Free to Protest
Well maybe.
A small update on a post I write a while back about the struggle for student political activities at Hosei University in Tokyo.
Five university student, who had been charged in June 2009 with acts of violence and vandalism and acquitted in May 2012, were cleared again in February of this year after the Court of Appeal admitted the evidence against them was inconclusive.
The students (four from the University and one student activist formerly from Tohoku University) were detained for 8 months as the police tried to extract confessions from them. Confessions are often the only form of evidence available to the prosecution due to lackadaisical or inept police work. Though it is well known that many are given under duress and unsafe (indeed a lot are withdrawn as soon as the defendant reaches a courtroom) in the Japanese courts they carry a lot of weight and thus lead to a very high conviction rate. The lack of any self-incriminating confession by the Hosei Five (as they came known) plus inadequate CCTV footage and witness statements left the court no choice to to reject the appeal brought by the university.
Now the former students, Taku Arai, Makoto Masui, Ryo Onda, Yuichi Utsumi and Yosuke Oda, with the support of the radical student union, Zengakuren are free to spearhead the fight against the authorities at Hosei University who they accuse of suppressing human-rights like free speech and student political participation along with broader, neo-liberal crimes such as profiting from education, by increasing student fees and outsourcing.
Since the troubles began at the university in 2006, there have been 125 people arrested or indicted for offences related to activism and eight Hosei students have been suspended indefinitely. Three of the Hosei Five were also expelled and in a protest on Friday last week (April 25th) several of those that had been affected by the campus’s clampdown noisily demanded the university publicly apologise to them and the other students that were caught up in the troubles and reinstate the students that were excluded.
About 60 people took apart in the protest which was policed by a roughly equal number of Tokyo’s finest and the private Hosei security guards. Just as last time the rally was noisy but small and mostly ignored by the other students, a handful of whom came to watch. There was one pantomime-like attempt to break the cordon and gain access to the university (top photo).
But the only real violence I saw was committed against one of the protesters: As activists, Yuhimaru Takeda and Makoto Masui (second photo) took up positions on the sidewalk to give a speech, an old man, pushing a wheelchair, took umbrage at the minute inconvenience he suffered in manoeuvring the even older lady in the chair around the protest by kicking Takeda hard in the chest. The young man went spilling across the road towards the main protest and the police van before regaining his balance and resuming his position on the sidewalk. he was winded and shocked but aside from angrily shouting questions at the attacker as he walked off, he did nothing. The police did nothing to apprehend the attacker also of course.
For a more in depth analysis of the issues regarding the protests at Hosei University and the court cases surrounding them have a look at this article by William Andrews in the Japan Times. With a couple of my images from Friday to accompany it.
More images of the Friday protest at Hosei University in Tokyo are available at my archive here:
Later
Very busy
Damon
School Days
The school year starts in April in Japan. But not for Ikuma Saito in the top picture. He has been expelled from Hosei University for membership of zengakuren, a militant left wing group that has been protesting the limits on freedom of expression imposed by the university on their group as it was handing out fliers on campus; plus numerous expulsions, suspensions and alleged beatings of students labelled as trouble makers.
Hosei is a large private university with a good reputation for studies of law. Saito san is (was) himself a law student and is an eloquent, impassioned and very entertaining speaker on what he sees are the unfair practices of university management: these include not just the repression of student political activity but also, according to a Zengakuren flier handed out at today’s demo, the steady privatization and monetization of Japanese education.
The protests take place everyday around lunch time outside the campus’s main entrance in Ichigaya though an injunction does forbid students from “loitering, putting up banners and making speeches within 200 metres” of the campus. This has led to many arrests and detentions and it was these “unjust punishments” that today’s, larger, rally was all about. With support from other left-wing union groups and other student activists from other universities, perhaps 300 people gathered outside the gate with a large force of police and private security men facing them. Not so secret policemen photographed and filmed the protesters, (a common occurrence in the UK apparently but pretty limited to the extreme leftwing here in Japan) and took copious notes of all and everything as the protest was moved, back off a public sidewalk where banners were displayed and students had been handing out fliers, to a small path in a riverside park on the opposite side of the road. After speeches from other expelled and suspended students like Masami Kuraoka (second image) the protest moved off in a short circuitous march of unimportant back streets to chants of “Whose University? Our University!” and “Free the prison university, Hosei!”
As we passed shops and private houses, whose residents and workers looked out bemusedly at the marching students, it struck me that the authorities wanted to really keep this low profile. As the protest started the blinds in all the windows of the university facing it were shut so the students inside couldn’t see the event and in the past students have been attacked and detained for reporting or photographing demonstrations, so I was a little worried. Mostly the police here in Japan are at a loss when it comes to dealing with gaijin photographers and journalists and tend to tell you what to do a lot (if they even speak to you) but are not quite sure how actually to move you out of the way or get you to follow instructions when you just act dumb to the language or even basically ignore them. This is an advantage sometimes like the time I photographed ex-Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe. Yet at this demo there was not a whole lot of respect for the authority in the air and the police and secret service didn’t let politeness or cultural confusion get in the way. I was there in the crowd of protesters so I was basically one of them in their minds!
I have never been touched by a policemen in Japan before today but a number of times this afternoon I was manhandled out of the way by thuggish secret service men. Indeed one walked with me a while and bumped into me on purpose a few times as I was taking pictures. Or so it seemed to me but that could just be my excuse for too many images with camera shake!!! I did see one secret service man pick up the umbrella that had fallen off the rucksack of activist photographer and give it back to him though. The photographer didn’t say thank you which I thought, considering the usual behavior of the police this day, just a little rude.
An interesting day, too late to write more, there is of course a deeper, ideological debate to be had on the issue. There are more angles to this report and story and more characters to illuminate and record. There is a mountain of research I have to do before I can even make head or tail of my opinions and direction on the things I want to shoot and write regarding this but it is nearly 3am, and I have a kids’ day tomorrow so better go to bed.
See more images of left wing protest in Japan at my photoshelter archive here.
Later
Damon
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sungypsy blog 
