Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation

Mobilizing Japanese Youth

The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation

Christopher Gerteis

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction: The Nexus of Gender, Class, and Generation

1. Unions, Youth, and the Cold War

2. The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Red Army

3. Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation

4. Cold War Warriors

5. Motorboat Gambling and Morals Education

Epilogue: Life and Democracy in Postwar Japan

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

In this business one comes to rely on a great many people, and over the course of this project I have incurred a great many debts of gratitude. Many friends and colleagues have given generously of their time in reading and commenting on various drafts of this manuscript. Aaron W. Moore encouraged me to return to this project after years of letting it sit on the hard drive. Bill Mihalopoulos and Stephen Vlastos read draft after draft with unfailing energy and encouragement while demanding that I think harder, and write more clearly, each time. I am also indebted to James McNally, Fujiwara Tetsuya, Laura Hein, Timothy S. George, Barak Kushner, Sheldon Garon, and Sabine Fruhstuck for their rigorous critique, thoughtful commentary, and gentle encouragement. I am thankful for the insights and critiques, both electronic and face to face, offered by Patricia Steinhoff, Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckhert, Frederick Cooper, Tak Fujitani, Andrew Gordon, Frank Grüner, Hans Martin Krämer, Linda K. Kerber, Karen Nakamura, David Tobaru Obermiller, and John W. Treat.

I want to convey a very special thank you to Helen Macnaughtan—and all my colleagues at the SOAS Japan Research Centre—for their good cheer, their camaraderie, and a string of small grants that helped keep me going. The SOAS Japan Research Centre has been a safe harbor for intellectual inquiry and collegiality amid the political and economic turmoil that befell UK higher education during the early twenty-first century. I am also deeply grateful to the staff and faculty of the Ōhara Institute for Social Research, Hōsei University, the Institute for Social Sciences of the University of Tokyo, and the Kōji Takazawa Collection of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. I particularly want to thank Tokiko Bazell and Patricia Steinhoff for their hard work in building and sustaining the unique materials that have inspired my thinking on the subject of radical politics in Japan.

None of this book would have been possible without significant financial support from the Japan–United States Educational Commission and the United States Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Fulbright Scholar Program (2008–9), the Northeast Asia Committee of the Association for Asian Studies (2007 and 2010), the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee of the United Kingdom (2012), the Humboldt University of Berlin International Research Center: Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History (2015–16), and the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Program for Japan Studies in Global Context, supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2016–17). Each of these organizations underwrote precious periods of time during which I was able to focus on writing in the decade it has taken to complete this book.

My editor at Cornell University Press, Roger Haydon, saw promise in a rough manuscript early on, and offered key insights that helped me see it to completion. My copyeditors, Rebekah Zwanzig and Eric Levy, hammered the final manuscript into something far more readable than it would have been without their help. Harald Fuess at the University of Heidelberg arranged for summer grants in 2014 and 2018 that supported me while I wrote both the first and final chapters along the banks of the Neckar River. Heidelberg is indeed a great city in which to write. I owe a particular debt to my colleagues at the Humboldt University of Berlin International Research Center: Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, with whom I was able to spend the academic year 2015–16 exploring the global comparative contexts of this book. I am also particularly indebted to my colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, where I finished this manuscript during the spring of 2020—Masuya Michiyo, Nakajima Takahiro, Sato Jin, and Baba Norihisa, in particular. But most of all, I am grateful to Jennifer E. Anderson, without whose fierce intellect, hardened critique, love, and support this book would not exist.

Note on Transliteration

Japanese terms have been transliterated into roman characters using the Hepburn (romaji kai) system. As is the custom in East Asia, family names precede personal names except when the subject has indicated the opposite preference.

Knowing how to pronounce the various names may make it easier for readers unfamiliar with Japanese to recall significant works later. Fortunately, Japanese is fairly simple to pronounce. The following rules will help readers sound out words as they read:

1. Syllables are single vowels or combinations of a consonant and an open vowel. The exception is n , which ends some syllables.

2. There are five basic vowel sounds:

a like the a in father, but shorter and more clipped

i like the i in machine, but shorter and more clipped.

u like the u in put, but shorter, more clipped, and without lip rounding.

e like the e in bet, but shorter and more clipped.

o like the o in hose, but shorter and more clipped.

3. There are two major diphthongs:

ai like the i in idea.

ei like the a in way.

