Political disillusionment is widespread in contemporary Japanese society, despite people’s struggles in the recession. Our social relationships become entangled, and we can no longer clearly identify our interest in politics. The search for the outside of stagnant reality sometimes leads marginalised young people to a disastrous imaginary for social change, such as war and death. The imaginary of disaster was actualised in March 2011. The huge earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which triggered the largest wave of activism since the 1960s. Based on the author’s fieldwork on the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movements in Tokyo, this thesis investigates how the disaster impacted people’s sense of agency and ethics, and ultimately explores the new political imaginary in postmodernity. The disaster revealed the interconnected nature of contemporary society. The thesis argues that their regret about their past indifference to politics motivated the protesters into social commitment without any totalising ideology or predetermined collective identity. They also found an ambiguity of the self, which is insufficient to know what should be done. Hence, they mobilise their bodies on to the streets, encountering others, and forcing themselves to feel and think. This is an ethical attitude, yet it simultaneously stems from the desire of each individual to make a difference to the self and society. The thesis concludes that the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movements signify a new way of doing politics as endless experiments by collectively responding to an unexpected force from an outside in a creative way.

Political disillusionment is widespread in contemporary Japanese society, despite people’s struggles in the recession. Our social relationships become entangled, and we can no longer clearly identify our interest in politics. The search for the outside of stagnant reality sometimes leads marginalised young people to a disastrous imaginary for social change, such as war and death. The imaginary of disaster was actualised in March 2011. The huge earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which triggered the largest wave of activism since the 1960s. Based on the author’s fieldwork on the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movements in Tokyo, this thesis investigates how the disaster impacted people’s sense of agency and ethics, and ultimately explores the new political imaginary in postmodernity. The disaster revealed the interconnected nature of contemporary society. The thesis argues that their regret about their past indifference to politics motivated the protesters into social commitment without any totalising ideology or predetermined collective identity. They also found an ambiguity of the self, which is insufficient to know what should be done. Hence, they mobilise their bodies on to the streets, encountering others, and forcing themselves to feel and think. This is an ethical attitude, yet it simultaneously stems from the desire of each individual to make a difference to the self and society. The thesis concludes that the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movements signify a new way of doing politics as endless experiments by collectively responding to an unexpected force from an outside in a creative way.

Au Japon, si les rapports sexuels avant le mariage sont largement acceptés par la société, la part des enfants nés hors mariage reste très faible (2,3 % en 2016). Ceci reflète la prégnance de la norme sociale qui veut que l’enfant naisse au sein d’un couple officiellement marié. Il existe pourtant des femmes qui outrepassent cette norme. Ce travail de doctorat vise, d’une part, à dévoiler qui sont ces femmes qui s’engagent dans la maternité hors mariage dans une société où ce choix est difficilement accepté et, d’autre part, à éclairer des questions autour de la modernité, de la famille et de l’individu au travers de l’analyse de ce phénomène. Dans ce but, nous mettrons d’abord en évidence le processus historique par lequel le mariage devient la norme absolue pour fonder une famille. Nous analyserons ensuite de quelles manières la maternité hors mariage devient un stigmate, en étudiant les politiques publiques, ainsi que les réactions dans l’entourage familial, à l’école et dans le lieu de travail. Enfin, à partir d’une série d’entretiens menés en 2012 et 2013, nous mettrons en lumière les logiques sous-jacentes ayant présidé à la démarche de ces mères japonaises non mariées. Au contraire de certaines recherches qui voient dans cette population une catégorie homogène, c’est avant tout sa pluralité qui ressorte de la présente thèse. Enfin, cette thèse démontre qu’il existe bel et bien des « individus » au Japon, comme le montrent les parcours variés de ces mères qui ont outrepassé la norme familiale dominante en adoptant des stratégies différentes. / In Japan, although pre-marital sex is widely accepted by society, birth out of marriage remains very low (2.3% of all birth in 2016), which marks a strong social norm: children must be born from an officially married couple. Some limited scholarship on this topic only points out this social pressure or the economic and legal disadvantages which Japanese women face once they become unmarried mothers, in order to highlight the rarity of the phenomenon. My research, on the other hand, aims to discover who these women are who engage in extramarital motherhood in a society where this choice is rarely accepted. First of all, it exposes the historical processes of how marriage becomes the absolute norm for starting a family. Secondly, by investigating the public policy as well as the reaction in family, school and work place against extramarital motherhood, it examines how unwedded motherhood becomes a stigma. An analysis of interviews with Japanese unmarried mothers conducted in 2012 and 2013 finally reveals not only their various profiles but also their different approaches and strategies to challenge this social norm. Through a study of marginal people, this research examines the relationship between modernity, families and the individual in Japanese society. Contrary to some scholarship which considers Japanese unmarried mothers as a homogeneous category, what emerges from my study is its plurality. This research demonstrates that there are indeed individuals in Japan and some of them are women who chose to become mothers without being married.

