Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation 1501756338, 9781501756337

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MOBILIZING JAPANESE YOUTH

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

MOBILIZING JAPANESE YOUTH The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation Christopher Gerteis

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress. cornell.edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gerteis, Christopher, 1968– author. Title: Mobilizing Japanese youth : the Cold War and the making of the sixties generation / Christopher Gerteis. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020046250 (print) | LCCN 2020046251 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501756313 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501756320 (epub) | ISBN 9781501756337 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Youth—Political activity—Japan—History—20th century. | Radicalism—Japan—History—20th century. | Political violence—Japan— History—20th century. | Political alienation—Japan—History—20th century. | Japan—Politics and government—1945– Classification: LCC HN730.Z9 R3225 2021 (print) | LCC HN730.Z9 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046250 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046251 Cover image: View of a group of teenaged “motorcycle kids” parked on an unidentified street, Tokyo, Japan, 1964. Photo by Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

Contents

Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration

Introduction: The Nexus of Gender, Class, and Generation

vii ix 1

1. Unions, Youth, and the Cold War

11

2. The Rise and Fall of

42

the Japanese Red Army

3. Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation

68

4. Cold War Warriors

100

5. Motorboat Gambling and Morals Education

121



Epilogue: Life and Democracy in Postwar Japan

Notes Index

144 155 173

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 vii

viii       Acknowledgments

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.

ix

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 votingage 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 1

2       Introduction

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,

Nexus of Gender, Class, and Generation      3

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

4       Introduction

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 smallhold 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

Nexus of Gender, Class, and Generation      5

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

6       Introduction

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 f­ oremost— 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 lowerclass 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

Nexus of Gender, Class, and Generation      7

postwar and transwar generations had enough in common to inform a steady flow of propaganda aimed at promoting radically different political causes. Highprofile 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,” sets the stage by looking at how organized labor, the backbone of class-based politics in postwar Japan, failed to adapt to the changing interests of their young members. The chapter argues that by the 1970s, high growth dramatically raised the wages and aspirations of blue-collar workers, young and old, to the point where they increasingly dreamed of living a middle-class lifestyle. By the end of the 1960s, thousands of young blue-collar radicals had broken entirely from the mainstream labor unions to join the political and cultural milieu of 1960s youth politics. Most subsequently followed a short trajectory toward a life of apolitical consumerism, but a significant and influential few chose a more violent path that led them to join terror groups in Japan and abroad. These entangled narratives of social alienation—right- and left-wing, male and female—embroider the margins of Japan’s high-growth era and run counter to the dominant perception that youth alienation of the 1960s resulted from an ennui born of middle-class affluence. The chapter examines how postwar leftist propaganda also offers a unique window on the cultural and political milieu at the center of Japan’s postwar democracy. The relatively sophisticated propaganda is a reminder of the fact that the Japanese populace as a whole was impressively literate and had access to a wide array of posters, newsletters, newspapers, and magazines produced by leftist organizations. The chapter traces the emergence of archetypical representations of “manhood” and “womanhood” that by the 1960s decreasingly appealed to young blue-collar men and women who increasingly perceived a generational schism between their interests and those of their fathers’ unions. Chapter 2, “The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Red Army,” examines the global context of left-wing youth radicalism in Japan through the lens of the global flow of ideas and people involved in revolutionary movements during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter begins by placing Japan’s leftist revolutionary group the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun) within the global convergence of leftist revolutionary groups that emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s. China’s Cultural Revolution had a significant impact on a generation of European,

8       Introduction

American, African, and Asian youth who by the late 1960s were motivated to collective action as the means to radically alter the political status quo. I end the chapter by reconstructing the narrative of the Red Army Faction member Wakamiya Masanori, whose dissatisfaction with the New Left movement led him to open a ramen shop in the slums of Osaka in the early 1970s. Like the Japanese Red Army founder Shigenobu Fusako, Wakamiya Masanori was emblematic of the social and economic forces that shaped the life course of blue-collar workers during the 1960s and 1970s. His experience of primary-sector vocational training followed by in-migration and urban factory employment was significantly impacted by union outreach initiatives that had the inadvertent effect of further alienating him from the mainstream labor movement. Both Shigenobu and Wakamiya sought to move youth politics in Japan beyond its parochial focus on the infinite clown fight of who had the better New Left theory—Shigenobu persuaded her cadre of revolutionaries to undertake global revolution and Wakamiya ignited a neighborhood war between local day laborers, gangsters, and police. The third chapter, “Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation,” examines the relationship between social stratification and political alienation by interrogating social survey data as a means of finding the basis of political consciousness and social values of young Japanese aged sixteen to twenty-nine during the 1970s. This chapter uses data collected by the parastatal broadcast corporation NHK during the 1970s to build on the notion that so-called “youth bulges” correlate with increased levels of political violence and social unrest, unpacking some of the social, cultural, and political positions expressed to pollsters by young men and women who composed the first generation(s) of the postwar era. It uses these data to reconstruct a statistical narrative of the social stratification and political mentalité, correlated with gender and class status, that underpinned the social alienation experienced by Japanese youth during the 1970s. A close analysis of the data shows how the political epochs of the late 1960s fostered a generational identity among young people born to the Sixties Generation that was nevertheless fractured by significant differences in political attitude that (though still distinctive to the age cohort) correlate more strongly with gender and class than with age. Chapter 4, “Cold War Warriors,” examines how a tight coalition of prominent Far Right activists sought to address the “youth problem” they thought plagued postwar Japan. It narrates how the coordinated suppression of leftist radicalism encouraged strange alliances between former war criminals, Far Right politicians, mob bosses, and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By the late 1960s, circumstances had evolved to the extent that the alleged war criminals, ardent ultranationalists, and wartime profiteers Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa

Nexus of Gender, Class, and Generation      9

Ryōichi had become two sides of the Far Right coin—Sasakawa the gentler public head and Kodama the more nefarious tail. The enigmatic nature of this alliance was not lost on the younger generation interested in Far Right politics during the 1960s and 1970s, and the young men who formed the vanguard of New Right politics in the early 1970s decried the established Far Right for its cozy relationship with the US and Japanese governments. The older generation of Far Right activists responded to their sense of Japan’s youth crisis by declaring that the corruption of Japan’s youth could be reversed by the adoption of a national educational curriculum centered on traditional Japanese moral values, respect for tradition and culture, and love for nation and native place. The fifth chapter, “Motorboat Gambling and Morals Education,” builds on chapter 4 by examining the propaganda efforts undertaken by ultranationalist activists as they sought to normalize Far Right political discourse and marginalize leftist political positions to the point of becoming anathema to the national polity. This chapter specifically examines how Sasakawa Ryōichi’s philanthropic gambling empire attempted to reshape the social conscience of young people and promote the reintroduction of morals education for Japanese youth. The chapter begins with a close examination of a series of short documentary films and television commercials commissioned by the Japan Ship Promotion Foundation (renamed the Nippon Foundation in 1995) to promote the various projects that Sasakawa supported. It explores how these media helped to normalize core assertions about the moral values of the Japanese nation while simultaneously presenting the audience with the notion that his organizations were doing good works for the state. The overall effect was to push larger numbers of Japanese to accept the validity of political positions advocating the reintroduction of mandatory morals education into the state curriculum alongside the forward deployment of armed Japanese troops abroad, both of which became the legal norm in 2016. The epilogue connects the radical youth politics of the 1970s to the contemporary phenomena of youth precarity. It narrates how young people in Japan have since 2010 attempted to mobilize against what they perceive to be adverse changes to the laws governing privacy, censorship, and the right of assembly. By the late 1980s, Japan was enmeshed within the neoliberal economics that seemed to promise most workers a life of middle-class affluence without consequence. When the economic bubble burst in 1993, successive government administrations, pushing through revision after revision of neoliberal bailout policy, failed to resolve the cascade of economic problems that plagued the Japanese economy well into the twenty-first century. Young people, for whom the perpetual search for work has been most pronounced since 1993, have inherited a seemingly

10       Introduction

endless string of impermanent jobs with little to gain from a system now focused on reallocating social resources to serve the needs of an aging demographic topography. The epilogue speculates as to the cause of the rightward shift in political values among members of the Sixties Generation, and also unpacks how that generation’s journey into four decades of political conservativism wrought a bleak future for the young people who, since the early 1990s, have faced lives of unrelenting underemployment and political irrelevance.

1 UNIONS, YOUTH, AND THE COLD WAR

Conflict between the transwar generation of union leaders and young workers in the 1960s had its roots in the twin pillars of the mass-mobilization strategies developed at the end of the Allied Occupation (1945–52). Leaders of the Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Sōhyōgikai (General Council of Trade Unions, or Sōhyō) committed the rank and file to a collective bargaining strategy aimed at raising the wages of male-headed households and a “peace” platform of unarmed neutrality in the Cold War. The class-based gender-role ideals of the family wage advocated by the first wave of postwar labor leaders—all men active in leftist politics during the 1920s and 1930s—forged socially conservative ideas about “work,” “womanhood,” and “manhood” that would define leftist politics well into the 1970s. High economic growth dramatically raised unionized blue-collar workers’ wages and aspirations, such that by the 1970s blue-collar workers—young and old— increasingly dreamed of living a middle-class lifestyle. However, Sōhyō’s collective bargaining strategy also marginalized female workers and stratified male workers’ wages along generational lines, producing a generational schism in the 1960s. Politically, blue-collar youth shared the transwar leadership’s opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty. However, in the global context of rising anti– Vietnam War sentiment and ethnonationalists’ demands for the reunification of Okinawa, a distinct minority of radical youth rejected the mass nonviolent tactics of their parents’ generation in favor of political violence. This chapter investigates how Left-led unions nevertheless failed to create political propaganda that was persuasive to youth born after 1945; instead, they continued to promote an idealized working-class home using the tools they 11

12       Chapter 1

developed from their experience of the interwar and wartime eras. The sophistication of their visual propaganda is a reminder of the fact that Japanese of all classes were impressively literate and had access to a wide array of posters, newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. This chapter traces how the propaganda portrayed classed notions of manhood and womanhood that, by the 1960s, represented policies that did little for the young blue-collar men and women whose interests were different from those of the previous generation. It further shows how the visual propaganda deployed by leftist unions framed the failure of Japan’s socialist labor movement in order to sustain its youngest members’ levels of commitment.

