The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 13 | Issue 7 | Number 4 | Feb 16, 2015

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The Internet and Personal Narratives in the Post-DisasterAnti-Nuclear Movement 災害後の脱原発運動におけるインターネットと個人の語り

Takanori Tamura

Abstract

In this essay I explore the way the internet hasfacilitated people's participation in anti-nuclearactivism in Japan. After contextualising the useof the internet in the anti-nuclear movementwhich developed after the compound disasterof "3/11", I present a case study focused on thetweet messages of one twitter user. Byundertaking content analysis, tracing tweetsover time, and tracing the connections betweenparticular vocabulary items, and an interview,we gain a picture of how one participant in theanti-nuclear movement developed a politicalconsciousness through participating ininternet-facilitated activism.

Keywords

Atomic Energy/Nuclear Power, Social Media,Social Movements

Introduction

In this essay I explore the role of the internet inanti-nuclear actions in Japan after thecompound disaster of 11 March 2011(hereafter "3/11"). The way people participatein the current anti-nuclear protests differs froman earlier generation of labour and socialistmovements. In the immediate post-SecondWorld War period individual participation insocial movements was typically facilitatedthrough membership of large hierarchicalorganisations such as political parties or theiraf f i l ia ted trade unions and cul turalassociations. In contemporary socialmovements, however, individual participation

in particular actions is less likely to be a resultof compliance with decisions made at theleadership level of a particular organisation. Itis more likely the result of individual decisionsto attend particular actions and events. Thestruggle against the ratification of theU.S.–Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960 wassomething of a watershed in the developmentof a more individualistic style of movementparticipation. Although large organisedgroupings such as the Japan Communist Party,the Japan Socialist Party and their affiliatesorganised huge numbers of people to attendanti-Anpo demonstrations this period also sawthe emergence of groups like the "Koe nakikoe" (voices of the voiceless) who emphasisedtheir independence from established politicalparties and labour unions.1 As Simon Avenellhas argued, the philosophy of the "shimin"(cit izen) which emerged out of thesemovements celebrated the political agency ofnon-aligned citizens as social movementactors.2 As the large left-wing parties andsmaller New Left groups declined in size andpower in the 1970s and 1980s these citizen-based movements flowered. Jasper observes asimilar trend in his studies of Euro-Americansocial movements where he describes a shiftfrom the predominance of movements such aslabour movements (which often competed witheach other because they had clearly definedconstituencies) and the new movements whichflow more easily into each other. He cites theenvironmental and feminist movements, forexample, which together inspired theantinuclear movement of the 1970s, which inturn gave rise to the disarmament movement of

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the early 1980s in Europe.3

The growth of internet communicationtechnologies including email, the world wideweb and newer social media platforms such asTwitter, Facebook and Youtube has acceleratedthe trend away from monolithic organisationalstructures and towards more fluid forms ofpolitical participation. As Slater et al. havenoted, after the 3/11 disaster social mediaplayed an important role in disseminatinginformation about the Fukushima nucleardisaster and facilitating anti-nuclear activism.4

Social media not only facilitates the flow ofinformation in real time across nationalborders5 it also influences the way in whichpeople participate in a social movement.6 Theloose, non-hieararchical and open structure ofnew social movement organisations in Japanfacilitates the participation of individuals anddoes not require them to subscribe to anybroader organisational agenda. Individualpatterns of engagement are visible on socialmedia as activists Tweet, blog and chat abouttheir involvement in different movements anddemonstrations.

Political scientist Gonoi Ikuo describes the wayinformation is shared through the internet incontemporary forms of grassroots politicalengagement in terms of the "cloudification" ofsocial movements. According to Gonoi, the webacts as a kind of "cloud" which people access inorder to exchange information easily. Internetcommunication technologies have decreasedthe cost of sharing information and have takenthe hassle out of organising events. Activistgroups no longer reply upon specific physicallocations or centres in which to organise butonly some symbolic information centre. Insteadthey can download designs for placards, find ameeting point, or check the route of ademonstration online.7 "Cloudification",however, does not satisfy all of the needs ofsocial movements. Some scholars havesuggested that the effectiveness of the internethas been exaggerated.8

