Me and the Zenkyoto
written inwritten in 2014
I take pride in the fact that I am the sole inheritor of the Zenkyoto movement. In the first place, there are few people of my generation (at most, only a few) in the narrow political movement scene who have explored their own path forward while constantly referring to the Zenkyoto movement. Moreover, I am probably the only one who has not merely referred to the Zenkyoto Movement, but who has aspired to go even further than the Zenkyoto Movement, and even gone so far as to propose a concrete direction for this movement. At the time when I was becoming increasingly convinced of this, Chisaka Kyoji's article "The War of 1968 and Its Possibility" in the first issue of "Han [Fearless]" stated, "Pre-fascist nature is also the greatest ideological legacy of this movement [Zenkyoto movement]. In other words, any ideology that does not pass through the self-affirmation of fascism cannot be reached after this movement". I read the statement, I am getting more and more boastful. This is because, after more than a decade of trial and error since I became aware of the Zenkyoto, I had declared my "conversion" to fascism about five years ago. 1. When I was born, Zenkyoto was already "over". As I understand it, the turning point in the transition of the Zenkyoto movement from the upsurge of the late 60s to the stagnation of the early 70s was the "Kaseito Accusation" of July 7, 1970 (For the record, I understood this before Hidemi Suga started discussing this issue extensively. Furthermore, although Suga calls it a turning point in which the Zenkyoto movement underwent a decisive transformation, he does not mean that it was a turning point "into a period of stagnation", so his nuance is slightly different from my argument). It was about three weeks after the Kaseito Accusation that I was born. My teenage years exactly coincide with the 80s. The 80s in Japan was the heyday of so called "control-oriented education". The situation in schools in the mid-80s, when the high school Zenkyoto movement had been suppressed and even "school violence" had long since been put down, was extremely stifling, with the power balance between teacher and student unilaterally tilted in favor of the former. My life as an activist began with resisting it. At the time, "anti control-oriented education" was a popular issue, and the "Newspaper for School Liberation", published by the group of Hosaka Nobuto, the founder of the movement, was said to have a circulation of 10,000 despite its independent distribution. However, as a high school student in Kyushu, moreover in Kagoshima, moreover in a very rural area of the country, I had no knowledge of such things, so my fighting style was completely self-directed. Specifically, it could be as simple as barging into the teacher's room by myself to protest unreasonable school rules and guidance, challenging the members of the student council executive board, who were nothing more than pawns of the school authorities, to debate at the student assembly, or gathering malcontents similar to myself in an after-school classroom to conspire. I at least knew that there was a convenient word "human rights", so I became interested in various other social issues, but when a naive 16-year-old in Kyushu, moreover in Kagoshima, moreover in a very rural area of the country in the mid-80s, took a quick look around, the only thing that came to his attention was the Communist Party. I visited the office of the only town council member of the Communist Party and received a large number of pamphlets to "study". I didn't join the Minsei (I had heard rumors that "Minsei" was an organization of the student movement, and that the "student movement", though I hadn't understood it well, was a terrible thing, involving things like Molotov cocktails and bombs!), but that's why I "fought" while in school days, with the level of a lax sympathizer of the Communist Party, both on the ideological and sense level. However, the educational system of the 80s would not allow the existence of even such a timid activist, and I was eventually forced to leave school "voluntarily" in the spring of 1988. Around this time, I first knew of Hosaka Nobuto's movement and devoured reports on the struggles of the junior and senior high school students who participated in it, which made me wonder if this was how I should have fought. I am a man who doesn't know when to quit, so even though I was no longer a high school student, I decided that I would continue the struggle by organizing a group like Hosaka's group in my hometown because I could not tolerate the situation of the school. At about the same time, I heard that a camp of "fighting high school students" from all over Japan was to be held in Tokyo. Although I was no longer a high school student, the event was open to dropouts as long as they were of "high school age", so I went and was shocked to see them. There were no high school students in Kagoshima or Fukuoka who were fighting more boldly than I was at the time (My "hometown" to begin with is Fukuoka, and during my high school years, mainly due to frequent conflicts with school authorities, I actually changed schools twice in just two years, which means that I attended a total of three different high schools, and the aforementioned high school in Kagoshima was the second. Except for that Kagoshima days, I have lived in Fukuoka most of the time, both now and in the past), so I had been conceited enough to think that I was the most highly aware and, in any case, the most amazing high school activist (even though I was below the "minsei"), but I was naturally made to realize that I was very much out of my mind. It would be like a swelled‐headed samurai from a shabby clan at the end of the Edo period going to Kyoto or Edo for the first time and meeting with bigwigs from other clans, only to be humiliated. Among the "fighting high school students" who rallied from all over Japan, some were of course important members of the Hosaka's group, others were involved in the activities of the newleft factions, and there was even one oddball who visited leftist centers of struggle throughout Japan during every summer and winter vacation. I felt sorry for myself, thinking that what I had done was nothing more than a child's struggle (well, actually, I was a child), but I also hated to lose, so I promised myself that I would finally focus on my activities in my hometown of Fukuoka, overtake them, and become a reputable activist that people would say, "The Fukuoka clan has Toyama Koichi". Simply making a name for myself throughout the country was soon to be realized. The reason is that when