Leftist Visual Propaganda Reading the labor movement’s visual propaganda presents an interesting challenge. The posters, handbills, pamphlets, and political cartoons of that period incorporate a highly politicized visual field that is entwined with rhetorical polemics printed in logographic characters, with historical as well as semantic meaning. Amid the political milieu of the 1950s and 1960s, union activists, writers, and cartoonists found socially conservative gender roles more suitable for mobilizing the movement’s members against the security treaty, in part because the treaty resonated with their own expectations that men worked for wages and women took care of the home. Since the 1920s, visual propaganda had featured prominently in the political campaigns sponsored by Left-led labor unions. Spanning from the rise of militarism and authoritarianism in imperial Japan to the cultural and political milieu at the center of Japan’s postwar democracy, these visual sources open a unique window onto the domestic conflict and turbulence that fashioned twentieth-century Japan. The broad basis of literacy evidenced in them can be traced back to the educational reforms introduced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which included both blue-collar workers and farmers. Consequently, leftist parties and labor-farmer associations generally churned out a variety of posters, newsletters, newspapers, and magazines to inform and inspire their supporters.1 A simultaneous phenomenon of the modern era was the rise of a new, politically conscious urban intelligentsia who were deeply engaged in publishing original leftist articles and books, and translating many of the fundamental Marxist, socialist, and Communist texts that defined radical thought in the Western tradition in formats that could reach a diverse audience, including the urban proletariat as well as farmers, foresters, and fishermen. Marx, Lenin, and a great many other radical theorists and polemicists became accessible not just through

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      13

the printed word but also through a variety of visual propaganda produced specifically to reach an audience that was keen to correct existing injustices inherited from the past. Most periodicals associated with leftist parties and unions were short lived: government censorship and repression, coupled with organizational infighting, did them in. Nonetheless, some survived long enough to have an impact. Additionally, they were buttressed by another genre of radical protest: proletarian literature. In the postwar era, this genre came to include a very sophisticated corpus of political cartooning. Ironically, the seven years of Allied occupation gave the labor movement time to reorganize and grow. The wartime state forced many leftists to recant, and those that refused were put into prison, or worse. A sizable number of the cadre who survived the war with their leftist ideological vision intact reemerged after 1945 to continue their role as the avant-garde of leftist culture. John Dower and Miriam Silverberg have detailed the extent to which many immersed themselves in the hedonistic, erotic/grotesque (eroguro) culture that took advantage of Japan’s American interregnum to reject the statist cultural mores that had dictated the political and cultural environments within which they had lived and worked prior to 1945.2 The visual propaganda they produced—political ephemera that included magazine art, cartoons, film posters, and political pamphlets and handbills—offers a fascinating window into the goals, purposes, and consequences of the political struggles in which Japan’s largest social movements were engaged. While organized labor’s postwar political agenda went mostly unrealized, the efforts of the many individual activists who were involved set significant precedents for autonomous patterns of change, resistance, and accommodation, which continue to reverberate within the political framework of contemporary Japan. Japan’s Left-led unions worked in close collaboration with sympathetic artists and intellectuals to create what they hoped would become the basis of socialist national culture in Japan. The aim of the postwar collaborations between leftist artists and union activists was to churn out labor-friendly publications, essays, and speeches. Established in 1954, the National Congress of Culture (Kokumin Bunka Kaigi, or NCC) received the bulk of its funding and logistical support from Sōhyō. For the next three and a half decades, Sōhyō leaders encouraged union activists to call on the small staff of the Tokyo-based NCC whenever they needed an article or speech for a publication or event. Official sponsorship, as well as a stable funding base, enabled the NCC to become the central cultural agent for the Left-led labor movement. In return, the NCC provided muchneeded funding and political support for scholars, writers, and activists, who themselves belonged to, or headed up, a wide range of left-leaning cultural associations, citizens’ activist groups, and think tanks. By the mid-1950s, the NCC

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had grown into the preeminent “culture broker” for organizations affiliated with the Left-led labor movement, and it acted as the hub for a vast network of artists and intellectuals who were engaged in producing cultural material for an emerging socialist subjectivity among Japan’s working class.3 The actual impact of visual propaganda is nigh impossible to determine, but a close reading of extant examples does provide an excellent window into the general mentalité of the era. The notion of a male-centered family-wage ideal was already operative in many unions. The poster reproduced in figure 1.1, which was printed for a 1948 strike by the steel and rolling stock workers’ union, portrays a male worker with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows; he is brandishing his contract while stridently demanding a guaranteed minimum wage. In the background and to his left stands a woman, most likely representing his spouse, who is brandishing a rice cooker and has an infant on her back. She is echoing his demands for a wage sufficient to support a wife and child at home. Armed with gendered and classed rhetoric, leftist labor unions papered the streets and alleyways of postwar Japan with visual propaganda calling for the Japanese proletariat to resist the reemergence of totalitarianism and the US-Japan Security Treaty. While the Left-led labor movement in Japan was not intrinsically anti-American, the Allied Occupation government became increasingly hostile toward Japanese labor. By the summer of 1948, US officials perceived the labor movement as a Communist insurgency in occupied Japan. The ironic consequence of this shift in occupation policy for organized labor was that the American-dominated Allied Occupation government’s anti-Communist machinations led to the formation of Sōhyō, and its dominant position representing the public-sector labor force empowered Left-socialist labor leaders who, by the mid-1950s, were calling for the eviction of US military forces from Japan. The Cold War also greatly influenced the political propaganda produced by Japan’s Left-led labor unions. Nearly a month before the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, and on the third anniversary of Japan’s postwar constitution, the supreme commander for the Allied powers, Major General Douglas MacArthur, declared that he doubted that the Japan Communist Party (JCP) deserved equal protection under the new constitution. MacArthur used a relatively minor incident as an excuse to order Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru to purge the JCP’s top executives, as well as more than twenty thousand dedicated JCP activists. With the outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula in June 1951, MacArthur suspended the publication of the JCP newspaper Akahata (Red flag), disbanded the JCPfriendly labor confederation Zenrōren, and actively pressured private employers to purge Communists from their firms.4 As the Cold War unfolded in East Asia it radically altered the political landscape of occupied Japan and precipitated American public sentiment that the

FIGURE 1.1.  Union propaganda of the 1950s relied on an iconography of the ideal working-class man and woman, in which men were represented as militant wage earners fighting to protect their jobs and women were militantly fighting to protect the family and home. The All-Japan Rolling Stock Workers’ Union and ¯ hara Digital Archive: the All-Japan Steel Workers’ Union, 1948, 37 cm x 53 cm, O ¯ hara Institute for Social Research at PB0102. Reprinted with permission of the O Ho¯sei University.

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United States’ global position was beginning to unravel. Ironically, Douglas MacArthur’s preemptive purge of labor militants in 1949 precipitated the crisis he said he wanted to avoid. Takano Minoru, the founding secretary general of Sōhyō, advocated for Japan to join the emerging nonaligned nations movement as a means to abstain from allying with either of the two superpowers. The United States’ foreign policy advisers decried the Non-Aligned Movement—led by Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Nasser, and Sukarno—as a Soviet Union ploy to undermine US interests in the developing world. Nevertheless, in the weekly newspaper published by Japan’s largest labor federation, Takano asserted that the war in Korea was evidence of an encroaching US military hegemony in East Asia and that the critical role that US military bases in Japan played in servicing the war flew in the face of the struggle for decolonization and self-determination shared by all East Asians. President Harry S. Truman’s decision to dismiss MacArthur and end the Allied Occupation further encouraged Takano to renew union mobilization against what he asserted were American imperialist ambitions in East Asia. Posters promoting the 1952 May Day rally marked both the annual labor celebration and the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan, which had ended two days prior to the federation’s planned May Day celebration. The slogans on the poster depicted in figure 1.2 call for Japanese workers to oppose rearmament and protect the 1947 constitution. Produced in line with Takano’s official call to assert Japan’s national autonomy through the promotion of intra-Asian unity, the poster features two masculine hands grasped in an intraregional handshake extended between China and Japan; the Korean Peninsula lies in the middle. The poster calls on all Japanese to defend the 1947 constitution of Japan, known colloquially as the “Peace Constitution,” by opposing MacArthur’s 1951 directives to rearm Japan, which many Japanese perceived to contradict Article 9 of the postwar constitution. The poster’s rhetorical purpose was to communicate Sōhyō’s anti-imperialist message amid Japan’s newly reacquired national sovereignty. However, there is an implicit gender ideal in its focus on strong, masculine hands joining in regional solidarity, which is further reinforced by an iconography of womanhood that portrayed Japanese women as housewives struggling for peace in solidarity with their husbands’ unions.5 In the spring of 1952, Sōhyō and its affiliated unions declared their support for the idea that “the right of self-governance is in the hands of skilled workers,” and called for an intraregional workers’ alliance, an end to the Yoshida government, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with China and North Korea. They advocated that the return of Japan’s national sovereignty empowered Japanese workers to determine their relationship with their brothers in China, Korea, and even Southeast Asia, all of whom shared a common ideological framework and

FIGURE 1.2.  “Oppose rearmament, defend the Peace Constitution!” The clasped masculine hands and forearms were common visual tropes for conveying the labor movement’s commitment to work, struggle, and resistance. ¯ hara Digital Archive: All Osaka General May Day Action Committee, 1952, O ¯ hara Institute for Social Research at PB2049. Reprinted with permission of the O Ho¯sei University.

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ethnic-national heritage. While this particular political vision was never realized, Sōhyō did send representatives to the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with the aim of establishing direct diplomatic ties between the Japanese Left and the Communist governments of both nations, and it even sent a small delegation to represent Japanese workers at the inaugural meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955.6 Sōhyō’s position was further elaborated in a series of editorial essays published by Sōhyō periodicals in 1953. There, Takano Minoru encouraged the unity of the Japanese ethnic nation (minzoku) to resist US imperialism in East Asia and force the United States to abandon its sizable military bases in Japan. During the 1950s, Sōhyō leaders focused their political mobilizations on the struggle against the US-Japan Security Treaty, opposition to the continued presence of US military bases in Japan, and the Japanese industry’s increasing dependence on US military spending. Other union activists focused their efforts on the rampant and recurrent industrial rationalization that threatened—and often delivered— large-scale layoffs in addition to lower wages for the workers who kept their jobs. The generational schism that emerged between union members in the 1960s was deeply steeped in the political struggles of the 1950s. Delegates from Sōhyō’s core member unions, including the railway workers’ (kokurō) and communications workers’ (zendentsu) unions, also affirmed the connection between their national economic and political aims. The plenary meeting of the 1953 Peace Economy Conference asserted Japan’s autonomy in the Cold War and that independence from the Cold War required an alternative to economic dependence on the United States. This would have significant consequences later in the decade, as Sōhyō leadership attempted to recombine the overtly political anti-securitytreaty struggle with the overtly economic issue of industrial rationalization at the Miike Coal Mines in Kyushu. Despite the best intentions, the 1953 conference failed to find a solution to the problem of Japanese economic dependence on at least one Cold War power. The plenary’s call for Japanese independence from the United States were underscored by a deeply troubled history of ethnic-nationalist rhetoric. Kevin Doak first unpacked how, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Japanese government was able to interweave popular conceptions of the imagined East Asian ethnic nation to bind the political fabric of its imperial and colonial projects in Korea, Taiwan, and, to a limited extent, North China and Manchuria. In the 1950s, a variety of leftist critics rehabilitated postwar ethnic-nationalist discourses as a means of criticizing the postwar state and its allies. The anti-­ Communist backlash that followed in the wake of the North Korean invasion of South Korea encouraged many leftists to revisit the rhetoric of ethnic nationalism

