![]() ![]() This transformation has gone hand in hand with a shift of action repertoire towards forms of direct action such as squatting, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and opening "cafés". Although the radical student organisations of the New Left have waned, new movements are forming among students and pre-carious university employees in response to neoliberalization trends in society and the precarization of their conditions. However, campuses have continued to play a role in activism. Japan's so-called freeter movements (movements of young men and women lack-ing regular employment) are often said to have emerged as young people shifted their base of activism from campuses to the 'street'. ![]() This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990's. The paper tries to locate, through a critical examination, the new movements within a broader context of anti-neo-liberalism and anti-globalization and find political potentiality within it. The transformation of society, economy and politics, known as `post-modernization' or recently as `globalization', has asked us to re-consider and re-define the basic concepts such as class, proletariat, power, labour and work which we once shared. It sees freeters, young part-time workers, as emerging, new political actors that have appeared through the transition of a mode of production from Fordism to post-Fordism. The paper also explores the historical background against which the new movements were born and have developed since the end of the Bubble economy. These movements are different from traditional Marxist political ones and even from the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that they incorporate more cultural practices such as art, music, dance and performance into their political activities. The new movements, including Dame-ren, the Cardboard House Art movements in Shinjuku and recent anti-war protests on the Iraqi war, were mainly led by young people, in particular, the freeter generation, who did not experience the leftist politics of the 1960s. This paper examines new cultural and political movements that have developed outside of traditional leftist politics since the early 1990s in Japan. ![]()
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