japan

Abolish Israel

From Institute of Barbarian Books

Anarchists are, after all, people who tend to be committed by principle to working towards abolishing not just the police and incarceration systems, but the very States we live in themselves (along with having dispensed of any illusion about justice under international law). Israel is a culmination of the worst aspects of authority and State power anarchists profess to oppose. Abolition is not only a natural objective, but a necessary one.

Life of anarchist-feminist revisited 100 years after her murder

From The Japan Times
September 11, 2023

Sept. 16 will mark 100 years since the brutal killing of Noe Ito, a Japanese anarchist, author and social critic of the Meiji and Taisho eras, who was targeted and killed in the massacres that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Beehive Design Collective: Reportback from 2023 Asia Pacific tour

From Beehive Design Collective
August 14, 2023

From February until May 2023, our family of Bees went to the Asia Pacific region to tour with the Beehive’s True Cost of Coal and Mesoamérica Resiste graphics, inspiring discussions about the intersections of colonialism, resource extraction, corporate globalization, workers movements and climate change. All in all, we did over 100 presentations at 70 different events, including an 8,000-person electronic music festival, a buddhist temple, bookstores, occupations, street parties, community centres, conferences, cafes, protests and 12 different schools, from middle schools to universities in Aotearoa, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Japan.

Sugako – Advance 2021

The lyrics are concerned with the name sake of the group, Kanno Sugako, a Japanese anarchist journalist interested in the liberation of women and humanity as a whole. She was executed by hanging on January 25, 1911 by the Japanese government due to her connections to the High Treason Incident, a plot by a group of socialists and anarchist to assassinate the Emperor Meiji. 26 people were arrested of which twelve were hanged to death despite the lack of direct evidence. Two more were sentenced to eight and eleven years of prison respectively and the remaining twelve were sentenced to life imprisonment. Sugako was the last person to be killed.

Part 1 & 2: The Japanese Anarchist Women Who Kept Trying to Kill Emperors

From Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

Margaret talks with comedian and podcast host Brodie Reed about Kaneko Fumiko and Kanno Suga, two Japanese anarchist women who did their best to end the lives of emperors and almost changed history.

The Father of “Self-Reliance”: Korea’s Nationalist Turned Anarchist Visionary, Sin Chae-ho

from Center for a Stateless Society

North and South Korea don’t have much in common today, after decades spent in very different political and economic systems.

However, there is one thing both sides of the DMZ have inherited: the concept of minjok, a word that translates as “people” but can refer, more broadly, to both the Korean nation and the Korean race. As such, it’s common on both sides of the Korean Peninsula to say that there is only one Korean nation, one that was divided against the will of the minjok, and that unification is inevitable. 

Another commonality: the two Koreas both got the term from an early 20th-century liberal-turned-anarchist who would be appalled at how the two nations have used his idea since. 

Hapax 13 "Pandemic" has been published

Most of the included texts were prepared half a year ago, and for various reasons they’re being published late. However (sadly) what’s presented here hasn’t aged in the least. “What the Virus Said,” which got a lot of responses on this blog, Bifo, Vaneigem, and others are as fresh as ever, and paired with “Two texts regarding contact tracing applications,” Lee Jingkyoung’s submission from South Korea, they should convey a new dimension of politics.

God is dead

...what struck me as wild on rereading Jakucho-san’s book was the staggering sense of passion and speed with which she moves from sex with Shusui to the plot to blow up the emperor. I could die right now, I’m doing this knowing I’ll die. That passion swells and explodes, leaving reason aside and connecting directly to terrorism. Of course, love and revolution are different things. But this book doesn’t let the reader feel that. Love makes people into bombs.

The swift rise and fall of Japanese anarchism

from japantimes.co by Michael Hoffman

Must there be nations, states, governments? What if the anarchists had won?

It’s an unlikely notion, so completely have they faded from the scene. But 100 years ago, in Japan as elsewhere, the anarchists numbered in their ranks philosophers, visionaries, conspirators and passionately committed fellow-travelers who saw anarchism — not anarchy, which they denied would ensue — as the inevitable and much preferable successor to the repressive, oppressive, retrograde piece of machinery known as the state.

Anti-Japan

In the early 70s, a group of young people - including ex-student radicals, disaffected party communists, and anarchists - went to war the Japanese state and society in the name of abolishing Japan itself. The following is the opening essay to the pamphlet Anti-Japan by Max Res detailing their lives and struggles along with some reflection on their continued relevance today. You can find this essay along with a partial translation of their manifesto/guerilla manual Hara Hara Tokei on the anarchist library or purchase a physical copy from Viscera (viscerapvd@protonmail.com) and other fine retailers of anarchist literature.

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