Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time: Arishima Cooperative Farm in Hokkaido, 1922–1935

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1845-1887
Author(s):  
SHO KONISHI
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Dual Purpose ◽  
New Era ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Tenant Farmer ◽  
Agricultural Laborers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tenant Farmers

AbstractThis paper offers a fresh anarchist history of modern rural experience at the heart of Japan's modernization project in Hokkaido. The rationalization of agricultural methods and the establishment of big farms in Hokkaido worked by tenant farmers served the dual purpose of both colonizing and modernizing Japan's northern frontier. Against the idea of progress imbued in that colonial project, the anarchist and celebrity writer, Arishima Takeo, liberated his tenant farmers by dissolving his tenant farm in Niseko in 1922. The farmers were made the new cooperative owners. Members of the farm, made famous during widespread tenant-farmer disputes, believed they stood at the heart of progress. ‘Sōgo fujō’ (mutual aid) was viewed as an ethic for social transformation, democracy and elimination of hierarchy that linked the farmers with the wider world. It was the farmers’ consciousness of working in a new era, better than ever before, that made them modern. Their community offers us a case study of the imagination and experience of modern temporality amongst the most unlikely subjects of the modern, ordinary agricultural laborers in rural Asia in the early twentieth century. This anarchist history challenges the conceptual framework that has categorized rural Japan as the seat of conservative politics, nativism and traditionalism, and the antithesis of modernity.

Exportation of Manpower: A Case Study of Chinese Seasonal Laborers in an Agricultural District in Hokkaido

2020 ◽  
Vol 03 (02) ◽  
pp. 2050005
Author(s):  
Yoshihisa Godo ◽  
Tai Wei Lim
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Capita Income ◽  
National Average ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Agricultural Industry ◽  
Agricultural Laborers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Wage Increases

Chiebun District in Hokkaido, one of Japan’s largest vegetable- producing districts, has a long history of accepting agricultural laborers from China. Previously, farms in Chiebun District recruited seasonal laborers from the northeastern part of China, where per-capita income is much lower than China’s national average. At that time, the main reason Chinese laborers came to work in Chiebun District was to earn money. However, because of wage increases in China, it became difficult for Chiebun District farms to recruit these seasonal laborers. Around the same time, consumers’ demands for new types of vegetables were increasing in other regions such as Hebei, Henan, and Shandon Provinces, creating the need to train the farmers in these areas. Farms in Chiebun District provide comfortable living and working conditions for Chinese laborers. In return, the Chinese laborers, as indispensable manpower, contribute to the prosperity of the local agricultural industry in Chiebun District. As such, Chiebun District presents a model of a reciprocal relationship between Japanese farms and Chinese seasonal laborers.

Marxism, Economic Theory, and Asian American Literary Studies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Chiang
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Cheap Labor ◽  
Japanese Internment ◽  
Money Economy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Inquiry ◽  
And Gender

As migrants who were drawn to North America to serve as cheap labor, questions of money, economy, and class have been central to Asian American experiences from the mid-19th century, and Marx’s critique of capitalism has circulated almost as long among Asian Americans and anticolonial, nationalist movements in Asia. However, the long history in the communist movement of the subordination of racial and gender inequality to a narrowly defined class struggle alienated many in US racialized communities. Subsequent interventions in Marxist theory leading to non-economically determinist accounts of social transformation have resulted in a post-Marxist Asian American literary and cultural studies. This is a theory, though, that is largely devoid of specifically economic inquiry, and this has led to the marginalization of questions of class, labor, and whiteness that might complicate questions about resistance to domination and capitalist hegemony. These elisions are only exacerbated in the turn to global and transnational frames of analysis, since the complexities of local racial dynamics are often lost in more abstract narratives and conceptual paradigms. The history of Japanese internment provides a case study that exemplifies some of the difficulties of evaluating the multiple forces motivating racial discrimination.

