AnarWiki/markdown/Osaka_Uprising_(1990).md

You must help yourself: Neo-liberal geographies and worker insurgency in
Osaka.

## Background

October 2nd, 1990. The day started as any other does in Osaka's
Nishi-Nari ward, men lined up around the yoseba employment center, in
the thousands, waiting for work. If it came, they would load into the
cars of construction contractors in groups, with parachute pants and
wrapped heads. For eight hours they might wave light wands 'guiding
pedestrians', dig concrete roads, re-pave highways or variously break
their backs in the sun. This proletarian fate was ceded by the city's
bourgeoisie over a period of thirty years of continuous unemployed
unrest; all the union officials touted it as labor 'won' from an inhuman
system. After all, without work, one does not eat, and once conditions
have worsened to the point that this phrase becomes dictatorial, one
works in a fervor; for work leads to 'independence'. Work might one day
lead out of the slum. If work didn't come, the men wait out lunch and
line up for the daily workfare handout, set aside for 'unsuccessful
job-seekers'. This yoseba is in Kamagasaki, a neighborhood of poverty
and celebration, a breathing lung, where the yakuza patrol day-workers
with icy looks and stashed weapons; at occupied 'triangle' park, men,
dogs and blue canvas spill out into the street sides. Udon and soba are
served at improvised stool stands roofed with canvas. Women and men
prepare boxed lunches, noodles and Okinawan fare at shops lining the
crowded avenues. Just to the east the brothel neighborhood of Tobita
sits in expectant dormancy, for the night will soon fall. The slum is
quiet. For the city hall and the construction capitalists, it was just
another Tuesday. There were multiple flashpoints, like any riot, origins
that became history for the individuals and groups that experienced
them. For most, the riots began with friends running past, heaving
paving stones at the police. But most will point to an account of an old
homeless man in the Namba theater district, north of Kamagasaki. Police
on patrol had stopped at his improvised blue canvas house, berating him
to leave the sidewalk. The man (known by most as 'a bit bizarre')
unleashed his dog, which quickly sunk its teeth into a senior patrolman.
After a struggle, he was surrounded by police and beaten as a crowd
gathered, consisting of other homeless people and some day-workers.
Hauled away and arrested, the angry crowd followed the car to the
Nishinari police station.\[1\] News spread on sprinting legs to the
enormous yoseba hiring hall in the south, circulating among groups of
day laborers. Without any particular confrontation, a few 'troublesome'
workers were pulled aside by the yoseba police patrol and in front of
thousands, beaten. The neighborhood exploded. Yoseba day-workers,
witnesses in their thousands, took their comrades back and drove the
police from the hiring hall, swarming outward like blood through
Kamagasaki's lungs. Crowds formed here and there, with a general
movement towards the police station, from which the police re-emerged. A
rain of stones fell. After the volleys reached a temporary abatement,
barricades were quickly erected, bicycles ignited with cheap lighter
fluid, stacked and burned, dumpsters dragged into the street.
<em>Capital's tendency to crisis, the proletarian form, was
erupting.</em>

The police retreated in order to barricade the neighborhoods, to shut
off the arteries that connect Kamagasaki to the north, south, east and
west.\[2\] A classic siege strategy was put into action punctuated by
sudden, violent streams of steel-shield armed police into the
neighborhoods. Mobile riot squads surrounded the area with armored buses
and paddy wagons, and soon lined the boulevards in columns with five
foot steel shields. All the forces of government and private capital
arrived to contain thousands of revolting workers and rapidly arriving
allies, to circumscribe a space that was impassable for the surging rage
of the rioters. Media vans pulled up and were stoned if they attempted
to penetrate the riot line and 'get the real story'. In several cases
cameras were sought after and smashed.\[3\] All footage of the events
comes from behind police lines. Advances by the cops were met with
volleys of objects flung from the parapets of apartment buildings by the
unemployed, workers and housewives. At times, the riot constituted
itself as a castle pocked with archers. When the first barricaded day
slipped into night, the cars of the construction barons were smashed and
degraded. Parks that had been evicted of squatters had their locks
broken and were re-taken. The insurrection faced its own limit, against
the borders of space drawn by the state and its own projectuality.