The deeper importance of the internet lies notmerely in its role as a powerful medium fordisseminating information but as an arena inwhich activists develop their identities. Fromthe point of view of the moral and emotionalside of social actions, the internet is a place toexchange personal narratives and exploreinteractions. Generally, internet usersrecognise themselves reflexively through theselinguistic interactions.9 This aspect of theinternet is connected with these individuals'participation in activism. Furthermore, thisemphasis on the internet as a forum foremotional and personality development isconsistent with new trends in the study ofsocial movements. A growing body of socialmovement literature demonstrates thatparticipation in social movements is not theresult of purely "rational" reasoning, as mightbe suggested by resource mobilisation theory,for example. Joseph Davis, for example, arguesthat

[…] participants must do morethan agree with a particularformulation of grievances orra t i ona le f o r engag ing i nameliorative action. Participants'involvement is perhaps neversimply logical and instrumental,but – and in many contexts more so– also imaginative, intuitive, andemotional.10

The current anti-nuclear movement draws onmultiple strands and diverse levels ofexperience in political activism. Someparticipants draw on pre-existing politicalgroups. Others are aligned with movements toimprove the situation of precarious workers.11

The movement also includes politically-committed artists, such as the rapper ECD, theartist and MCAN (Metropolitan CoalitionAgainst Nukes) organiser Misao Redwolf, orthe graphic designer Kozuka Ruiko. In all ofthese cases, however, motivations for

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participation in the anti-nuclear movementreflect a complex of rationalistic and emotionalfactors.

Some of the most promising social movementtheories take a narrative approach to thinkingabout political consciousness. Such theoristsargue that developing a political consciousnessbears some resemblance to rel igiousconversion. In recent religious studies based ona narrative approach, conversion is understoodto involve a process whereby the individualgradually takes on the vocabulary and rhetoricof a religion.12 As a follower's beliefs develop,the individual can become more involved in thevocabulary of the religious organisation andcome to use its more sophisticated rhetoric.13 Inactivism, we can observe a similar process.Individuals talk about their experiences ofactivism and thereby sustain a collectiveidentity.14 Participants learn the vocabulary ofactivism, share collective stories of activismand tell this as a narrative of their lives.15 Thisis not a sudden and complete conversion, but acontinuing process of storytelling and rewritingof their life stories.

Beautiful @tatangarani's Dining Tablesand Anti-nuclear Activism

How do indiv iduals decide to go to ademonstration for the first time and what is therole of the internet in this process? In order toexplore how internet communicationtechnologies facilitate individual engagementin contemporary social movements I analysethe the case of a company employee in Tokyow h o g o e s b y t h e T w i t t e r h a n d l e o f@tatangarani. Having grown up in a rural cityof Japan in a rather conservative family,@tatangarani had never thought aboutparticipating in political protests prior to 3/11.I can trace her activism through an interview Iconducted with her in 201316 and via ananalysis of the Twitter messages which sheprovided to me.17 I used text mining software toanalyse her tweets, from 11 August 2010 to 4

August 2013, a total of 50,563 messages,allowing me to investigate the role of theinternet in developing a narrative ofinvolvement in a social movement.

Figure 1 is a visualisation of her Twittermessages. These messages were analysedusing the software, KH Coder,18 and are shownhere as a network of frequently occurringwords. Words in the map were translated intoEnglish after the analysis. This method is calledquantitative text analysis or text mining. First,we break sentences into their smallest parts,morphemes, and classify them according to theparts of speech. Then we find the words whichappear most frequently and then those whichco-occur most frequently. The KH Coder isunable to analyse syntactic constructions butcan provide a visual map of characteristics ofthe text. The map indicates the co-occurrenceratio of words. Frequently co-occuring wordsare connected by lines and this leads to avisualisation of networks of words. Each sub-network – a small network which is roughlyunderstandable as a topic – is connected to theother sub-networks and this constitutes thewhole network map. Words which unite pluralnetworks are cal led words with high"betweenness centrality". Words with high"betweenness centrality" relate multiple topicsand are therefore significant.

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Figure 1: @tatangarani's Twitter Messagesbefore 3/11. (From 23:01, 11 August 2010to 14:10, 11 march 2011. 8 months. 4168Twitter messages).

