Youth Movements, Trauma and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1. Trauma, Empowerment and Alternative Space -- Collective Trauma -- Empowerment and the Role of Alternative Space in Social Movements -- 2. Japan's Lost Decade and Two Recoveries -- The End of The Bubble and the Arrival of Precarity -- The Sense of Closure and the Legacy of Earlier Protest -- Lost Decade, Regained Activism? -- 3. The New Cultural Movements -- The Storm of Autumn -- The League of Good-for-Nothings -- Anti-war Protests and the Prehistory of Sound-Demos -- 4. The Rise of Movements Against Precarity -- The General Freeter Union and the "precariat" -- "Life" and "Survival" in the Precarity Movement -- 5. Space, Art and Homelessness -- Art Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Shinjuku Cardboard Village -- Anti-Poverty and Viva Poverty -- "Waking up From the Dream": Nagai Park's Theatre of Resistance -- Miyashita Park: Can a No-Man's-Land be Defended? -- 6. Alternative Space, Withdrawal and Empowerment -- Support Groups for Social Withdrawers and NEET -- Freeter Unions: Narratives of Recovery -- 7. Campus Protest -- 8. The Recovery of Activism -- Three Innovations of Freeter Activism -- The Importance of Space: Cntestation and Backeting -- Fukushima and Beyond -- Appendix 1. Chronological Table of Key Events and Major Organisations -- Appendix 2. Interviews -- Bibliography -- Index.