Discussions arose everywhere on where to go next. Many feared that the
riotous action would blacklist the neighborhood from construction
contracts, that the yoseba would close like the one in Tokyo had just a
year earlier, that poverty would worsen. Most gazed over the surrounding
steel buses of the riot police and saw the impossibility of expansion,
of the riot spreading to other sectors. NGO workers and city hall
mediators arrived urging people to 'calm down', that police violence
could be 'addressed'. But these particular beatings were only moments on
a continuum of violent surveillance and control. There was no doubt that
the situation was in fact rapidly worsening as police ran wild in the
streets, smashing skulls and faces with steel pipes and shields. The
Kamagasaki population was at open revolt with the organs of repression,
most saw no way back to 'normality'.\[4\] Buses and sound-cars of the
unions and organizations of the unemployed mobilized from their garages
and circled the neighborhood, providing a temporary barrier; they
eventually moving through police lines, broadcasting messages to a wider
portion of the city. Night fell again. "I edged back to the crowd. From
behind me, someone yelled 'Aim for the lights\!'. Stones were thrown
aiming towards the lights of TV cameras stationed behind the riot squad.
I entered the crowd. No one took any notice of the camera that I held in
my hand. After a while, a man spoke to me. 'Are you from the news
papers?' When I answered no, he said, 'If you are, you are going to get
killed.'" <em>-anonymous observer at Kamagasaki</em> As the riot
entered into its third, fourth day the city's strategy was in continual
escalation. The rioting, unarmed workers were meat for the mobile riot
squads. Largely defensive formations changed into charges, five-foot
steel shields were leveled against the flesh of the disgusted.
Barricades collapsed or were extinguished, and the police made real
progress into the neighborhoods. If the streets could be cleared, then
the tear-gas buses and paddy wagons could move in. Hundreds of the most
militant were chased south into a union building where the insurrection
made its last, unarmed stand. Concurrently and further south, partly in
inspiration from the Kamagasaki rebellion, a youth revolt had exploded,
spearheaded by 'speed tribe' gangs on motorcycles who fought the police
in skirmishes. This rebellion was contained even quicker, and most of
the young rioters found themselves chased into the same building with
the older workers. There would be no cavalry for Kamagasaki. The
building was taken with tremendous violence. The 22nd riot in the
neighborhood's 30 year history had ended. Despite the arrest and
imprisonment of many, over the next four years there would be more small
riots, sporadically, where the police or contractors were targeted. When
unrest broke out, other workers would come running; construction
contractors dodging back-wages found themselves at the mercy of mobs.
People took inspiration from the riots that raged through the
neighborhoods throughout the 1960s, contestation, above all was the
agenda\! The strategy against the riot by the city and the bourgeoisie
was drawn from every lesson learned in the past forty years of class
struggle in post-fordist Japan. Initial direct force, followed by the
deployment of mediators, the deployment of advanced technological means
of repression, filtering of news about the riots, news blackouts,
concluding in total geographical isolation of the proletarian ferment.
Riots can not be permitted to spread to other sectors, and therefore
Japanese capital's only strategy against the eruption of its own
contradictions is containment. MUZZLED CONTRADICTIONS, STRANGLED
PROLETARIANS The riots of the 1990s took place amid the massive
restructuring of the 1980s and the economic crisis of 1989 as the
investment 'bubble' burst and the promise of a Japanese 'prosperity'
proved hollow. Already migrant workers from Okinawa and Tokyo had taken
up park occupations all over Osaka, not to mention Nishi-nari ward and
the Kamagasaki neighborhood. Improvised huts, roofed with blue tarp,
decorated with paint, junk, sometimes city free jazz schedules and at
the very least posters of famous female crooners holding beer mugs,
sprung up all over the city. The huts were statements of autonomy,
arising from the immediate inability of newly-arrived workers to afford
housing; as a strategy the 'tent villages' blanketed the city, in order
to stake out an existence independent of the welfare state's
institutionalization. Out of the riots, the workers' movement in
Kamagasaki re-composed into union coalitions. NGOs replaced the direct
discipline of police batons as their mediating roles were appreciated by
the city in halting unrest. 16 surveillance cameras at major
intersections and shopping streets were installed in Kamagasaki alone.
