Social movements

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sera Yeong Seo Park
July 5, 2022

For the bereaved of Sewol and activists in solidarity, the yellow ribbon is a powerful index of remembrance, political dissent, and community making.

A day before the seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, I was sitting alongside a handful of activists in a snug children’s library in Yongsan District, with piles of yellow foam boards and silver chains stacked in front of us. The members of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective were determined to fashion as many yellow ribbons as possible to be circulated in the school district the following morning. This late-night ribbon crafting had become a ritual of sorts to memorialize the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014. April, for those who gathered there, was imbued with harrowing memories of the disaster and the weight of the guilt that they carried as helpless witnesses to the tragedy.

The Yongsan 4.16 Collective was just one among many local clusters of Sewol activism that I came to know during my fieldwork in Korea. Independently organized, these grassroots networks performed paramount work in sustaining the movement nationwide, in solidarity with bereaved family members calling for remembrance, truth, and accountability. What animated these spaces was the yellow ribbon—what was initially a token of condolence, and, later, of multiple affects such as grief, anger, and remembrance. Notably, many who took up the work of Sewol activism often deliberately avoided calling themselves “activists” (hwaldongga) because what they were doing, they told me, fell short of the single-minded, unfaltering commitment they associated with activist work. After all, they diverged from Namhee Lee’s account of the ideological, protest-oriented struggles of the anti-authoritarian, pro-democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s led by the Minjung—common people. Yet, as the Sewol movement illustrates, what it means to “act” was also changing with the historical and cultural currents of Korea. The yellow ribbons that I encountered on the field fashioned new, expansive modes of solidarity, opening up spaces for memorialization of the Sewol disaster and permeable connections within and beyond circles of activists.

The Sewol ferry disaster and the yellow ribbon

The Sewol disaster claimed the lives of 304 passengers, 250 of whom were high school students on a fieldtrip to Jeju Island on the southern coast of the peninsula. It quickly became clear that this was an utterly preventable tragedy. The MV Sewol ferry had been illegally modified to carry more cargo and passengers than originally designed; when the ferry took an abruptly sharp turn on the morning of the 16th, the captain and the crew members were among the first to escape, and passengers were told to “stay put.” Those who followed the instructions through the loudspeakers never made it out of the ill-fated ferry, while the dispatched coast guard forces merely circled around during the critical minutes of the rescue operation.

Image Description: A color photograph shows a group of people wearing yellow vests and holding signs. They stand in single file behind a large white and yellow banner that shows a yellow ribbon. A yellow bus and corroded ferry stand behind them.
Caption: October 2020, Jeonnam province, Korea. Activists demand the truth of the Sewol Disaster, as part of the Truth Bus (jinsilbeoseu) campaign. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

The sinking of the ferry quickly incited a widespread social movement in South Korea, founded on condolence for the victims, guilt in having condoned power structures that failed citizens, and collective determination that “things must change.” The Sewol movement broadly drew on the repertoires and networks afforded by the simin (citizens’) movements, which emerged after the installation of democratic governance. These relatively recent movements foregrounded what Amy Levine describes as “liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches” to political change, relying on the language of hu m an rights and legal action. Yet the Sewol movement also maintained distinct effects and affects of its own. The yellow ribbon first emerged as a symbol of hope for safe return of the missing passengers: social media users embellished their profile photos with yellow ribbons and the slogan, “May one small movement bring a great miracle.” As the chance of victims returning grew fainter with each passing day, the yellow ribbon morphed into a symbol for remembering the victims and expressing solidarity with their families’ demand for truth and justice.

Refusing to remain idle in the aftermath of this shattering loss, citizens turned to the yellow ribbon to cope with, and make something out of, their grief. A collective that came to be known as the Gwanghwamun noran ribon gongjakso (Gwanghwamun yellow ribbon studio) took up a small corner across the memorial altar set up for the victims in Gwanghwamun plaza in Seoul’s city center. While some showed up daily, any passer-by could join in as they wished. After the physical studio was disbanded and the altar was taken down, other yellow ribbon studios emerged nationwide, most of which are run by volunteers who create and distribute ribbons to the wider public.

At the height of the mass protest denouncing the corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and demanding the president’s impeachment, the yellow ribbons came to adopt another layer of meaning. The bereaved of Sewol took to the streets to demand truth and accountability, mobilizing a post-disaster campaign of unprecedented scale in Korea. Grievances against the administration were already simmering to the brim when Park’s flagrant abuse of power came to light at the end of 2016. In the weeks leading up to March 2017, Seoul witnessed 20 consecutive weekends of mass mobilizations demanding that Park step down from office―protests unparalleled in scale and reach, writes Nan Kim, since the democratic uprising in 1987. Yellow ribbons were among the most pervasive motifs in these anti-Park rallies, donned not only by the bereaved but by innumerable other citizens who took to the streets, testifying to the inextricable tie the disaster shared with the wider denunciation of the Park administration.