I wrote a memoir of my "days of struggle" during my high school years and brought it to a major publisher in Tokyo, it was easily published. As a result, I was recognized on the scene as a new leader of the thriving anti control-oriented education movement, but ideologically, I was still, even at that time, a mediocre postwar democrat who had simply subtracted Marxism from the JCP. I organized local junior and senior high school students who had read my book and contacted me to start our own anti control-oriented education group, published our own journal, and began to appear on the leftist, so-called nonpartisan (I highly doubt if it can really be called that) civil movement scene with themes such as nuclear power, the emperor system, and anti-war, etc. It was around mid-1989 when I somehow settled into the style of such "ordinary" activist. Soon, however, this group of mine collapsed. The roles (?) have become fixed between a handful of members who are actively involved in the activities and the majority who just hang out in the apartment I have prepared for them every day and enjoy chatting with each other. I got mad and kicked out the majority, but that would have drastically reduced the number of people and instantly brought the activities to a standstill. During my "days of stagnation", I began to dwell on the following. How can we achieve an organization of only those who fight? Picturing the faces of the majority of those who left, I could no longer believe that everyone would understand if we talked to them. Picturing the faces of the majority who left, I could no longer believe that we could understand each other if we all talked to each other. First of all, although we say "anti control-oriented education", is there such a thing as "education that is not control-oriented"? If we reform the schools to be merely "somewhat better" than they are now, there will be more people who will be satisfied with that (like the majority who lost their will to fight as soon as they found a "comfortable place" in the base apartment), won't there? In other words, the group's quick collapse ignited my radicalism orientation. 2. As a few remaining members exchanged opinions with each other with little practical action, the discussion tended to be organized toward the more radical (since only those members with a strong fighting spirit remained). The contents of the journal, which continued to be published regularly, no longer reported on activities but mainly on the status of such discussions, and this became popular among the radicals at the aforementioned high school students' camp. Relationships with them that had been temporarily estranged were restored in a stronger form, and my group became a sort of Fukuoka chapter of a radical high school activist network scattered across Japan. At that time, around the beginning of 1990, a comrade in Hiroshima, who was a member of the network, was so excited that he "had found a great book", that he wanted everyone to read it, but since it had been out of print for so long, he printed several hundred copies without permission using the printing press at his school and sent them to comrades all over the country. Of course, it was sent to me. That was Takeuchi Shizuko's "Anti-War High School Students", published in 1970, which is, in essence, a detailed report on the high school Zenkyoto. I read it because it was so highly recommended by an important comrade, but I don't think it immediately clicked with me. Starting from a level no better than Minsei, I had just spent a few years finally getting started on the radical way, and the Zenkyoto was still a long way off. Following the experience of my group collapsing, the next square in the "radical backgammon" that I stopped at was the eccentricity of entering another new high school as a freshman in April 1990, at my age of 19. Of course, I did it with the intention of being like the activists of the newleft faction who repeatedly re-enter universities to maintain their strongholds. I wanted to break out of the situation that "actual practice in schools" had stagnated due to the drastic decrease in the number of members of current high school students caused by the collapse of the group, but needless to say, such acrobatics were never successful. The uncomfortableness of having a 19-year-old mixed in with a group of 15-year-olds is probably beyond comparison to that of middle-aged activists in the room of the student union at universities. I dropped out again soon after all, but once I got out of the "school", hung around for two years and thought about things, and then went back to the "school", all the details of the school space that I had not thought about when I was in active duty started to look strange. Even the arrangement of the teaching podiums and student chairs in the classrooms serves a program of surveillance and control. It was a rare experience to observe the school situation from the students' point of view, knowing which teachers were members of the JKU and which teachers were members of the second union, but it also made me realize how the school system functions by including even the opponents such as the JKU in the process. Apparently, through this "experience of infiltration", I finally began to understand the issues raised by the Zenkyoto, and in a text I wrote at the time, I quoted the following description from "Anti-War High School Students". Companies need young employees who are willing to speak their minds to some extent and cause trouble, and bureaucracies need innovative bureaucrats who are willing to stand up to directors and ministers. In high schools, there needs to be students who submit their questions about life and insist that they must talk more about and live with such things, and that they must not be indifferent to the Vietnam War. A controlled society functions best when there is a balance and harmony between the large number of silent sheep and the small number of sheep that want to be fed better grass. The very movement that seeks to reform the control-oriented school situation would rather reinforce the control-oriented school situation. What to do then, you may ask, is simple. We must insist on "school abolition", not "school reformation". Skipping over some of the squares I stopped because this is not an autobiography, the next is a debate among high school students, also held in August of 1990, in Kobe. The event was held in response to a major incident that occurred in Kobe just prior to the event, which was attributed to "control-oriented education", and was attended by a large number of local high school students. I was there, along with several core