Over 1990-1995, the men at city hall dumped all the previous strategies,
and Kamagasaki moved from a zone of discipline to one of control, from
containment of outburst to total regulation; the unemployed were
channeled, mediated and surveilled like never before; what could once
communicate itself as a struggle of autonomy against the control
apparatus was now more and more forced to speak the language of social
peace.\[5\] Park occupations were slowly apologized for as a response to
the poverty of the city's institutional shelters as well as the lack of
viable jobs, instead of their obvious essence, areas autonomous from
capitalist time, characterized by relaxation, karaoke songs and games
like go and shogi. The occupations were attempts to attain a moderately
bourgeois standard of living, actualizing in motion, against an ocean of
industrial poverty.\[6\] Continual violence and harassment by yakuza and
police managed to dull the direct-action strategy of spiteful
day-workers as well as the heaviest strategies by newly radicalized
unions, who quickly transformed into facilitators of ritual action: such
as protest marches completely surrounded by police, food handouts and
supplication to city officials at any level of struggle. "As real
subsumption advanced it appeared that the mediations of the existence of
the class in the capitalist mode of production, far from being exterior
to the 'being' of the class which must affirm itself against them, were
nothing but this being in movement, in its necessary implication with
the other pole of society, capital." <em>- Theorie Communiste</em>
NEO-LIBERALISM: TRANSFORMED EXPLOITATION, TRANSFORMED GEOGRAPHIES
Outside of Kamagasaki and Osaka, across the social terrain of Japan, the
neo-liberal project had been advancing at least since the collapse of
the new left in the late 1970s. A near collapse of the social safety net
ensued: previous welfare guarantees were transformed increasingly into
workfare, an entire landlord class was born atop workfare-registered
workers struggling to pay 'discounted' rents on yoseba wages. The
retirement age was officially moved from 60 to 65 for most businesses in
2005, completing an already unofficial shift planned long-term by the
LDP; a whole generation of parents suddenly found themselves working
longer and harder and by desperation turning their children's' schools
into factories for the production of workers who could support them
post-retirement, as pension guarantees seemed bound for an irreversible
crisis. Elderly workers who laid-off in the crisis often found
themselves on the street with no employment prospects. Among the
bourgeoisie, support for privatization and the gradual wearing away of
the 'welfare state' gained steam. Nothing characterized the period more
than speed-up. With the unification in the late 60s of train lines
around the country under the JR Company and the rapid acceleration of
bullet train technology, capital smoothed space towards a white plane,
one with no resistance to the circulation of raw materials, labor power
and surplus value. Highways brought the same changes, and inside the
workplace a collapse of the labor movement ensured human beings snared
in 60-70 hour weeks became the norm for full-time employees. The
individual experience of labor became more and more an endless conveyor
belt between home, transit and the workplace. A metropolitan factory
modeled on assembly lines, bound by its very constitution, to disaster.
ENCLOSURE, SPEED, DISASTER As an island chain along major fault lines,
Japanese civilization is fraught with constant disaster. The 1995
earthquake in Kobe was only the most recent massive demonstration of the
power of continental plates (5,273 people were killed, most crushed to
death in the collapse of their houses or consumed by the fires that
followed the earthquake, 96.3 billion dollars of damage were assessed).
Earthquakes are phantoms, haunting all considerations of the future.
