feminist movement, for example, or the vibrant anti-nuclear power movements of the 1980s (though the latter does rate a mention). These omissions seems surprising when we consider Cassegård’s nuanced discussion in this book of the importance of history and memory in the construction of contemporary activist cultures. In the process of choosing and excluding predecessors, he explains, activists define their politics against their memories of the past.

Nevertheless, the experience of activism in Japan in the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s that is documented here has undoubtedly had a major influence on regenerating activism in Japan. Cassegård’s convincing conclusion is that the breadth and scale of the anti-nuclear power movement after Fukushima was a testament to the work of recovery and empowerment that has been taking place in Japan in activist spaces and in the streets throughout the so-called ‘lost’ decades.