members of the network, and it turned out to be a mess, with the overwhelming majority of local high school students and us, the minority, blaming each other. After all, we don't like each other's "behavior". The high school student acting as moderators tried to control the flow of the discussion (toward a scheduled conclusion), and the rest of us meekly obeyed him. Whenever we hear something stupid, we interrupt and start a discussion without raising our hands and therefore without waiting for the moderator to designate us, and when the moderator gets angry, we try to bring the discussion to a debate between us and the moderator. Ultimately, it became a shouting match in the composition of us versus all the others. Ours was, in fact, the style of debate at that camp where we first met each other. In a group of dozens or a hundred people at the most, discussions can proceed without a moderator. Hooting and jeering may also be allowed. Suggestions such as, "Someone hasn't said anything since a while ago, so let's hear what he has to say,” would be immediately rejected. If he doesn't have the power or passion to speak up on his own, he should just shut up and listen. First of all, how can any person fight against the school if he doesn't have that level of proactivity? Our "manners" like this were hated by people everywhere we went to gatherings afterwards. It was a daily occurrence to receive calls of "go home!", and when that happened we would remain with a wry smile on our faces and saying, "Here it goes again". Needless to say, our style was very similar to that of the Zenkyoto, although we were not aware so. Let's move forward some more squares. Also in the autumn of 1990. At the time, the "Convention on the Rights of the Child" was a popular topic of discussion in the anti control-oriented education movement scene, and everyone was busy demanding that the government ratify the Convention. We turned our fangs up at this. As with the aforementioned high school students' rally, several of us hitchhiked to gatherings held in various parts of the country to discuss the issue with the panelists on the stage, throwing in “irregular remarks" from the audience. Our argument was as follows. The important thing is that the students themselves should develop their own struggles at their schools, and it is simply a waste to spend so much energy on a topic that can only take the form of having Diet members and lawyers at the forefront, moreover, it is the worst policy to try to mobilize and involve students who have awakened their rights consciousness in this movement one after another, preventing the outbreak of important struggles at the school site. Our group was decisively isolated from all others in the anti control-oriented education movement, since our actions to crush the campaign demanding ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child were met with a general rejection. In the process of this struggle, we began to feel a strong sense of discomfort and eventually antipathy toward not only the idea of "using the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a new weapon in the struggle", but also "Don't infringe on the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to do something!" style of criticism against schools, and the gap between us and the mainstream grew wider and wider. Of course, our sympathy for the Zenkyoto became even stronger. We were, after all, criticizing the mainstream of the movement, just as the Zenkyoto groups criticized the Minsei. We didn't use violence because we were only a small group, but if there had been far more members, we would have done it, and we had also come to hate the mainstream enough to want to do it if we could. To begin with, the anti control-oriented education movement grew out of Hosaka Nobuto's Kojimachi Junior High School Zenkyoto and the struggle to support his lawsuit. But at that time, the entire scene, including Hosaka's group, was already enthusiastic about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, except for us. We were beginning to realize that the "after" of the Zenkyoto-like movement had become somewhat similar to the Minsei of the past. The days of going around the country to "smash and destroy" silly rallies were fun, but we could not keep it up for very long. By the beginning of 1991, the comrades, including myself, were completely exhausted and feeling desperate. When it comes to this, as usual, a sterile internal dispute would begin. Through the series of struggles, we had acquired the skill of abusing enemies, and now it was directed at comrades. The slightest "opportunistic" word or deed of any comrade became a target of denunciation. I was already in the core of the faction at that time, and although I was not a leader, I was always on the side of denouncing others since I was in an ideologue role. One by one our comrades had been exhausted and dropped out, and finally the leader and I were the last two left. The denunciation of me by the leader began. I did not give in, refused the demand to be self-critical, and we parted ways. I became alone again. 3. Soon after, I read Kasai Kiyoshi's "Phenomenology of terrorism". The parts written about the United Red Army incident and the Moscow trials made me deeply realize that such things can indeed happen. I was truly glad that the whole movement was small (and therefore not close to violence) at the time in the first place, and that our group did not adopt any kind of policy that would have kept us in some closed base. I was right in denouncing the comrades, but I also came to recognize that right is not always good. Before and after, I also read the "Thrilling Clock". After years of being in the leftist movement scene, even I had somehow naturally internalized the newlefts' anti-discrimination theory symbolized by the term "bloody debt". However, I understood that if I pursued the logic thoroughly, I would have no choice but to volunteer for the Anti-Japan Armed Front. I simply did not have the courage to make the decision to leap to the only option available to me to take "responsibility as a Japanese". Although I felt that my motive was reversing the logical order, I decided that I had to reconstruct a revolutionary logic different from the newlefts' style anti-discrimination theory in order to be consistent with my non-participation in the Anti-Japan struggle. Also, although I was aware that this was a bit of an outburst of anger, I still felt a twinge of disgust when I saw people who, like me, did not have the courage to launch an Anti-Japan struggle or the intelligence to understand the inevitability of such a struggle, but who, unlike