Before 3/11, @tatangarani primarily wroteabout her impressions of Tokyo, nice shops,friends, design, socialising, work and deliciousfood. "Smile", (the "smile" emoticon) has thehighest "betweenness centrality" and connectsall the sub-networks of tweets. It indicates thecheerful life of a young woman in Tokyo whohas friends and enjoys good restaurants andconsumer goods. Her tweets from before theearthquake do not indicate that she wasdissatisfied with society. Her last "pre-Fukushima" message (Figure 2), sent fifteenminutes before the earthquake of 11 Marchwas as follows.

When I see the weeds sproutingfrom a stone wall, I feel it is spring,too. #Twitpict (Figure 14).

After this message, the earthquake occurred.This event profoundly changed the lives of theJapanese people and has led to a new politicalconsc iousness for some. Af ter 3 /11@tatangarani, who has many friends overseas,received numerous emails from abroad withlinks to reports from the BBC and CNN. Theseinternational broadcasters ran stories thatshowed the seriousness of the nuclear powerplant accident, and provided more informationthan did the media in Japan. She started tostudy the effects of radiation exposure via theinternet. She slept only a few hours every day.She tweeted and re-tweeted messages on theissue. As a result, she gained many newfollowers.

Figure 2: Weeds sprouting from a stonewall.

@tatangarani had no previous intention toparticipate in protests. Far from it, she thought

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that if she went to a demonstration she wouldbe arrested or treated roughly by the riotpolice. In her imagination, a demonstration wasa dangerous place. She hesitated, butultimately participated in the 4.10 GenpatsuYamero Demo!!!!!!! (10 April No NukesDemonstration). One of popular singer SaitōKazuyoshi's songs was a decisive factor in@tatangarani's decision. Saitō uploaded a song"Zutto uso datta" (It Was Always a Lie)19 to thevideo sharing site YouTube.20 The song chargedthat the government and the nuclear powerindustry had been lying to the Japanese peopleabout the dangers of nuclear power. The videowas deleted soon after, but somebody keptuploading it persistently. @tatangarani thoughtSaitō might encounter serious difficulties in hiscareer because of this but she recognised thathe was f igh t ing , never the less . H i sdetermination to speak out inspired her. Shethought:

I have to respond to this. If I don'trespond, what kind of person amI?21

She consulted her friends about participating inthe demonstrations and they said, "Don't do it!"She was disappointed that she could notdepend on her existing networks. She went toher first demonstration with a new friend thatshe got to know via Twitter. She thus found anew network via the internet. Now, she likes togo to the demonstrations of TwitNoNukes andthe Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes(MCAN). She goes to these demonstrationsbecause the organisers pay attention to howthey present themselves. As Patricia Steinhoffobserves, many people in Japan have extremelynegative views of political protest which aretied up with disturbing collective memories ofthe violent incidents which marred the studentNew Left in the early 1970s. 22 The organisersof TwitNoNukes, like many new participants inthe anti-nuclear movement, feel that only by

dissociating their activism from the disturbingmemories of violence which they associate with"old style" demonstrations can they attract newfollowers and develop popular legitimacy. Theorganisers therefore prohibit the banners oflabor unions and political parties which werepopular in these "old style" demonstrations, inorder to make the demonstrations seem lessthreatening for new participants. They stoppeople from provoking confrontations withpolice, because this would make it difficult tosustain the movement. @tatangarani's ownprofessional work is related to this kind of"impression control," so she found theirmethods easy to understand. She was uneasyabout participating in demonstrations at firstbut she was moved by the behaviour of theorganisers and started acting like them.

I can go to my office in torn jeans ifI want to, but I intentionally wearsome "office lady"-like dress to thedemonstrations.23

The dark suits worn by male Japanesesalarymen and female so-called "Office Ladies'(OL) are gendered symbols which designatetheir wearers as respectable middle classprofessionals. By adopting the identity of a"normal" Japanese office worker when sheattends the protest @tatangarani, like theTwitNoNukes organisers, attempted todissociate the act of participation in ademonstration from stereotypes of violentstudent protest. The demonstration is ratherpresented as an activity in which salariedworkers and other "normal" Japanese peoplecan participate.

@tatangarani's consciousness about her dressreflects how important the embodied act ofdemonstrating was in the development of hernew identity as a social activist. Her originalexplorations of the dangers of radioactivefallout on the internet were materialisedthrough her decision to participate in physical

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demonstrations. The friends she made onlinediscussing nuclear power translated into real-world re lat ionships as she attendeddemonstrations with them.

