The recovery of protest in Japan: from the ‘ice age’ to the post-2011 movements

Abstract

ABSTRACT For a long time after the end of large-scale student unrest in the 1970s Japan stood out by a comparatively low level of protest. Yet spectacular waves of mass-protest returned with the anti-nuke mobilizations following the 2011 Fukushima meltdown and other ‘post-2011’ movements. In this paper I develop an analytical framework inspired by the multi-level perspective in transition studies to illuminate two questions: how can the relatively low level of protest in Japan before 2011 – in particular the so called ‘ice age’ of protest from the 1970s to the early 2000s – be explained, and what enabled the recovery of protest afterwards, starting in the early 2000s and leading up to the post-2011 protest cycle? I point to the crucial role played on the one hand by niches in the form of social movement spaces in fostering oppositional discourses and on the other hand by landscape changes that destabilized the established politico-cultural regime. A crucial role was played by the creative work of freeter activists in social movement spaces during the 1990s who reinvented activism in response to stigmatization of open protest after the collective trauma of the perceived defeat of the New Left in the 1970s. This creative work was a precondition for the rise of protest movements in the early 2000s which in turn prepared the way for the post-2011 protest wave.