Against Japanism

Kota is joined by Roger Raymundo of Migrante Japan, a regional chapter of Migrante International, a global alliance of grassroots migrant organizations of overseas Filipinos and their families.

We begin our conversation with Roger’s own story of migration from the Philippines to Japan, and how the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during WWII affected his life, as well as the semi-colonization and semi-feudalization of the Philippines by imperialist countries such as Japan as the root cause of poverty and the subsequent mass migration. We then discuss the specific history of Filipino migration to Japan starting in the 1960s with the Marcos dictatorship and the creation of the Labour Export Policy which institutionalized the mass migration of Filipino workers as OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) to Japan. Many of these workers were women funneled into precarious employment in the red-light district as “entertainers,” as dancers, singers, hostesses, and sex workers often referred to as "Japayuki-san” after “Karayuki-san” referring to Japanese girls and women from poor agrarian communities trafficked abroad to serve as sex workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

We discuss the amendment to Japan’s Nationality Act in 2009 which allowed the children of Filipina migrant workers and Japanese men to claim Japanese citizenship. This was a victory for these families, as well as the Filipino and Japanese human rights organizations which fought on their behalf, and led to the proliferation of intermediary organizations which assist them in obtaining Japanese citizenship and family-related long term visas. However, while these organizations are often registered as non-profits or foundations, some of them act as for-profit labour brokers recruiting them as workers and matching them with their prospective employers in Japan. Moreover, since these recruitment agencies are not properly regulated by authorities in Japan or the Philippines, this has created a loophole in which the recruiters and their local managers act as the agents of intermediary exploitation by charging these migrants exorbitant fees and often deducting them from their salaries, causing them to accumulate debt and forcing these single mothers into poverty, as well as other instances of abuse.

We discuss how Japan’s strict and exclusionary immigration policies criminalize migrants through the cases of two women: Loida Quindoy, a Flipina migrant who was deported after 30 years in Japan, as well as Pat (or Pato-chan), a trans Filipina who was subjected to transphobic harassment and various human rights violations by the Nyukan.
We conclude the interview by discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic affected Filipino migrants in Japan, and the solutions to semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism in the Philippines, as well as the current campaigns and initiatives that Migrate Japan is working on.

Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma

Outro Music: Anong Kleseng Bayani

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Kota is joined by Ken Kawashima, author of The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan and translator of Theory of Crisis by Japanese Marxist economist Uno Kōzō.

We begin the interview by discussing Uno’s methodology in analyzing capitalism called Sandankairon, or three-steps theory. The first step involves elucidating the fundamental principles of capitalism. The second step involves tracing the historical development of capitalism in stages. The third step is the conjectural analysis of capitalism in the present.

Through the analysis of fundamental principles, Uno argued that the crisis under capitalism is not an accident, but necessarily built into its cyclical movement through three phases: prosperity, crisis, and depression. Unlike other Marxist theories of crisis which identified its cause in the spheres of production or circulation, Uno argues that the crisis originates in the intersection of production and circulation: the commodification of labour power. Since labour power is the only commodity that can produce value, as much as the workers are reliant on wage for their subsistence, capitalism is equally reliant on the continuous commodification of their labor power for its survival. However, capitalism’s drive toward infinite growth meets its own barrier as the supply of labour power of human beings cannot be increased at will to meet the demands of expanding production. As a result, capitalist production comes to a stand-still. Uno therefore calls the commodification of labour power the fundamental contradiction of capitalism or its Archille’s Heel.

Since capitalism is unable to readily produce human beings as things, it creates what Marx called relative surplus populations, a mass of unemployed workers considered surplus or excessive in relation to capitalist production, whom it can bring back into production once the cycle re-enters the phase of prosperity and capitalism resumes its expansion...in theory. However, while this repetition indicates the inevitability of crisis under capitalism, the ways in which the crisis happens changed with the development of capitalism from liberalism to imperialism. Under imperialism, capitalism no longer follows the clearly demarcated phases, but stagnates in the chronic state of depression and relies on the pool of chronically unemployed surplus populations, often located in (semi-)colonized countries.

