Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the process through which politically disinterested individuals become right-wing citizens in contemporary Japan. It explores how individual-level emotions are translated into collective grievances and they are embodied through everyday practices.

Paper long abstract:

How do politically disinterested individuals become right-wing citizens? Despite a number of empirical works in Hate speech activities in contemporary Japan, existing literature tends to reduce this problem to the efforts of collective framing by social movement organizations. The result is tenuous understanding of the role of individual's agency. Combining insights from the sociology of emotion and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, this paper sees political conversion as the transformation of moral selfhood -a set of dispositions about what is right and wrong-, which requires individuals' active commitments. Drawing on original and secondary interview data, ethnographic observation of activities by right-wing citizens, as well as the analysis of conservative magazines, I examine how individual-level emotions are translated into collective grievances and they are embodied through everyday practices. I demonstrate how such practices as the internet surfing, street protests, and denial of their political views in daily lives turned politically disinterested individuals to right-wing citizens.