The Fukushima disaster of 2011 ignited an anti-racism resistance movement in Japan to defend minorities such as Koreans.
Tokyo, Japan – In the low light of a pop-up restaurant in Ebisu, I sit across from Sabako as she takes pictures of the two onigiri (rice balls) that have just arrived at our table.
Sabako, who spoke to me under a pseudonym, is friends with the chef, a fellow activist who caters at anti-racism, LGBT , and music events in Tokyo. She takes a few minutes to upload the photos to Twitter using #OnigiriAction. Activists had been using this hashtag for several days in late November 2016 to raise awareness of poverty and food insecurity throughout Japan.
Sabako is one of the many activists who took to the streets and social media in the aftermath of Japan’s mega-disaster of a 9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdowns on March 11, 2011.
With 18,000 people dead or missing in the tsunami and thousands relocated, 3/11 – as it is commonly called by people in Japan – remains a deeply traumatic moment six years later.
In the ensuing panic over the spread of radiation throughout eastern Japan, Sabako, her teenaged child, and other family members fled Tokyo for the northern city of Sapporo. She stayed there for a month. Sabako signed up for a Twitter account and upon her return to Tokyo began regularly attending anti-nuclear rallies and demonstrations. She was searching for answers about the risks of radiation for her family, but also, simply angry at what she saw as a lack of accountability by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and other entities responsible for the nuclear disaster.
These days, however, her time and focus have shifted to a battle against racism and anti-foreigner hate speech.
READ MORE: The debate over South Korea’s ‘comfort women’
The rebirth of anti-discrimination social movements in Japan is one of the unexpected stories of 3/11.
Fukushima “awakened” first-time protesters in the tens of thousands to both the fragility and potentials of democracy in times of crisis. Yet this mass mobilisation did not merely represent activists’ attempts to build a new nation from the rubble of disaster. Rather, escalated feelings of distrust in government, media , and scientific authorities, in addition to a deep sense of remorse, shook up notions of what it means to be Japanese and to live in Japan.
Minority-led civil rights movements by ethnic Koreans, Buraku (a historically discriminated-against social caste), and indigenous groups, such as Ainu and Okinawans, have existed in Japan throughout the 20th century.
But what anti-racism activists have aspired to after 3/11 is different. Primarily an ethnically Japanese movement, they view racism as a problem that is harmful to all aspects of society. These activists seek to make the anti-racism movement mainstream among Japanese people and to take on the physical and emotional labour of activism as a means of alleviating the risks and burdens faced by minorities.
At its peak in 2012, the movement against nuclear energy drew crowds of 200,000, with activists occupying the streets and pavement in front of the prime minister’s residence and the National Diet, the Japanese parliament, in Tokyo.
Leading up to this in April 2011, one month after the disaster, culture critic and former vice editor-in-chief of Music Magazine Noma Yasumichi helped found TwitNoNukes, a Twitter-based group that quickly became a bridge for connecting protesters of diverse political affiliations and backgrounds around a common anti-nuclear cause. Many activists turned to Noma as an opinion leader among what they saw as a sea of tepid media coverage and conspiracy theories slandering minorities on Twitter and other social media.
In February 2013, Noma put out an appeal on Twitter in response to what he saw as an imminent threat: the nationalist group, Citizens’ Association to Oppose Special Rights for Resident Koreans (Zaitokukai), was marching in Shin Okubo, the Koreatown of Tokyo. Outside Tokyo, they also targeted the ethnic Korean enclave of Tsuruhashi in Osaka, and Sakuramoto, a multicultural neighbourhood in Kawasaki.
Their primary target was Zainichi Koreans, one of Japan’s largest ethnic minorities, which includes a diverse demographic spanning generations, from Koreans forcibly migrated under Japanese prewar colonial conditions to “newcomers”, many of them commercial purveyors of K-pop and Korean food. Noma’s appeal was a call to action against the racists.
Founded in 2006, Zaitokukai had previously targeted a 14-year old Filipino girl in 2009 – after her parents were deported for overstaying their visa – by protesting outside her home and school. They gained further notoriety the following year, after surrounding an ethnic Korean elementary school in Kyoto, verbally abusing the students there by calling them “children of spies” and “stinking” of kimchi.
3/11 had opened a new door for xenophobic politics.
As anti-racism activists often see it, political chaos and social unease in the aftermath of the disaster allowed groups like Zaitokukai to amplify their brand of xenophobia and racial scapegoating. Ultra-right internet users fomented panic on websites like 2Channel, the Japanese website that inspired 4chan. Even in 2017, the website boasts over a million new posts every day.
They accused Zainichi Koreans of exploiting national welfare systems and spread rumours that Japan’s mass anti-nuclear protests were run not by “real Japanese” people, but by seditious foreigners.