Last December, a scandal broke in the news media; Hidetsugu Aneha, a 48
year old architect working at a construction firm called Hyuza in Tokyo
had, under pressure from his superiors to cut costs on the buildings he
was designing, reduced steel reinforcements in building skeletons and
falsified data to cover his tracks. As his actions were uncovered and an
investigation was launched by the city, it came out that the building
for which design statistics had been falsified was not a lone example;
the number quickly mushroomed, resulted in the implication of 78 hotels
and buildings as being at 30-80% of minimal earthquake preparedness,
meaning likely collapse during a strong earthquake. In his defense Aneha
protested that when he raised these issues to his superiors they told
him the firm would simply lose the contract to other firms if proper
costs were covered, and so he must cut expenses any way he could;
Aneha's comments therefore implicate not only himself and his
corporation, but the construction industry as a whole. These vast,
condensed metropolises of the Japanese islands contain millions of
bodies on foundations increasingly precarious, and despite the
spectacular efforts by city governments at reform and revision,
thousands will not survive the next earthquake (as many were killed in
recent Niigata prefecture earthquakes). Capitalism has developed all
formalized dwellings, all massive dormitories of the exploited that
stretch from the city to suburbia, into potential coffins. In ironic
contrast stand the humble hut-dwelling day-workers of Osaka whose
low-impact 'outside dwellings' are in no danger of killing them during a
disaster. In 1987, Japan's nationalized train lines were divided into
west and east and privatized. Adding a profit motive to trains, already
circulating on the rhythm of breakneck post-Fordist Japanese capitalism,
guaranteed the narrowing of bottom lines and an amplified pursuit of
speed between stations. In 2005, a rush-hour train derailed between
Amagasaki station and Takaradsuka station north of Osaka. The young
train driver had been berated repeatedly by supervisors and his
supervising senior driver to cut seven minutes off of the recommended
transit time for the 25 km between these two stations. The train
derailed, traveling at a tremendous speed and collided with a large
apartment building, destroying part of its foundation and causing the
building to collapse on top of the train car. 105 people died either
instantly or before rescue workers could reach them. Unfortunately for
the bureaucrats and company officials rolled out to the scene to beg
apology (and for all who ride these trains) no uptake of individual
responsibility for this massacre can erase the obvious but unspeakable
culpability of the economy, cloud of massified instrumental necessity,
which by shearing away life-time from the individual worker according to
its internal pressure, must constantly flirt with cheap materials and
disastrous speed. The reaction of the individual: 'Where is my train? My
son is waiting.' gives form to this pressure. Universal demand for the
reduction of transit time, born out of the stubborn intransigence of
work time, pushes the trains faster and faster. The social pressure of
work time against life time produces derailments, just as the concrete
capitalist organization of geography ensures this acceleratory dynamic
across space. Crisis is therefore implicit in the accumulated forms of
capitalist working class subsumption. To which again, capital can only
respond with containment. "When the ship goes down, so too do the first
class passengers... The ruling class, for its part incapable of
struggling against the devil of business activity, superproduction and
superconstruction for its own skin, thus demonstrates the end of its
control over society, and it is foolish to expect that, in the name of a
progress with its trail indicated by bloodstains, it can produce safer
(trains) than those of the past..." <em>-Amadeo Bordiga, Murdering the
Dead</em> DISINTEGRATING WORKPLACES; ANTAGONISTIC SPACES During the
neo-liberal wave, an expansion of 'irregular employment' brought about
the birth of a precarious class of workers that would precede Europe's
'precariat' in conditions if not consciousness. It would also create new
forms of social labor that were 'out', roving the cities.\[7\] Inside
workplaces, an increasing concentration of fixed capital within
factories accompanied by off-shoring meant that Japanese government had
a mostly idle labor force, steadily being undermined in its real
conditions of subsistence by welfare reform, one that could be put to
work in entirely new 'service' industries. Jobs were invented. Escalator
girls, elevator girls, kyaku-hiki (customer pullers), street megaphones,
flyering, etc. new 'services' that were above all 'out and about',
social forms that seized forms of inter-human sociality, the tap on the
shoulder, the kind holding of the elevator door, the smile, amplifying
them, valorizing what had been mostly unwaged action. Population shifts
led to the unavoidable importation of foreign labor, causing a gradual
cosmopolitanization that has thrown the idea of a 'Japanese' identity
into crisis, while also strengthening reactionary ideologies that take
strength from it. The growth of an English education industry brought
thousands of temporary workers to Japan, and with them, historical
methods of class struggle that clashed strongly with Japanese welfare
state compromises of the 70s and 80s. As capitalists continually sought
to preclude the ability of foreign labor to organize itself, the
workplace form quickly dissolved from private schools to dispatch
offices, private lessons in libraries, citizen halls, cafes everywhere.
