After the event of 9.11 as well as global over-
accumulation of capital and concomitant deflation, it has
become increasingly clear to the eyes of many that the
promise of the freedom and justice in neo-liberalism was
indeed fallacious. 
The globalisation of neo-liberalism did not bring about
freedom, justice and initiative to everyone, but only to
a selected few, who are capable of competing and
winning the battle against others. 
They enjoy freedom to dominate and exploit with power to
dominate over the weaker and to determine what the justice is.

Welcome to EARCAG 2003

Amidst every individual and social group having turned into a subject and unit of reckless competition,
the individuals and various social groups have increasingly become fragmented, and brought into pitting
against others.    The ideology of post-modernism as its superstructure functioned, after all, not to
achieve peaceful coexistence of variegated identities and value systems, but to bring back classical
‘divide-and-rule’ situation in our contemporary world.

This system of domination has an element of something different from the past, however.
  The most obvious is its way of legitimatisation. 
The dominating power mobilises various pretexts, which are by now accepted norms
among the masses as taken for granted, .in part as a fruit of alternative political struggle to achieve
human rights and freedom.   The pretext ranges from fragmented identity politics having originally
been put forward by the alternatives to the discourse of rational nature as absolute neutral power.
  Discrimination and exclusion are thus fashioned based on the ideologies of prima facie progressive
or natural, in conformity with human rights and justice, and thus regarded as something that anyone
with common sense must accept, without questioning.
The EARCAG 2003 ran into this post-modernist mode of discrimination and exclusion head-on. 
Barriers have popped up suddenly in our world which, until just recently, had boasted ‘global convergence’
or ‘the end of the nation state’, tearing the globe apart again into a mosaic of territories, within which
the countrypersons have been confined and spatial freedom of moving out of which deprived of.  The authority
which rules the relational space of the globe expectantly imposed arbitral boundary over the claimed global
contiguity of space, and drew a new map of global configuration at its own will. 
The most affected was the Chinese people, which mean the persons living in the mainland PRC, Hong Kong
and Macau Special Administrative Regions or Taiwan (‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ as a general term for these
territories hereafter).  A Chinese has been denied the right of spatial mobility across some international
boundaries and the use of some facilities just because s/he is a Chinese, even though s/he has had no previous
proven contact with the SARS patients at all.  Many Chinese conducting just a normal life at home has
suddenly become a suspect, subjected to suspicious eye, and spatially confined. 
Some exclusionary or prejudicial discourses emerged in countries such as Japan which is yet to be affected
by SARS. This discriminatory behaviour was legitimatised through the ‘neutrality’ imputed to the natural
substance, the virus which has been in some cases fatal. 

Although the holders of the People’s Republic or the
Republic of China passports as well as the ethnic
Chinese in Hong Kong or elsewhere have officially been
always free to enter Japan with proper visas as required,
the authority of Osaka City University, where the
EARCAG 2003 Organising Committee originally planned
to hold the conference, declined use of their facilities as
our conference venue, because our prospective list of
delegates included those from territories affected by
SARS.  The authority renounced our procurement of the
‘Center of Excellence (COE)’ fund (some funding was
restored later upon our demand),

which was introduced by the Japanese government to force universities compete against one
another under the neo-liberalist principle, and withdrew their auspices to the conference
unless we give in their policy of suspending sweepingly all the academic exchanges with China
for the fiscal year 2003.  Due to these moves, the EARCAG 2003 Osaka had almost been
coerced into postponement for an indefinite period.
A debate ensued among the EARCAG 2003 Organising Committee members.  Some proposed
to conform and postpone the conference, and others insisted to hold the conference in its spite
as scheduled, stating that postponement meant our endorsement of this discriminately and
exclusionary practise.  In the meantime, Professor Mizuuchi made hard effort in negotiating
with the university authority, which the Organising Committee deeply acknowledges here.
  His effort having turned out futile, the Organising Committee was left with a hard choice:
either to postpone, or to hold it as scheduled,
using a venue other than the Osaka CityUniversity. 
The Organising Committee reaffirmed the principles:  we have to be accountable to
all the colleagues who have associated with the EARCAG conferences; we must be explicit in
action not to join this discriminatory gaze and practise to our Asian colleagues but should
rather take this opportunity to reinforce our grass-root solidarity in the region; and its decision
has to reflect moral honesty and justice backed up by the principles of critical geography
which have by now achieved the status of common currency in our global academic circle,
with efforts of critical geographers in the world many of whom associate with the International
Critical Geography Group (ICGG), to which the EARCAG affiliates.
After some searches, the Organising Committee managed to produce a new spatial configuration
of the conference through displacement: changing a part of the venue of the conference from
Osaka to a conference facility in Tokyo, which fortunately maintained a policy which made no
discrimination on the ground of ethnicity or nationality of the users.  

The Organisation Committee of the EARCAG
2003 is extremely grateful of all the delegates
who understood this difficulty that we faced and
supported our action against the unjust
exclusionary move aimed principally towards
a particular ethnic group in Asia.  We would like
to report to our colleagues joining today that,
in spite of this last-minute change of a part of the
conference, few delegates showed intention of
participation have withdrawn.
 We indeed want the world, and we want

globalism, but not that dominated by the authority.  How such a globalism from below
could it be attained?  Various stratagems of spatial resistance have been proposed, and already put into
practise.  Many peoples in the Middle East and Afghanistan, for instance, are now creating their own
spatial niche, or ‘thirdspace’, and started struggle of resistance against military domination of the
United States over that area and over the globe.  The Organising Committee of the EARCAG 2003
feels honoured to have been able to become a part of this series of attempts to produce spatial niche for
resisting the authority, albeit at much smaller scale than theirs.Today, on 5 August 2003, here in Tokyo,
the Organising Committee wholeheartedly welcomes you to the EARCAG 2003, the niche set up
within which alternative conceptions of space or strategies of rec
onstructing globalism from below are to be incubated, discussed and manifested. 
Let us work together with ingenuity, presentations reporting spatial struggles in many corners of Asia
and elsewhere, and intense yet sincere debates to make the conference a great community, from which
we can wage a new struggle to counter military and economic hegemony of the global super power and
to bring us in solidarity with the alternative movements in many corners of the globe. 


5 August 2003

For the EARCAG 2003 Organising Committee,

Fujio MIZUOKA

(Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University
Tokyo, Japan)