Introduction

The Nexus of Gender, Class, and Generation

Mobilizing Japanese Youth examines how the leaders of Japan’s nonstate institutions tried to shape the political consciousness of the first generation of youth born after the end of the Second World War. It explores how the older transwar generation, who led Japan’s civic institutions for nearly five decades after 1945, sought to influence the political consciousness of a postwar generation of young people who by the late 1960s were the demographic majority of voting-age adults. The book breaks from previous studies of Japanese youth and radical politics by focusing on how nonstate actors—on the political Far Left and Far Right—deployed propaganda constructed from common shared notions of gender and class. It argues that socially constructed aspects of class and gender preconfigured the forms of political rhetoric and social organization that the Far Right and Far Left deployed to mobilize postwar youth during the 1950s and 1960s, which further exacerbated the levels of social and political alienation expressed by young blue- and pink-collar working men and women well into the 1970s.

This book deploys an interdisciplinary toolkit to investigate the historical trajectory of generational change in postwar Japan. It unpacks the extent to which notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women—from the weekly rants found in a sports gambling magazine to the political subject embedded within the first commercial protopunk record album released in Japan. It meshes with analyses of diplomatic, police, and intelligence reports collected from archives in Japan, Great Britain, and the United States; social survey data from the data archive of the University of Tokyo Institute for Social Science; and personal papers and ephemera found in the archives of the Takazawa Collection at the University of Hawai‘i in Manoa and the Ōhara Institute for Social Research at Hōsei University in Tokyo. Using the analytical tools employed by social and cultural historians, this book shifts the focus from state to nonstate to investigate Japan’s place in the global political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the connections and disconnections between two generations of political radicals in order to understand the ways in which customary notions of class and gender impacted the political attitudes expressed by Far Right and Far Left activists from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Japanese youth of the 1960s and 1970s were profoundly influenced by a transnational flow of ideas and people that constituted a unique historical convergence of pan-Asianism, Maoism, black nationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-Communism, neofascism, and ultranationalism. The six chapters that compose the core of this book unpack the formative experiences of the first generation of Japanese born after the Second World War. By the late 1960s, young people seemed to be engulfed by social, cultural, and political challenges to both the hegemonic culture and the authority of the Japanese state. The first three chapters examine how the mass-mobilization politics orchestrated by organized labor during the 1950s and 1960s did not capture the political imagination of the Sixties Generation and instead helped to precipitate the formation of New Left revolutionary groups like the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun). The fourth chapter examines the impact of youth mobilizations by constructing the statistical narrative of the 1970s political mentalité. The last two chapters build on the statistical snapshot of the political dissonance of the 1970s, narrating how a Far Right philanthropist funded cultural and educational propaganda for young people born in the late 1960s and early 1970s that tracked with a rightward shift in individual attitudes toward core political institutions held by their Sixties Generation parents. These last two chapters jointly argue that well-funded, private cultural and educational interventions laid significant groundwork for the Far Right to push its agenda into the 1990s and beyond.

By comparison, the Meiji, the Taishō, and even the early Shōwa eras (1868–1912, 1912–26, and 1926–31) witnessed considerable right- and left-wing political activity, some of it quite radical. Politicians and bureaucrats throughout the twentieth century navigated their shared interest in the social welfare of Japanese youth alongside their fear that young people also constituted a significant threat to social stability. The Japanese state responded to its twentieth-century youth problems with measured amounts of co-option and repression, but the constitutional democracy after 1945 limited the extent to which the state could resort to repression while simultaneously imbuing young people with a new sense of inalienable rights. No longer children, but not yet fully emancipated adults, young people in postwar Japan learned to express their subjectivity during an intense period of successive cultural movements and political crises that ran parallel to the experiences of young people in the highly industrialized nations of Western Europe and the Americas.

The postwar years saw high levels of civic engagement. Indeed, the postwar era was a clear example of fractious democratic capitalism, even though the huge citizens’ movements of the era are rarely recalled today. As a result, the postwar era is remembered within the narrow, sometimes stultifying context of the economic miracle narrative. This blind spot has obscured the way that Japan realized both economic growth and political pluralism as well as the co-optation of citizens’ movements before they could fundamentally transform the nation’s political economy.

