On the second Friday of every month, a small group gathers.
In February, it was in front of the industry ministry’s annex building, just a stone’s throw away from the plum blossoms unfurling in pink and white at Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. A small but passionate group of three dozen people — young and old alike — lifted a vibrant banner that read in Japanese: “The Climate Crisis is a matter of life and death!” The group is Fridays for Future, a climate activist organization originally inspired by Greta Thunberg’s 2018 school strike. They have branches in 20 regions across Japan, with the shared mission of raising Japanese voices in favor of tackling climate change.
“Delaying climate action is not a course of action available to us,” says Ayako Kawasaki, a recent college graduate and activist with Fridays for Future. “We need to figure out a way to get more youth involved.”
But by at least one key measure, Fridays for Future and groups like it are struggling to make their voices heard: last month, the government approved twin energy and emissions plans that experts say are insufficient to meet the globally agreed goal of trying to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Such struggles highlight the difficulty these groups have had in boosting climate education and localizing their messaging. They also raise the question of what exactly they can do to have a greater impact.
Nonetheless, climate change has already arrived, impacting Japan in the form of record-breaking temperatures, more powerful typhoons and more besides. A survey published last year found that young people in Japan are worried: 87% believe that it is either “very” or “somewhat” important to respond to climate change.
Despite those concerns, apathy is apparent. While similar youth-led climate protests around the world have seen thousands and even tens of thousands of marchers, climate demonstrations in Japan rarely break the 100-person barrier. Japan was the only country in that survey where over 10% of youth indicated that they didn’t care about responding to climate change; in another, more than a third of 17- to 19-year-olds either didn’t know or did not believe that greenhouse gas emissions caused climate change.
“The level of understanding of climate change among Japanese youth is generally limited,” says University of Tokyo researcher Kelvin Tang. “Relatively few young people expressed a willingness to engage in political or activist-related climate actions.”
Hard at work
Kawasaki first became involved with Fridays for Future four years ago. A college course had reintroduced her to the climate crisis, and she realized the problem she had read about in her middle school textbooks wasn’t anywhere near solved. In addition to Fridays for Future, she works with a number of other nongovernmental organizations and community initiatives, including the activist group Watashi no Mirai. She’s also part of a youth-led climate lawsuit filed against thermal power companies for failing to stop greenhouse gas emissions.
“Our government is still trying to promote nuclear energy as a solution to climate change, which is very slow and very expensive. I feel that our government pretends to listen to youth, but really has no intention of addressing our concerns,” Kawasaki says, recalling how public comments on the 7th Strategic Energy Plan were largely ignored.
Through Watashi no Mirai, which translates as "My Future," Kawasaki works to connect a wide variety of environmental NGOs to young people in order to spark youth involvement in a number of fields. While she feels that her own activism has a long way to go, Kawasaki noted several recent successes. These include an energetic protest in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district organized in collaboration with pro-Palestinian activists last March, and an upcoming symposium in the city of Kyoto that will bring together activists from Taiwan and South Korea who successfully launched similar climate lawsuits in their own countries.
Climate Youth Japan (CYJ) is another prominent organization led by young people. They focus on participating in policy sessions with government bodies, amplifying young people’s voices on climate change and sending a youth delegation to the annual United Nations climate change conference.
“The presence of ‘youth’ is not a strong one in Japanese society,” says Yuki Wada from CYJ’s youth empowerment division. “In Europe, youth are recognized as stakeholders in society, and therefore have both influence and opportunities. But in Japan and Asia, there is a tendency for both adults and youth to overlook the importance of young people as a group.” Japan is far from lacking in smart thinkers on environmental issues in its next generation.
Young activists include Mutsumi Kurobe, who works on innovative art projects, and leaders originally from abroad who have founded their own organizations to take environmental action, like Katrin Miyazawa in Nagoya. But complex factors converge to discourage mass participation in climate action and prevent these voices from being heard by the powers-that-be.
What’s stopping a genuine movement?
The last time a youth-led activist movement effectively mobilized thousands and left its mark on the nation was about a decade ago. In 2015, angered by national security legislation that would allow Japanese forces to engage in acts of self-defense on behalf of allies, tens of thousands of young people protested across the country. The group SEALDs (Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy) spearheaded some of the largest popular protests in Japan since the student-led movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Shunichiro Kobayashi, who was involved with SEALDs as a translator for the group, explains that SEALDs made use of strong media relations and tapped into rhetorical tools like philosophy and pop music to energize the movement.
