18.09.2017 - 16:21

Research Forum Lecture by Mahito Hayashi

Labor/Poverty Politics against the Japanese Developmental State: De-Nationalization after 1945, Nationalization by New Actors | Mon., Sept. 18, 2017, 16–18 h | Room LE 736, Campus Duisburg

Abstract

A historical analysis of the Japanese (post)developmental state is offered, with a focus that is largely different from mainstream scholarship on this topic: the focus is on the marginalized, dislocated, and impoverished. Linking this view with notions borrowed from critical state theory, the argument is made that Japanese post-1945 developmentalism became possible by “de-nationalizing” radical social movements fighting for critical labor/poverty issues. This historical analysis is enhanced by field observations of innovative social-movement strategy in one Japanese region, Kanagawa Prefecture, in which “pro-homeless" groups transformed the local sphere of labor/poverty politics for the sake of the homeless and day laborers. The crisis of developmentalism starting in the 1990s brought a major rupture to the status quo of de-nationalization. Concluding we can say that in contemporary Japan, this rupture is spawning the progressive politics of “nationalization” regarding labor/poverty politics.