In the second half of this interview, we apply Uno’s Theory of Crisis to the historical stage of imperialism and the concrete struggle of Korean workers in the interwar period, who jumped out of the flying pan of agrarian poverty in the Korean countryside into the fire of post-WWI industrial recession and the Great Depression. We discuss the book’s title “Proletarian Gamble," how the struggle of Korean workers was intertwined with their struggle as tenants, how the rise in unemployment during the post-war recession and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as well as the Korean Independence Movement in 1919 led to the reorganization of policing in the Japanese Empire. We conclude our interview by discussing how the struggle of Korean workers continued during and after WWII, and the struggle of migrants in Japan today and what this history tells us about capitalism and the necessity of communism.

Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma

Outro Music: Flying Pan by Sugar Brown

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Against Japanism presents Part 2 of an interview with Dr. Gavin Walker about the history of Marxism in Japan, focusing on the postwar period starting in the late 1940s.

First, we discuss the reason behind the Japanese Communist Party’s re-emergence as a mass party in the immediate postwar period. As mentioned in Part 1, in the 1920s and 30s, the JCP was a member of the Communist International or the Comintern (also known as the Third International) headquartered in the Soviet Union. Throughout its existence, members of the Comintern, who were representatives from communist parties from around the world, debated the meaning of fascism and how communists should respond to this rising far right movement.

As capitalism went into a series of crises during this period, they initially adapted a position that capitalism was in its final days and revolution was inevitable, and saw reformist social democracy as the primary enemy of the working class blocking the path to proletarian revolution. This was called the thesis on social fascism, equating social democracy and fascism as two sides of the same coin. However, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power and the subsequent anti-communist repression in Germany, the Comintern shifted its anti-fascist strategy to seeking broad based alliance with non-communist forces. This period of the Comintern’s existence is known as the Popular Front period.

While this debate was also taking place in Japan, it was cut short due to the intense state repression culminating in the Com Academy Incident of 1936 and the Popular Front Incident of 1937 (The former was a mass arrest of the Koza-ha Marxists and the latter the Rono-ha despite its renunciation of the Comintern and underground organizing). It was not until the 1945-1947 when the Japanese left experienced a brief moment of relative freedom under the US-led Allied Occupation that the JCP was really able to put the Popular Front policy into practice in the form of “democratic people’s front” (which was however largely rejected by its rival Socialist Party of Japan controlled by right wing social democrats).

Seeing the resurgence of militant labour movement in Japan and confronted with the spectre of communism in Asia, the US reversed its previous de-fascisization policy to turn Japan into a bastion of anti-communism. In doing so, they severely restricted civil liberties and workers’ rights on the pretext that social movements and labour unions are a hotbed of communist organizing, while releasing the wartime fascist leaders from prison and restoring them to power. Once again driven underground, the JCP turned to armed struggle in 1951.

We discuss how the Chinese Revolution and Maoism influenced the JCP of this period and the Japanese New Left, and how the JCP’s abandonment of armed struggle in 1955 and subsequent turn to reformism shaped the political landscape of the 1960s and 70s. We also discuss how the postwar Japanese left grappled with the questions of nationalism and internationalism. Finally, we conclude our interview by discussing how we can study and write history differently, not to idealize or trivialize the past, but to critique the present in the service of class struggle and revolution.
Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma
Outro Music: Parabola

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In this two part series, Kota sits down with Gavin Walker to discuss the history of Marxism in Japan. Instead of simply narrating the facts of this history chronologically, we focus on particular theoretical and political questions that animated the Japanese communist movement before and after the Second World War.
We begin our conversation by discussing what the history of Marxism in Japan tells us about “Japan” as represented by the Eurocentric and Orientalist conception of the world, and the importance of the national question, the ways in which Marxists address issues related to nationhood, nationalism, and internationalism.

We then zoom in on the debate on Japanese capitalism during the 1930s that divided the Japanese communist movement between the Koza-ha (Lecture Faction) and the Rono-ha (Labour Farmer Faction).
This debate was centred around the question of what the Meiji Restoration of 1868 meant for the development of capitalism in Japan, specifically the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and whether capitalism in Japan during the 1930s was sufficiently developed to pave the way for a socialist revolution.