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      19

as an “effective tool for criticizing, simultaneously, the capitalist postwar Japanese state and the cultural colonialism of American imperialism,” in Doak’s description. This form of ethnic-nationalist discourse shaped leftist propaganda all through the postwar era. Perhaps more importantly, politically moderate critiques of Japanese support for the Vietnam War also drew on a similar ethos to condemn the state for overreaching its mandate.7 Gayle argues that in the wake of the wartime state’s use of a rhetoric that assimilated the colonial peoples of Asia into one homogeneous “Asian” ethnic identity, “some postwar leftists began advocating a pan-Asian ethnic, anti-­ imperialist discourse, believing it to be a viable alternative to the bourgeois democracy made compulsory by the American occupier and its collaborators.”8 A significant minority of Japan’s postwar Marxists, such as Takano, cited anticolonial movements in India and China as evidence that true Asian modernity lay in an East Asian community bound together by a common ethnic identity united in resistance to the emergent US imperial hegemony. The same audacious claim was made by unions that opposed Sōhyō’s leftist political agenda, such as the All Japan Seamen’s Union, whose members crewed the cargo ships that carried the bulk of munitions and materiel—largely manufactured in Japan—that supplied US forces in Korea. Indeed, Japanese unions’ claims of a pan–East Asian ethnic solidarity were all the more galling because they came from citizens of a nation that had just recently been deposed as an imperial and colonial aggressor in East Asia. Nevertheless, the legacy of wartime rhetoric on ethnic commonality (which underpinned forced assimilations in Taiwan and Korea in the early twentieth century) may have combined with the narrowing ethnic identification that accompanied the American postwar bifurcation of Japan and Korea to provide fertile soil for the belief that the West was the real hegemonic threat to the East Asian region.9

Never Trust Anyone over Thirty That sense of ethnic affinity also influenced the eighteen million Japanese who joined demonstrations, job actions, and campus occupations in protest of the US war in Vietnam.10 Asada Sadao has argued that the stories of massacres and body counts filed by Japanese reporters writing from Vietnam “intensified the Japanese sense of racial victimization; events seemed to confirm the view that American racial callousness toward Asians lay behind their use of the atomic bombs.”11 Regular reports of US atrocities in Vietnam encouraged the interpretation that race was the critical factor in US foreign policy for all of the Far East. Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war in 1965 made it impossible for most

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Japanese to ignore that US military bases in Japan and Okinawa were the primary staging areas for military operations in Southeast Asia. Until 1972 Okinawa was a United Nations protectorate under de facto US control. Fed up with being treated as the live-in servants of an occupying force, despite powerful public memories of war atrocities committed against Okinawan civilians by the Japanese Imperial Army, in the late 1960s many Okinawans engaged in a popular movement demanding that their islands be returned to Japanese control. Since the issue embarrassed the US government, and because of Okinawa’s prominent role in supplying, transporting, recreating, and training US soldiers in Vietnam, antiwar groups seized the issue of Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereign control and mobilized public protests to force the United States to get out of Okinawa and Vietnam. The war correspondents Honda Katsuichi and Takeshi Kaikō also made the same connection, and by the late 1960s, they were expressing in print their sense of a racial affinity with the Vietnamese struggle for independence. Takeshi Kaikō would go on to fictionalize his experiences as a war correspondent in both South and North Vietnam, in his 1968 novel Into a Black Sun (Kagayakeru yami), and assert that what he witnessed disabused him of his belief in the benevolence of the United States. The carpet bombings of North and South Vietnam prompted him, along with many other Japanese from his generation, to conclude that the defining experience of being Asian in the twentieth century was the experience of American bombings.12 Despite the fractured alliances between the JCP and the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), the student radical group Zengakuren played a pivotal role in mobilizing several waves of student militancy against the parliamentary ratification of the Japan–South Korea Treaty in 1965. Indeed, Zengakuren’s outreach efforts to high school students and young workers, which were inadvertently bolstered by the state’s continued increase of university tuition fees without a corresponding investment in educational infrastructure, helped to swell the ranks of the movement such that by 1967, student leaders felt ready to reengage the interrelated issues of the 1960 anti-security-treaty protests by linking Japan’s complicity in the Vietnam War to the question of Okinawa’s status as a de facto US colony. In October 1967, helmeted student militants marched on the entrance gate to Haneda Airport in an effort to prevent Prime Minister Satō Eisaku’s formal visit to South Vietnam. More than a thousand student demonstrators clashed with several hundred riot police, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of the University of Kyoto student Yamazaki Hiroaki, which many student leaders later asserted marked the birth of the Japanese New Left.13 Student activists, who were eager to build their movement independently from the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations, which they began to

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      21

refer to as the Old Left, mobilized a cascading series of protests. Student groups were instrumental in mobilizing protests against both the visiting US nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise and the government’s extrajudicial seizure of land to expand Narita Airport.14 When the US-Japan Security Treaty again came up for renewal negotiations in 1968 (the treaty was set to expire in 1970), the first waves of opposition came from a new generation of young radicals, who wrapped the treaty issue in concomitant concerns about the US war in Vietnam and the call for Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty. The Okinawa sovereignty issue and the continued presence of US bases on Japanese soil twenty years after the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan were intimately linked. In an attempt to dampen popular opposition to the US military bases in Japan, in the mid-1960s the United States began to move the bulk of its military forces from Japan proper to what was then the US protectorate of Okinawa. Blaming the indiscipline of youth politics on a dearth of young people belonging to Sōhyō-affiliated unions, in 1965 Sōhyō’s secretary general, Ōta Kaoru, authorized funding for the Sōhyō Young Workers’ Department to work with the JSP’s Socialist Youth Alliance (Nihon Shakaishugi Seinen Dōmei, or Shaseidō) in an effort to mobilize young workers through a new outreach group, the Antiwar Youth Committee (Hansen Seinen Iinkai). Ōta believed that the Antiwar Youth Committee could become the means to reengage blue-collar youth by offering them an authorized alternative to the student movement, and could thereby replace Zengakuren as the avant-garde that could free Japan from the hegemonic control of the United States and involvement in a war in Southeast Asia that the Japanese populace did not support or want to be (even indirectly) involved in.15 In theory, Ōta’s decision to co-opt these issues was sound. Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War was wildly unpopular among young people in Japan. Aircraft carrying troops, supplies, and even ordnance departed daily from Japan and Okinawa, and by the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of US troops had passed through Japan on their way to and from the war in Southeast Asia. Indeed, Japan was an active supporter of the United States’ war in Vietnam. Perhaps what galled antiwar activists most, however, was that, for a short time, the United States launched its bombing campaign against North Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder) from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, an act that directly linked the war in Vietnam to lingering resentment about the popular perception that Japan in general, and Okinawa specifically, was a military colony of the United States. With financial support from Sōhyō and the JSP, the Antiwar Youth Committee grew into a loose confederation of autonomous local chapters. Sōhyō documents suggest that the total membership of the committee never exceeded five to six thousand activists; most belonged to chapters concentrated around the Osaka and

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Tokyo regions. Despite an uneasy relationship between Sōhyō and Zengakuren, the JSP encouraged its youth action group Shaseidō to recruit Antiwar Youth Committee leaders from the ranks of Zengakuren because of their political commitment, organizing experience, and youth. One result was that the majority of Antiwar Youth Committee local chapters were run by a core of male, former student activists: no leader was female or selected either from rank-and-file bluecollar youth or from a small but active number of blue- and pink-collar men and women who attended university courses at night, worked a regular job during the day, and dedicated what was left of their time to the movement. Indeed, internal tensions between middle-class white- and blue-collar activists eventually alienated several young worker-activists, such as Wakamiya Masanori (discussed in chapter 2), who broke away from the movement to join more violent splinter groups.16 Sōhyō and its member unions continued to mobilize in support of the antiwar effort well into the late 1960s. However, many Antiwar Youth Committee activists were increasingly drawn to the antihierarchical, antiauthoritarian ideals espoused by the radical student movement that Sōhyō’s leaders criticized as too bourgeois. As a result, many committee chapters came into direct conflict with the JSP and Sōhyō.17 Having replaced Ōta as the head of Sōhyō in 1966, Horii Toshikatsu was frustrated by the trajectory that the committee had taken and expressed skepticism about the potential for future youth outreach programs. In 1967, the committee broke with the JSP altogether, condemning the party for its authoritarian hierarchy and rigid doctrine. But a vocal minority of union activists argued that the problem lay with basic economics, and not with worker culture or national politics. The heads of several unions’ affiliated Young Workers’ Departments within Sōhyō’s federation declared that young workers were likely to be further alienated unless Sōhyō secured higher base wages and a rapid promotion track for young workers who were being squeezed out by the familywage standard that had been established as a base model for Sōhyō unions in the early 1950s.18 While the Antiwar Youth Committee did provide several thousand blue-collar men with an authorized alternative forum for political activism, Sōhyō’s attempt to harness the radical youth movement failed. Yet Sōhyō representatives charged with the responsibility of bringing young workers back into the fold of Sōhyōled labor activism continued to tout the federation line by asserting that young workers had a duty to devote themselves to the federation—thus demonstrating the organization’s inability to accommodate the interests of a new generation of blue-collar workers. However, local Antiwar Youth Committee chapter groups, like the Osaka chapter that twenty-year-old Wakamiya Masanori joined, immediately focused their mobilization efforts in support of an unsuccessful JCP campaign to stop the ratification of the Japan–South Korea Peace Treaty, and they joined with Zengakuren to organize protests against the US bombing of Hanoi.

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      23

But it was the October 1968 Haneda Airport protests that established the Antiwar Youth Committee’s reputation among radical student groups and invited the ire of Sōhyō and the JSP.19 Although the Antiwar Youth Committee leadership did not break outright with Sōhyō, internal union documents show that by 1968 the federation had little influence over the organization. In March, the Sōhyō Central Committee sponsored two directives published as essays authored by the Sōhyō Youth Committee (none of whose members were under the age of thirty), chastising the Antiwar Youth Committee’s leadership for breaking away from the socialist party and drawing too close to the radical student movement.20 Violent confrontations with police at Haneda Airport in October, which were instigated by radical student groups in collaboration with the Antiwar Youth Committee, further estranged the Antiwar Youth Committee from the Sōhyō leadership. Condemned by the socialist party, and in serious trouble with Sōhyō, the coalition of Antiwar Youth Committee chapters declared that the Old Left was incapable of meeting the members’ core demand for the right to determine their own political subjectivity, and the collaboration disintegrated. The local Antiwar Youth Committee chapters spun off in a variety of directions—some dissolving altogether and others morphing into community-organizing groups. Others merged with the more violent political groups that were beginning to appear during the late 1960s as a manifestation of youth discontent with the socialist status quo.21 The Okinawa question loomed large and was a focal point of political protest in the late 1960s. Retained as a US protectorate since 1952, Okinawa was a critical strategic asset for the US military. In 1968, union activists who had opposed the 1960 security treaty saw the opportunity to gain some political leverage by supporting the Japanese and Okinawan youth who were calling for Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. By the late 1960s, despite a complex and brutal history of Japanese colonialism dating from the 1609 invasion of the Ryukyu Kingdom, many Okinawans saw reversion to Japan as preferable to remaining under the yoke of US military rule. Okinawa had been occupied by US troops since 1944, and the Pentagon-run United States Civil Administration for the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) had been a dumping ground for serious personnel problems since the 1950s. Racial tensions in a recently desegregated US military, coupled with the United States’ use of the Okinawan archipelago as a rest-and-relaxation hub for US soldiers, contributed to successive violent conflicts between severely undisciplined servicemen and Okinawan civilians. Although the Antiwar Youth Committee did not break with Sōhyō outright, internal Sōhyō documents show that by 1968 the federation had little influence over the organization.22 Violent confrontations with police at Haneda Airport in October, which were instigated by radical student groups in collaboration with the Antiwar Youth Committee, further estranged the young activists—who

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formed the active core of the committee—from the transwar men who ran Sōhyō, the national federation that funded them. Visual culture also figured prominently in attempts to mobilize young people against the war. Figures 1.3 and 1.4 are indicative of the kinds of visual propaganda produced by labor unions in support of the growing antiwar and reversion

FIGURE 1.3.  “The Great March of 1968.” Suzuki Heihachi began his cartooning career for So¯hyo¯ in the 1950s. His feature cartoons and posters were popular with union activists in the 1950s but did not connect with younger workers in the 1960s. Suzuki Heihachi, Gekkan So ¯hyo ¯, January 1968, 77. ¯ hara Institute for Social Research at Ho¯sei Reprinted with permission of the O University.

