[Gipfelsoli Newsletter] Hokkaido

[International Newsletter]

Update on G8 repression and the riot situation in Kamagasaki

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. 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. (A shield captured
from cops by riot participants)

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.

Tabi Rounin was thankfully released after a week in jail, and is back home The
Rakunan Union can be contacted at the following address: Kyoto-fu Uji-shi
Hironocho Nishiura 99-14 Pal Dai-ichi Biru 3F Rakunan Union Jiritsu Roudou
Kumiai Rengou TEL:0774-43-8721　Fax:0774-44-3102

Updates about the situation in Kamagasaki are being posted here (Japanese)
http://www1.odn.ne.jp/~cex38710/thesedays13.htm
Source: email