On the one hand, the Koza-ha held that the fascistic nature of the Japanese state was a product of the remnants of feudalism that persisted in the countryside after the Meiji Restoration and held back the development of capitalism in Japan. Thus, they argued for a two stage revolution in which the completion of a bourgeois democratic revolution (including the abolition of the emperor system) precedes the socialist revolution. On the other hand, the Rono-ha argued that capitalism was fully matured by then, and hence what Japan needed was a one stage socialist revolution. We also discuss the theory of Uno Kozo who came out of the Rono-ha tradition, but charted an independent path in the postwar period and made a retrospective contribution to this debate.

While both Koza-ha and Rono-ha produced a vast amount of literature about Japanese society, and contributed to the dominance of Marxism among Japanese intellectuals that persisted into the postwar period, both were relatively silent about the role of imperialism and colonialism in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Japan. We delve into the question of why this was the case and the link between the rapid development of capitalism in Japan, and the colonization of the Ainu homelands and the Ryukyu Kingdom, as well as Korea, Taiwan, South Pacific Islands, and northeastern China.

We conclude the first part of this interview by discussing how this debate on Japanese capitalism influenced the strategies and tactics of the Japanese communist movement in the prewar period, as well as the role of arts and culture in popularizing Marxism.

Part 2 will cover topics such as the impact of the Chinese Revolution and Maoism on the Japanese left, and the questions of nationalism and internationalism in postwar Japan.
Gavin Walker is Associate Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016) and the forthcoming Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux Éditeur, 2021), the editor of The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), and The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (Verso, 2020) as well as editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). He is widely published in critical theory, social and political thought, modern intellectual history, and Marxist theory. Among other projects, he is now writing a short book on the national question.
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Intro Music: Cielo by Huma-Huma
Outro Mu

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David McNeil joins Kota to discuss militant labour unionism and state repression in the Kansai region of southwestern Japan.

We specifically discuss the struggle of truck drivers who work for small-to-medium ready-mix concrete companies, and whose job is to take dry concrete, water it, and deliver the wet concrete to various construction sites managed by large construction companies. They are organized by the Kansai Regional Ready-Mix Branch known as Kan’nama Shibu or Kan’nama, which is part of a larger national union called All-Japan Construction and Transport Solidarity Union known as Rentai.

Unlike the rest of labour unions in Japan, the Kan’nama uses the method of industrial unionism to organize all workers in the same industry into the same union, as opposed to company unionism that only organizes workers in the same company and is hence more pliant towards the bosses. Since its establishment in 1965, members of Kan’nama have struggled militantly to counter the super-exploitation of their labour power and improve their substandard working conditions.

The Kan’nama has also pursued a strategy of class alliance with their small-to-medium employers against large construction companies by organizing them into a cooperative to minimize competition and prevent them from beating the price of wet concrete down, which would negatively affect the workers’ wages, as well as the quality of the concrete and the safety of buildings in which it is used to built.

However, the Kan’nama’s militant industrial unionism and attempt at unifying their employers against large construction companies have met intense police repression and mass arrest of its members. Since 2018, 81 members of the union have been arrested on legally dubious charges including the union’s co-founder Take Kenichi who was detained for 641 days without trial.

The union’s strategic alliance with the bosses also seems to have backfired as they hired yakuzas and even neo-Nazis as their mercenaries to attack the union and terrorize its members.

David argues that a repression of this scale could not have happened spontaneously without a centralized coordination from Tokyo. We discuss who really made the decision to crack down on the Kan’nama and the class interests behind it.

We also discuss why mainstream journalists have largely turned a blind eye to this struggle and what it tells us about the state of journalism in Japan.

We conclude our discussion by talking about how the union has fought back against the repression and the ways in which we can support them, as well as what this struggle tells us about contemporary Japanese society and the world at large.
Intro: Cielo by Huma-Huma
Outro: The Internationale by Ōe Tetsuhiro
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