[DEBATE] : FThe workers in Kamagasaki and G8

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Andrej Grubacic
<balkanozapatista at gmail.com> wrote:
> The workers  in Kamagasaki area in Osaka are rioting right now.
> This is unrelated to the G8, but it began on the very day that the G8
> meeting of the economic ministers took place.
>
> ....
> You can read about Kamagasaki in the following:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamagasaki

Wikipedia doesn't mention it, but out of the riots in the long sixties
were born various unions and other organizations of day laborers.
Aoki Hideo's Japan's Underclass: Day Laborers and the Homeless (Trans.
Teresa Castelvetere, Trans Pacific Press, 2006) is perhaps the best
and most recent book-length study, though the work of Tsuru Tamiko is
also useful.

It's interesting that Japanese academics who called for the Counter G8
International Forum didn't think of starting the discussion of
neoliberal capitalism and precarious labor with the history of such
workers' organizations in Japan.  The points of departure for them (at
least as they are spelled out in their call
<http://www.counterg8forum.org/information.html>) are the Zapatistas,
the Battle of Seattle, etc.

Yoshie