Japan’s two constitutions—the Meiji constitution of 1889, and the current constitution in effect since 1947—were both literally handed to the Japanese people from above, the former from the Meiji emperor, the latter from the Allied Occupation authorities who authored the document and then pretended it had been crafted by a Japanese parliamentary committee. The Allied Occupation, historical memory of the war, and the new constitution established an unprecedentedly popular infrastructure that Japanese conservatives could do little to change. What they could control, however, was how the state responded to it, and the meanings assigned to these responses. In doing so, they were writing new chapters in the story of Japan’s continuing redefinition of its modern domestic and international identity.

As a result, the 1950s were witness to great social and economic turmoil, from the efforts by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the nuclear arms race to the unionization struggles led by coal miners demanding basic safety equipment and fair wages in Kyushu and Hokkaido. Indeed, wage-earning city women joined local farm women as they blocked military base gates in Sunagawa in protest of Japan’s emergent role as an ally of the United States in the Cold War.¹ This picture of Japanese life stands in stark contrast to the middle-class family lives portrayed widely in television and motion-picture melodramas in Japan today and uncritically celebrated abroad in bestsellers such as Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One. Yet the 1950s saw the consolidation of conservative rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), despite the upsurge in civic organizations and mass movements underpinned by constitutional protections for individual rights and mass politics.

By the late 1950s, the political dissatisfactions of millions of Japanese had sparked a national movement to rescind the postwar military treaties with the United States. These dissatisfactions grew by the end of the 1960s into vast national movements calling for the end of Japanese support for the Vietnam War and the reversion of Okinawa from US to Japanese sovereignty. The protests targeted US government policies as much as those of the Japanese government. Not coincidentally, the United States poured resources into protecting the Japanese government from popular democratic demands to expel US military bases from Japan and end Japan’s logistical support for the United States’ war in Vietnam.²

After the social movements of the 1960s were squashed—largely by extraparliamentary, and occasionally extrajudicial, action—many politically active Japanese refocused their civic engagement onto more local concerns, such as the failure of corporate authorities to make good on their promises to make whole the damages inflicted by industrial pollution in Minamata, the state’s miserly social welfare programs for the disabled and elderly, and the bulldozing of the rights of small-hold farmers in Narita. In long, hard struggles, these post-1970 citizen-activists were occasionally able to force corporate and government authorities to address some of their demands—but not all, and not for very long. Periodic outbreaks of civic protest pushed authorities to offer some concessions, but also prompted national and local authorities to respond with increasingly repressive measures.³

Social movements from the late 1950s to the early 1970s defined the outer boundaries of democracy in Japan, shaped not by citizen apathy but by increasingly impermeable institutional barriers. Citizens were deeply involved in national political movements for the first fifteen years of the postwar era but hit several roadblocks between 1960 and 1970 that demarcated what has customarily been characterized as a decline in participatory democracy and the consolidation of one-party rule. Although leftist political movements exerted considerable influence on the shape of Japanese society, the center Right, determined to emerge as the more powerful force, leveraged its access to corporate patronage networks and to US Cold War initiatives with its nearly endless political funding for those who hopped on for the ride. The formation of the LDP in 1955 marked the beginning of an era of conservative politics that remained the norm apart from short breaks in LDP rule in 1993–94 and 2009–12. These conservative rulers continued a time-worn modern tradition, rooted in the machinations of the Meiji era oligarchy, of responding to domestic challenges just in time, and just enough, to hold on to the reins of national power.

Gender norms also helped to stratify societal divisions, both material and discursive, that led some Japanese to feel the pinch of hard times more, and the bounty of good times less, than others. My earlier scholarship examined how prewar gender roles reemerged after 1945 to enable men and women—socialist, Communist, conservative, and ultranationalist—to reestablish prewar gender norms at home and in the workplace, which made women second-class citizens despite the constitutional guarantee of their legal equality.⁴ In the highly industrialized societies of Europe, the Americas, and Pacific Asia, gender functions as a normative coding of terms, phrases, and metaphors that inform the core workings of the everyday nation-state where social qualities associated with manliness and womanliness are used to define the borders of national identity. During the early decades of the postwar era, public and private institutions constructed social roles for blue-collar men and women that in essential aspects institutionalized prewar gender practices legitimizing the subordination of women to men and the dominance of some men over others. The resultant hegemonic ideals for the blue-collar working man and housewife and mother were nonetheless ideologically flexible: labor leaders found them useful as a means of mobilizing union militancy, corporate managers were able to deploy them to quell union militancy, and the state found them a useful symbol of Japan’s economic success. By the mid-1960s, work had become the measure of citizenship, employment synonymous with manhood, and Japanese men the breadwinners of postwar society.⁵

