Updates on repression & revolt in Japan

Here are two updates about the situation in Japan, the first is
about the case of Tabi Rounin, and the second is about the wave of
repression against anti-g8 activity and the riots which erupted in
Osaka after a day-worker was brutally beaten. (This riots happened
the same day a preliminary G8 meeting was taking place in Osaka.)

----------------------------------------------

Update from ABC Osaka about anarchist Tabi Rounin

from the ABC:

We Denounce the Arrest of Squatter Activist and Comrade Tabi Rounin!

On the morning of June 5th, the squatter liberation activist Tabi
Rounin was arrested via warrant claiming that he was a member of
the "Black Helmets, a violent ultra-left group" and charged with
"falsifying address registration" (the 'crime' of registering his
driver's license at his parent's house), which led to his residence
being searched three times and 21 items being taken by the police
including his PC, cell phone, work resume, texts related to social
movements and flyers. Tabi was taken to Nara prefecture's Koriyama
police station and slapped with a 10 day extension of custody the
next day. Special detectives in Nara prefecture assigned to the
'ultra-left' and Osaka city public order police came to investigate.

We only feel contempt for the idiocy and greed for budget money
which motivates the public order police in their incessant tailing
and eavesdropping over the past six months.

Their focus was absolutely on the movement against the G8 summit,
foreign guests, Tabi Rounin's relationship with social and
solidarity movements, and of course the naked aim of economically
bankrupting Tabi Rounin, who had a job interview the next day. The
material seized in the search of his apartment verifies all this.

Thanks to all those who supported Tabi, we were able to win his
freedom on June 13th.. Allow us to thank you for your efforts and
support.

However the twists and turns continue here.

Hearing the story of a worker who was brutally beaten in the
investigation room of the Nishinari police department in
Kamagasaki, hundreds of day laborers and squatting/homeless workers
gathered for several days in response to the call of the Kamagasaki
labor union in front of the Nishinari police station and begun an
autonomous, physical struggle with many arrests in the late nights
after the labor unions leave.

One of our number who went to visit an arrestee in jail was stopped
by police and questioned, leading to our Free Worker offices here
in Osaka to be watched by public order police. Just yesterday, June
18th, our offices were searched in relation to another G8 arrestee
although no items were taken. We are preparing for second and third
waves of repression against our members.

Please keep a focus on the events here as they transpire.

June 17th, 2008

Anarchist Black Cross
Osaka-shi Kita-ku Nakazakicho 3-3-1-401
Jiyuu Roudousha Rengou Tsuke
Post office bank account (Yuubin Furikae Kouza) 00200-5-38572
Name (Meigi) S-16 Kokushoku Kyuuenkai
Mail : abc-j@sanpal.co.jp

---------------------------

In the Shadow of G8: Repression and Revolt in Japan

Over the past week and a half, an unprecedented political crackdown
has been enacted in advance of a series of economic summits around
the country. Despite this, the brave workers of Kamagasaki stood up
against the stiff security environment in riots against the brutal
beating of a day laborer over the past five days. The twin
situations of repression and revolt deserve to be examined in more
detail.

Repression

In the run-up to the series of summits, over 40 people were
arrested in pre-emptive sweeps of broad left and anarchist groups.

On May 29th, 38 people were arrested at Hosei University in Tokyo
at a political assembly against the G8. These large-scale arrests
were carried out by over 100 public security agents after the
students staged after a march across campus protesting the
summits.1 All of the arrestees are still jailed, and among them are
apparently some leadership of the Chuukaku-ha Leninist
organization, one of the largest organizations of its kind in Japan.

On June 4th, Tabi Rounin, an active anarchist from the Kansai
region, was arrested on accusation of having his address registered
at a location other than where he was living. When arrested, his
computer, cell phone, political flyers and more was taken from him;
these items were used when detectives interrogated him, asking him
about his relationship to internationals possibly arriving for the
G8, as well as his activity around Osaka. He would be the first
obviously political arrest masked as routine police work.

On June 12th, an activist from the Kamagasaki Patrol (an Osaka
squatter and anti-capitalist group), was arrested for allegedly
defrauding lifestyle assistance payments. This person has been
constantly followed by plainclothes police and even helicopters
during demonstrations. Clearly, his arrest was planned with the
idea of keeping him away from the major anti-summit mobilizations
and he will be held without bail for the maximum of 23 until the
summit is over. The office of an anarchist organization called the
Free Worker was raided in order to look for 'evidence' in this
comrade's case.

The same day the Rakunan union in Kyoto was raided, with police
officers searching their offices and arresting two of their members
on suspicion of fraudulent unemployment insurance receipt. One of
these two arrested are accused of funneling money received from
unemployment insurance to the Asian Wide Campaign, which was
organizing against the economic summits. In the meantime, Osaka
city mobilized thousands of police with the pretext of preventing
terrorism against the summit, setting up inspection points and
monitoring all around the city. But the strengthened state high on
its own power inevitably deployed it in violence, and turned the
day laborers of southern Osaka against it in riot.

