Attempting to fill this void, this article focuses on the involvement of Japan’s and South Korea’s civil societies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Surprisingly though, this development has so far been largely overlooked. We suggest the case study of SEALDs offers a novel contribution to the research of student activism worldwide, and highlights the importance of social context in any attempt to understand particular manifestations of student-led activism.Īs East-West Asia relations expand and diversify, cross-regional non-state relations develop as well. Unlike other movements that aim to ‘radically disrupt the system’ SEALDs found success through branding and popular appeal. The authors argue that while existing in a hybrid of cyberspace and urban space SEALDs was able to resonate with the country through social networking sites, music, fashion, and pop-culture appeal. By taking a case study approach, this paper analyses the movement and focuses on their unique ability to mobilise the masses through a unique utilisation of what Castells terms ‘spaces of autonomy’. Despite a variety of socio-contextual factors that have contributed to this reality, a student movement known as SEALDs emerged in 2015 and successfully mobilised a substantial number of Japanese youth and shifted public discourse on social activism. In recent decades Japanese university students have been characterised as politically apathetic and disinterested in organising for grassroots change. These conceptions of space, I argue, are needed to account for the various forms campus protest has taken since the 1990s. In this paper I focus on the develop-ment of campus protest in Kyoto from the mid-1990s until today to shed light on the following questions: How have campus-based activists responded to the ne-oliberalization of Japanese universities? What motivates them to use art or art-like forms of direct action and how are these activities related to space? I investigate the notions of space towards which activists have been oriented since the 1990's, focusing on three notions: official public space, counter-space and no-man's-land. This transformation has gone hand in hand with a shift of action repertoire towards forms of direct action such as squatting, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and opening "cafés". Although the radical student organisations of the New Left have waned, new movements are forming among students and pre-carious university employees in response to neoliberalization trends in society and the precarization of their conditions. However, campuses have continued to play a role in activism. Japan's so-called freeter movements (movements of young men and women lack-ing regular employment) are often said to have emerged as young people shifted their base of activism from campuses to the 'street'. This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990's.
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