Image Description: Two sets of silver keys and keychains, each including a twist of yellow ribbon dangling on a keychain. The ribbon on the right is visibly worn.
Caption: The owner of the thin and frayed yellow ribbon on the right had been carrying it with him since 2014, soon after the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Sera Yeong Seo Park

As the Sewol movement expanded, Liora Sarfati and Bora Chung argue that yellow ribbons served as an “affective symbol” that “tie[d] together the personal grief and shock from the disaster with broader public concerns such as personal safety and corruption,” while also being incorporated “into other social injustice debates and demonstrations.” Nan Kim now dubs the yellow ribbon “the most prevalent and durable material metaphor of progressive dissent” in Korea. According to Kim, it was precisely the diverse significations of the yellow ribbon––not just militancy and dissidence, but also hope and the ribbon’s moral register––that gave the symbol such a wide reach.

Materiality, sociality, and the yellow ribbon

My ethnographic work suggests that yellow ribbons were powerful because they fostered a sociality in which people forged ethical and affective attachments to the Sewol cause. In the case of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective, for instance, the crafting sessions kindled conversations about what the disaster meant for each person in the room. On the eve of the seventh anniversary, Eunhee, a seasoned activist who led the Sewol movement in the district, invited everyone to share what had brought them there. Eunhee’s invitation sparked a string of reflections as we went around the room, from a 20-year-old first-timer who had put together events in memoriam for the victims throughout middle and high school to a woman in her forties with children of her own around the age of the deceased students and for whom the tragedy hit too close to home. As the night drifted along and yellow ribbons piled up before us, a chorus of stories emerged. The simple, manual labor of crafting ribbons had woven us together into a collective bound by a common commitment to remembrance.

Image Description: Two children and a woman stand in a busy street in front of a white table, on which stand two trays and two piles of small yellow ribbons. A man on the other end of the table hands them yellow ribbons.
Caption: A family collects ribbons during a street campaign held in the Yongsan district, on the 7th anniversary of the Sewol Disaster. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

Distributing the ribbons on busy streets was also an important part of the project of remembrance. Most pedestrians would carry on without giving a second look at the yellow ribbon campaigns, a bitter testament to the waning presence of the Sewol disaster in the public memory. But there were always a few memorable encounters that reminded me and my fellow campaigners of the power of this symbol as it travels. The owner of a small restaurant across the street from where we held our campaign for the 6th anniversary, for instance, approached us to ask whether he could chip in with a donation; an elderly man inquired if he could take five more for his friends. Several people retracted their steps once they heard the word “Sewol” to skim through the bundle of ribbons laid out on the table. Each of these encounters, albeit ephemeral, facilitated a continual circulation of the yellow ribbons, kindling diffuse, far-reaching networks of solidarity through everyday material encounters.

Towards a wide movement

The yellow ribbon became a versatile symbol standing for, yet also exceeding, the critique of systemic failures and corruption that the Sewol Disaster had brought to the surface. For the bereaved of Sewol, a chance encounter with a yellow ribbon dangling on a stranger’s backpack could be a poignant reminder that theirs is not a solitary fight. For activists across the peninsula, the crafting and distributing of the yellow ribbon is a small yet crucial means to keep the memory of the Sewol disaster alive.

The Sewol movement, according to an activist I met in the field, would be viable insofar as it is a “wide” movement, one with blurred boundaries between its locus and the margins, and between sporadic and sustained engagements. In this formulation, the loosely organized ribbon-crafting sessions and the fleeting encounters with the recipients of the yellow ribbon were as crucial as events of more pronounced political energy and impact, such as protests. The yellow ribbons were crucial for achieving this width, their crafting and circulation inviting diverse repertoires of solidarity without circumscribing what solidarity is or ought to look like.

Sera Yeong Seo Park is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation examines the social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include activism, emotions, affect, and the anthropology of ethics and morality.

Cite as: Park, Sera Yeong Seo. 2022. “Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster.” Anthropology News website, July 5, 2022.

Love Kindstrand (U of Chicago)

What imagery has come to define political life in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe? In the summer of 2012, a few hundred protesters gathering weekly “in front of the prime minister’s office (Kantei-mae)” grew into hundreds of thousands. Every Friday evening, the crowd manifested itself, pouring silently out of subway exits and municipal buses, politely dodging riot police and right-wing mobs, only to disperse obediently after exactly two hours of rhythmic chanting. Within this limited time-space, repertoires of collective performance emerged through participants’ assiduous negotiation with the semiotic void between propriety and righteous indignation.