me, expressed a typical anti-discrimination argument. I had no serious contact with the newleft factions, but I had plenty of opportunities to read their papers, so I was aware that the Central Core Faction seemed to be most enthusiastic about "anti-discrimination". Although I could not logically explain it, I also noticed that there seemed to be some common emotional basis for the passion to dare to engage in the Internal Violence and the emphasis on the "bloody debt" theory of anti-discrimination. In addition, I remembered that the newspaper of the Central Core Faction persistently wrote "Kaseito Accusation, Kaseito Accusation", and as I read other books on the history of the Japanese newleft Movement, I became convinced that the atmosphere of the Zenkyoto movement had indeed changed drastically from before to after the accusation. It is just plain fun to read the records of Zenkyoto before the Kaseito Accusation. It is exciting to read them. But as soon as the Kaseito Accusation occurs, the atmosphere immediately became gruesome. I also quickly noticed that it had been right around the time that Tsumura Takashi's book, "Our Internal Discrimination", was being highly reputed. The slogan "self-denial", which was originated by the Zenkyoto of Tokyo University and became popular throughout the Zenkyoto movement, I had understood it as an expression of a sense of crisis, that "if I continued to be a good boy, I would become a useful man for this terrible society", or as a pep talk to encourage themselves not to run away from clashes with riot police or the Minsei. However, I began to think that if the slogan was connected with anti-discrimination theory, it would lead to something harmful, and in fact, that may have happened. Recalling that Saisyu Satoru, one of the main characters in the struggle at Tokyo University, was also an important figure in the anti-discrimination movement, I realized that it was true after all. Originally, I liked "logic-based wild argument", and I had been a fan of the writings of Kure Tomofusa since before that time, but when I noticed the fact that Tsumura Takashi and Saikyu Satoru were often thoroughly criticized by Kure when he wrote about criticism against the anti-discrimination movement, which impressed me that Kure was indeed a great teacher. The Zenkyoto before the Kaseito Accusatio is fine. After the Kaseito Accusatio everything went something wrong. So I understood that the most important theme for me when I think about the Zenkyoto is whether the Kaseito Accusatio is an inevitable extension of the Zenkyoto movement, or whether it could have developed in any other direction. That's about what I had in mind in 1991, when I was alone again and determined to make a fresh start as a heretical far-left activist (In other words, a far-left activist who seeks some other revolutionary logic that does not necessitate the "bloody debt" theory of anti-discrimination that most of the left, with the exception of the JCP and others, have internalized, whatever its concentration). Of course, I am so far late to the Zenkyoto that I was "born" late rather than "arrived" late and so my thoughts were not based on real-time experience, but on fragmentary knowledge I gained from materials that would still be readable 20 years after the events. So after reading the detailed analysis that Suga Hidemi as a real-time generation member has been doing in recent years, I have now changed my understanding in many points (if I have any objection, it is that I still disagree with his opinion that the "road to the Kaseito Accusatio" was inevitable). However, at the age of 21, I was forced to continue my solitary trial-and-error process, unable to share such problematic awareness with anyone else, until about 10 years later when Suga began the series of work. Nevertheless, what I actually developed during the following short years was nothing but senseless struggles that, now in retrospect, might be criticized as mere active nihilism. No matter how much I brag about finding a revolutionary logic different from all the other contemporary leftists, if it had been that easy to find, someone else would have done it earlier, so I could not find a good solution immediately. If I can' t find the way to go on, I should be doing nothing, but I suffered from a serious chronic disease called Left-Wing Infantile Disorder, in which I almost died of boredom if I didn't move anyway, no matter what it was. For about three years, I would occasionally appear on the scene of the movements of leftists who backslid into postwar democracy, which I had long given up on, and cause troubles, get abused, kicked out, or even beaten up, and write a funny report of it for my friends and acquaintances who shared some sense of humor. Those were still sterile struggles by any measure. 4. The turning point first came in 1995. It was the year of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which struck as soon as it began. I hitchhiked to the city of rubble accompanying several people who were sympathetic to my aforementioned unconscious active nihilist struggles. It was the day after the earthquake. Of course, it was just a visit to see the sights. After two days of wandering around the messed-up city, we returned to Fukuoka. As if to replace people like us, large numbers of young people began to come to Kobe from all over the country to work as volunteers. I saw the situation on the TV news and swore at it. If you have time to help others, there must be your own reality that you have to deal with first. At the same time that our struggle stalled in 1991, other young people of our generation who were engaged in awareness campaigns for global environmental issues (only successfully avoiding the nuclear power plant issue, where a clash with power is inevitable) and the prevention of AIDS infection began to stand out. Continually irritated by their normalcy and innocence, I could only first swear at the young earthquake volunteers, but I was actually also upset inside, on the other hand. I wondered if I was being a little too hard-hearted and evil-minded. The February following the earthquake. I met the "Failures' Federation" movement in Tokyo. Initially starting out as a small non-partisan political group at Waseda University, the Failures' Federation has been amused by its innovative "talk" technique, using embarrassingly straightforward slogans and phrases that are so uncool that they are laughable, such as "passionate revolution of communication", and has intervened in various leftist political movements, underground cultural movements, and even the scene of young literary and social scholars