This podcast seeks to challenge the commonly held assumptions about Japan as harmonious, homogeneous, and traditional by recasting its history as a history of conflict and change, as the history of class struggles, from anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and intersectional perspectives.
https://againstjapanism.buzzsprout.com
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 1 day 15 hours 28 minutes
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The History of Marxism in Japan w/ Gavin Walker - Part 2
Against Japanism presents Part 2 of an interview with Dr. Gavin Walker about the history of Marxism in Japan, focusing on the postwar period starting in the late 1940s.
First, we discuss the reason behind the Japanese Communist Party’s re-emergence as a mass party in the immediate postwar period. As mentioned in Part 1, in the 1920s and 30s, the JCP was a member of the Communist International or the Comintern (also known as the Third International) headquartered in the Soviet Union...
The History of Marxism in Japan w/ Gavin Walker - Part 1
In this two part series, Kota sits down with Gavin Walker to discuss the history of Marxism in Japan. Instead of simply narrating the facts of this history chronologically, we focus on particular theoretical and political questions that animated the Japanese communist movement before and after the Second World War...
A Fundraising Appeal from Pato-chan
This mini-episode features a message from Pat (also known as Pato-chan), a trans woman from the Philippines and a former migrant detainee living in Japan, who is raising funds to support herself during her "provisional release" (Karihoumen in Japanese) which prohibits her from working and accessing healthcare. Donate here or here. Sign this petition to defeat the "Immigration Law Revision Bill...
Translating the Japanese Ideology: The Anti-Fascist Philosophy of Tosaka Jun w/ Robert Stolz - Part 2
In the second part of an interview with Robert Stolz, we continue our conversation about the affinity between fascism and liberalism, as well as the difference between idealist and materialist philosophies theorized by Tosaka Jun in his book The Japanese Ideology from 1935...
Translating the Japanese Ideology: The Anti-Fascist Philosophy of Tosaka Jun w/ Robert Stolz - Part 1
In this two part series, Kota is joined by Robert Stolz to discuss the anti-fascist philosophy of Tosaka Jun, a Marxist philosopher and cultural critic active during the 1930s.
Tosaka is often associated with the Kyoto School, a group of academics who studied together at Kyoto Imperial University, led by his academic advisor Nishida Kitaro, influenced by German idealist philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger...
Orientalism and Reactionary Ideologies in Video Games w/ Kazuma Hashimoto and Andrew Kiya
Kota is joined by Kazuma Hashimoto and Andrew Kiya to discuss the Ghost of Tsushima, its fetishization of the samurai through a misinterpretation of Kurosawa Akira's films, Cyberpunk 2077, how Orientalism and the idealization of Japan in these games (re-packaged and exported abroad through the Japanese state's "Cool Japan" initiative) enable the far right pro-imperialist politics both in ideology and practice...
episode 1: Introduction to the Against Japanism Podcast
Warm and militant greetings!
I'm your host Kota and welcome to the Against Japanism Podcast: Destabilizing Japanese History from the Left! In this introductory episode, I discuss the goals of this podcast and the principles behind it, and preview the upcoming episodes that I have already recorded and will be published here very soon...