Cette thèse cherche à montrer le rôle structurant pour l’individu tenu par les pratiques religieuses dans la société japonaise contemporaine et la façon dont elles sont porteuses de sens aujourd’hui, dans une ville de pèlerinage appelée Sasaguri et située près de la mégapole de Fukuoka à Kyūshū. La première partie présente ce cadre en montrant à quel point Sasaguri forme un espace où se donnent à voir des pratiques religieuses de toutes sortes, notamment pour les visiteurs venus de l’extérieur, mais aussi comment, il est représentatif d’une religiosité que l’on retrouve partout au Japon, ancré dans la vie des communautés locales, et que j’appelle ici « premier niveau de l’expérience religieuse ». La deuxième partie se focalise sur différents types de spécialistes religieux. La troisième et dernière partie traite des modalités individuelles du rapport au religieux par l’angle des interactions entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur, du fidèle et de l’espace, du système ou du réseau dans lequel il évolue et dont il est centre. / This doctoral dissertation aims to determine the structural role that religious practice can have for the individual and how they are meaningful nowadays, in the context of a pilgrimage town called Sasaguri, situated near the big city of Fukuoka in Kyūshū. The first part presents this frame by showing how Sasaguri forms a sacred, dynamic and multi-layered space where various religious practices are displayed by people coming from outside of the town. The second part of this thesis explores the various possibilities between different types of religious specialists. The third and last part of this thesis discusses the individual modalities of the religious practices, via the interactions between the internal and external dimensions: those of the practitioner, the space they are in, or the network which they belong to and which is revolving around them.

This dissertation investigates how different stakeholders have competed over the interpretation and commemoration of the Aum Affair. The Aum Affair was a series of crimes committed by new religious movement Aum Shinrikyō between 1988 and 1995, which culminated in the gassing of the Tokyo subway system using sarin in March 1995. The Tokyo attack was the largest act of terrorism in post-war Japan. I combine qualitative methods of media analysis, interviews, and participant observation to analyse how different stakeholders have narrated and commemorated the Aum Affair. I propose ‘collective trauma’ as a revised theory of ‘cultural trauma’ to describe an event which is represented as harmful and indelible to collective memory and identity. In contrast to ‘cultural trauma’, which stresses the importance of symbolic representations of traumatic events, ‘collective trauma’ considers other ‘material’ processes – such as establishing facts, collective action, state responses, and litigation – which also contribute to trauma construction. My overarching argument is that various stakeholders – including state authorities, mass media, public intellectuals, victims, and former Aum believers – have constructed the Aum Affair as a collective trauma in multiple and conflicting ways. Many media representations situated Aum as an evil ‘cult’ which ‘brainwashed’ believers and intended to take over Japan through terror. State authorities also responded by treating Aum as a dangerous terrorist group. In some instances, these binary representations of Japan locked in a struggle against an evil force led to municipal governments violating the civil rights of Aum believers. Some individuals such as public intellectuals and former believers have challenged this divisive view by treating Aum as a ‘religion’, not a ‘cult’, and locating the root causes of Aum’s growth in Japanese society. Additionally, victims and former members have pursued divergent goals such as retributive justice, financial reparations, and social reconciliation through their public actions. A key conclusion of this dissertation is that whilst confronting horrific acts of violence may require social construction of collective trauma using cultural codes of good and evil, the entrenchment of these symbolic categories can result in lasting social tension and division.