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      25

FIGURE 1.4.  “ ‘Security Treaty’ Reparations,” from the comic feature The Break Room, which ran as a regular feature throughout the 1960s and 1970s and was penned by a small cohort of regular So¯hyo¯ artists. Gekkan So ¯hyo ¯, November ¯ hara Institute for Social Research 1968, 69. Reprinted with permission of the O at Ho¯sei University.

movements. While the impact of a particular poster or handbill cannot be measured, the slogans and visual elements of the material relics themselves reveal a great deal about the mentality of those who produced them. In January 1968, Suzuki Heihachi’s long-running comic feature for Gekkan Sōhyō (figure 1.3) portrayed the three significant slogans for 1968: “Oppose the Vietnam War,” “Revert Okinawa,” and “Better Wages.” The slogans appear on placards carried by three youthful workers who are leaping over the number 68 and onto three political figures who represent the US military and the Japanese government. At the bottom left of the cartoon, the figure furthest to the right greatly resembles

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Prime Minister Satō Eisaku, who publicly advocated for Japan to adopt his Three Nonnuclear Principles (nonproduction, nonpossession, and nonintroduction), for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, while he was secretly negotiating with the Nixon administration to allow the United States to keep its military bases and nuclear weapons in Okinawa in exchange for its reversion to Japanese sovereignty.23 Published in the November 1968 issue of Gekkan Sōhyō, the regular comic feature The Break Room (figure 1.4) depicts a physical education teacher (with a whistle around his neck) leading three grade-school-aged children in an outdoor lesson. He appears to have to shout and use broad hand gestures in order to communicate over the roar of the American F-4 fighter jet that looms above them in the darkened sky. The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II was one of the most identifiable American fighter jets of the Vietnam War era, and in 1968, the Japanese government was in the process of procuring 140 of them from the US government as part of its effort to assure operational compatibility between the United States and Japan. The caption to this cartoon, which reads “ ‘Security Treaty’ Reparations,” refers to both the financial cost of military integration with the United States and the cost in terms of the threat and risk of military accidents in and around US military bases. Indeed, US military air crashes in Japan were common; the most recent had occurred when a US Air Force F-4 Phantom II crashed into a building on the main campus of Kyushu University on 2 June 1968. The pilot and weapons officer ejected safely, the building was empty, and no one was killed or injured on the ground. However, the student body was incensed, and four thousand students rallied to protest the way in which the United States had callously risked their lives. Just four years earlier, in April 1964, a Marine Corps RF-8A Crusader crashed into the residential neighborhood of Machida, near Tokyo. On the ground, four people were killed and thirty-one injured, while the pilot ejected safely at five thousand feet, which led the Japanese press to question the veracity of his assertion that he had been unable to redirect his aircraft from hitting the Japanese neighborhood. While this cartoon does not make the obvious connection, several schools bordered the perimeter of the Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station, which was where most of the American F-4s stationed in Japan were based and where the Japanese government would receive the delivery of its F-4s in 1968.24

Linking Okinawa and Vietnam The Okinawa question was central to the political activism of the late 1960s. Zengakuren’s student propagandists asserted that, under US military occupation,

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      27

Okinawa was tantamount to a front-line base for the United States’ military operations in Vietnam. Zengakuren slogans called for Japanese students and workers to “Take back Okinawa! Crush the security treaty and down with Japanese imperialism!”25 Young people, students, and workers were urged to stand together in solidarity with Okinawans in their struggle to get the US military to withdraw and return Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty. Zengakuren leaders called for further collaborations between students from mainland Japan and Okinawa’s Ryukyu University who were working side by side with Okinawans employed on the military bases that covered a sizable percentage of the island. Sōhyō’s secretary general, Ōta Kaoru, perceived this as an opportunity to incorporate popular opposition to the Vietnam War into the federation’s national agenda as a means of bolstering union membership rolls, which were down nationwide—most dramatically among workers under the age of thirty. In an essay for Sōhyō’s monthly magazine Gekkan Sōhyō, the union economist Ōmachi Keisuke articulated his sense that there would be trouble brewing for the labor federation shortly. Ōmachi observed that the wage disparity between men in their twenties and men in their thirties (young and middle-aged) played a significant role in the “graying” of the labor movement. The majority of workers in the rapidly growing communications, transportation, and service sectors were aged twenty-five to thirty, but the average age of union members in those same sectors would soon reach thirty-five. Ōmachi argued that the wage disparity between young and middle-aged men was far worse in Japan than in Western Europe or the United States. He further warned of dire consequences for Sōhyō’s ability to recruit and retain young union members if the trend went unaddressed for much longer.26 Ōmachi’s article pinpointed a problem that Sōhyō leaders preferred to ignore. Sōhyō unions had won contracts that secured better wages and faster promotion for male blue-collar workers in exchange for management schemes that systemically relegated women and young men to the lower-paying base of the workforce, regardless of skill or ability. Sōhyō unions agreed to contracts paying younger men and women less as a means of defraying the cost of higher wages for middle-aged men. Young workers—males and females under the age of thirty—­composed a more significant percentage of the waged workforce than unions had on their membership rolls. While the low rates of unionization among young workers resulted from a variety of causes, Ōmachi argued that a significant part of the problem lay with the wage disparity between younger and middle-aged men that underpinned the family wage model advocated by Sōhyō since the mid-1950s.27 While union leaders initially did not agree with Ōmachi that the “graying” of union membership was a problem endemic to an organization built on the premise of age-based wages, the Sōhyō Youth Department nonetheless began to

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call for improved wages for younger workers, which seemed to result in a slight narrowing of the wage differential between younger and older men. That the average age of Sōhyō members continued to rise (reaching thirty-three in 1970) suggests that despite a narrowing pay differential, Sōhyō unions continued to struggle to recruit young members. Wage and union membership data offer only a glimpse of the economic basis of worker mentality, but it seems likely that the declining numbers of young blue-collar union members were in part the result of an emerging rift between blue-collar men over the issue of a generational wage differential. Despite Ōmachi’s warning that the real threat lay with the age- and seniority-based wage system, Ōta Kaoru blamed the fall in the number of young union members to the divisive politics of contemporary youth culture, most notably the radical student movement of the era, which he considered undisciplined and dominated by bourgeois students. Yet Sōhyō was deeply enmeshed in the antiwar movement and was regularly tapped by a network of leftist artists and publishers to fund antiwar propaganda like figure 1.5, a page from the photobook Photographs to Take Back Vietnam. It presents an unattributed photograph—typical of journalistic coverage of the Vietnam War—that shows an American soldier in the field looking across, and past, the dead body of, presumably, a Vietnamese youth. The caption is a few lines from a poem by the poet, playwright, and noted socialist activist Doi Daisuke, whose commitment to socialist politics began in 1947 when he joined the JCP at the age of twenty: Don’t just say “it’s pitiful” when you see this picture. Don’t think that anyone who sees this will feel anger or sorrow as you do. Otherwise, how is it that the guy over there can come back on leave to this country!28 The photobook, the publication of which was arranged by the Sōhyō-funded NCC, was a collection of photojournalist accounts of atrocities committed by US and South Vietnamese soldiers, captioned with poetry by Doi and other prominent leftist authors. The poem calls into question the idea that the viewer of the photograph could empathize with the plight of the deceased while shocking the audience with the sudden reminder that the soldier gazing upon the body might be furloughed for R&R (rest and relaxation) in Japan.29 Throughout the radical 1960s, even as Sōhyō was funding the Antiwar Youth Committee’s foray into radical youth politics, the labor press continued to deploy the trope of “family man as union man” in its effort to stir up rank-and-file support. The paucity of young men’s voices in Sōhyō publications, as well as the lack of younger visions of socialist, unionized manhood, also underscores the issue: by failing to resolve the “youth question,” Sōhyō and its member unions lost the

FIGURE 1.5.  Photographs to Take Back Vietnam, Doi Daisuke, Betonamu shashin o torimodosu kai, Kodomo o mamoru sekai kaigi junbi-kai, Shijinkaigi, ¯ hara Digital Archive: Nihon kikan-shi tsu¯shin-sha, 1969, 37 cm x 51 cm, O ¯ hara Institute for Social Research at PB3141. Reprinted with permission of the O Ho¯sei University.

30       Chapter 1

struggle over blue-collar masculinity. Indeed, labor propaganda after 1965 offers next to no essays, poems, or political cartoons that are credited to men under the age of thirty. While to antiwar protesters the Japanese government appeared to be little more than lackeys of the US Department of State, most Japanese antiwar activists themselves had an overly complicated relationship with the US military in general, and the war in particular. The Vietnam War was very profitable for Japan, and many of those who protested also benefited from the more than $1 billion per year that poured into Japanese corporate coffers throughout the late 1960s because of US military procurements. Blue-collar wages were higher in part because of the war. Nevertheless, Sōhyō leaders, activists, and affiliated writers implored union members to criticize the Japanese government for allowing Japan to become the industrial hub for the United States’ war in Southeast Asia. Antiwar union activists, coordinated by the general council, are best remembered for press accounts of their wide-scale job actions and rallies staged in loose collaboration with antiwar intellectuals and citizens’ groups. Stories of antiwar student demonstrations and violent campus occupations at universities in Japan’s urban centers filled newspaper articles and the nightly television news. Japan’s cities seemed on the brink of revolution, and Japanese police clamped down hard with batons and tear gas. The national press declared that the police suppression of antiwar protests violated the constitutional right of public assembly. The government responded with restrictive legislation intended to make it easier to detain and arrest protesters. What had been a small but vociferous opposition in 1965 had grown by 1968 into a robust and politically diverse social movement. Protests calling for the end of Japan’s support for and indirect involvement in the Vietnam War attracted tens of thousands of young people. In April, June, and August 1968, antiwar demonstrations drew unusually large crowds, and speakers took this opportunity to call for the return of Okinawa to Japanese sovereign control. Designed and printed by Sōhyō’s Youth Department in support of the Antiwar Youth Committee, the poster depicted in figure 1.6 calls for a day of “youth direct action.” That day was to be 19 June, and the date was written in bold red characters that are set below a clenched fist punching through the text of the US-Japan Security Treaty. Taken as a whole, the text and visual elements of the poster somewhat dryly call for Japanese youth to join Sōhyō’s national day of protest at Hibiya Park, for the revocation of the Security Treaty, for a stop to the conservative ruling party’s threat to revise the no-war clause of the 1947 constitution, and for help electing socialist candidates in the general election. But Old Left organizations like Sōhyō and the JSP were increasingly unable to contain the radical youth movement. The poster reproduced in figure 1.6 is

FIGURE 1.6.  Poster calling on young workers to unite on 19 June to defend the 1947 constitution by rallying to oppose the security treaty. “6.19” National Youth General Direction Action Committee, 19 June 1968, 41 cm x 62 cm, ¯ hara Digital Archive: PB1136. Reprinted with permission of the O ¯ hara Institute O for Social Research at Ho¯sei University.

