By comparison, many of the high-income earners who did become activists were proprietors, technical specialists and employees of foreign-owned companies
Alexander Brown, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, is co-editor with Vera Mackie of a special issue on Art and Activism in Post-Disaster Japan. Between he was a research student at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. He is the author of ‘A Society in Which People Demonstrate: Karatani Kojin and the Politics of the Anti-nuclear Movement’, Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the Japan Studies Association of Australia, .
Research published in English on the post-Fukushima antinuclear movement in Japan has focused on its cultural aspects. 3 This article takes a different approach. Since , I have taken part in the antinuclear movement in Tokyo and spent time with activists. My analysis of the antinuclear movement in Japan based on the questions outlined above is unique in both the English and Japanese language literature.
By the late 1960s, a growing number of citizens’ movements (shimin undo) and student movements began to appear that were free from JCP influence. These movements arose in reaction to the problems caused by high economic growth. The student movement grew in the context of a decline in the social position of students. An increasing number of high school graduates were entering university. As a consequence of this, the quality of education declined as lecturers struggled to deal with the influx and university facilities groaned under the 
increased demand. In the rapidly growing cities, discontent over environmental degradation was also increasing. Japan’s “1968” was the product of the coming together of these spontaneous movements with the New Left. They were all opposed to JCP policies, the Vietnam War and the US-Japan Security Treaty. 10
After Koizumi, successive LDP administrations have faced a dilemma. If they cut public works spending, regional economies suffer. If they increase it, the budget deficit grows and they face criticism from urban residents. Liberalizing labor regulations leads to a reduction in average wages and household incomes and contributes further to the declining fertility rate and the aging of the population. If the government tries to increase women’s participation in the workforce or to increase migration, it risks a backlash from its conservative base.
Who were the actors in the antinuclear movement after the Fukushima accident? I consider this question by looking at both the main actors, those who organized the demonstrations, and the ordinary participants. As explained further below, those whom I refer to here as the “main actors” here do not necessarily think of themselves as activists and may not be affiliated with any particular organization.
The Japanese mass media has long focused on the role of housewives in antinuclear movements. These women are typically represented as “mothers protecting their children”. While mothers have long been an important source of opposition to nuclear energy, they were not the main actors in the demonstrations in 2011 and 2012. This reflects a more general failure on the part of the Japanese mass media to adapt to structural change in society. It also reflects an environment where major media outlets have been losing younger readers and relying on older subscribers over the age of 50.
Here we see the constraints imposed by a political culture. While cracks began to appear in the “Japanese-style management” mode of corporate governance typical of Japan’s large corporations in the 1990s, it remains dominant. Salarymen are bound to spend long hours at work and have few opportunities to change jobs. This affords them little individual freedom to express their political views or to choose how to spend their time outside of formal work hours. Technical specialists and employees of foreign-owned companies have greater career mobility and are not bound by the cultural constraints of Japan’s large corporations. They seem, therefore, to have greater freedom to express their political views.
There were 26 men and 27 women among the fifty-three interviewees. Two were in their teens, 13 in their 20s, ten in their 30s, nine in their 40s, three in their 50s, 11 in their 60s, four in their 70s and one in her 80s. There were two foreign nationals. The interviewees were more diverse in terms of age and occupation than the activists I surveyed. The male interviewees displayed a wide range of occupations and education levels: they were company employees, executives, engineers, musicians, designers, university lecturers, self-employed, construction workers, taxi drivers and old-age pensioners. Among the female interviewees, however, the most common occupations were six housewives and two childcare workers. Like healthcare workers, housewives and childcare workers tend to be particularly aware of the issue of radiation. Some of the women also had occupations like those of the activists I surveyed such as editors, writers, web designers and hospital staff. Others were teachers, office workers, company employees, dispatch workers, self-employed and farmers.
This distribution of background experiences was confirmed in my survey of 53 main actors in the movement discussed in the previous section. However, some activities are difficult to classify. Take for example a fan of a band that plays political music who shares information on Twitter about an upcoming concert. It would be difficult for such a person to answer “yes” or “no” to a question that asks something like, “have you ever participated in a social movement.” Yet it is much easier for someone with this kind of experience to share information about a rally, or be an event marshal, than it is for someone who has never done anything of the sort.
His research focuses on national identity and nationalism, colonial policy, and democratic thought and social movements in modern Japan
MCAN holds its meetings in a cafe near the government district. Meetings take place after the weekly Friday protests, once the PA and other equipment have been put away. There they discuss correspondence and upcoming events. People who cannot attend meetings for a period of time ask one of the other members what was discussed. Members who stop coming for a long time cease to be core members. Some members formally announce that they are withdrawing from the group while others simply stop coming without explanation. They share much in common with similar groups in other developed countries. It seems that all over the world, the internet and SNS facilitate such activism.
A research group conducting a study of the dissemination of information via SNS surveyed participants in the protest outside the prime minister’s residence using a questionnaire. Organizers estimated that this rally was attended by 100,000 people. The survey found that participants learned about the protest from the following sources: Twitter 39.6%, word of mouth 17.3%, web 11.6%, Facebook 6.7%, television 6.5%, newspaper 6.3%, notification from an organized group 6.1%, and other 6.1%. 23 Activists from MCAN, however, said that the maximum number of people they could mobilize via Twitter was 2000. 24 They believed that the main reason the demonstrations exceeded this number was due to reports in the mass media and word of mouth about the protests disseminated through places like child care centers and workplaces.
