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Japan -High-school girl crusading against voter apathy

http://dailywitness.com/feature-high-school-girl-crusading-against-voter-apathy/

Image courtesy of Ploughshares.org

Aine, a 16-year-old high school girl, is a new breed of political activist. Leading a protest group of high school students, she is trying to make change happen in a country of endemic voter apathy that is feared to be drifting dangerously to the right.

Aine, who uses only her first name, formed the group, T-nsSOWL, in June last year together with other like-minded high school students. The group’s name is purported to stand for “Teens Stand up to Oppose War Law.”

The name is a reference to a set of new national security laws championed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to pave the way for the Self-Defense Forces to play a more active role overseas, an initiative seen by some people as a breach of the war-renouncing provision of the Japanese Constitution. The laws were enacted last September.

Aine’s group organizes protest activities in the busy streets of Shibuya and Harajuku in Tokyo, which are the haunts of high school students and other young people.

During last year’s Christmas season, it staged a protest march in Harajuku. To the tune of music flowing from a truck leading the march, Ryuki, 18, another group leader who also uses only his first name, cried out rap-ish slogans like “Protect the Constitution,” “Don’t kill anybody” and “Don’t look down on the people.”

Aine was clad in her school uniform as she led the march, which was joined by around a thousand protesters. Onlookers were using smartphones to take shots of the rare sight of high school students spearheading a political protest activity. To those people, Aine called out: “We are demonstrating against the national security laws. Let’s march together.”

Aine’s family background apparently had little influence in setting her on this course of activism. She lives with her parents, who work in building-related jobs and do not bring up politics at the dinner table.

Something akin to political awareness grew within her after the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, which took place when she was in her last year at elementary school. She began to sense a disconnect between what politicians were saying and what was actually happening.

Huge tsunami waves triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, spreading radioactive fallout, but the government continued to downplay the health risk. Meanwhile, the areas around the doomed nuclear plant have been kept off-limits for residents, many of whom still live in makeshift homes.

“That struck me as odd,” Aine said. “There were things that were too difficult to understand, but even children could see something was wrong.”

Over the following years, Japan’s political landscape changed. The Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan for most of the postwar period, took back power from the Democratic Party of Japan, and the Abe government arrived with a national security agenda that aroused suspicions that he would take Japan away from its pacifist path.

For Aine, the defining moment came on a December day in 2014, just before the last general election. Having gone through the ordeal of a term-end examination, Aine went shopping in Shibuya with friends, before moving on to the neighborhood of the Diet building. The area had become the locus of antigovernment protest around that time, later attracting droves of people outraged at the Abe government’s attempt to railroad the national security bills through parliament despite widespread voter reservations.

On that day, more than a thousand protesters were rallying against Japan’s new secrecy law, which toughens penalties for leakers of state secrets, in front of the nearby prime minister’s official residence under the leadership of a students’ group which would later evolve into SEALDs, a major protest movement against the new security legislation. Despite the intensity of such protest activities, voter indifference remained a problem, with the turnout at the general election falling to a record low of 52 percent.

Inspired by her experience of the protests around the Diet, Aine started to join protest rallies, and she got to know other students who would later become her allies in T-nsSOWL.

Aine said she did not feel uneasy, as a typical Japanese would do, about joining marches and rallies as a means to express protest. There is nothing special about ordinary people participating in such activities, she said, citing the kind of epoch-making popular movements that are taken up by history textbooks.

Talking about the history of her protest activities, Aine named a string of political events on which she has kept tabs. Among them were the landslide victory of Abe’s LDP in the 2014 general election, Abe’s visit to the United States to cement ties with Japan’s major military ally, and the hustle and bustle over the deliberation and enactment of the national security bills.

Aine’s group has now around 70 members, including 35 in the Kanto region that includes Tokyo. For her, talking with the group’s members about politics, war and peace is a valuable experience that can’t be gained in the classroom.

She is also hoping that her group’s activities will inject a breath of fresh air and a dose of energy into Japanese politics by shaking the business-as-usual mindset of politicians and by helping to nudge voters to the polls. “If high school students show interest in politics and go as far as to join demonstration activities, that will keep politicians on their toes and have an impact on ordinary people as well,” she said.

In the elections to the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of parliament, scheduled for this coming summer, high school students will cast ballots for the first time in Japan as the minimum voting age is lowered from 20 to 18. Unfortunately, Aine will be one year shy of the age limit at that time. But she is “not that disappointed,” saying what she cares about most is her fight against voter apathy.

February 7, 2016 - Posted by arclight2011part2 | Uncategorized