32       Chapter 1

indicative of the way in which Sōhyō sought to harness the youth movement to suit the federation’s political agenda, but it also makes plain the extent to which the poster’s call for direct action paled in comparison to how willing young activists were to engage in direct political violence on the streets of Japan. Indeed, Sōhyō did not offer a radical-enough message for the politically active youth they were targeting. Sōhyō used various outreach methods to communicate its annual political agenda, but by the late 1960s, most of its regular media features were being ignored by younger members, although they still seemed to be popular and well read by Sōhyō’s middle-aged members. Since the formation of the labor federation in 1956, its monthly magazine Gekkan Sōhyō was the primary voice of the vanguard of leftist labor activism and was circulated in union halls and the homes of union activists across Japan. But by the end of the 1960s, young members were not as interested in what the established union leadership had to say in the pages of Gekkan Sōhyō, and the voice selected to represent the federation of labor unions was somewhat older than it had been at the start of the postwar era. Suzuki’s serial cartooning emerged to represent the dreams and aspirations of a generation older than those young workers whom the labor federation sought to mobilize, but Gekkan Sōhyō was not the only means of mobilizing unionized workers. An implicit masculine ideal for radical young men can be glimpsed within the Antiwar Youth Committee organization. Like their Old Left funders, committee leaders constructed gender roles that privileged male activism by marginalizing women’s participation, limiting it to pouring tea and serving senbei (snacks). While there were likely competing notions of masculinity at play within the larger youth movement, the Antiwar Youth Committee and Sōhyō leaders both presumed radical politics—especially direct conflict—to be the domain of men. In the end, the committee pushed the few women active in the movement into supportive roles akin to the gender-segregated labor hierarchies advocated by Sōhyō. Regardless of similarities in their attitude toward women, young bluecollar men refused to embrace the subservient position reserved for them within the age and gender hierarchy of the male-dominant labor movement.30 The Antiwar Youth Committee never became the mass organization of young blue-collar men its funders intended. Most committee chapters were small, for logistical as well as ideological reasons. They formed close ties, even sharing members, with local student groups by forming joint-struggle councils that were established as a means of improving intramovement collaboration to prepare for protests and direct actions. While the antiwar movement remained a central issue, committee chapters were deeply involved in politics closer to home. Kansai-based chapters, for example, attempted to organize unemployed workers,

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      33

and they launched several waves of unionization drives among television and radio workers. The Osaka chapter also engaged in a campaign to organize workers for the 1970 Osaka World Expo, which the committee and affiliated student groups also used as a platform to oppose global capitalism and US imperialism in Southeast Asia. By the mid-1970s, union leaders stood at the head of an organization made up of middle-aged men who were unable to persuade the younger men of the Sixties Generation to engage with the type of union-led mass-mobilizations that had underpinned their successes during the 1940s and 1950s. The generational divide marked a divergence in notions of masculine ideals to which the postwar labor movement seemed unable to adapt, and young workers appear to have been lost to the older generation of union leaders that sought to mobilize them.

Gender, Politics, and the Union Man Perhaps what is most striking is that Sōhyō publications such as Gekkan Sōhyō never diverged from union orthodoxy in their attempts to address the social and economic concerns of young men. The results of the 1973 national survey conducted by the research division of the national broadcaster, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), are testimony to this fact. The consensus revealed that, out of young men and women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four, 48.7 percent had switched off any union announcements when they appeared on television and reported having no knowledge of their right to belong to a labor union.31 In the economically troubled years following the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and 1974, Sōhyō leaders no longer even tried to develop outreach programs for the younger workers who were interested in alternative political and cultural modes of expression. Instead, energy and resources were focused on alleviating the impact of rising consumer prices and stagnant wages. Nowhere was this reinvention of the union man more apparent than in the political cartoons included in the January 1975 issue of Kokurō bunka (Railway culture). Selected by magazine editors for the New Year’s special issue, two political cartoons by Suzuki Akuzō, an employee of the Japan National Railways at the Ōmiya Workshop,32 represent the growing generational tension within Sōhyō’s flagship union.33 Suzuki’s cartoon (figure 1.7) opened the segment with the ubiquitous depiction of the union man as a family man. Central to this panel is a brief exchange between two young male children. One exclaims to the other, “Only Father and the postman work on New Year’s!” The male railway worker that the young boys are talking about is the ticket puncher to the right of the frame, who presumably is also the father of the cheeky child.

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FIGURE 1.7.  “Only Father and the postman work on New Year’s!” Suzuki ¯ miya Workshop, Kokuro Akuzo¯, O ¯ bunka, January 1975, 67. Reprinted with ¯ hara Institute for Social Research at Ho¯sei University. permission of the O

Suzuki’s cartooning relied on the “family man as union man” trope, which had been common in labor’s political cartooning (manga) since the 1950s, to reach his intended audience. However, the panel featured in figure 1.7 also depicts a growing undercurrent of resentment within the railway workforce, providing the intended reader the opportunity to explore the rank and file’s displeasure that management and union leaders had agreed to longer work hours in exchange for higher monthly wages. By the early 1970s, transportation workers were working an average of 35 percent more hours per month than they had been a decade earlier, and although the hours were for the most part evenly distributed between age groups, wages were not.34 Indeed, Kumazawa Makoto argues that the national labor trend in longer working hours was the result of a tacit agreement between union leadership and management to seek ways to improve worker productivity in exchange for higher aggregate monthly wages. While this was an open process in many of the industrial unions outside Sōhyō, productivity arrangements also accounted for a measurable percentage of the annual base wage increases won by Sōhyō member unions since the early 1960s.35 Suzuki Akuzō’s cartoon depicted in figure 1.8, which was also included in the January 1975 issue of Kokurō bunka, offers additional insight into the

¯ miya Workshop, Kokuro FIGURE 1.8.  “New Year’s Temple Visit,” Suzuki Akuzo ¯, O ¯ ¯ hara Institute for bunka, January 1975, 73. Reprinted with permission of the O Social Research at Ho ¯sei University.

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rank-and-file consciousness of the railway workers of the mid-1970s. It presents an image of union roles for men and women that demonstrates how middleaged men had failed to adapt to the changing interests of young workers. Titled “New Year’s Temple Visit,” the panel was published as part of the occasional series JNR Manga Collective, which magazine editors used to groom artists who were thought to show the potential to become regular contributors. Divided into eight frames, Suzuki’s vignette depicts a small group of union men out visiting families on New Year’s Day. In the cartoon, the men step into the entryway of the home (genkan) of the chief of their local union chapter as they call out their New Year’s wishes to the union leader’s wife. She greets them in the entryway but is surprised that this delegation has come to visit her. The men explain that their union secretary had almost been disinherited by his family because of the amount of time his union duties required, but once his wife had realized what his union was up to, she was able to convince them to back down by explaining that without the union, he and his family would have nothing. In gratitude for her intervention, the union leaders elected to visit all their union members’ wives in order to convey their New Year’s wishes. “We have resolved that at the start of the New Year we should visit the wives [kami-san, which is a homonym for both “wife” and the “god” of a shrine] of our union members instead of shrines and temples.” “Mother,” the woman’s husband and union chief announce, “the Shuntō is coming soon; we would be grateful for your support.” The cartoon was meant as a reminder of the normative gender roles for women and men, and it echoes these prescribed gender norms by reinforcing the supportive role that married women were expected to play in union affairs. It illustrates a union orthodoxy that precluded the emergence of social roles at odds with the gender norms established in the 1950s. While the social roles represented in the cartoon continued to appeal to men over the age of thirty-five, every year after 1960 fewer men under the age of thirty joined Sōhyō-affiliated unions, which suggests that the institutional culture of Sōhyō did not appeal to the majority of young blue-collar workers—male or female—who seemed to be involved in a significant shift in ideas around self-identification. Making more money than ever before, blue-collar men, both young and old, were by the mid-1970s increasingly imagining themselves to be middle class. Importantly, the January 1975 issue of Kokurō bunka also marked an increased interest in the trappings of middle-class life by union leaders and rank-andfile members. Since the late 1940s, editors had featured works of fiction and prose submitted to the magazine by union workers.36 Most submissions were selected to reflect the theme of a particular issue.37 Despite the general emphasis on union-authorized propaganda, in an attempt to reflect the interests of their

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      37

readers, labor magazine editors published other perspectives. One essay by the Okayama station attendant Onimaru Hiroyuki introduced a new form of expression to union members: the travel essay. Onimaru explored the historic sights and sounds of rural rail travel in and around the city of Kyoto by romantically intertwining modern rail travel with an ancient landscape.38 Onimaru’s dreamlike journey illustrates an emerging desire among blue- and white-collar workers for more leisure time. This commodification of leisure is further developed in a short essay submitted by the Railway Credit Union clerk Ōki Kiyoshi. Ōki’s “Ski Area of the Future” narrates his personal dream of skiing on mountain slopes like the Olympic athletes he and millions of other Japanese had watched during the 1972 televised Winter Olympic Games, which were hosted by the northern city of Sapporo and during which Kasaya Yukio and two other Japanese nationals swept the top three places in the ski jump event.39 While sports and leisure travel were familiar tropes for articulating a masculine ideal in the socialist lexicon of Western and Northern Europe, skiing required expensive gear—skis, boots, poles—that was not customarily owned by blue-collar Japanese men. The essays by Ōki and Onimaru are not merely stolid nods to socialist ideals; they illustrate the emergence of a middle-class consumer consciousness among male blue-collar workers who wanted time to enjoy the increased standards of living that had been made available since the mid-1960s. Writing in the mid-1970s, when both were in their early thirties, Ōki and Onimaru expressed their dreams of middle-class life outside the union-authorized trope of the “working man as family man.” While the leaders of Sōhyō unions were still profoundly invested in constructing a socialist subjectivity for Japan’s working class, by the mid-1970s the freshfaced, yellow-helmeted “railway man,” represented on the cover of the union’s monthly magazine in figure 1.9, significantly differed from the makkuro papa, the grease- or soot-covered craftsman of the mid-1960s who featured in the union’s annual wage struggle poster of 1963, depicted in figure 1.10. The difference was significant: although the archetypical union man of 1975 still dreamed of providing for his family, he also desired leisure time to spend on individual pursuits, such as travel, sports, and perhaps even owning his own automobile. Ironically, it was union-authorized publications like Kokurō bunka that enabled rank-and-file members to express the fact that they did not dream of class liberation so much as they dreamed of being middle class. The question that plagued Sōhyō leaders for the remainder of the decade was whether there was a role for socialist unions in a middle-class society. The cover story of the January 1975 issue of Kokurō bunka (figure 1.10) reveals that influential members of Sōhyō’s inner circles were increasingly ambivalent toward, if not confused about, the impact that the changing class identity of

FIGURE 1.9.  Front cover of the railway workers’ union magazine Kokuro ¯ bunka, ¯ hara Institute for Social January 1975. Reprinted with permission of the O Research at Ho ¯sei University.