@tatangarani's narrative of identity involvesboth online communication and physicalparticipation in the movement. In addition tonarrating her journey into activism via Twitter,@tatangarani also maintains a collection ofephemera (known as gudzu [goods] inJapanese) which she has collected at thedemonstrations she attended in a cake tin.During our interview she showed me this tinand reflected on the meaning of the tin and theobjects it contained to the development of hernew activist identity. "It's like the jewellery boxof a little schoolgirl", she said, as she smiled,and opened the tin (Figure 3). "I don't knowwhy I am collecting these, but I remembermany things while I am reading these fliers".24

Inside the box there were MCAN stickers andf l iers f rom Twi tNoNukes and o therdemonstrations. The fliers are filed accordingto the organisation which issued them.

Figure 3: Demo "goods"

I asked her if that was a way of maintaining hermemories.

Well, hmm…I wonder? I haven'tthought about it that way so far. Ijust tried to save them in the caketin because I had collected somany. I put items I bought to assistaffected areas in Tōhoku here, too.Demonstrations and assisting theaffected areas are two sides of thesame coin to me.25

Keeping these mementos and organising themis also a way of ordering and remembering herexperiences. Stickers and fliers, voluntarilydesigned by artists, were not only theexpression of protests but also mnemonics forparticipants to order their memories and create

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an internally consistent timeline through whichthey can reflexively create their own identity.In personal narratives, individuals like@tatangarani choose the elements of theirexperience and line them up according to atimeline which makes sense from the point ofview of the moment of narration. In narrativeidentity theory, a personal narrative is a pointof view which makes sense of the individualand their convictions.26 With the clues providedby the mementos from the demonstrations, sheconfirms her convictions about social activismand nuclear power. These physical artefactscomplement her online narrative.

An analysis of @tatangarani's tweets since 3/11shows that they have drastically changed sincethe disaster (Figure 4). Where the "smile"emoticon previously had the highest"betweenness centrality", now the word "demo"connects all sub-networks: sub-networks A(demo-nuke plants), B (government-Japan), C(Fukushima-evacuation) and so on. Thisnetwork provides a map of the Twittermessages sent by @tatangarani – a companyemployee who a l so par t i c ipa tes i ndemonstrations. Her previous daily life is stillpresent, however, in words like "delicious","eat", "work" and "time".

@tatangarani's tweets also reflect her changingattitudes. Figure 5 is a time series analysis forcategories of messages. I set up a coding rulewhich classifies messages according tocategories. Twitter messages were classifedinto five categories, including "anti-nuclearaction", "radiation exposure", "children","Japan", or "anti-racism". This is based on thetrends of the most frequently-appearing words.From April 2011 to July 2011, the number ofwords for radiation exposure suddenlyincreased. This is the period when she waslearning about radiation and learning a newvocabulary. After September 2011, the term"anti-nuclear action" started increasing and

there was a peak in June 2012.

Figure 4: Tweets after 3/11. (From 16:53,11 March 2011 to 16:16, 4 August 2013. 30months. 46,395 Twitter messages).

As @tatangarani's level of comfort with socialactivism grew she began to branch out fromher anti-nuclear activism and take an interestin other issues. After February 2013, the "anti-racism" category increased due to herdeveloping interest in the Counter-RacistAction Collective (C.R.A.C., formerly ReishisutoShibaki-tai), a group dedicated to counteringthe racist hate speech of the Zaitoku-kai.27

Reishisuto Shibaki-tai started their actionsagainst the Zaitoku-kai in February.

This time series analysis indicates that therewere transitions in the issues with which shewas concerned. As described above, gaining anew vocabulary is the first step in attitudinalchange, whether in religious conversion or indeveloping political consciousness. FromMarch to September 2011 she acquired a newvocabulary, developed her consciousness ofs o c i a l i s s u e s a n d o v e r c a m e h e rmisapprehension about participating in

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political demonstrations.

