This book offers a timely and multifaceted reanalysis of student radicalism in postwar Japan. It considers how students actively engaged the early postwar debates over subjectivity, and how the emergence of a new generation of students in the mid-1950s influenced the nation’s embrace of the idea that ‘the postwar’ had ended. Attentive to the shifting spatial and temporal boundaries of ‘postwar Japan,’ it elucidates previously neglected histories of student and zainichi Korean activism and their interactions with the Japanese Communist Party. This book is a key read for scholars in the field of Japanese history, social movements and postcolonial studies, as well as the history of student radicalism.

In the 1960s, a new generation of university-educated youth in Japan challenged forms of capitalism and the state. In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women's participation in these protest movements led by the New Left through the early 1970s. Women were involved in contentious politics to an unprecedented degree, but they and their concerns were frequently marginalized by men in the movement and the mass media, and the movement at large is often memorialized as male and masculine. Drawing on stories of individual women, Schieder outlines how the media and other activists portrayed these women as icons of vulnerability and victims of violence, making women central to discourses about legitimate forms of postwar political expression. Schieder disentangles the gendered patterns that obscured radical women's voices to construct a feminist genealogy of the Japanese New Left, demonstrating that student activism in 1960s Japan cannot be understood without considering the experiences and representations of these women.

Conformist, mute and malleable? Andrews tackles head-on this absurd caricature of Japanese society in his fascinating history of its militant sub-cultures, radical societies and well-established traditions of dissent Following the March 2011 tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis, the media remarked with surprise on how thousands of demonstrators had flocked to the streets of Tokyo. But mass protest movements are nothing new in Japan and the post-war period experienced years of unrest and violence on both sides of the political spectrum: from demos to riots, strikes, campus occupations, faction infighting, assassinations and even international terrorism. This is the first comprehensive history in English of political radicalism and counterculture in Japan, as well as the artistic developments during this turbulent time. It chronicles the major events and movements from 1945 to the new flowering of protests and civil dissent in the wake of Fukushima. Introducing readers to often ignored aspects of Japanese society, it explores the fascinating ideologies and personalities on the Right and the Left, including the student movement, militant groups and communes. While some elements parallel developments in Europe and America, much of Japan's radical recent past (and present) is unique and offers valuable lessons for understanding the context to the new waves of anti-government protests the nation is currently witnessing.

Tracing Japanese Leftist Political Activism (1957–2017) tells the story of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), a militant left-wing group founded in 1971 which was involved in numerous terrorist attacks. It traces the origins of the group in the Japanese New Left in the 1960s and looks at Red Army groups of the early 1970s in Japan, such as the Red Army Faction, and the United Red Army which became infamous for murdering its own members. The book also examines the JRA's trans- and international links with other militant groups including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as the networks of intellectuals and fellow activists who supported them. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of terrorism, radicalism, and Japanese social history.

In Mobilizing Japanese Youth, Christopher Gerteis examines how non-state institutions in Japan—left-wing radicals and right-wing activists—attempted to mold the political consciousness of the nation's first postwar generation, which by the late 1960s were the demographic majority of voting-age adults. Gerteis argues that socially constructed aspects of class and gender preconfigured the forms of political rhetoric and social organization that both the far-right and far-left deployed to mobilize postwar, further exacerbating the levels of social and political alienation expressed by young blue- and pink- collar working men and women well into the 1970s, illustrated by high-profile acts of political violence committed by young Japanese in this era. As Gerteis shows, Japanese youth were profoundly influenced by a transnational flow of ideas and people that constituted a unique historical convergence of pan-Asianism, Mao-ism, black nationalism, anti-imperialism, anticommunism, neo-fascism, and ultra-nationalism. Mobilizing Japanese Youth carefully unpacks their formative experiences and the social, cultural, and political challenges to both the hegemonic culture and the authority of the Japanese state that engulfed them. The 1950s-style mass-mobilization efforts orchestrated by organized labor could not capture their political imagination in the way that more extreme ideologies could. By focusing on how far-right and far-left organizations attempted to reach-out to young radicals, especially those of working-class origins, this book offers a new understanding of successive waves of youth radicalism since 1960.