In a unique way, this foreign labor also became 'out', dislocated,
social. To contain these new socialities arising across old geographies,
the police and city planners are continuously at work. In late 2003, the
already barricaded and privatized Tennoji Park in Osaka was invaded by
300 riot police who had come to evict what was known as the 'karaoke
village', a large area of the park taken over by karaoke carts, venders
and crooners, gathering point for hundreds of day-workers daily who
belted out song classics after work. For forty years the plaza was a
hot-spot, even tourist attraction known as the 'soul of Osaka', a
musical space occupied by the downtrodden, who sunk into song and drink,
dulling the pain, remembering more riotous times. In December 2003 the
riot police moved in and barricaded the park for 'construction
purposes'. Vendors and crooners showed up in hundreds to watch the
demolition and vent their rage. Barricades were thrown at the police,
but the disobedients were quickly arrested. There would be no repeat of
October 1990. All that is left of the karaoke village now is a steel
fence, wrapping a completely empty lot. The park is silent. Osaka city
now plans a wave of evictions of squatters from parks all over its map.
The first of the year is already underway in mid-city, and the park's
residents are crouched down, preparing to resist the riot squads. The
proletarians of Osaka's wards must learn the lessons of the past:
against the brutal technological barricades of the riot police,
surveillance and containment, they must adapt an improvised, mobile
capability. The riots around Clichy-sous-bois provide a possible source
of inspiration, totally mobile, skirmish-based attack, no commitments,
no demands as such. No gathering points and thus no encirclement, no
containment. Also in question is how social space can be re-worked and
decelerated, how an autonomous space can develop against the crushing
weight of capitalism, while simultaneously understanding its own
limitations, how we might 'help ourselves' to a future that doubtlessly
awaits us if we seek it.\[8\] The strange new crisis-ridden social
geographies of post-fordist capitalism offer gates for the fleeing
proletariat, which now finds itself everywhere. FOOTNOTES 1 It was
revealed earlier that week that the police chief in Nishinari had been
taking bribes from Yakuza gangs for a variety of 'favors'. 2 Except for
the Yakuza gangs who had all run away from the scene. 3 The information
sharing grid between media, yakuza and government is well known in most
parts of the islands. 4 Some of these older workers had cut their teeth
on the anti-Yakuza struggles of the 1980s in Tokyo's Sanya district,
some who were ex-members of militant groups like the red army, some who
had served prison time for throwing bombs at police in the 60s.
Incidentally, the Kamagasaki revolt was a big inspiration for Otomo
Katsuhiro's Akira. 5 NGO workers can now be seen every day on the
winding employment lines, monitoring workers with friendly armbands that
say 'safety patrol'\! 6 Some hut plots in the autonomous parks have
gorgeous gardens growing in them, in one case an occupant had improvised
a permaculture system, with over-arching grape vines shading greens
below and tomatoes flanking. 7 Many factory jobs were also shipped to
East Asia at this time. 8 One phenomenon that may offer inspiration on
this point: in Tennoji park, the same park that has been fenced and
barricaded, robbed of most autonomy, two homeless men living in the
lower part of the park have set out before their home five comfortable
leather chairs, apparently open to anyone to sit in, chat or play go.
The path on which these men live and on which their chairs are situated
is a vital walking path for commuters, who everyday gaze curiously or
longingly at these lounging non-workers, these jesters of the free
community. from an anonymously published article in datacide magazine.