I did not know anything aboutnuclear power stations … I hadbeen scared of people who yelled"no-nukes!" though I didn't knowanything. (Twitter message, 12April 2011)

She was aware of her ignorance, studied hard,learned about the issues and got to know that itwas time for her to change. She had becomemore proactive in seeking information aboutthe nuclear issue. However, this growingpolitical engagement did not result in herletting go of her existing identity. The fluidnature of communication through Twitterallows us to see how participants' daily lifeactivities are enmeshed with their politicalparticipation. @tatangarani continued to postregular photographs of her meals, a verypopular activity among social media users inJapan. Not all in her existing "follower"network, however, understood the relationshipbetween these two aspects of @tatangarani'sidentity.

Figure 5: Time series analysis of categoriesof tweets

Somebody suggested that I shouldhave two [twitter] accounts, onef o r d a i l y l i f e a n d o n e f o rantinuclear issues. But, both are

the truth and both are me. So, Idon't divide my account. Pleasefeel free to respond to my dailymessages about the food I likeeven if I post about my angerabout nukes. I appreciate it.(Twitter message, 28 April 2011)

Her narratives before 3/11 differed from thoseafter 3/11 as is indicated in Figures 4 and 5. Ifshe had created a separate Twitter account, itwould have symbolised another identity for her.However, the phrase "both are the truth andboth are me" indicates that she accepted hernew convictions and reconstructed hernarrative of self and of her identity. This is insome ways similar to the abovementioneddescriptions of religious conversion. Thisdecision also implies her making a bridgebetween the world she inhabited before 3/11,where many of her followers still belong, andher awareness after 3/11. She said,

I am afraid to be presumptuous,but I want to be a bridge betweendemonstrators and others who arenot interested in demonstrations. Ikeep sending Twitter messagesabout my daily life and talk aboutthe nuclear issue, too.28

Just as @tatangarani had donned typical "OfficeLady" attire in order to present an easilydigestible image of protest, she continued todisplay a concern with "image management"through her Twitter feed. She presents herselfin her tweets through beautiful images of herdining table to make it easy for her followers tounderstand her (Figures 6 and 7).

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F i g u r e 6 & F i g u r e 7 : P h o t o s o f@tatangarani's dining table posted toTwitter.

Twitter message for Figure 6 - Bacon-cheesebagel from Shigekuniya 55 bakery, salad(organic tomatoes from Hokkaido, sweet!),pumpkin potage soup, orange, grapes, orangejuice and Perrier. September is starting! Havea nice day! (September 2, 2013) .

Twitter message for Figure 7 - Late breakfast. Ihad a peach smoothie when I got up. Kefir, abowl of frozen berries, orange juice,shortbread. I love this wooden spoon fromAfrica, via "fair-trade". Simple but beautiful.(August 31, 2013)

Since 3/11, the lives of many people in Japan

have changed. @tatangarani realised herignorance about nuclear power, studied thesi tuat ion and came to part ic ipate indemonstrations. She had been scared ofdemonstrations, but now invites others toparticipate. She accepted this change andthought that ordinary life and social activismwere both part of her truth. She learnedthrough Twitter, tweeted and reflectivelyreconstructed her narratives of her self. As isreflected in the changing content of her tweets,she has started to participate in the anti-racismmovement as well as the anti-nuclearmovement. She has jumped into a newnetworks of re lat ionships and a newconsciousness of social issues which wereestablished and nurtured in the anti-nuclearmovement.

Conclusions

@tatangarani's participation in the anti-nuclearmovement is an example of how internetcommunication technologies facilitate thehighly individualised forms of participationcharacteristic of contemporary socialmovements. @tatangarani is not a member ofan organised political party or organization andher involvement in the anti-nuclear movementafter 3/11 is her first experience of socialactivism. As her comfort with participating indemonstrations and her political consciousnessdeveloped, @tatangarani moved between theanti-nuclear movement and the anti-racismmovement. She was an avid Twitter user priorto the 3/11 disasters and she used the mediumto communicate about her life in Tokyo. As shebecame more and more concerned about theFukushima nuclear disaster she turned to thesocial media platform to express her fears,learn about nuclear power, developrelationships with other users who sharedthose concerns and eventually join in her firstpolitical protest. Later, as she became morecomfortable with the world of political activism,she began to take part in anti-racist actions andto encourage others to join the movement.

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Nevertheless, she continued to use Twitter tocommunicate about her everyday life and tocontextualise her new-found desire fordemocracy within her existing narrative of heridentity.

