Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan: New Directions in Social Movements

Modern social movements frequently serve as a space to voice concerns in a supportive and collective context and thus are an important venue for individuals to learn how to speak up for themselves. With the rise of new generations and advancement of technology such as digital networks, contemporary Japanese social movements and activism have transformed significantly in recent years, now with more flexibility and less reliance on ideology and institutional foundations. The new patterns provide individuals different spaces and ways to get involved in “politics,” which have shed the traditional settings and expectations. This transformation carries both advantages and risks. In Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan, twelve original ethnographic studies illustrate how social movements are creating new alternatives for Japan in the current century. The term “alternative” has a double meaning. First, it refers to forms of political engagement that are outside the standard politics of political parties and institutional forums. Second, it engages with contemporary movements seeking an alternative politics that is culturally specific and historically embedded, an alternative to past periods of activism in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s often characterized as tainted, and causing the decline of social movement activity for nearly two decades.

The introduction written by Slater and Steinhoff places the volume in historical, social, and methodological context and analyzes the main characteristics of the new social movements. Each chapter provides a rich description of a particular movement active between 1990 and 2020, showing what the participants wanted to achieve, how they tried to distance themselves from earlier movements, and how they used new social media and other innovations to do so. The accounts preserve the immediacy of the period when the fieldwork was conducted, but each end with a postscript bringing the movement up to date. Engagingly written by an international community of Japan specialists committed to doing extended fieldwork with small social movement groups, Alternative Politics will appeal to social scientists interested in activism and Japan specialists in sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines, as well as undergraduates in a wide range of courses.

• David H. Slater, Editor

  David H. Slater is professor of cultural anthropology and Japanese studies at Sophia University, Tokyo.

• Patricia G. Steinhoff, Editor

  Patricia G. Steinhoff is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Contributors

• Patricia G. Steinhoff
• Shinji Kojima
• Robin O'Day
• Carl Cassegård
• Makoto Nishikido
• Yoko Iida
• Rika Morioka
• Yuki Asahina
• Vivian Shaw
• Vinicius de Aguiar Furuie
• Alexander Brown
• David H. Slater

• [Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan] offers significant insights not only to Japanese researchers but also to participants involved in social movements. A particularly commendable contribution of this book lies in its ability to reframe actors and organizations typically dismissed as ‘old’ in Japanese social movements and their scholarship by situating them within a continuum that extends into the ‘new’ social movements of the 2000s and beyond. . . . [The] book provides a well-balanced overview of movements from the 1960s to the 2010s, ranging from organized social movements to individual, unnetworked actions, and from radical to proposal-based activism. It holds significant value for examining social movements from the 2020s onwards.
  —Kyoko Tominaga, Ritsumeikan University, Japanese Journal of Sociology, 35:1 (2026)
• Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan is an edited volume that clearly succeeds to be much more than the sum of its contributions. It showcases the strengths of ethnographic research on social movements and—taken collectively—helps to understand the diverse manifestations of 'alternative politics' in post-3/11 Japan and the challenges they have been facing in the specific historical and political context of postwar political activism in Japan. As such, the volume is a useful resource for teaching, and not least a productive point of departure for future research.
  —Hanno Jentzsch, University of Vienna, Asian Ethnology 85:1