The trajectory for the emergence of hegemonic gender ideals in Japan was not unique. Gail Bederman, Kristin Hoganson, Mire Koikare, and Michael Kimmel demonstrate how, during periods of social crisis, political elites and social commentators often turn to the debates over who does, and who does not, embody the ideal-type national masculine or feminine. Their machinations served as a means of marking the boundaries of who was, and who was not, to blame for the problems then faced by the liminal nation.⁶ As mentioned earlier, the final chapters of this book investigate the extent to which the middle-class nation that emerged during the 1970s was founded on strongly gendered notions of work, family, and political participation that invoked class-stratified, ideologically laden notions of moral citizenship. These notions resonated with the gender praxis of the prewar and interwar era, and underscored the failure of attempts during the late 1960s to overcome modernity and redefine the contours of the postwar nation, state, and society.

This book specifically builds on works by Setsu Shigematsu, Chelsea Schieder, and Oguma Eiji, who have each offered critical insights into the social upheaval that characterized the New Left youth politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Oguma’s two-thousand-page double-volume account of the late 1960s concludes that the youth revolts of 1968 were not a mass movement so much as a generation’s path to self-discovery. He argues that rapid economic growth precipitated the social changes at the heart of the Sixties Generation’s contemporary unhappiness, in which the material comforts of prosperity precipitated a generational crisis of identity that drove the frenzied activism of the era. The sites of political protest became an involuted space for Sixties Youth to recover their sense of humanity and personal identity, but at the cost of irrelevance outside the generational space of encounter.⁷

Oguma’s encyclopedic documentation of the late 1960s offered important narrative evidence of women’s significant roles in the mass movements of 1968. However, Setsu Shigematsu and Chelsea Schieder broke new ground by building on the work of a dedicated cadre of feminist scholars—Ueno Chizuko foremost—to show how the male-dominated youth politics of the era embraced notions of sex and gender that alienated a significant minority of young women, who then split off to form the vanguard of the radical feminist movement in Japan. Their accounts of the rise of the women’s liberation movement in Japan is representative of strong feminist scholarship that rightly holds the field to account for the serious dearth of earlier work on the subject. However, feminist scholarship has tended to overlook the impact of class in its effort to address the seriously understudied aspects of women’s experiences of domination by men amid the youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s.⁸

The historian David Ambaras’s path-breaking study of youth deviance in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan shows how state bureaucrats, despite official rhetoric portraying young people as the future of Japan, more often than not enacted policies conceived from a uniform perception of youth from the lower classes as necessarily a social problem to be dealt with through discipline and punishment. Ambaras’s later work built on his study of bad youth by examining the life course of those lumpen proletariat who inhabited the periphery of the Japanese colonial territories. His specific interest in social mobility among the underclasses of imperial Japan—from sex workers to pirates—underscored the significance of gender and class as fluid components within a complex process of identity formation that crossed the borders of empire and defined the parameters of industrialization.⁹

Looking at Japan in the 1990s, the anthropologist Robert Yoder examined how representatives of state educational institutions were still most likely to perceive lower-class suburban youth as a social problem solved by class-specific social controls. Yoder asserted that authorities who expected deviance from particular types of youth further encouraged nonconformist social behavior among lower-class suburban youth, and thus precipitated much of the problem they sought to control.¹⁰

These studies illustrate how the youth and social movements of the era were an expression of a generational consciousness as much as a response to a repressive regime bent on forcing young people to conform to social norms. While each has greatly contributed to understanding the contours of the youth movements of the era, they have not interrogated ways in which socially constructed aspects of gender and class within the movement mirrored conventional notions of gender espoused by the older transwar generation of men and women they sought to overthrow. In terms of attitudes toward customary class and gender roles, the postwar and transwar generations had enough in common to inform a steady flow of propaganda aimed at promoting radically different political causes. High-profile acts of political violence committed by young Japanese during the 1960s and 1970s illustrate that social alienation in a highly industrialized society, such as Japan, is born of a complex interchange of material, social, political, and psychological conditions. By focusing specifically on how Far Right and Far Left organizations attempted to reach out to young radicals, with a particular interest in those of blue-collar origins, this book breaks from conventional studies of Japanese youth and political violence that have tended to blame the ennui of affluence for several waves of youth radicalism since 1960.

The first chapter, Unions, Youth, and the Cold War,