Informal Life Politics and Grassroots Action in Twenty-First-Century Northeast Asia
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NEW WORLDS FROM BELOW Informal life politics and grassroots action in twenty-first-century Northeast Asia NEW WORLDS FROM BELOW Informal life politics and grassroots action in twenty-first-century Northeast Asia EDITED BY TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI AND EUN JEONG SOH ASIAN STUDIES SERIES MONOGRAPH 9 Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: New worlds from below : informal life politics and grassroots action in twenty-first century Northeast Asia / Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Eun Jeong Soh, editors. ISBN: 9781760460907 (paperback) 9781760460914 (ebook) Series: Asian studies series ; 9. Subjects: Communities--Asia, Northeast--Citizen participation. Community development--Asia, Northeast. Asia, Northeast--Politics and government--Citizen participation. Asia, Northeast--Social conditions. Other Creators/Contributors: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, editor. Soh, Eun Jeong, editor. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover photograph: Tessa Morris-Suzuki. This edition © 2017 ANU Press Contents List of Figures and Tables . vii Acknowledgements . ix Introduction: Informal Life Politics in Northeast Asia . 1 Tessa Morris-Suzuki 1 . Provincialising the State: Symbiotic Nature and Survival Politics in Post-World War Zero Japan . 15 Sho Konishi 2 . Social Change and Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in China . 37 Ou Ning 3 . A Century of Social Alternatives in a Japanese Mountain Community . 51 Tessa Morris-Suzuki 4 . Transnational Activism and Japan’s Second Modernity . 77 Simon Avenell 5 . Animism: A Grassroots Response to Socioenvironmental Crisis in Japan . 99 Shoko Yoneyama 6 . Informal Labour, Local Citizens and the Tokyo Electric Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Crisis: Responses to Neoliberal Disaster Management . .131 Adam Broinowski 7 . National Subjects, Citizens and Refugees: Thoughts on the Politics of Survival, Violence and Mourning following the Sewol Ferry Disaster in South Korea . .. 167 Cho (Han) Haejoang 8 . Thinking of Art as Informal Life Politics in Hong Kong . 197 Olivier Krischer 9 . Informal Life Politics of Marketisation in North Korea . .. 227 Eun Jeong Soh 10 . Social Innovation in Asia: Trends and Characteristics in China, Korea, India, Japan and Thailand . 249 The Hope Institute Epilogue . 275 Tessa Morris-Suzuki Author Information . 279 List of Figures and Tables Figure 1: Schematic image of Bishan community ................48 Figure 2: The Motai saké festival .............................53 Figure 3: A meeting of the Shinshū Miyamoto School ............71 Figure 4: The ‘Ishimure Michiko Phenomenon’: Ishimure Michiko in the mainstream media (1970–2014) ..................114 Figure 5: A small village shrine stands intact in the area completely devastated by the tsunami including the tide-water control forest. The coastal area of Wakabayashi Ward in Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture. 122 Figure 6: ‘Too Many. Too Many and Too Young’ ...............176 Figure 7: ‘Farewell. Farewell’. ..............................177 Figure 8: Exhibition view from Global Activism at ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Germany, February 2014. Detail of an artwork by Mark Wallinger, comprising a reconstruction of a ‘peace camp’ in London’s Parliament Square, where activist Brian Haw lived from 2001 until his eviction in 2006, in protest at the UK’s participation in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, Wallinger’s ‘installation’ based on Haw’s encampment won the prestigious Turner Prize following its exhibition at the Tate Modern ...............199 Figure 9: An event at Wooferten in September 2013 ............209 Figure 10: Installation view of Ichimura Misako’s ‘Homeless Artist’ exhibition at Wooferten, August 2011. The slogan on the wall reads ‘Hands off Miyashita Park!’, referring to the ultimately unsuccessful protests by Ichimura and colleagues to save Tokyo’s public Miyashita Park from private commercial development by the Nike Corporation ..................215 vii NEW WORLDS FROM BELOW Figure 11: Performance still of the ‘Back to 6.7.89 Pitt Street Riot – Rolling Theatre of Tiananmen Massacre’, staged in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong, on 31 May and 7 June 2014 .....223 Figure 12: Hyesan Market, 22 July 2015 .....................230 Table 1: ANIS Annual Meetings from 2009 to 2013 ............258 Table 2: Field visits by The Hope Institute research team .........261 Figure 13: Keyword cloud of social innovation .................262 