The Kantei-mae crowd flooding the streets around the prime minister’s office. Photograph courtesy (cc) NODA Masaya/ JVJA

One contagious slogan resonating through the crowd: Saikadō hantai! “Against restarting” the 50-or-so reactors put on emergency hiatus after a magnitude 9 earthquake struck eastern Japan on March 11, 2011, triggering 130-feet tsunami waves that obliterated everything in their path as far as six miles inland. Saikadō hantai! Against prime minister Noda and his cabinet, desperate to assert the legitimacy and profitability of the nuclear establishment, itself a cornerstone of the postwar consolidation of political and economic power, even in the midst of escalating nuclear catastrophe. Saikadō hantai! Against the inextricability of state and nuclear power in the nexus of complicity and vested interest known as the nuclear village, and its unstable foldings of everyday social experience and signification into what I call the nuclear state of political life in contemporary Japan. Amidst the emergent complexity of the nuclear aftermath, newly spun threads of affinity cocooned the chanting masses in all-too-familiar narratives of popular legitimacy, far beyond the organizers’ “single-issue” concerns. Increasingly overburdened by significance, this against reverberated throughout a traumatized social consciousness, and—quite literally—throughout the spatial nexus of government authority.

The prime minister’s office: straddling the steep hillside behind the Diet building amidst towering government complexes, a stone’s throw from Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) headquarters, had become the symbolic locus of government disaster response. Now, it played reluctant host to a different spectacle. Not since the 1960 protests against the renewed US-Japan Security Treaty (Ampo) that brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets had the sterile parade grounds yielded to such a crowd. Below a byline declaring “‘ordinary people’ in protest,” the Asahi evening news declared that “after a 52 long years, the citizen demonstration has returned,” invoking haunting images of another crowd, different but the same, flooding the same spaces of state power in eternal recurrence.

As weekly participation peaked at 200,000 in June 2012, pundits proclaimed the unprecedented turnout a new paradigm of citizen expressivity; an “age of demonstration” soon dubbed the Hydrangea Revolution after the blooming flowerbeds encircling the crowds at the protest site. Surveys showed that a majority of participants demonstrated here for the first time, mobilized through online counterpublics with millions more spectating. Reifying itself as the “tip of the iceberg”—a signifier of larger, latent processes of social change—the crowd was in turn wielded as pliable instrument for other causes. The organizers themselves seized on this imagery of popular discontent, mobilizing a populist imagery of the people manifesting itself in defiance of illegitimate representation by state and capital.

Crowds encircling the Diet in 1960. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

But PM Noda remained undeterred, dismissing the spectacle as nothing but “loud noise.” In an interview, former PM Hatoyama Yukio—one of many politicians who opportunistically sought to associate themselves with the Kantei-mae crowd—cautioned his successor not to “underestimate this people’s power.” “When I was inside the office,” Hatoyama assured, “I could hear the chanting … I think it’s an issue of whether [Noda] is listening or not.” Soon, Noda pledged his “careful attention” not to the irreverent crowd, but to the “voiceless voices” of ordinary people whose silence, at least to Noda, signaled their support for restarting the reactors. In invoking the same silent majority by which Nixon had dismissed the civil rights movement in 1969, Noda used the exact words by which yet another PM, Kishi Nobusuke (grandfather of current PM Shinzo Abe), had steamrolled the 1960 renewal of the US-Japan security treaty through the Diet during the height of outrage against U.S. imperialism. Thus the news that Noda had agreed to host a delegation of 10 representatives of the weekly assembly of protesters shocked both conservative mass media and the political establishment. Despite thorough lampooning of the elected 10 in conservative media rags, Noda’s invitation in effect consecrated the Kantei-mae crowd as a legitimate incarnation of popular discontent with the state’s post-disaster recovery and policy measures.

Meanwhile, the crowd disappeared. Participation plummeted dramatically in the late summer, from the hundreds of thousands amassing only weeks earlier, to the few thousand gathered outside the Kantei in tense anticipation on the long-awaited audience with Noda. Nevertheless, its ambassadors, in their confrontation with the prime minster, relied entirely on a narrative of populist embodiment. After a courteous greeting by Noda (and a moment of anguished silence), organizer Misao Redwolf began:

Today, we really wanted to come here together with the many, the many hundreds of thousands of people outside, but because of the location [inside the Kantei, this is not possible.] I hope that someday you will listen (…) to the voice of the people.

Kantei-mae representatives address the prime minister. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg0HhEG4imY

As invoked by Redwolf and others, the figure of the crowd takes on almost mythical properties. Framed in terms of the simultaneously omnipresent gaze and missing voice of the people, it transcends all spatiotemporal boundaries: at once outside and within, present and absent—as if the image of the people can be as fully incarnated by the ten present inside as by the tens or hundreds of thousands absent outside, and the millions asserted to be participating digitally. How could the Kantei-mae assembly lay claim to the embodiment of a general will? The crowd was gone. But in spite of its deafening absence, its envoys resorted to the crowd as a figure of populist legitimacy. If images of a seemingly endless mass of people, thronging at impenetrable monuments of state power, have now become emblematic of the crisis of political representation gripping Japanese society, this simultaneous presence and absence needs to be accounted for by any serious study of political action, affect and legitimacy in the long nuclear aftermath.

This is the fourth report of an article series on the social movements that are currently occurring in Japan.

Love Kindstrand is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, who is interested in the legacies and legitimacies of social activism in postwar Japan.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi K. Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou(yizhou@ucdavis.edu).