Double challenges to Japanese farmers : nuclear accident and transpactfic regional partnership = 日本農民的雙重挑戰 : 核危機及太平洋區域的合作關係

For a while after Japan was struck by a major earthquake and tsunami on 11 March this year, gloomy and depressing atmosphere was dominant in Japanese people. As soon as the disaster occurred, corporations refrained from distributing their commercial messages (CMs) on TV. Japanese people are usually exposed by the enormous amount of CMs, but could not but repeatedly watch CMs produced by AC (Advertising Council Japan), a private non-profit agency, during the few weeks. Most of the agency’s CMs are more public than those of other private companies, such as a CM to enhance women’s awareness of breast cancer screening tests. Many Japanese people watched again and again a CM that three Japanese soccer players sent solidarity messages to people who suffered from the earthquake and tsunami. One of them, Uchida Atsuto, a brilliant soccer player who is affiliated with a German club, tried to cheer up Japanese people by saying, “each person should do what he or she can do. Japan is like a team”. He advised his fellow Japanese people to be united (like an organised soccer team) in order to overcome difficulties. The representation of Japanese people as a whole and coherent unit is not new, but it is much more influential in the media after the earthquake and tsunami. I do not intend to deny this kind of nationalism to recover from the disaster. Rather I am just concerned that this representation can lead us to overlooking the unfair relationship between different groups of Japanese people. The list of people who are disadvantaged includes casual workers, people living in Fukushima, and farmers and fisheries. This paper focuses particularly on Japanese farmers who suffer from the nuclear accident. They are also challenged by Transpacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a regional economic partnership agreement, which aims to facilitate trade liberalisation in the Pacific and Asian region