38

FIGURE 1.10.  Calling on workers to “Concentrate on the Spring Wage Offensive,” this poster declares that large-scale wage increases were the goal ¯ hara Digital of the 1963 wage struggle. Committee, 1963, 36 cm x 51 cm, O ¯ hara Institute for Social Archive: PB0395. Reprinted with permission of the O Research at Ho ¯sei University. 39

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blue-collar workers was having on the future of the labor movement. In “The Struggle with Inflation,” Kokurō Central Committee chairman Sakai Ichizō and the labor economist Kamakura Takao examined the extent to which the doubledigit inflation that followed the 1973 “oil shock” threatened to erode the hardwon wage gains of the 1960s.40 Interestingly, Sakai and Kamakura dedicated a significant portion of their jointly written essay to the rapidly increasing cost of gasoline. Given that they were writing for an audience of unionized railway workers, the authors could easily have crafted their comments as an admonishment against overreliance on private automobiles. Instead, they offered reassurances that gas prices might still stablize enough to allow car travel to become affordable for most railway workers and their families. Automobile ownership, the first of the “three Cs”— car, “cooler” (air conditioning), and color television—was the primary consumer symbol of the middle class.41 Sakai and Kamakura’s feeling compelled to offer an optimistic assessment of the chances that the Japan National Railways’ (JNR) blue-collar workers could soon afford to own and drive their own automobiles is a good indication of the increasing cultural significance that the union movement assigned to the material goods associated with middleclass life. But in embracing the dream of affluence, labor leaders somehow failed to persuade Japan’s older generation of blue-collar workers of the continued importance of solidarity with the younger, and increasingly more militant, generation in securing the wages that paid for all of this.42 During the first three decades of the postwar era, leaders of Japan’s socialist unions deployed notions of the “family man as union man,” tantamount to sole breadwinner, that were predicated on economic and cultural systems that relegated younger men and women of all ages to the lower tiers of a wage economy and that privileged middle-aged men whose single salary was meant to support a housewife whose unwaged domestic labor cared for him and their two children. Tacitly, union leaders advocated gender-segregated political and economic roles for union men and women. Strategically, advocating gender-segregated roles allowed the labor movement to win significant increases in the standard of living for Japan’s working-class families in the 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of the 1960 Ikeda Incomes Doubling Policy, crafted specifically to quell the labor militancy that characterized the previous decade, the majority of blue-collar workers who were outside the direct influence of militant unions appeared content. However, the notion of the “union man as family man” did not have the same appeal for the young blue-collar men who came of age amid the countercultural and political movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, and it did not benefit them much either. Although the unprecedented standards of living experienced by blue-collar Japanese families in the mid and late 1960s seemed to justify the gender-differentiated labor and social systems that defined workplace and home,

Unions, Youth, and the Cold War      41

the wage systems built in the 1950s, which were predicated on the notion that a male wage earner worked to support a wife and children at home, were also premised on the belief that younger men did not need wages equal to those of their older male coworkers. It seems likely that the union economist Ōmachi Keisuke was warranted in his warning that the wage disparity between young and middle-aged blue-collar men played a significant role in the fossilization of “male breadwinner” gender norms for men and women even while blocking the younger generation from economic advancement sufficient to support their growing desire to live a middle-class life. The postwar wage system that excluded wage-earning women and young men was nonetheless responsible for an unprecedented improvement in the economic status of most Japanese. A lot of contemporary writing about Japan has reported how most Japanese considered themselves middle class. Japan’s labor unions played a significant role in the national political struggle that won them the wages that enabled that self-perception. However, success had profound consequences for the militant unions that spearheaded the wage struggles of the postwar period. Winning better wages for their blue-collar members undermined their organizing base by elevating blue-collar Japanese into the middle class. The failure of unionized labor to make space for young men and women who wanted to explore new political ideals undermined the labor movement’s ability to remain relevant to new generations of workers. The next chapter examines the extent to which the labor movement’s transwar political leaders, and political ideals, helped to push a few influential blue-collar youth to embrace more extreme politics as the avant-garde of a global revolution. These entangled narratives of social and political alienation embroider the margins of Japan’s highgrowth era and run counter to the dominant perception that the youth alienation of the 1960s resulted from an ennui born of middle-class affluence.

2 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE JAPANESE RED ARMY

The rise of the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun, or JRA) exemplifies the global flow of ideas and people that characterized revolutionary movements of the late 1960s. A mélange of leftist ideals influenced a generation of European, American, African, and Asian youth who, by the late 1960s, were motivated and mobilized to radically alter the political status quo. By examining the influences that shaped, and were shaped by, the JRA—from its origins in 1969 to its arrival on the international scene with the massacre at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv in May 1972—this chapter resituates the narrative of leftist radicals within the ebb and flow of global political and cultural movements to offer a deeper understanding of the historical frameworks that encompass the history of youth, gender, and radical politics in Japan. The rise and trajectory of the JRA shows how a transnational flow of ideas and people informed the actions of radicalized leftist youth as they moved between Japan, China, North Korea, the United States, and the Middle East. Leftist revolutionaries in and from Japan deployed propagandized narratives of “world revolution” that relied on sexualized violence to capture the attention of potential recruits. These narratives perpetuated gendered stereotypes of politicized youth that were tantamount to double jeopardy for the women engaged in radical politics—violent or not—and obstructed actualization of their political agency. The sexualized revolutionary propaganda of the JRA reinforced the conventional social hierarchy predicated on a hegemonic masculine norm of political agency. It also had the inadvertent effect of eclipsing the transnationality of the JRA’s call for panracial, anti-imperialist world revolution. 42

Rise and Fall of the Japanese Red Army      43

In May 1972, a three-man team of Japanese revolutionaries changed the face of international terrorism when they exited airport security at Lod International Airport in Tel Aviv, opened their suitcases, unpacked assault rifles and hand grenades, and began firing indiscriminately at airport staff and visitors. The attack killed twenty-four tourists and religious pilgrims and wounded seventy-three others. Credit for the attack was first claimed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); however, the unexpected nationality of the three gunmen, labeled by the Israeli authorities and the international press as Japanese terrorists, forced the PFLP’s Lebanon-based, Japanese spokesperson to issue a press release that reclaimed the attack for the international wing of an organization that had not existed until that point—the JRA. The 1972 Lod Airport attack was the first in a series of international incidents planned and carried out as joint operations between the PFLP and the JRA during the 1970s, and the subsequent international media attention helped shape popular perception—in Japan, Western Europe, and the Americas—of the era as an age of global terrorism. The late 1960s and early 1970s were characterized by intense, heterodoxic forms of social, cultural, and political engagement. Maoist doctrine, often conveyed by The Quotations of Chairman Mao (colloquially known as The Little Red Book) but also through direct sponsorship and training from the PFLP and the North Korean government, inspired a minority of youth across the globe who were active in the social movements of the late 1960s that abandoned tactics of mass lawful protest for political violence.1 The Sixties activist and historian Jeremy Varon observes that the near-simultaneous turn to violence by the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground in the United States, when placed alongside the emergence of the Maoist revolutionary groups in West Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Middle East, was the logical result of young people spending “years of questioning, organizing, demonstrating, and, as the 1960s ground on, angrily confronting the authorities.” Varon concludes that throughout the developed world, within youth political movements of the Left, a minority moved toward the position that they had no choice but to make revolution through political violence.2 One common characteristic of youth movements during the late 1960s was how they communicated their demands for political and cultural change through masculine language and cultural forms reflective of these movements’ gender norms, which reproduced rather than critiqued society’s patriarchal paradigm. Sara Evans observes that, across the industrialized world, young women who formed the vanguard of the feminist movements of the early 1970s were largely catalyzed by their direct experience of the male-dominated social movements of the late 1960s. Evans further argues that for many women activists, their experiences of male objectification clashed with their own growing sense of political

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agency. By the early 1970s, Evans concludes, a new wave of radical young women had begun to question many of the gender norms that defined political protest and activism in the 1960s.3 According to the Japanese historian Oguma Eiji, the globality of youth ­politics—in Chicago, Prague, Paris, and Tokyo—was “magnified by the visual images of TV, film and mass media, inspired movements elsewhere and conveyed the sense that they were somehow linked.”4 Oguma argues that through these media representations, “diverse local movements with little knowledge of the causes and character of movements elsewhere came to be viewed as constituent parts of a ‘global 1968.’ ”5 Oguma, and later the Japanese pioneering feminist cultural critic Setsu Shigematsu, contends that the 1960s youth movements in Japan were deeply flawed due to “their retrograde treatment of minorities and female activists.”6 In Oguma’s view, the radical student movement’s “increasing insularity and stress on cultivating a street-combat subjectivity” between 1968 and 1969 reinforced an organizational ethos built on the assumption of a homosocial masculine polis, which made radical youth politics generally hostile territory for most women.7 Moreover, as protest turned violent, political violence became synonymous with political authenticity.8 Chelsea Schieder argues that the massmedia bias in the coverage of political violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s refocused the Japanese public’s perception of the New Left through a lens that projected an iconography of young women as instigators of political violence, one that was “both terrifying and titillating.”9 As discussed below, one young woman radical, the JRA cofounder Shigenobu Fusako, quite willingly embraced the iconographies of sexualized revolutionary violence that were fostered within and by the male-dominant youth movements of the era.