in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The group was always well received, and within three years of its formation, it had established a huge "circle of communication" in the Tokyo metropolitan area that transcended the boundaries of genres and included several hundred members. From the day we met, I spent more than a month in the Failures' Federation community, almost one-sidedly listening to the comfort of their over-relaxed talk. On conclusion I was, in short, greatly healed. Anyway, I thought, let's learn from the Failures' Federation. Let's go back to Fukuoka and create a "circle of communication" by copying exactly what the Failures' Federation does. Let us pursue the possibility of direct "talk" with young people who are innocently excited about protecting the earth or volunteering, instead of staring coldly at them from a distance. Although this "method of the Failures' Federation" is not in the direction of the "heretical far-left" that I had originally intended to pursue, it is better than continuing to slavishly engage in nihilistic activities, such as occasionally vandalizing a silly leftist rally to relieve my frustration. Just when I had made up my mind to do so, the sarin gas attack on the subway occurred in the following month of March. I was terrified. Not against the religious Aum, of course. I was horrified by the police's heavy-handed attitude, which led to a level of petty arrests and separate arrests that far exceeded anything I had seen or heard about in the political movement, and by the mass hysteria of public opinion and the media, which not only enthusiastically supported this attitude but even said, "The police are still lax in their approach. I even tried to sound the alarm by writing in a serial column I only had at the time in a particular subculture magazine that no one would read, "A war is coming!" As I will explain later, this understanding was, in a sense, conclusively wrong. However, ever since I started on the radical way, I have always despised the "this is the way we used to go" type of anti-war rhetoric that mediocre leftists repeat at every opportunity, but only at that time did I seriously believe that a war was about to begin. But the reaction on the left was surprisingly muted. Perhaps fearing a divergence from public opinion, the left was mostly silent; in fact, there were even some leftist journalists who sympathized with the bashing of Aum. At the time, only two, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Suga Hidemi, showed the courage to confront public opinion and fought well, among left-wing intellectuals who already had a certain level of name recognition. Rather, Taku Hachiro, Suzuki Kunio, and the editors of Weekly Playboy, who would have been considered eccentric and unorthodox from a common sense perspective, were principled critics of the police. Others were completely silent at that crucial time. Since then to the present, a myriad of social changes, large and small, have occurred in one common direction (as described below). I have been horrified by each and every one of them, calling attention to at every opportunity, emphasizing that they are all in the context of the "post-Aum" period, but almost no one has responded (except for Mori Tatsuya who, some years later, independently started saying the same thing, without any relation to me). 5. Anyway, I have restarted my activities in Fukuoka again. As mentioned above, it was an attempt to "import" the Failures' Federation movement. Initially, things did not go very well. My language had become rather stiff after several years of active nihilism, and the timing of the Aum incident left me constantly frustrated by my inability to reconcile my inner urgency to prepare for "war" with the methods of the Failures' Federation. I continued my efforts in Fukuoka, keeping a close eye on the Failures' Federation in Tokyo and the surroundings. Of course, I sometimes traveled to Tokyo to "inspect" the situation firsthand. If there was any interesting movement, I would "import" it to Fukuoka. An example is "Men's Lib Tokyo". The men's lib movement in Japan first began around 1990 in Osaka, and at first it was strongly characterized as a "self-criticism" movement by men who had given in to various denunciations from feminists (who were usually their wives or lovers). Naturally, it was a foolish and simply despicable movement for me to pursue the "heretical far-left" way, but the men's lib movement that spread to the Tokyo scene was a bit different. They didn't deny feminism (in fact, they probably supported it), but for the time being, they emphasized the aspect of the self-liberation movement by saying that the pressure from the society to "live a manly life" was stifling for men themselves, as an issue of a different dimension. In other words, it was a mens' lib as a "disempowering movement", very close to the Failures' Federation. Soon a men's lib group was born in Fukuoka, and I intervened there from its formation stage in an effort to warn against the Osaka way and introduce the Tokyo way (although I was ultimately defeated). Or there was the movement that demanded, "Don't raise the public bath fee". At first glance, this may seem like too plain a theme, but the people who use public bathhouses on a daily basis in Tokyo are young people living in apartments with low rents and no baths. Those who want to become "full-fledged members of society" live in extremely expensive apartments with bathtubs, perhaps considering public appearances, or even forcing themselves to work from morning to night just to make rent, and become "company animals", but those who live in apartments without baths are young people who do not live that way (consciously or not), and this movement was organized with this class of people in mind. Therefore, the criticism of the lifestyle symbolized by houses with baths (in Japanese, a bath in the house is called "uchiburo", which sounds similar to "petit bourgeois") included an analysis of the severe working environment during the recession, anticipating today's "precariat" movement by almost 10 years. Furthermore, the insistence on preserving the cluttered townscape with many wooden apartments without baths contained a motif of criticism of a controlled and monitored society that opposed redevelopment into an orderly and well-managed townscape. Because their pamphlets were both somewhat difficult to understand but also quite pop, they were gradually expanding their influence on the metropolitan movement scene. And then there was Matsumoto Hajime's "Association for the Preservation of the Atmosphere of Poverty at Hosei University. He reorganized the traditional