In this essay, I have discussed the relationshipbetween the internet and one person's newlevel of activism. Activist groups such asTwitNoNukes and MCAN use the internet andnew social media to disseminate informationabout their actions. Saitō Kazuyoshi's anti-nuclear song on Youtube prompted people like@tatangarani to participate in demonstrations.She, in turn, used Twitter to disseminateinformation about the nuclear issue and thedemonstrations in which she participated. Theinternet is a new social infrastructure forexchanging information and making newrelationships. It has what is called a "bridgingfunction" in social capital theory.29 The internetcan expand unexpected encounters andconstruct new communities, as it did for@tatangarani. For @tatangarani, the Internetis a place to talk about herself. Through such aprocess individuals can objectify theirexperiences, reinforce their convictions andlearn strategies for social movements. Socialmovements, in turn, can use the internet toraise consciousness, disseminate informationabout meetings and demonstrations, ordisseminate designs for placards and posters.

While it is widely accepted that the internetplays an important role in disseminatinginformation in social movements there is lessunderstanding of the particular ways in whichinternet communication technologies like socialmedia shape the forms which activism takes. Aslarge, hierarchically organised socialmovements have given way to more fluid formsof citizen activism participation in movementshas come to reflect the complexity of multipleindividual processes of identity formation. Theinternet, with its non-hiearchical spaces, allowsusers to construct their own narrative identityby communicating about what is important to

them, sharing photographs and interacting witho ther users . As in terne t users l i ke@tatangarani became more and more involvedin social movements, the manner in which theyconstructed their identity changed toincorporate their new identifications withoutnecessarily letting go of consumer pleasureslike photographing foodstuffs. Similarly, media-savvy protesters like @tatangarani engage inprotest activity in an image-conscious manner.@tatangarani preferred to participate inprotests like TwitNoNukes and the MCANactions because organisers shared her image-c o n s c i o u s n e s s a n d c r e a t e d e a s i l ycommunicable and "likable" messages whichcould communicate key ideas to a wideaudience. As the forms of participation in socialmovements become more fluid and contingenton individual actions and desires and largerorganisational imperatives take a back foot theinternet provides an important infrastructurethrough which intersecting narratives of anti-nuclear identity can coalesce into streetprotest.

Acknowledgments

This article draws on research conducted aspart of Australian Research Council DiscoveryProject DP10928278 (2010–2013), InternetHistory in Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

Recommended citation: Takanori Tamura, "TheInternet and Personal Narratives in the Post-Disaster Anti-Nuclear Movement", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, No. 4,February 16, 2015.

Author Biography

Takanori Tamura is a lecturer at HōseiUniversity in Tokyo. He studies humanin te rac t i on i n compute r med ia tedcommunication (CMC). Starting from studies ofa pre-internet domestic networking system inJapan, he is interested in the self presentationand interaction of people via CMC based on anarrative approach. He has written on religion,

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privacy and social movements' use of CMC. Heis the author, along with Tamura Daiyu, of"Reflexive Self Identification of Internet Usersand the Authority of Soka Gakkai: Analysis ofDiscourse in Japanese BBS, Ni-Channeru", pp.173–195 in Japanese Religions on the Internet:Innovation, Representation, and Authority, NewYork, Routledge, 2011.

Notes

1 Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing theSpontaneous: Citizens Protest in PostwarJapan, University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu,2001, pp. 148–194.

2 Simon Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens:Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shiminin Postwar Japan, University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, 2010.

3 James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral ProtestCulture, Biography, and Creativity in SocialMovements, Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 1999, p. 7.

4 David H. Slater, Keiko Nishimura and LoveKindstrand, "Social Media, Information andPolitical Activism in Japan's 3.11 Crisis"(https://apjjf.org/-Nishimura-Keiko/3762?rand=1350712554&type=print&print=1), The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 10, no. 24, iss. 1, 2012.Retrieved 14 October 2014.

5 Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff, Mike Ananny,Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce and Danah Boyd,"The Revolutions Were Tweeted: InformationFlows During the 2011 Tunisian and EgyptianRevolutions", International Journal ofCommunication, Vol. 5, 2011, pp. 1375–1405.