Bingo Capitalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Bedford
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Diverse Economies ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Gambling Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Political Economic

Bingo Capitalism uses bingo—a female-dominated and notoriously self-effacing game—to think differently about regulation and political economy. A key objective is to make bingo, as lens, more central to our debates about the regulation of economy and society. Part I sets the scene, responding to the query: why bingo? Part II explores the legal and political history of bingo. Part III analyses the regulation of people, while Part IV examines the regulation of products, places, and technologies. In so doing, the book uses bingo to better understand the role of the state in shaping the classed and gendered interrelation between diverse economies, especially in relation to non-commercial and commercial gambling. Bingo Capitalism offers the first sociolegal account of bingo as a globally significant and immensely popular pastime, centring implementation experiences alongside the broader political, economic, and social context to legislative reform. While considering the perspectives of lawmakers, who have debated what the game reflects about the nation and its economy, the book also centres the experiences of those who work in, and play, bingo, to trace how gambling law and regulation impact people in everyday life. The book identifies the central historical role of non-commercial, mutual aid play to UK gambling law and policy, and traces the ongoing relevance of this realm for current debates about the interrelation between capitalist and more-than-capitalist everyday economies. Bingo Capitalism also uses bingo as a case study of research into the gendered nature of regulation, showing how gender shapes, and is shaped by, diverse state rules on gambling.

The Customer-Focused Business Care

2011 ◽  
pp. 106-128
Author(s):  
Craig LeClair
Keyword(s):  
Technology Adoption ◽  
Business Case ◽  
Strategic Objectives ◽  
New Era ◽  
Software Companies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Difficult Issue

This chapter first describes challenges that software companies face in making a strong business case to prospective customers. These include a history of solutions falling short of projected business case expectations, the customer’s unique perspective of costs and the difficult issue of technology adoption. Secondly, a process for building the software company’s business case in the new era is discussed. The process uses strategic frameworks to estimate and validate strategic objectives. Lastly, we look at a case study of e-docs that developed a unique way to manage unpredictable technology adoption.

scholarly journals ‘The Free-Flying Natural Woman Boobs of Yore’? the Body Beyond Representation in Feminist Accounts of Objectification

2020 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-88
Author(s):  
Hannah McCann
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Representational Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Feminist Movements

This article takes up references to breasts as a key case study to examine white Western feminist debate around embodiment and objectification. Tracking shifting understandings of ‘the gaze’ in these accounts, we find that objectification is often rendered singular, ahistorical and, increasingly, individually internalised. The history of these approaches to objectification helps to explain why during the early 2000s, theorisations of feminist politics-lost were often rhetorically located alongside discussions of surgically modified breasts as a symbol of a new era of ‘fake’ feminism. In contrast, the 2010s saw several feminist movements premised on exposure of flesh and claims to individual recuperation of bodily autonomy. This article contends that both of these perspectives rely on a notion, built over successive eras of white Western feminist thought, that political work can and ought to be done through the body as a site of representational politics. This article subsequently offers a brief insight into how we might queer our approach to breasts to better account for the messiness of experiences of the flesh, considering the personal as political, while not investing in the body as the site where politics must be enacted.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

Turning Aliens into Socialists

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jessica Moberg
Keyword(s):  
Outer Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Swedish History ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Highly Evolved

Immediately after the Second World War Sweden was struck by a wave of sightings of strange flying objects. In some cases these mass sightings resulted in panic, particularly after authorities failed to identify them. Decades later, these phenomena were interpreted by two members of the Swedish UFO movement, Erland Sandqvist and Gösta Rehn, as alien spaceships, or UFOs. Rehn argued that ‘[t]here is nothing so dramatic in the Swedish history of UFOs as this invasion of alien fly-things’ (Rehn 1969: 50). In this article the interpretation of such sightings proposed by these authors, namely that we are visited by extraterrestrials from outer space, is approached from the perspective of myth theory. According to this mythical theme, not only are we are not alone in the universe, but also the history of humankind has been shaped by encounters with more highly-evolved alien beings. In their modern day form, these kinds of ideas about aliens and UFOs originated in the United States. The reasoning of Sandqvist and Rehn exemplifies the localization process that took place as members of the Swedish UFO movement began to produce their own narratives about aliens and UFOs. The question I will address is: in what ways do these stories change in new contexts? Texts produced by the Swedish UFO movement are analyzed as a case study of this process.

A Case Study on the Process of Creating Interests in History of History-Deokhu

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Young-Seok Seo ◽  
Bong-Seok Kim
Keyword(s):  
History Of
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