Revolt

Kamagasaki is a traditionally day laborer neighborhood that has
experienced over thirty riots since the early 1960s. The last riot
in Kamagasaki was sparked in 1990 by police brutality and the
exposure of connections between the police and Yakuza gangs.

The causes this time were not much different. A man was arrested in
a shopping arcade near Kamagasaki and taken to the Nishinari police
station where he was punched repeatedly in the face by four
detectives one after another. Then he was kicked and hung upside
down by rope to be beaten some more.

He was released the next day and went to show his friends the
wounds from the beatings and the rope. This brought over 200
workers to surround the police station and demand that the police
chief come out and apologize. Later people also started demanding
that the four detectives be fired. Met with steel shields and a
barricaded police station, the crowd began to riot, throwing stones
and bottles into the police station. Scraps with the riot police
resulted in some of their shields and equipment being temporarily
seized. The riot stopped around midnight with the riot police being
backed into the police station. The next day they brought over 35
police buses and riot vehicles into the Naniwa police station with
the intention of using these against the rioters.

During the riot, the police surveilled rioters from the top of the
police station, from plainclothes positions and from a helicopter.
Riot police with steel shields were deployed all around the
neighborhood in strategic places to charge in when the action
kicked off. The workers organizations which by the second day were
maintaining the protest had chosen a good time to do so because the
police department proved unwilling to unleash the direct, brutal
charges seen in the 1990 riot due to the international spotlight
focused on them. On Saturday a police infiltrator was found in the
crowd, pushed up against a fence and smashed in the head with a
metal bar.

The riot has lasted since the 13th and every night there is a
resumption of hostility between the day laborers and the cops.
Workers so far refuse anything less than the fulfillment of their
demands in light of the police brutality incident. Despite the call
from more 'moderate' NGOs to 'stop the violence' there has been no
let-up in hostility towards the police, although the real level of
violent confrontation is not as strong as the weekend of the 13th-
15th. The riot has been characterized by the participation of young
people as well as the older day laborers in confrontation with the
police. As the guarantors of everyday exploitation under capitalism
who have to assertively maintain the constant dispossession of the
urban working class, the police have many enemies. This they are
finding out every night.

Over the past couple of days there have been points where more than
500 people have gathered and rioted around the neighborhood. Police
have responded mainly by defending the Nishinari police station,
their home base, while getting back up from the local Naniwa police
station, which has a riot countermeasure practicing lot, and holds
tens of anti-riot vehicles. Despite this mighty arsenal, the police
were perhaps surprised when they deployed their tear gas cannon on
the first day only to be met with cries of joy and laughter. The
use of force no longer has any spell of intimidation, it is simply
expected.

Still, the combined brutality of the police and their riot vehicles
has netted over 40 arrests (including of many young people), many
injuries and even blinded one worker with a direct shot of tear gas
water to his right eye.

The struggle here is inevitably limited by the particular
situations of day laborers, who are dispatched to their job sites
and have no direct access to the means of production that standard
wage workers would. This prevents them from for instance calling
political strikes against police brutality, and hitting powerful
interests in the city where they really hurt. As workers deprived
of these means to struggle, the day laborers will always have the
riot as a method not only of collective defense but for also
forcing concessions from the city in the form of expanding welfare
access, creating jobs, backing off of eviction campaigns etc. While
these are more or less important gains strictly in terms of
survival, it is important to explore the possibilities of spreading
the antagonism of the Kamagasaki workers to the larger population
of exploited people in order to imagine doing away with this power
structure once and for all.

It is unclear exactly where the situation is headed, but we can
know for sure that the real repression in Kamagasaki will arrive
after the summits have ended and the focus is off of the Japanese
government. Then we will see the raids, the arrests and the
scapegoating of particular individuals for the righteous outburst
of class violence that these riots are. Instead of quietly
accepting their fates as people to be trampled upon, the
participants have directly attacked the wardens of wage labor who
guarantee the violence of everyday slum life.

Overall, the ongoing repression against those involved in
organizing against the G8 summit as well as Kamagasaki should not
convince anyone that the ruling class here is once again afraid of
the working class. In repressing certain left groups organizing
against the economic summits, the Japanese government is more
interested in preventing a movement from emerging that starts to
question capital at the macro level, than actually attacking an
existing one. On the other hand in Kamagasaki, the state tries to
deny the possibility of antagonism in a major metropole and the
visibility of this revolt, for fear of it spreading. This is why
most news reports have blacked out the ongoing riots in Kamagasaki.
The concreteness and universality of the Kamagasaki revolt truly
threatens to expand beyond the borders of police violence. Visitors
to Kamagasaki from near and far have over the past five days
participated and found their own struggle in riots fought by total
strangers. The ruling class fears and knows that it cannot control
this horizontal sympathy and the real practice of revolt that
accompanies it.