Figure 14: Two-step categorisation of keywords and themes of social innovation in Asia ...........................262 viii Acknowledgements This book emerged from research and conferences supported by the Australian Research Council’s Laureate Fellowship project ‘Informal Life Politics in the Remaking of Northeast Asia: From Cold War to Post-Cold War’ (Project ID FL120100155) and the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant funded by the Korean Government (Ministry of Education) (AKS-2011-BAA-2106). The editors and authors gratefully acknowledge the support of these funding agencies. Our thanks also go to Ms Maxine McArthur for her assistance with the copyediting and final preparation of the manuscript. ix Introduction: Informal Life Politics in Northeast Asia Tessa Morris-Suzuki Liberating Politics A group of prewar Hokkaido farmers creating their own experiment in communal living; a Chinese village where artists and locals come together to reinvent tradition; fishermen in mercury-polluted Minamata creating a new philosophy of nature; two grieving fathers walking across South Korea in remembrance of children killed in an avoidable disaster; North Koreans setting up a market in the streets of their town, in defiance of official regulations. These are some of the people you will encounter in the pages that follow. None of these people is behaving in an overtly ‘political’ way, but the argument of this book is that their actions are part of an invisible politics that is quietly transforming aspects of life in Northeast Asia today. Understanding the emergence and nature of this invisible politics is important in order to make sense of contemporary Northeast Asia. Beyond that, it is important because these small experiments in ‘politics from below’ shed light on some fundamental global dilemmas of 21st-century political life. ‘Politics’ is constantly defined and redefined. A broadly recognisable definition, though, might be this, which draws on (but slightly rewords) the writings of British political scientist David Runciman: politics is about the collective choices that shape the way people live, and about the nature of the human interrelationships through which those choices are made.1 In everyday speech we equate politics with the formal mechanisms of government: national constitutions, parliaments, cabinets, 1 David Runciman, Politics: Ideas in Profile (London: Profile Books, 2014). 1 NEW WORLDS FROM BELOW prime ministers or presidents, elections, party platforms. We include local institutions like city councils, and international bodies like the United Nations. We also sometimes consider the actions of lobby groups and of organised protest movements. But the activities of such formal and semi- formal political institutions are only a small corner of politics in the full meaning of the word. For many people, none of the formal institutions of politics—whether local, national or international—seems able or willing to address the life crises that they face, or to assist them in making meaningful choices. In response, these people try to act out aspects of the change they seek in their everyday lives, through autonomous collective responses. The responses may be enacted by the local community of a village or urban area, but may also be enacted by networks dispersed across the boundaries of region or nation. This is ‘informal life politics’: an act of collected self-protection in the face of the profound deficits of institutional politics. Often, though not always, informal life politics is truly ‘survival politics’—an act of desperation in response to direct threats to the physical survival of individuals or the social survival of communities. This book sets out to explore examples of informal life politics in Northeast Asia, building on the work of scholars like James C. Scott and Benedict Tria Kerkvliet, who have charted and made visible forms of political action embedded in everyday life.2 Such forms of politics have a long history, but there are impasses in the world of formal governmental politics today that make it particularly important to reconsider the past, present and possibilities of this less visible political realm. How can we reconceive politics to include that realm, and how might our understanding of politics in all its dimensions change if we broaden our vision in this way? 2 See, for example, James C. Scott, ‘Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance’, in James C. Scott and Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet eds, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-East Asia (London: Frank Cass, 1986), 5–35; Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). 2 INTRODUCTION Northeast Asia and the Crisis