Matsumoto Ya
Matsumoto once went to court for street protests. When he learned that the judicial personnel were worried that he had the intention to escape fear of guilt, he said: "My hourly salary is only 800 yen (about 50 yuan). I work 3 days a week, and my monthly salary is only 80,000 yen (about 5,000 yuan). How do I run? I will starve to death if I run away!" The court was filled with laughter, no longer a "boring and serious" space.
Matsumoto Ya proposed the saying "the poor are counterattacking". Photography/Leng Junxiao
Matsumoto Ya's work "The Amateur Rebellion" (Taiwan Version).
In the mid-1990s, under the impact of bubble economy and neoliberal economic reforms, a group of workers who were in a state of unstable employment emerged. The unstable proletarians in Japan are mainly young people, and in broad sense, they include people who do not have stable employment contracts or earn below the average (2 million yen/year). They lack security and engage in temporary or irregular labor, and are therefore excluded by mainstream society that advocates lifelong employment and corporate family loyalty.
Faced with this dilemma of inability to flow upward, Japanese people generally have two attitudes to deal with it. One is to be stubborn about the living standards of the middle class - most people choose to persist in vain; the other is to give up this obsession and live a "stupid" life with confidence. Matsumoto's "The Counterattack of the Poor!" ——The book "Guide to Live Without Spending a Penny" tells the story of such a group of Japanese youths gathering together to create a life that is not dependent on the country or is bound by the company. In the eyes of Japanese scholar Hitotani, this is a "joy alliance that fights against the gap between classes." This article mainly sorts out the alternative survival experiments of Japanese Fits in the city. Previously, they did not receive much attention in the mainstream media in China.
Weak young man?
faced the bubble economy in his youth and middle-aged years. Young people born between 1976 and 1996 are known as "new new humans/surplus generations", but the "new new" and "surplus" here do not mean being left free and living a rich life. They were polished during the bubble economy and employment ice age, and were also influenced by the Western self-centered free competition values, which was an integration of the new and old elements.
The goal of obtaining a stable life and traditional middle-class social status with the help of art and entrepreneurship is almost impossible, which makes potential innovators a veritable marginal group. As long as the mainstream population still aims to have a stable middle-class life, it will be difficult for them to be recognized by society.
In the view of most Japanese analysts from the Western perspective, these unstable proletarians are a difficult group because they rarely launch influential resistance. For example, Tovinon classified this group of people as "quiet mavericks", Kaseg believes that these people are the inventors of "play empowerment", and Hong Kong writer Tang Zhaozhen believes that these people are "calm debugging". These tags all seem to reveal a weak aura. However, it seems to be biased to determine that Yu Yu generation does not have the power of resistance.
Resistance in daily life?
Although Japan lacks open social movements since the 1990s, this does not mean that the source of motivation for social resistance has entered a state of rest. Kaseg believes that this source of motivation comes from the common people, including the Fetts, the nits, the Otakus, the homeless, the foreign workers, etc. Daily resistance is always going on, but daily resistance (such as laziness, noise, and escape) has never been recorded in history because of its ordinaryness, although they are more effective than a massive head-on confrontation.
Kaseger, through studying the Neo-United Nations movement (NAM) initiated by the Pedestrians of Yasuya, noted that Yasuya attempted to guide daily forms of resistance through top-level design - creating a greenhouse space within multiple cities (including Tokyo, Osaka, , Osaka, ) to shape a life beyond capital, country and nation for marginal people. As an alternative to capital exchange, the electronic regional currency system Q was invented, and people can obtain currency Q by participating in activities that help marginal populations (such as volunteering in non-profit schools for scholar-averse scholars).But the top-level design of utopian technology is out of touch with the common people who need NAM services the most. They still find it difficult to accumulate enough Q currency, just like they can't make money on weekdays.
Japanese literary critic Hiroyuki participated in Japan's 68 Storm, and he was keenly aware that Yasuya's adjustment of daily life turned it into an anti-daily: it is difficult for ordinary people to understand what a system that transcends capital and nation. He teased that the street war in the late 1960s created a condensing space of practice. Although it failed in the end, it contained happiness and actual emotional collisions between people. Because the abstract order was broken with actions and established the truth belonging to the rebels, it could have an impact. Tachigu did not create such a space, he just dreamed of yellow light.
said no humorously!
