Dystopia as Forecast: How the Japanese Privacy Movement Contested an Imagined Data State, 1970s–1990s

During the 1970s, as computerization became central to Japan’s public administration, the state advanced a sociotechnical imaginary of an efficient, digitally unified information society, built on integrating personal data and culminating in a proposed national identification number. In response, a social movement emerged to contest the concentration of informational power in state and corporate systems. This article argues that the movement is best understood as a politics of anticipation. It mobilized against a data state that did not yet exist, contesting the imaginary as a claim about the future, not present harms. Drawing on imported and projected examples, activists fought on two fronts, protection of personal data and access to government information, in an anticipatory contest that co-produced Japan’s data-governance regime. Tracing the movement from the 1972 founding of the Central Council for Opposing the National ID System and Protecting Privacy through census resistance and activists’ entry into local government, the article shows that the feared data state arrived only in constrained form, hedged by the oversight the movement had demanded. Neither the imaginary’s triumph nor the movement’s victory, the resulting settlement turns on the question it first raised: who should control the collection, circulation, and use of personal information?