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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Japanese youth activists practises solidarity with Palestine in contexts where such engagement is socially unexpected. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kyoto, it explores how solidarity emerges through persistence, and everyday negotiation across difference.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how solidarity is practised in contexts where political alignment is neither obvious nor socially encouraged, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kyoto. Following activists who have organised demonstrations, vigils, and digital campaigns in solidarity with Palestine which is an engagement that sits uneasily within the political restraint and civic harmony of Japan.

Rather than approaching solidarity as a shared ideological position, the paper focuses on how it is produced through everyday practices that are tentative, affectively charged, and uncomfortable. Activists describe their participation not in terms of certainty but through feelings of hesitation, responsibility, and the difficulty of remaining visible in public and online spaces. Solidarity is sustained through constant repetition, showing up, reposting, standing together despite doubts about effectiveness and social reception.

The paper foregrounds the affective labour involved in these practices, tracing how care, fatigue, anxiety, and moral unease circulate within the movement. Digital platforms play a central role, not simply as tools for mobilisation but as spaces where memories, images, and emotions are archived, contested, and reworked. These digital traces intersect with embodied actions in the city, blurring boundaries between online and offline activism and between solidarity and charity.

By focusing on these lived dynamics, the paper contributes to discussions of “counterintuitive solidarity” by showing how collective action can emerge despite political distance, unequal exposure to risk, and limited expectations of success. Solidarity appears not as a seamless moral stance but as a fragile, negotiated practice rooted in affect, presence, and ongoing relational work.