Revolutionaries into Terrorists The fray of New Left organizations that emerged out of the fratricidal animus between radical youth organizations of the late 1960s in Japan is best understood through the lens of three interrelated organizations that coalesced between 1969 and 1972 (see figure 2.1): the Red Army Faction (Sekigunha, or RAF, founded by Takaya Shiomi in 1969), the United Red Army (Rengo Sekigun, cofounded by Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko in 1971), and the JRA (founded by Shigenobu Fusako in 1972).10 These “Red Army” groups were born out of the sense that the student movement of the 1960s had utterly failed to achieve its goals and that direct acts of political violence were logically the next (and only) step. The root organization, the RAF, entered onto the national political stage with a manifesto, the “Declaration of World Revolutionary War,” which presaged a

Rise and Fall of the Japanese Red Army      45

Kakumei Saha (Keihin Ampō Kyōtō)

Red Army Faction (Sekigunha)

Active 1968–72

Active 1969–72

Pyongyang Hijacking Group (Yodogō hijackers) In exile in North Korea since 1970

United Red Army (Rengō Sekigun)

Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun)

Active 1969–72

Active 1971–2001

FIGURE 2.1.  This adaptation of Patricia Steinhoff’s organizational chart shows the relational framework of Red Army–affiliated organizations. See Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 4. (November 1989): 725.

series of urban uprisings in autumn 1969 that resulted in hundreds of arrests—as the national police proved remarkably well informed about the organization’s activities. Cofounder and principal strategist Takaya Shiomi, who avoided arrest during the 1969 sweeps by police, emerged from the failed uprisings committed to finding the means to, as Patricia Steinhoff puts it, “connect the aspirations of the youth of Japan to the more immediate revolutionary possibilities in other parts of the world.”11 In her longitudinal study of the interrelated organizational culture of the Sekigun movement, Steinhoff notes that “Sekigun had considerable experience in organizing the sorts of mass activities that were common throughout the student movement of the era. They knew how to produce and distribute all sorts of political publications, how to organize mass meetings in rented halls, and how to coordinate large-scale street demonstrations.”12 Steinhoff observes that “onstage, Sekigun’s leaders made rousing speeches with black ski masks covering their faces so they could not be identified.”13 Despite increased police surveillance, cells of the RAF were able to undertake a series of bank robberies and minor operations. In March 1970 the RAF engineered a spectacular international terrorist incident, when nine RAF members took control of Japan Airlines’ flight 351 armed with swords and pipe bombs. The Yodogō hijackers, whom the press named after the airplane they seized, released the majority of their 129 hostages in two separate groups: the first at Fukuoka Airport and the second at Seoul’s Kimpo Airport in exchange for the Japanese minister of transportation, Yamamura Shinjuru.14 With the flight crew and the minister as their only remaining hostages, the hijackers directed the plane to Pyongyang, where the last hostages were repatriated and the hijackers received political asylum from the North Korean government.15

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The RAF’s audacious turn to international terrorism positioned it at the vanguard of world revolution but also led to its demise. Following the Yodogō hijacking, the police, capitalizing on the RAF’s weak operational security, arrested most RAF leaders, which precipitated the formation of several much smaller splinter groups, while two other factions, led by Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko, merged to form the United Red Army (URA). Under the co-leadership of Mori and Nagata, the URA was able to launch several successful domestic attacks that dominated the headlines of Japan’s daily newspapers and television news programs. The URA began to self-immolate in early 1972, killing fourteen of its own members during a series of purification purges. The last of the URA stalwarts were captured by police in February 1972 after a dramatic ten-day televised standoff at the group’s mountain lodge in Nagano.16 Nevertheless, television and newspaper accounts gave wide coverage to Nagata’s role in deploying deadly violence against her own members. Setsu Shigematsu argues that the Japanese mass media’s portrayal of Nagata “illuminated the relationship between the gendering of state power [and how its authority] was maintained through violent domination,”17 a circumstance duplicated by the masculinist culture of political violence that undergirded the RAF and the URA. Chelsea Schieder notes that whereas Nagata, as the face of the URA, “may have been terrifying for her ‘unfeminine’ violent leadership,” television and press accounts of the JRA founder Shigenobu Fusako tended to present her as a woman revolutionary with a particular poise that embodied “the deadly combination of femininity and violence.”18 Shigenobu was an active conspirator in fashioning the highly gendered symbolism through which her image was used to portray the movement—perhaps most famously when she was pictured posing with an AK-47 automatic rifle, the iconic weapon of the 1970s revolutionary. Early in 1971 one cell of RAF activists, led by Shigenobu Fusako, decamped for Lebanon and committed themselves to international terrorism as an arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In her 1974 revolutionary memoir Waga ai, waga kakumei (Our love, our revolution), Shigenobu explained, “I decided to give up my studies of children’s literature [at Meiji University], quit my job as an OL [office lady], broke up with my fiancé, and steeled myself to become a professional revolutionary. To change the world, [I thought] there is only violence; only violent revolution can change our reality.”19 She dates this transformation to her college years at Meiji University in the mid-1960s, yet the teenage Shigenobu had often argued politics with her father, the proprietor of a failing corner store in Tokyo and an ardent ultranationalist who had been a member of a fascist group as a youth and served as an officer in the military’s secret police (Kempeitai) during the Asia-Pacific War. Shigenobu does not analyze her relationship with her father in her memoir, but evidence of her later

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extremist turn is evident in her adolescent opposition to her overbearing rightwing father, her encounter with Japanese society’s constricting gender norms, and her desire to transcend the low career horizons that society at large assigned to women of her family’s socioeconomic status.20 Her childhood experiences—connected to her family, her schools, her peers— in a lower-class neighborhood of Tokyo all revolved around molding her to conform to prescribed gender and class roles. Her parents foremost expected her to follow a life trajectory, conventionally gendered and classed, that would channel her into pink-collar employment. With university education financially out of reach, she enrolled in a vocational high school; graduating in the spring of 1964, as expected, she immediately entered the lower ranks of pink-collar employment as an OL, a clerical worker at the Kikkoman Corporation, a major purveyor of soy sauce and related condiments. Shigenobu recalled that Kikkoman was a popular employer among her schoolmates, as it offered a good salary: “After graduating from high school and finding employment, my life as an OL began [with me and] my entry cohort of thirty OLs being instructed on our first day in the virtues of femininity within the office workplace.”21 She later recalled that her long-term prospects at Kikkoman had likely been undermined by the sarcastic evaluation she wrote on the post-lecture survey handed out by her section head at the end of the workplace femininity lecture, which earned her the early wrath of management and most of her coworkers: she did not see how womanly virtues improved the quality of their clerical work. This did not bode well for easy integration into life as a pink-collar worker. Indeed, she found the work unchallenging and the hierarchical division between high school female office workers and their junior-college counterparts oppressive. She also found it difficult to reconcile her growing disillusionment with company life with the benefits of her relatively high salary—for a young woman of her class.22 Life improved, however, when she encountered a coworker who told her about the option to attend university night classes, which her salary would enable her to pay for on her own, without incurring a financial burden for her parents.23 She chose Meiji University, she later wrote, “because it was conveniently located between home and work. My night classes were filled with excellent young people who came to Tokyo from rural areas, found jobs, and burned with curiosity.”24 Shigenobu was enthralled by the day-to-day contact with civil servants whose access to the state was unlike anything she could hope to achieve: “We were all poor, but the [Surugadai] neighborhood [around Meiji University] was a ‘place of encounter’ [sōgū basho]: in the daytime, the neighborhood was full of civil servants, police officers, self-defense force officials, postal workers, and government office workers as well as private company employees [like me]. Student clubs were vibrant, and I was able to engage with literature, music, history, education,

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and politics through club activities alongside night classes.”25 She recalled that her first encounter with the student movement was when she went to campus to pay her first-year enrollment fees in 1965, where she observed firsthand a significant shift in campus politics as university administrators began to crack down on student protesters.26 According to Shigenobu, during the mass protests that demarcated popular opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960, “the university president had himself closed the gates to the university and led Meiji students as they marched in protest against the US-Japan Security Treaty.”27 In 1965, however, the university was much less supportive of student political activism and was itself the focus of significant protest by students suffering from higher tuition fees and lowered student-living stipends from the government. The university administration was now the target of student protest, and the objectives of the movement had evolved beyond simple opposition to the security treaty. Shigenobu recalled that she was quickly swept up in the political moment: “I was surprised and impressed that such people were there. . . . These people, including my classmates, discussed the problems between Japan and Korea and [the growing war in] Vietnam. We discussed each other’s workplace difficulties and helped each other find work, as well as joining protests and demonstrations.”28

The Black Panthers in Japan A complex array of influences set Shigenobu on the path to revolutionary violence. She credited the anti–Vietnam War movement for her finding her political voice, and her further political alienation amid the fratricidal chaos of 1968 led her to conclude that protest politics were useless. Early in 1969 she joined the revolutionary Red Army Faction.29 One of the RAF’s first public meetings, held in late September 1969 near Tokyo Station, featured a panel of guest speakers from the United States that included representatives from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party, who spoke plainly about their revolutionary struggles in solidarity with the New Left movement in Japan. The historian Yuichiro Onishi credits the emergence of intense interest in black liberation among the New Left movement in Japan to a relatively obscure study group, the Kokujin Kenkyū no Kai (Association of Negro Studies), which conjured an “echo of black radicalism” within postwar Japan that they perceived as the ideal model for postimperial Japan.30 New Left Japanese activists’ racialized understanding of Japan’s position within the United States’ Cold War empire led them to identify with black soldiers’ struggle against racial discrimination within the US military. The social and political location of Okinawans, both before and

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after reversion in 1972, offered Japan’s New Left a unique opportunity to build a joint struggle with otherwise disparate groups—US soldiers, Okinawan civilian workers, and Far Left radicals from mainland Japan. The photographer Ishikawa Mao documented the complex relationship between the US military, African Americans, Japan, and Okinawa by photographing her female friends, most of whom worked along the fringes of the base town’s sex industry, as they interacted with their African American boyfriends/customers. Ishikawa’s documentation of the interplay between sex, race, gender, and class offers a significant visual record of the epiphytic relationship between the sex industry and US military bases in Okinawa first examined by the feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe. Indeed, Ishikawa and Enloe independently document the crux of the “race problem” in Okinawa as perceived by mainland Japanese and American officials during the early and mid-1970s: black men engaged in sexual relationships with Okinawans—a colonial population for many of whom the experiences of Japanese imperial rule, then US military occupation, felt familiar.31 Yuichiro Onishi argues that the highly charged racial term of the era, “AfroAsia,” “highlights the presence of multiple currents of resistance—anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-war, and antiracist”32—struggles within Japanese domestic politics that young Japanese identified with similar struggles across the globe.33 Their revolutionary rhetoric was profoundly influenced by The Quotations of Chairman Mao, which had become a central text for RAF members; its Maoist lexicon also inspired a romance with the Cultural Revolution, which was widely shared by Japanese youth, who used it to imagine themselves as cadres in a global guerrilla war, an imagined struggle made real by the web of intellectual, and personal, connections they had made in the late 1960s.34 Mao Zedong’s ideological framework for national self-liberation was particularly useful to the Black Panther Party founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who first thought they might raise funds to buy weapons by selling copies of The Quotations to students on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Once they started reading the text, Seale and Newton found it easily adaptable to their situation and made the book a central text in their effort to internationalize the Black Panther movement. Despite the ad hoc way in which the Black Panther Party adapted its Marxist-Leninist ideological platform, party leadership and members nevertheless perceived themselves as part of a global movement of Marxist revolutionaries. Jason Jones and Cristina Mislan have each observed that a typology of transnationality informed the Black Panther movement so as to position black nationalism alongside Marxist-Leninist revolutionary politics as an alternative means for party members to conceptualize their position within what, by the early 1970s, party “internationalists” were beginning to represent as a world revolution.35