“SEALD’s media effort as a whole palatably represented young people’s increasing interest in politics,” explains Kobayashi, who is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside.
“People in advanced capitalist countries like Japan and the United States live in a profound apathy,” Kobayashi says. “In these countries, almost no movement has succeeded in winning transformative social change in the past few decades.” General apathy is compounded by issues of education and the challenges of building a movement. Tang has conducted research on junior high school student’s awareness and understanding of climate change, identifying a wide variety of misconceptions and knowledge gaps — for example, that the depletion of the ozone layer is the primary cause of climate change.
“One of the primary reasons for these gaps is the lack of comprehensive climate change education in schools,” Tang says. “The most critical step is to formally integrate climate education into Japan’s national curriculum.” Unlike SEALDs, which energized a movement in response to the 2015 security bill, most climate groups in Japan lack a strong local angle. Instead, they tend to rely on the messaging of foreign activists like Thunberg or international frameworks like the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.
“When people demonstrate or march, a lot of the chants and signs are written in English, which sometimes leaves me feeling uncomfortable,” Kawasaki reflects. “There hasn’t been an existing narrative of the climate crisis as a distinctly Japanese problem.”
Kawasaki explains that most of the messaging heard in Japan about climate change is that it’s a global problem, rather than a local one, and a problem solved not by political action but by personal action, such as by reducing water or electricity use.
“We need to emphasize the Japanese victims of climate change and the distinct local issues climate change poses to us here,” Kawasaki says.
Opportunities to grow
Reflecting on the legacy of SEALDs, Kobayashi says that beyond generating a sense of hope, it didn’t manage to achieve many concrete goals.
“My fundamental critique of SEALDs is that it did not build an organization. It was meant to be a moment, not a movement,” he says.
“SEALDs was part of the landscape in which mere participation and sloganeering street protests are significantly appreciated even when the actions aren’t leading to any palpable changes,” he says. “(This attitude) is harmful insofar as it reduces the motivation to discuss fundamental strategic matters.”
Kobayashi thinks that in order for climate activists to win better climate policies, they need to focus on achieving specific policy goals, and come up with strategies aligned with them.
Forging stronger partnerships with other groups is another path forward. Kawasaki notes that joint events she has participated in, such as those with anti-nuclear activists and pro-Palestinian activists, have been some of the most energizing. Anti-nuclear activists tend to be from an older generation, which can allow younger climate activists to learn from the successes and failures of the past.
Next month, Kawasaki will start working at an anti-nuclear nonprofit organization, giving her a new vantage point from which to identify fresh collaborations.
CYJ, meanwhile, sees the potential to grow through education.
“Some of the most impactful events I’ve seen are local ones that offer climate change workshops for children, such as Happy Earth Day in Osaka,” Wada says. “Approaching the crisis through education is incredibly important.” As an organization, CYJ is focused less on mass demonstrations and more on what they call “inside approaches,” working directly with government officials on climate policy solutions.
“We believe that small-scale group discussions and activities — not just on climate change, but on issues ranging from biodiversity to plastic pollution — can become a Japanese-style climate movement,” Wada says.
CYJ, along with other groups like Fridays for Future and the Japan Youth Council, participated in subcommittee sessions for the 7th Strategic Energy Plan. But unlike their counterparts, CYJ feels that its participation was worthwhile, despite their proposals not ultimately making it into the plan. “It was an experience where we really felt the importance of being able to engage in dialogue, in addition to having high-quality proposals,” Wada reflects.
The fight against the climate crisis is a long and arduous one. Activists such as Kurobe have been open about the burnout they’ve experienced.
“There wasn’t much evidence that (our activism) was generating interest or leading to action, much less changing society as a whole,” she told the Asahi Shimbun last summer. “By the time I was in my second year of college, I was troubled and tired.” As a result, youth activists are still in search of some transformational spark — something to light a flame under the movement. As official policy advances at a slow pace, genuine change may have to come from someone and somewhere else.
“It’s not just advancing climate measures,” Kawasaki says. “We also have to take back democracy — to change our system to one where our voices are actually heard.”
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