PROLE PLANET UPDATE

...“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.” The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations. These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.......

Last Sunday, November 1), Utopia (the broad-left bookstore/ “salon” in Beijing) hosted a screening of the Japanese documentary film “Freeters’ Revolt” (《素人之乱》, translated elsewhere as “Amateur’s Revolt”), and a discussion with the filmmaker, freeter activist and second-hand shop owner Hajime Matsumoto (松本 哉), along with Higuchi Takuro (樋口拓朗), billed as the main organizer of the 2008 anti-G8 protests in Japan and researcher at Tokyo University’s Global COE [Centers of Excellence] Program. Call Utopia at (010) 6276.0856+11/0. http://chinastudygroup.net/2009/10/freeters-revolt-screening/

http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/coe/english/greeting/index.html

http://www.wyzxsx.com/Article/Class1/200910/110902.html

http://www.douban.com/event/11136827/