by Hiroki Matsukura

Through learning the concept of “frame” on our society in class, I found it being the conception of exclusion from “society”. It finally decides outsiders or insiders about one issue. In this system, they, insiders, seem to ignore outsiders saying. What, in addition, we must not forget is there is not only the exclusion from the insiders when it comes to seeing from the outsiders view to protest the situation. The outsiders also create their own frame against the frame that excludes them. Thus, at last, they lead to exclude each other. We might see the social movements as one of the figures of exclusion between both sides.

Thinking of this exclusive system, we may conclude that the situation cannot be solved from this approach that people just insist toward each other what they want to do or to be. We need to establish the “framework” to include each other well. To reach such framework, we should know well about the structure of our society. In this blog post, I would like to use the Japanese structure as the example. As we can know from a lot of the Japanese contemporary novels and movies, in the old days, around 1960s, the social movements were led by especially young university students, and it was seen as a sort of extreme or crazy movements. On the other hand, the present movements are seen relatively as being milder and behaving itself. However, this does not mean their movements are thought as agreeable.

The social movements are seen as something strange as long as they are labelled with the name of “social movement” in Japan. It means that social movements in Japan are regarded as heterogeneity for the frame of homogeneity, “being usual.” Notably, the Japanese government is an important symbol seemed to be established over the frame of the Japanese usualness. Nevertheless, those who join the social movements expect the government to change its policy along with them. Additionally, as mentioned above, even in Japan we have to think about the both-side-exclusion between a frame and a frame of anti-frame existing. From this, we can point out that this situation seems contradictory. As this explanation, we can state our Japanese society is under a top-down structure. In short with a simple expression, it means when the government says something is its justice, the thing becomes everyone’s justice in Japanese society.

This is being a Japanese common sense under conscience about social activities. In any frame, the Japanese society always is cuffed with the thought. Thus, the social movements firstly try to make the government accept their ideas for Japanese politics. From the point of my view, I point out that they lose the recognition that the people themselves are the politics itself, not the government. To establish the framework to understand and include various standing points in Japan, we firstly need to throw away the top-down structure from Japan and to create a people-centred society in a new sense. Abandoning the symbol of “being usual,” we find us standing on even ground.