themes of the student movement, such as "opposition to raising tuition fees" and "opposition to rebuilding the Student Circle Hall", by using the comical approach of "protect the poor atmosphere", and by launching a series of outlandish (and ridiculous) tactics, he achieved the miracle of elevating the student movement, though only for a short time, after a long period of stagnation. The "circle of communication" in Fukuoka had grown to about a hundred people as I continued to work hard, and the series of movement information and related documents that I "imported" from Tokyo, as well as new keywords and catch phrases invented and used there one after another, were well received in Fukuoka, and the common mood and sense that they all had in common permeated the city to some extent. In the process, I could at least find a direction to combine the issues I had been focusing on regarding the "post-Aum" situation with this "Failures' Federation Fukuoka" movement. I described it as "the vigilante to protect ourselves from other vigilantes". The same is true of the young people participating in that series of movements in Tokyo, as well as the young people who gathered at the Failures' Federation Fukuoka's "circle of communication", but in short, they are, from the public's point of view, a "suspicious and dubious people". After the Aum incident, various moves have been intensified to wipe out such people from civil society. We must be well aware of this, and we must unite and prepare to defend ourselves against the "wholesome people" who are the majority of the civil society. In fact, this idea is the prototype of what I consider "fascism", but I had not yet realized that much at the time. And although the direction in which to proceed was clear, the Failures' Federation Fukuoka's "circle of communication" suddenly collapsed before it could actually embark on an attempt to realize it. The collapse began with my hitting a girlfriend I was dating at the time in a moment of rage after a trivial lover's quarrel, which was the target of denunciation by leftist activists inside and outside the "circle of communication". Of course, I am not easily bowed to this kind of denunciation, because I was aware of the problem as I have described above. The "circle of communication" was divided between those who supported me and those who supported the leftist denouncers, and the overwhelming majority, who were still coming and going with only a sense of sympathy, would immediately stop coming when the situation became serious, and I had no energy to hold them back because I was no longer in a position to do so. In the end, I was separated (halfway forcefully) from the woman and we broke up, but women are so shallow (which means that I am now a fascist who discriminates against women with conviction), and she became even more active in the leftist movement after we broke up, and after more than a year she suddenly filed criminal charges against me for the initial beating. Moreover, the group of lawyers who followed her were the same ones who had been at the center of that "Convention on the Rights of the Child" movement in Fukuoka, and had "crushed" several of the rallies at that time by us. Naturally, among the group of leftist activists in Fukuoka, of which she herself had become a member, there were many with whom I had clashed during the active nihilism of the early 90s, who wanted to use this as an opportunity to finally cut off my political career and avenge their long-standing grudges. In other words, for me, the situation was so perfectly constructed that I could not retreat any further, and I was forced to confront it with my entire activist life up to that point, which was a very serious matter. 6. The "circle of communication" collapsed in the spring of 1999, and for a while after that, I was almost like a shell of a person (I even went to a psychiatrist for the first time), leading an unprecedentedly rough and miserable life. Then, suddenly, I received a summons from the court and a notice of the first trial date (of course, it was just a trivial lovers' quarrel, so I was not arrested, and I had to go to the court from my home). Although I will skip the lengthy explanation of the trial because it would be too long, I was determined to confront them head-on and took the following stance. My view of the problem is quite clear. I am against the expansion of state power into every corner of civil society, under the guise of a cause that no one can directly oppose, such as the enactment of the Stalking Control Law and the Domestic Violence Prevention Law in recent years, which were foreshadowed around the time of the debate on sexual harassment. Moreover, it is outrageous that the left-wing forces that should be trying to curb the growth of state power are rather atrophied by the onslaught of feminism, and are in fact even encouraging it. Since this is an important point, I would like to explain my problem in more detail, adding some perspectives that I acquired later. At present in 2009, the world is under wartime conditions. Moreover, this war is a new world war, the "Fourth World War" ("Third" is so-called the Cold War). Generally it is called the "War on Terror". To say that the War on Terror is a world war does not mean that the whole world is involved in America's war. Every country is proactively engaged in the war on terror to varying degrees. For example, Japan has been continuing its own war on terror since the Sarin gas attack on the subway in 1995. It is said that the greatest feature of the current World War is that it has the aspect of a "civil war". In civil wars, the main actor is the police, not the military. The outbreak of large-scale crimes (usually some form of "terrorism"), which far exceeded the scale that had been vaguely assumed up to that point, triggered an unlimited strengthening of police forces. This is not a "road to war", but the "unlimited expansion of police power" itself is the very act of war. I have already mentioned that when I saw the social situation when the Aum incident broke out, I had an intuition that "a war is coming!" And I also said, "This perception was definitely wrong". However, this is what I mean by that. The Aum incident did not initiate the "road to war"; in other words, it was not the beginning of the "prewar" period, but in fact, the outbreak of the Aum incident marked the beginning of the war, and from then on, the country has already been ( not metaphorically but literally ) under "wartime conditions". Yes, it may appear that the U.S. is sending troops around the world, but in essence, the U.S. is merely sending its police force as the "world police". What the U.S. is doing to Al Qaeda is not at all different from what Japan is doing to Aum. The outbreak of war is triggered by some specific incident (Sarin gas attack on the subway, "9/11"), but once started, this war will last forever (as the U.S. leadership declared at the outbreak of war). In order to prevent similar incidents to the Sarin gas attack and 9/11 from arising again, we cannot say that we will be relieved if Aum and al-Qaeda are eliminated. There, the hunt for "suspicious people" begins, with the public and private sectors joining forces. Once again, if you look around you with a careful security sense, you should realize that it is not only Aum believers who "might do something at any time". North Korean agents, foreign criminals, yakuza, stalkers, domestic violence men, unemployed men in their 20s (moreover, in their 30s!), children who easily explode with emotion, children who are too quiet (shut-ins), parents who abuse their own children, drunk drivers, street parking drivers, ...... and even those who do not properly separate garbage or who smoke while walking downtown without hesitation, all of them come to seem like a creepy pre-criminal group. Ordinary citizens voluntarily install surveillance cameras throughout the city, organize street patrols, and distribute crime prevention goods to their children. Mass media is also willing to cooperate in wartime. When they hear that a resident is a bit of a nuisance, they rush in, denounce him or her, and support expulsion of the resident. They dramatize the misery of the victims of crimes and only stir up hatred for the perpetrators. Since professional judges are cold-hearted (cool-headed) and hesitant to impose severe punishment on the perpetrators for reasons that are of no concern to the victims, such as balance with other cases, demands have grown to allow "ordinary people" to participate directly in lynchings, and even a jury system has been introduced. In addition, the existence of several "new" leftist factions, which were undoubtedly "terrorists" to begin with, could not be left unchecked, and the authorities of some universities such as Meiji, Waseda, and Hosei, which were famous for having compromised with them and tolerated their activities on campus, were forced to change their policies to a heavy-handed suppression of these factions. There is no end to the list, but at any rate, the entire phenomenon that has been taking place in this country since 1995 is a war (civil war), and the various issues that have become familiar when we speak of "war" before that time, such as overseas deployment, constitutional changes, the Yasukuni Shrine, the national flag and anthem, and ......, have no direct relation to the current war, at least not this time. The fact that some right-wing politicians want to send the military overseas or tamper with Article 9 in any way is either a matter of "cold war idiot" on the same level as the leftists who oppose those actions, or at best a matter of dealing with the US, and has nothing to do with the issue of war, which Japan is independently and proactively waging on its own. If you truly stand on an "anti-war" stance today, you should not be concerned about such trivial matters as the deployment of Japanese troops to Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else to exterminate pirates, but rather, you should reexamine one by one the countless wartime policies that have been implemented since 1995 to strengthen the police force. Concretely, we must abolish the anti-Aum law, the Wiretapping law, the Organized Crime Law, the Residential Network Law, the Anti-Stalking Law, the Anti-Domestic Violence Law, the Crime Victims Support Law, the Health Promotion Law, the Recycling Law, the No Smoking on Streets Ordinance and ...... all of them. And we must withdraw all changes to the Juvenile Law, the Penal Code, and the Road Traffic Law, cancel the parking inspector system and the jury system, remove surveillance cameras from the streets, and stop the media's wartime cooperation in sensationalist crime reporting. If not, you cannot be said to be opposed to the current war. Let's get back to the subject of my court battle again. For each of the various wartime policies I have just listed, I expressed my sense of urgency each time, though I was simply unaware that they were "wartime policies". However, the left, spellbound by images of the past war ( not the Cold War, which was the previous war, but World War II, which was a war even further previous), could not react at all, especially to the kinds of war bills such as domestic violence prevention laws and health promotion laws. It is no wonder, then, that the Domestic Violence Prevention Act, the Stalking Control Act, and the Victims Assistance Act have been promoted by feminists ("victims' rights" were first proposed by feminists for sexual crimes, I never forget), the Health Promotion Act, the Recycling Act, and the No Smoking Ordinance have been promoted by ecologists (including anti-smoking rights activists), in short, much of the "war time policies" have actually been promoted at the demand and support of leftists. Since I have not had a chance to mention it, I will mention now that throughout the 90s I had been saying (purposefully and loudly) "anti-imperialism and anti-Stalinism". Moreover, at such occasions, I have put more emphasis on "anti-Stalinism", and this is due to my intuitive suspicion that the government has been "leaning left" since the collapse of the Cold War. Of course, as I have just mentioned, this is in view of the situation in which policies that are supposedly leftist in nature (and even in the criminal legal area) are being incorporated one after another. Many people say that the world rapidly shifted to the right in the 90s, but isn't it really the other way around? Moreover, these PC (Political Correctness) policies are, needless to say, the present form of leftist justice since the Kaseito Accusation in Japan, which means that "Zenkyoto has been winning (without being aware of it). Even before Suga Hidemi pointed this out, that is to say, I had been saying this since the 90s, and as a result, I have been treated as a madman. The process of the court battle reinforced these suspicions for me, and thus I began to "lean right" rapidly. First, I couldn't find a lawyer. My awareness of the issue itself was also leftist, and so I first tried to explain this to several leftist lawyers I knew in Fukuoka, but in the end, they all supported the opponent (the number of lawyers in the region itself is small, and the few lawyers who were clearly leftist usually had substantive ties to the