through europe

An Ex Post Facto View of 2011

When we reflect upon the year 2011, especially the situations surrounding 3/11 and the global uprisings, everything that happened before appears to have been in preparation for these two extreme moments. All events in the recent past seem to have been proceeding toward or engulfed into these currents: radiation and revolution. This is mainly due to our habit of thinking itself that always thinks things ex post facto rather than ex ante facto. But at the same time this most deadly disaster and the insurrections across the globe, the extreme poles of despair and hope, are framing our present as the accumulation of all temporalities past and present and what they portend for possibilities we are confronting now. The impossible mix of the two currents is, as many of us are forced to experience, now causing a global turbulence whose dynamics and orientation are unpredictable.
 

For one thing there are unprecedented crises in the lives of the majority on the globe. All key components of the apparatus that capitalism and state power have been building up are now on the verge of collapse and are turning against and attacking the people with sheer violence, as a last resort for the maintenance of financial capitalism, industrial/military conglomeration and the governance: precarious labor conditions approaching either servitude or disposal (expendability), debt of various scales imposed upon entire populaces, genetically modified or poisoned food products widely distributed for daily consumption, environmental contamination by various production and mining affecting the locals everywhere, escalading joblessness and homelessness, budget cuts in every corner of public services, recurring racial and gender discrimination, police brutality or war against civilians in all nation-states, and the radiation-spread instigated by a government itself… Jobs, money, housing, energy, food, medicine and environment – everything we rely on as our lifeline turns into a weapon against us. This is a total war of those in power waged against the commoners.

I visited my home country Japan for about two weeks in early June 2011. The main purpose of the trip was to meet with my comrades who are working on various anti-capitalist projects in Tokyo and Osaka, observe their everyday lives and share the prospects of their new struggle. I could not go to the disaster-stricken area, which I am hoping to visit on my next trip. In any case, as various reports indicate, the recovery is facing tremendous difficulties, despite the efforts of many, due to the magnitude of damages caused by the tsunami and earthquake overlaid with radiation. Some voices even indicate that the idea of recovery, that is to say, people continuously living there under radiation,is itself questionable. In this instance, the traditional notion of utopia, of self-recovery of community from within, might have to be replaced by a massive migration and the building of new communities elsewhere.

Since 3/11 and subsequent calamites, I have been thinking all the time about Japan, the archipelago in the Far East where I was born. Now it has been thirty years since I moved to NYC, but beginning from the 1990s, I began to reconnect myself with various veins of radical movements there. So I have many comrades and friends suffering and struggling there at the moment. I am communicating with a number of them every day by skype and e-mail. Along with a few other Japan-born activists in NYC, I cannot remove my attention from what is going-on there. We are destined to be closer to the situation than the majority of New Yorkers.

At the moment in Japan, the government is trying to make the situation look as normal as possible, by veiling crucial information on the degree of radiation and the calamitous condition of the reactors. This menacing situation notwithstanding, it does not show any intension to terminate its pro-nuclear power policy. In accordance with the benefit of TEPCO (The Tokyo Electric Power Co), it is instigating temporal blackout in large areas outside central Tokyo, as if sending the message to the people: no nuclear power, no electricity.