Did the movements of “1968” change societies fundamentally worldwide? This article examines “1968” from the perspective of Japanese history. Japan's “1968” shared such common elements with “1968” in other countries, as the social background, development of visual media, and progress of modernization. This article investigates Japan's “1968” in light of the common background and characteristics of the movements in Japan and globally. I conclude that “1968” was a product of the resonance of unrelated phenomena throughout the world, and many evaluations of “1968” confuse the general trend of modernization with the specific influences of the movements.

In this essay I provide an account of a series of commemorative events held in Eastern Australia since the compound disaster of March 2011 occurred in Fukushima in Northeastern Japan. Individuals expressed transnational solidarity through the embodied experience of attending and participating in local events. Reflecting on these events reminds us of the entangled and mutually imbricated histories of Japan and Australia, and the ways in which various individuals and groups are positioned in the global networks of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry.

In this essay I explore the way the internet has facilitated people's participation in anti-nuclear activism in Japan. After contextualising the use of the internet in the anti-nuclear movement which developed after the compound disaster of “3/11”, I present a case study focused on the tweet messages of one twitter user. By undertaking content analysis, tracing tweets over time, and tracing the connections between particular vocabulary items, and an interview, we gain a picture of how one participant in the anti-nuclear movement developed a political consciousness through participating in internet-facilitated activism.

In contemporary Japan Ainu women create spaces of cultural vitalization wherein they transit between Ainu identity determined by their natal relationships and actively negotiating with Ainu identity through their art. Engaging in self-craft through cloth arts has empowered Ainu women to imagine new expressions of self and to redefine their identities as Ainu or mixed ancestry, and thus reflects women's lived realities and struggles. Women's clothwork, as well as musical performance and other arts, has also been pivotal to the Ainu Indigenous rights movement and to cultural revitalization efforts. By carefully positioning heritage cloth, ritual regalia, and ancestral patterns as mouthpieces of Ainu indigeneity, Ainu women have leveraged traditional knowledge to claim Indigenous rights in UN forums and the Japanese Diet.

As such, Ainu women move between “being Ainu,” a racist label attached to Ainu bodies by settler society, to actively “becoming Ainu” and determining what this means on their own terms. The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum, and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and Indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles.

History tends to memorialize the stars and leaders, yet both musical and social movements are also made possible by people who work in the background, organize, seed trends, and otherwise help make things happen. The Japanese rap pioneer and activist ECD, who passed away on January 24, 2018, was neither the earliest nor most commercially successful rapper, and he would have eschewed calling himself a leader of any protest group. Nonetheless, he was what Gramsci would have called an organic intellectual of the working class. The frankness of his music, writing, and performances touched his audiences at an affective level, connecting them to the movements in which he participated. This article looks back at his life, which embodied the worlds of hip-hop, contentious politics, and the working class. It also examines his songs, which not only convey a vivid account of his life, but also reflect his personal and political concerns as well as the ambience of street protests. ECD was a key figure in the development of the underground hip-hop scene, organizing events that allowed it to take root and be lifted into commercial viability. He was on the front lines of several Japanese social movements—anti-Iraq War, anti-nuclear power, anti-racist, pro-democracy, and anti-militarization. He wrote protest anthems, inspired Sprechchor, performed at protests, and helped to establish a new mode of participatory performance, which engaged protesters more fully. His sheer presence at demonstrations, constant and reliable, energized and reassured protesters. Part I describes his years as a hip-hop pioneer, and Part II portrays his role in Japanese social movements of this century.

While Hong Kong's Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) Movement in 2019 did not lead to systemic policy changes, the protests provided coalitional moments for mainstream Hongkongers to connect with the city's marginalised South Asian community. This essay first contextualises the positionality and history of marginalisation of South Asians in Hong Kong. It then examines moments of rupture during the Anti-ELAB Movement that fostered solidarity between the two ethnic groups. This case study illustrates how anti-authoritarian social movements and the affective charge of protests help cultivate a politics of relation that supersedes racialisation.

In addition to a citizen initiative to launch a criminal lawsuit against Tepco and Japanese state executives over their responsibility for the Fukushima nuclear disaster, more than thirty collective civil actions have been launched across the country. Thus far, thirteen verdicts have been handed down, with a large majority of courts ruling against Tepco and the state. Despite disappointingly small amounts of compensation, these verdicts carry important sociological significance as they challenge the government's efforts to restart nuclear power plants. This article provides an overview and typology of the lawsuits, showing that these civil actions build on a legacy of social movements organized by networks of lawyers and activists.

Femonationalism, or the selective use of feminist discourse to advance far-right causes, has often been analyzed through the lens of party politics. Shifting the focus to grassroots activists, this article studies a group of far-right female activists in France organized as a women-only collective of “identitarian feminists” to explore how these grassroots activists articulate anti-feminist frames while also appropriating selective aspects of feminism. The study relies on three types of empirical data: a long-term digital observation of the collective, a critical analysis of documents, and 10 semi-structured interviews. These data reveal that these activists diverge from traditional anti-feminism and instead reflect a femonationalist appropriation of feminism. This appropriation can be seen in three interconnected frames used by the collective in the fight against street harassment: an opposition to intersectional feminism, the use of postfeminist frames, and the racialization of sexism.

What are the characteristics of a political protest that enable it to win public support, and what is the role of the political environment? The literature has argued about the characteristics that induce the public to sympathize with protesters (such as the identity of the protesters, their demands, and their methods), but little research has focused on the role of the political context, which includes the presence of other protests making different (or even opposite) demands, the contrasting identity of the protesters, and protest methods. In the research reported in this study, we focused on two protests that unfolded during 2023–24 in Italy (protests by environmental activists and farmers/livestock raisers) to investigate the impact of protesters' identity on public perceptions of their action's legitimacy, when two protests with contrasting aims but similar methods occur at the same time. We used a pre-registered randomized experimental design that manipulated the sequence in which a sample of respondents was presented with descriptions of protests by both groups. Our findings suggest that the sequence in which protests are presented significantly affect respondents' perceptions. Once primed with the evaluation of the farmers' protests, in fact, they perceive climate activists' actions as more legitimate. Our results suggest that people tend to comparatively evaluate social movements and to adjust their opinions accordingly when exposed to cognitively dissonant information.

Esta investigación plantea que el espacio urbano contribuye a la caracterización de movimientos sociales urbanos. Para ello, hace un análisis espacial cartográfico del Paro Nacional de 2021 en Bogotá y Cali (Colombia), el cual se realizó a partir de un mapeo de los lugares y tipos de protesta mediante revisión de prensa y redes sociales. Se encontraron patrones que permiten evidenciar estrategias de ocupación espacial de la protesta, así como una dispersión que caracteriza la agencia ciudadana. También se evidenció cómo la pobreza determina la selección de lugares por proximidad y visibilidad, mas no intersección, y que los sistemas de transporte guían la dispersión en función de su significado como materialidad del Estado. Finalmente, se identificó cómo tensiones sobre los bordes territoriales consolidan desplazamiento de las acciones del interior de los barrios o a los límites, lo que apoya procesos de territorialización que identifican a los movimientos sociales urbanos emergentes.