Anarchy in Nippon

There are very few anarchists in Japan. Nor have we any major anarchist groups and syndicalist unions. We have just a few small collectives. We are one of those collectives in Japan.

We have accessed many anarchist web sites all around the world through the Internet. However, we could not find any Japanese anarchist sites. Therefore we started to build a Japanese anarchist site by ourselves. What we are doing now is to translate An Anarchist FAQ into Japanese, to put various Japanese anarchists' texts (mostly old ones because of copyrights, duh!) in our site, book reviews and so on.

Japanese society has been consisted of socially recognized groups (blood-ties traditionally, companies recently). Individuals have identified with their belonging groups and if a person does not belong to any group or company, s/he will treat as being worthless. The value of an individual has been recognized by his/her belonging group and his/her status in that group. What the individual thinks or acts personally has meant nothing here. Thus an individual in Japan has been treated as an interchangeable part of a group (system). A person who cannot work very well as a part of a system will be gotten rid of the system and will be isolated from the society. Then he or she will be ignored as if the person does not exist. Unfortunately the radical groups, regardless of rightists or leftists, have the same tendency in our country.

However, this system does not work well these days. There are many people who drop out from it. But still we have little opportunities and alternatives for those who are out of the system to live well. Some go into religious cults, some become criminals, and some commit suicide. They do not have other alternatives!

We believe anarchism will teach them that they can live without the existing groups. We believe anarchism teach them that they do not need to be desperate when they are out of the existing system. In this society, which has no basis of individualism, an anarchist society will start from here.