So, does the social practice that helps marginalists break prejudice and cognition exist?
The hustle and bustling play movement near Tokyo Koenji Station did not set a grand goal to challenge the capital system.
second-hand electrical appliance owner Yamatsu Moto is the soul of entertainment and sports. In 2006, he launched a march against the Electrical Supplies Safety Act (PSE) at Shinjuku Station. The huge team was driven by a truck. The Niets accompanied him were wearing cartoon costumes. The controlled police scolded him: "All of them are so big, don't you know the rules of society?" One Christmas Eve, Matsumoto and his friends came to the luxury business district in Roppongi and set up a hot pot next to the street, claiming to "smash capitalist consumption". This is similar to the graffiti "The Bourgeois class has no Christmas" on the streets of the French Yellow Vest Movement, except that their hot pot was eventually taken away by the police. After this, the amateur march has a large-scale appeal. The anti-nuclear power plant march in 2011 reached a scale of more than 20,000 participants (the march only delayed for a moment, and nuclear power plants across Japan have basically resumed operations).
When scholar Kaseg found this group, he only found the clumsy word empowerment to describe it. Strictly speaking, these movements are more of a "stress response": in the face of unsatisfactory labor relations and labor conditions, participants take to the streets to resist mainstream ideology with play and laziness.
Amateur sports, while highlighting their own identity and demands, cleverly utilizes the attributes of "poverty" and "incompetence" to gain sympathy, creating a play space that is difficult to intervene, and will become a joke if it is involved. The cool elements carried in play cleverly borrow the expression of the pop culture industry, using hysterical trumpets and funny music and costumes to soften the battle line, and using the magnetism of fun to attract more people to join the "revolution". It can be said that it is play that gives them personal dignity and action.
This reminds people of the "disagreement" form advocated by Rancier. The original abstract order is torn apart and the new emotional distribution is realized. Excellent political action is born only when new types that seem irrational, inappropriate, and even contradictory emerge and become subjective, confront those clear types, and are more in attracting attention. The amateurs' play methods rejected the bloody struggle line in the last century and even the last century. Matsumoto and others who promoted the "post-revolution" adopted peaceful but uncompromising expression methods, and seemed to have the opportunity to wait for a different future.
play and exercise!
Professor Katsuki Mori at the University of the Arts of Tokyo has self-critical sympathy for the unstable proletariat. Although "class demise" has become almost a common phenomenon in Japan, most citizens still recognize "there are all kinds of Japanese." Unlike the socialist/communist struggle ideas in the 1960s and 1970s, the unstable proletariat have straightforward ideas (the thoughts of ストリートトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトトト�
Maori believes that straightforward thoughts have the following four characteristics:
1, distributed in a dot-like shape, and at first glance they are flowing and scattered ideas, which can actually cross space. When some special events occur (such as the Iraq War, the Congress passed the PSE law, and the Fukushima nuclear explosion), they are connected into "lines", giving birth to social movements, but it is difficult to grasp or copy afterwards. 2. It is a practical idea generated from the grassroots level. 3. Without a name, it belongs to the idea of a large number of unknown people (all). 4. Express it in non-verbal form of electronic culture (such as music, video, etc.). The straightforward thought produces happiness and ease with a different meaning, and its internal logic is anti-consumerist. The most typical manifestation is Matsumoto's hot pot parade, which advocates intimate communication between people, or "positive social relations" as Marx said. A straightforward thought does not belong to money, it regards the existing phenomenon of capital flow as something that happens in other places.
play and movement creates a subculture space that removes disguise. Under huge social pressure, unstable people are gradually losing their voice organs, and playing and exercising is the moment when the fact of expulsion surfaces. We picked up the magnifying glass and observed this moment carefully, and then found that "escape is shameful but useful" has become the life creed of more and more unstable people. On the other side of the glamorous coin, their survival experiment will continue.
Written by Leng Junxiao
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