“Marches Don’t work”―An Engineer’s Vision for Remaking Participatory Democracy in Japan
Introducing “Japan Changer,” a web service that faxes protest messages to every office in the Japanese Diet
by Yuta Hagiwara
If Japanese people from twenty years ago were to time travel from to the present-day National Diet Building, they might not believe what they saw.
“What in the world is going on here?” our quantum leapers from the 90s might say.
A few decades ago, Japanese people were routinely pigeonholed in the global media for being passive and indifferent to politics. This summer, however, thousands of ordinary citizens converged on the Diet Building to voice opposition to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s proposed security bill — which, if passed, will revise the Japanese constitution to expand the nation’s military operations overseas. Stereotyped for so long as “modest” and “unwilling to voice personal opinions,” the Japanese seem to be entering a full-fledged season of protest.
But one politically-minded citizen takes a dim view of marches and public demonstrations as tools of opposition politics. His name is Fukuyuki Murakami. An IT engineer who began his career at Matsushita Electronics and works today as a developer of apps and web services, Murakami says he has run out of patience with “the total ineffectiveness” of mainstream political protest.
Since the Fukushima Earthquake struck Japan in 2011, lively political demonstrations have become more and more common, with citizens gathering all over Tokyo in opposition to everything from nuclear energy to the Abe administration’s State Secrets Protection Bill. Suddenly, political protest is drawing closer to the lives of ordinary Japanese that it has been in years. Demonstrations and marches have become more and more popular as means for ordinary people to make their views heard — and young Japanese, who in previous generations had been notorious for showing no interest in politics, have thrown themselves enthusiastically into the new wave of opposition.
But for all their seeming resurgence, Murakami says these demonstrations are “effectively meaningless.”
“You’ll see people holding one march after another in shopping districts like Shinjuku and Shibuya, but there aren’t any politicians in these places. Or they’ll have a standing demonstration in front of the Prime Minister’s official residence or the National Diet Building — but once Diet members finish their deliberations, they just go home. So you end up with a bunch of people chanting ‘stop Abe!’ in front of an empty building. That seems pretty ridiculous.”
If that were Murakami’s only opinion on the subject, he might not sound much different from the sarcastic, self-involved techie stereotype so often associated with men in the engineering industry. But the real Fukuyuki Murakami is far from a nihilist, and he certainly hasn’t thrown away his hopes for the future. As proof of his dedication to social change, in July Murakami launched “Japan Changer” ( http://japanchanger.x0.to/), an alternative platform for political protest that he considers more effective than marches and demonstrations.
By filling out a web form and paying a fee of ¥4,800 (about $40), users of Japan Changer can have a statement of protest automatically faxed to all 717 members of the Japanese Diet. At first Murakami had planned to have the service send mass protest e-mails, but he gave up on that when he learned that only 124 Diet members have public addresses. Undeterred, he turned his attention to a quaint holdover from an older generation of technology: the fax machine.
Even though e-mail ostensibly forced fax machines into obsolescence a generation ago, they’re still an active part the Japanese Diet’s day-to-day operations. Even the Diet’s operating hours are still announced by fax. If he could use fax technology to communicate people’s political discontent, Murakami thought, lawmakers would find it much harder to ignore them.
“Flooding the Diet’s fax machines is a way to exercise civil disobedience by forcibly disrupting the business of the Diet. But to keep from interfering too much with day-to-day operations, I have all the faxes sent in one batch in the middle of the night.” Even in protest, Murakami shows consideration to his recipients.
Today, both houses of the Diet are controlled by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which possesses a majority large enough, in principle, to allow it to pass any law it wants. In casual conversation, Murakami compares this situation to a videogame set to “No-Enemies Mode,” but behind the flippant analogy he betrays genuine concern that Japanese politics has reached a turning point in the country’s seventy-year history of postwar democracy.
“No matter how many people oppose the new security laws, the LDP has 326 seats in the Lower House and 115 in the Upper House — more than enough to pass the bill. All of this puts Japanese democracy in a very precarious position. Right now, I feel like the government is rushing down a path that shows little concern for the wishes or happiness of its citizens.”
Just two weeks after the platform’s launch, dozens of users had registered with Japan Changer. The service maintains a politically inclusive policy and says it will send any demand to the Diet, regardless of content. “As long as it’s not illegal,” Murakami says, “Japan Changer will fax it.”
On his personal blog, Murakami’s profile is riddled with self-deprecating humor that portrays him as almost stereotypically nerdy. He describes himself as “bad at human interaction” and proudly declares that “I never have anyone to meet on my day off, so I spend all day inside on the internet.” Between his rapidfire snark and odd mannerisms, most people, for better or worse, would probably think of Murakami as a prototypical computer otaku.
Yet behind the otaku demeanor lies an activist deeply committed to political change. In addition to launching Japan Changer, Murakami has used social media to raise millions of yen for disaster relief in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines. His mind, it seems, is a combination of data-obsessed otaku — completely absorbed in his own world — and maverick social reformer, committed to making positive changes in the world around him. How did this unusual synthesis come about?
“I used to work at Matsushita Electronics,” explains Murakami, who today is employed at Panasonic. “There, employees were taught that we should always strive to do work that has social and cultural significance.”
As Murakami tells his story, he keeps coming back to the Matsushita company pledge: “everyone in industry devotes himself to doing good work, with his mind set on improving life in society and contributing to the growth of world culture.” These, Murakami explains, are the words of company founder Konosuke Matsushita, a businessman revered throughout Japan as “the God of Management.”
“If you think of, say, a securities firm, a place like that is bound to value high revenues and record-breaking profits, but by itself that isn’t something that deserves anyone’s respect. If we’re talking about making an impact on society or making a positive contribution to culture, a company like NicoNico Douga [a popular Japanese video sharing site] deserves more respect than a place like that. Companies that just hoard money aren’t respected because they don’t leave anything behind for the next generation.”
In addition, Murakami’s family have owned and operated a lumber company for four generations, and the founder of Japan Changer says his family’s values played a huge role in shaping his worldview. Despite being in commerce for nearly a century, Murakami says his family always taught him that “a businessman must be charitable.”
“If you get money from other people you have to give something back — that’s what I always heard growing up. People in business understand how to make money, so they have an obligation to give support to places like temples, orphanages, galleries, museums, and developing nations. My family always made a point of making major contributions to temple building funds. Compared to them, I’m still working on a pretty small scale.”
Murakami takes no profit from Japan Changer or from his other fundraising activities. In fact, he says these projects have involved a huge expenditure of funds, labor, and time from him. In 2014, Murakami collected relief contributions for victims of Typhoon Hagupit, which killed over 10,000 people in the Philippines. But when processing issues prevented him from withdrawing the funds from PayPal, he reraised three million yen (roughly $24,120), paying for much of the contribution out of his own pocket. Why would he put himself through so much personal trouble just for charity?
“If you’re only living for money, you don’t really have anything. It’s like the old saying, ‘he who owns all the land can’t eat all the food’ [‘tenka tottemo nigōhan.’] No matter how rich a person is, he can’t eat all the rice [gohan] in the world. You have to use the money you make for the betterment of society. When I decided to rereaise the three million yen I knew I was going to have to pay most of it myself — but even when you lose money, you can always make more.”
Armed with old-fashioned community values and modern web technology, this unusual engineer has set his sights on creating new revolutions in Japanese society.
(photo: Daisuke Hayata translation: Michael Craig)
Originally published at ignition.co.
