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. Lees verder