opponent). I was so distressed that I contacted a citizens' group that had been pursuing the allegation (at that time, before Koizumi's visit to North Korea) of Japanese abductions by North Korea, assuming that they must be right-wing, and explained my position and situation. The lawyer I was referred to did not take the case in the end, but the first person I consulted with was, as I had imagined, a clear right-wing thinker, and he was very amused by my "criticism of the leftist mainstream as a leftist heretic", and we have continued to communicate to these days. In the end, I decided to fight the case virtually without a defense attorney (of course, I had a court-appointed defense attorney, but the attorney and the defendant were cursing at each other politely in the courtroom), and if I could not get both sides of the political movement scene on my side, I decided to try to get the attention of the avant-garde art scene, and I employed tactics to make the trial a thorough performance (one of them was to argue with my attorney), which infuriated the judge. As a result, I won a stunning prison sentence in a shabby lovers' quarrel trial. Despite the fact that every lawyer I consulted beforehand, on both right and left, and every newspaper reporter with years of courtroom reporting experience, agreed that no matter how competent or incompetent a lawyer I had, there was no way I could get anything but a suspended conviction. And I ended up spending two full years in prison, from May 2002 to May 2004 (Last year, again, I brought a minor traffic violation by a moped to a formal trial and received an unprecedented and astonishing sentence of a fine "eight times the amount sought", which was reported in the national press. Apparently, I am too skilled at provoking and infuriating judges while maintaining a very gentlemanly demeanor). Although I was already leaning quite far to the right, I still retained my identity as a "heretical far-leftist" when I entered prison, but I finally decided to "convert" during the middle of my two years in prison (I am proud to say that "conversion in prison" is also a behavior that is appropriate for wartime). However, I did not turn and become a right-winger, but a "fascist", which is a different kind of political position from the right. While in prison, I read a critical biography (Michiro Fujisawa, "The Birth of Fascism") that detailed the first half of Musolini's life. I empathized wholeheartedly with the process of Musolini's creation of fascism as an original idea, neither left nor right, from a truly heretical, far-left position, and decided to follow in his footsteps. 7. I will leave the details of what I consider "fascism" to another time, but I would like you to guess the rest with my own summary based on the context up to this point: "When position X, which is confrontational in character with state power, is associated with left-wing forces in opposition because state power is leaning right, it is called anarchism, and when it is associated with right-wing forces in opposition because state power is leaning left, it is called fascism" (I have already released various other writings in Japanese, and I intend to translate them into English little by little). I consider myself very fortunate that I was not involved in the anti-war movements against Afghanistan in late 2001 and Iraq in 2003, which would directly lead to the current "precariat" movements, as I was occupied with court battles or in prison at the time when the anti-war movements were gaining momentum with the mass entry of the younger generation. If I had been involved, I would have been forced into a solitary struggle that would have undoubtedly resulted in another bitter licking of heresy and all but a fruitless struggle. Of course, while in prison, I consciously gathered as much information as possible about the anti-war movement and kept a close eye on its progress. Even today, Japanese anti-war groups have not been able to get out of the perspective that this war is the US's war, and Japan is at best only involved in or following it. Many people say that "we are now in wartime", but with the exception of Mori Tatsuya, all the others are saying this only in the sense that they have been saying this "since 9/11". Such an "anti-war" movement has no meaning or vision. And in fact, I am not an "anti-war" advocate today. As Bush and Rumsfeld first declared, this war is an "eternal war" and will "never end". In this eternal civil war situation, the only option the dissidents can take is to "fight back" (or "surrender"). As a fascist, I have chosen to join with right-wing forces in the future to confront left-leaning state power (and its companion, left-wing forces). There is realistic prospect. First of all, why do the leftists oppose conscription? Whether the government leans to the right or to the left, as long as the military is a volunteer force, by the very nature of its existence, the military will be composed of an overwhelming majority of (regimented) non-politicals and a minority of right-wingers. No matter how much the leftists lobby the military, at best they can only obtain a few "anti-war self-defense officers". As the revolutionary process deepens, as long as it is genuine, it will eventually come to a point where it must confront and defeat the armed forces of the police. If the soldiers cannot be expected to rise in response to the revolutionary side at that time, they will have no choice but to cultivate their own armed forces in advance. Building one's own "revolutionary army" is not only extremely difficult in itself, but also makes repression easier, since it is always against the law. Finally, the Zenkyoto was also "defeated" because it was unable to successfully overcome this difficult point. We hope the left will continue to oppose the draft and continue to prevent the military from turning left. On the other hand, we will enthusiastically agree with thoughtless conservative politicians when they propose military policies that will make it easier for the "military to run amok" and undermine civilian control. The limitation of the Zenkyoto is that it remained only a trial and error within the leftist sphere. At the same time, it also made "the road to the Kaseito Accusation" inevitable. Young people have always been sensitive and rebellious. Today, as state power leans to the left, many young people are rightly leaning to the right as well. The only way to break through is in the direction of the "Zenkyoto of the right-wing version". If we can achieve even half the elevation of the former "Zenkyoto of the left-wing version", then the next time we might, indeed, "win". |