The samurai films of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa are set in the past, but they tell us much about the present, as do his crime stories, romances, military films, medical dramas and art films. His movies are beloved for their timeless protagonists and haunting vistas of old Japan, but we haven't yet fully grasped everything they can teach us about modern Japan. Kurosawa's films evolved as Japan redefined and reinvented itself, from movies made for the wartime regime to those made amid the trials of American occupation. From the lavish epics of the economic miracle years to searching masterpieces made with international assistance in a globalizing world, Kurosawa's movies responded to changing times. This detailed study of all 30 of Kurosawa's films analyzes the links between the thrilling narratives onscreen and the equally remarkable events that occurred in Japan over his long, productive career. This book explores how Kurosawa's classics depict the political, economic, cultural, sexual and environmental upheavals of a nation at the center of a turbulent century, both directly and through period-piece mythmaking.

When do we see social movements mobilize against the American military overseas, and what explains their varying intensity? Despite increasing interest in the vast network of U.S. military bases on foreign soil, it is still not well understood why some host communities resist the bases in their backyards, while others remain compliant. In Base Towns, Claudia Junghyun Kim addresses this puzzle by investigating the contentious politics surrounding twenty U.S. military bases across Korea and Japan. In particular, she looks at municipalities hosting these bases and differing levels of community acceptance and resistance over time. Drawing on fieldwork interviews, participant observation, and protest event data from 2000-2015, Kim shows that activists occasionally manage to join hands with the otherwise politically inactive local populations when they deliberately subordinate their radical movement goals to more immediate, mundane demands that form the basis of everyday local grievances. Specifically, the activists in base towns successfully build broad anti-base movements when they take advantage of quotidian disruption, adopt culturally resonant movement frames, and ally with local political elites. These activist strategies, however, sometimes end up reinforcing the widely presumed inevitability of the American presence. In examining activist actions, strategies, and dilemmas, this book sheds light on marginalized actors in domestic and international politics--far removed from elite decision-making processes that shape interstate base politics and yet living with their consequences--who sometimes manage to complicate the operations of America's military behemoth.

This book examines the widespread protests which took place in Japan in 1960 against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and assesses their far-reaching impact. It emphasizes the scale of the protests, at the climax of which hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan's National Diet building on nearly a daily basis, and large protests took place in other cities and towns all across Japan. It considers the results of the protests, which included the cancellation of President Eisenhower’s state visit and Prime Minister Kishi’s removal from office, and argues that although the protests apparently failed in that the Security Treaty was renewed and the Liberal Democratic Party remained in power, nevertheless the protests brought about subtle lasting changes in Japan: they revealed many latent societal and political tensions, and they compelled the ruling establishment to reshape itself, having to take seriously non-militarization and the need to listen to the people. The events are analysed in terms of social movement dynamics, with comparative references to the Western European protests of 1968.

Enlisting a natural experiment, global surveys, and historical data, this book examines the university's evolution and its contemporary impact. Its authors conduct an unprecedented big-data comparative study of the consequences of higher education on ideology, democratic citizenship, and more. They conclude that university education has a profound effect on social and political attitudes across the world, greater than that registered by social class, gender, or age. A university education enhances political trust and participation, reduces propensities to crime and corruption, and builds support for democracy. It generates more tolerant attitudes toward social deviance, enhances respect for rationalist inquiry and scientific authority, and usually encourages support for Leftist parties and movements. It does not nurture support for taxation, redistribution, or the welfare state, and may stimulate opposition to these policies. These effects are summarized by the co-authors as liberal, understood in its classic, nineteenth-century meaning.

The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan. In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home. The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state. Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives—including memoirs and survivor interviews—to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.