6 W. Lance Bennett, "The Personalization ofPolitics: Political Identity, Social Media, andChanging Patterns of Participation", Annals ofthe American Academy of Political and SocialScience, Vol. 644, no. 1, pp. 20–30.

7 Gonoi Ikuo, Demo to wa Nani ka: Henbō suru

Chokusetsu Minshushugi What is a Demonstration: The

Transformation of Direct Democracy], Tokyo, NHK Shuppan, 2012, p. 15.

8 Itō Masaki, Demo no Media Ron, Chikumashobō, Tokyo, 2012, pp. 92-4.

9 Yasmin Ibrahim, "Weblogs as PersonalNarrat ives : Disp lac ing History andT e m p o r a l i t y , "(http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/08-ibrahim.php) M/C Journal, vol. 9, no 6, 2006, p.24. Retrieved on Jan. 2014; Asako Miura andKiyomi Yamashita, "Psychological and SocialInfluences on Blog Writing: An Online Survey ofBlog Authors in Japan." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication vol. 12, no. 4, 2007,pp. 1452–1471.

10 Joseph E. Davis, Stories of Change: Narrativeand Social Movements, New York, StateUniversity of New York Press, 2002, p. 24.

11 Akihiro Ogawa, "Young Precariat at theForefront: Anti-nuclear Rallies in Post-Fukushima Japan", Inter-Asian CulturalStudies, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 317–326.

12 Akiba Hiroshi and Kawabata Akira, Reinō noRiariti e: Shakaigaku, Shin'nyoen ni HairuApproaching the Reality of Mediumship: Sociology Enters Shin'nyo-en], Tokyo,

Shin'yōsha, 2004.

13 Akiba and Kawabata, Reinō no Riariti e, pp.228–9. There is a quite a long history of seeinganalogies between the development of politicalconsciousness and religious conversion. See:Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women inJapan: Gender, Labour and Activism,1900–1937, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997, p. 172.

14 Francesca Polletta, It Was like a Fever:Storytelling in Protest and Politics, Chicago,University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 51–2.

15 Robert D. Benford called this "participantnarratives" as contrasted with "movementnarratives" in Davis, Stories of Change, p. 54.

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16 Interview with @tatangarani, 13 April 2013

17 The tweets analysed are from 11 August 2010to 4 August 2013 (a total of 50,563 messages).

18 KH Coder is free software and can beo b t a i n e d f r o m S o u r c e f o r g e(http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/). Retrieved 14March 2014.

1 9 " Z u t t o u s o d a t t a "(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY4j9KoEtA0). Retrieved 14 March 2014.

20 This was a reworking of one of his earliersongs "Zutto suki datta" (I always loved you).

21 Interview with @tatangarani, 13 April 2013.

22 Patricia Steinhoff, "Memories of New LeftProtest", Contemporary Japan, Vol. 25, No. 2,2013, pp. 127–165.

23 Interview with @tatangarani, 13 April 2013.

24 Interview with @tatangarani, 13 April 2013.

25 Interview with @tatangarani, 13 April 2013.

26 Asano Tomohiko, Jiko e no Monogatariteki

Sekkin: Kazoku Ryōhō kara Shakaigaku eApproaching the Self through Narrative: From Family Therapy to Sociology], Tokyo,

Keisō Shobō, 2001.

27 The Zaitokukai, an abbreviation of thegroup's full name "Citizens Against the SpecialPrivileges of the Zainichi". The organisation,founded in 2006, is an extreme nationalistorganisation which believes a fabricated storythat ethnic Koreans who are resident in Japan(Zainichi Koreans) enjoy "special privileges"(tokken), which are unavailable to ethnicallyJapanese nationals or other foreign residents.They are particularly active on the internet. Onthe Zaitokukai, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki,"Freedom of Hate Speech: Abe Shinzo andJ a p a n ' s P u b l i c S p h e r e "(http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/blogs/asiarights/2013/02/20/freedom-of-hate-speech-abe-shinzo-and-japans-public-sphere/). Retrieved on 23February 2014.

28 Interview with @tatangarani, 13 April 2013.

29 Kakuko Miyata, Ken'ichi Ikeda and KobayashiTetsuro, "The Internet, Social Capital, CivicEngagement, and Gender in Japan", in Nan Linand Bonnie H. Erickson (eds.), Social Capital:An International Research Program, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 206–233.