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Elbert Howard, deputy minister of information and founding editor of the party newspaper, the Black Panther, noted that, in the late 1960s, “many groups such as student, labor, and political organizations sent letters of support and invitations to come and speak in their countries.”36 International delegations established links with solidarity groups whose support work in the decolonizing “third world” as well as the colonizer nations of the so-called “first world” served a significant rhetorical purpose within the pages of the Black Panther and even helped to raise funds for the organization.37 Perhaps more importantly, Black Panther delegations to Japan inspired some young Japanese leftists to think about their political struggles at home as part of a greater international struggle for racial liberation.38 The Japanese media’s sensationalized portrayal of the Black Panther Party’s militancy and antiestablishment ideology inadvertently provided an impetus. Jason Jones’s analysis of references to the party in the Asahi shinbum, Japan’s leading daily with a readership of more than twenty million, found that a “lexicon of crime, arrest, court, bail, plots, extremism/radicalism, demonstrations, shootings, murder, and kidnapping” permeated its coverage.39 These were the same media tropes that filled late-1960s reporting on Japan’s radical youth movements, inducing a sense of kinship.40 In the autumn of 1968, Black Panther Party founding members Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Neal, and Earl Anthony accepted an invitation to participate in an antiwar roundtable discussion organized by a coalition of student groups in Japan. However, Cleaver’s parole officer denied him permission to travel, and the Japanese government denied Neal permission to enter Japan while she was in transit. Only Anthony, who was later revealed to be an FBI informant, made it to Tokyo, where he was feted as the sole representative of the Black Panther Party by small but enthusiastic crowds of young radicals who were keen on learning firsthand about the black liberation movement in the United States.41 New Left propaganda, as well as some of the mainstream Japanese press, presented Anthony as the embodiment of the American revolutionary group, yet very little seems to have resulted from that early contact until the summer of 1969. A bloc of young radicals associated with the Zengaku Kyōtō Kaigi (also known as Zenkyōtō, or the All-Campus Joint-Struggle Committee, some members of which would help form the RAF) sent a follow-up communiqué to the Black Panther Party headquarters in Oakland that declared that the “proletariat of the brown nations must form a practical link with the struggles for liberation in the Third World, eventually to win in the struggle for world revolution.”42 The communiqué further declared that Japanese youth “will stage an armed struggle to topple the regime of the Japanese imperialists this October. This struggle will be an attempt to establish a foundation for a common struggle against Japanese and

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American imperialists. Next month we will hold an international anti-­imperialist conference to discuss, debate, and coordinate an alliance for the future of the struggle against imperialism inside of the developed countries.”43 The communiqué was accompanied by two one-way air tickets and an invitation to attend a conference in Tokyo in advance of the October struggle. The Black Panther Party founding members Elbert Howard and Roberta Alexander were the only ones sufficiently unencumbered to accept the invitation, and their arrival in Japan was greeted by enthusiastic audiences of young radicals whose notions of blackness reflected an ad hoc understanding of African American experiences as communicated through print and televised media. Landing amid the turmoil, Howard and Alexander were escorted through Tokyo by a loosely affiliated group of young radicals that included Takaya Shiomi and Shigenobu Fusako. While the national press scarcely reported on the Black Panther delegation, newsletters produced by local and national New Left youth groups, like the worker-student organization Hansen Seinen Iinkai and the national student alliance Zengakuren, reported their appearances at events and struggle sites around Tokyo. They recounted how Howard and Alexander’s participation in the 5 September 1969 conference in Tokyo featured a vibrant debate comparing revolutionary strategies and philosophies that was followed by a whirlwind tour of struggle sites across the Tokyo metropolitan area, including the day-laborer neighborhood of San’ya, where Howard and Alexander were shown the human cost of rapid capitalist development in Japan. Howard reported to the Black Panther rank and file that “the people in this ghetto are all Japanese. . . . [Yet] the workers in San’ya face discrimination and social degradation in many ways as severe as the oppression that the Black people in the United States face.”44 The delegation also traveled with their hosts to the protest site at Sanrizuka, where a confederation of New Left youth and local farmers were engaged in intermittent, violent clashes with police over the government’s imminent expansion of the Narita International Airport. Importantly, Adrienne C. Hurley observes that Alexander and Howard felt a much stronger connection to the ethnically Japanese and Korean day laborers of San’ya than to the predominantly middle-class student radicals who had hosted their visit.45 Shigenobu Fusako, whose journey to Lebanon and international terrorism we now turn to, strikingly parallels in her memoirs of the era the Black Panthers’ racial critique of US imperialism, explaining in particular how she would lead the struggle for global revolution through a joint struggle with the people of color resisting the global yoke of US imperialism. The subsequent propaganda she helped create articulated her vision for world revolution, which closely paralleled Huey Newton’s belief that international engagement would transform what

FIGURE 2.2.  This page from the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party narrates Roberta Alexander and Elbert “Big Man” Howard’s visit to Japan in September 1969. Black Panther, 11 October 1969, 9.

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he thought was a parochial Black Panther movement into a global movement for liberation from US Cold War imperialism.

Collaboration with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Shigenobu began her life as an international revolutionary working in the PFLP’s Beirut office translating propaganda for recruitment in Japan, a role that kept her in regular contact with her Red Army network in Japan. While Shigenobu was assigned a desk job, Okudaira Tsuyoshi and a small cadre of male volunteers who had arrived in Lebanon at the same time were assigned to paramilitary training units. Even though she was a highly experienced young radical who had been active in the Japanese student movement since the mid1960s, Shigenobu recorded no misgivings about her assignment. Shigenobu and her RAF comrades’ fateful decision to join the fight for Palestinian liberation originated in PFLP founder George Habash’s trip to Pyongyang in September of 1970 to request military aid from the North Korean and Chinese governments. Knowing that Habash was keen to build an international auxiliary of the PFLP, his North Korean hosts introduced him to the Yodogō hijackers, who were living in exile in North Korea, and they passed the word via the Sekigun network in Japan that the PFLP would provide military training to any aspiring guerrillas who could make their way from Japan to Lebanon. Shigenobu’s involvement with the increasingly violent, high-profile student politics, including the founding of the RAF, had put her on the police watch list, which made it unlikely that she would be approved for a passport. She and her fellow RAF cadre Okudaira Tsuyoshi hit on a creative solution: they forged their registry in his family koseki, the official family register maintained by the city government, to obtain a marriage certificate from the city office. Shigenobu’s taking Okudaira’s family name meant that she and Okudaira were able to successfully apply for her passport under a name not then known to police. They departed for Lebanon separately in February 1971.46 By the time the Japanese prospective revolutionaries arrived in Lebanon, the PFLP had already trained several thousand guerrilla fighters with direct funding from the Syrian government and indirect support from the Soviet Union. Soon after, word reached the independent filmmakers Wakamatsu Kōji and Adachi Masao via the same network, and in July 1970, they interrupted their return from the Cannes Film Festival to travel to Beirut, where they joined up with the small band of Japanese revolutionaries who had by that point heeded Habash’s call to arms and smuggled themselves to Lebanon.

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Wakamatsu and Adachi, who had been active in Left politics since the 1950s, achieved a degree of notoriety during the 1960s as producers and directors of low-budget erotic films that exploited loopholes in the obscenity laws that protected political speech to make films that rewarded viewers with ample on-screen carnality framed within radical political contexts. They were persuaded to travel to Lebanon in 1970 by their contacts in the Japanese RAF to produce a documentary on members of the group undertaking military training with the PFLP.47 In Beirut, Wakamatsu and Adachi were met by their PFLP liaison, the twentysix-year-old Shigenobu Fusako, who traveled with them by car to training camps in Lebanon and Jordan, where they filmed weapons and combat-training classes, tactical simulations, Marxist study groups, and interviews with a handful of individuals, including George Habash and the Black September hijacker Leila Khaled. Shigenobu ended up a central figure in the final cut of the documentary, Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai sensō sengen (Red Army-PFLP: Declaration of world war), which was filmed in Lebanon during the summer of 1971 and shown during recruitment meetings at university campuses across Japan during autumn 1971 and winter 1972. Adachi, and sometimes Wakamatsu, accompanied the film aboard the “Sekigun Bus” as it traveled from campus to campus with a caravan of riot police buses trailing behind it. The film was well received by sympathetic campus-based supporters and activists even though fewer than forty recruits ever made the journey to Lebanon.48 Wakamatsu and Adachi perceived their work, which linked political themes to representations of sex and violence, as an act of political sabotage, yet their films were nonetheless commercial enterprises that hinged entirely on the raw carnality they directed their casts to portray.49 Their decision to make a documentary about Japanese who had joined the Palestinian struggle for independence marked a break with their past filmography of soft-pornography “pink” films, many depicting rape and sadism. Now deeply influenced by the Maoist political rhetoric of the era, Adachi and Wakamatsu even included a scene depicting a small group of young Palestinian and Japanese guerrillas sitting in a circle, somewhere in a barren, semi-desert region of Lebanon, reading from Arabic translations of The Quotations of Chairman Mao. To drive home the link between support of the PFLP and world revolution, they filmed scenes of Shigenobu talking about the collaboration between the two groups and articulating their shared ideas about world revolution, rather than simply the liberation of Palestine and revolution in Japan as national goals. The film also featured long shots of weapons training intended to spur recruitment of young Japanese radicals, who had no firearms experience but were enticed by the romance of training for guerrilla warfare.50 Adachi and Wakamatsu had initially intended Sekigun-PFLP to portray a broader view of life in the training camps, but the PFLP, under threat of assassination and military attack, asked the filmmakers not to include any scenes

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FIGURE 2.3.  Shigenobu Fusako explains that “it’s the PFLP which is our successor in spreading the struggle.” Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai senso ¯ sengen, directed by Wakamatsu Koji and written by Adachi Masao, Wakamatsu Productions (1971). Reprinted courtesy of Wakamatsu Purodakushon.

containing tactically useful information, which resulted in long segments of the film portraying desertscape from a moving vehicle as Shigenobu’s voice-over narration explains the context of the PFLP struggle for a Palestinian homeland. Indeed, the long segments of barren landscape have the unintended effect of making Shigenobu’s testimonial essential to delivering the film’s message, and more effective than originally intended. At the one-hour point in the film, the scene cuts to Shigenobu’s face, which takes up the entire screen, while she appeals demurely for her revolutionary comrades in Japan to join the struggle in Lebanon. She explains how Japanese volunteers are engaged in a strategically significant revolutionary moment that is the logical culmination of the global anti-imperialist movement. Shigenobu’s extended and complicated ideological commentary—really a theoretical ­argument—coalesces around the ideological links she asserts between the PFLP’s struggle for Palestinian liberation in the Middle East and the Japanese student movement’s political struggles against both the extended US occupation of Okinawa and the Japanese government’s support for the US war in Vietnam. She implores the viewer to understand that the PFLP is the successor to the nowdisbanded Red Army in Japan and is bringing the struggle against US imperialism to the people of the world.

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The Red Army–PFLP collaboration, declares Shigenobu, “must be a joint action, a joint military struggle, with whom the Palestinian people, or the Tupamaros or Black Panthers worldwide, can emerge with a world revolutionary strategy to beat the imperialists through joint military action.”51 Shigenobu’s seemingly casual conflation of Japanese support for the PFLP’s struggle for national liberation in the Middle East with her ideological attraction to the struggles for racial defense and national liberation by the Black Panthers and the Tupamaros is mediated by her command of the intricate dogma of leftist revolutionary thought alongside her ability to wield fashionable, media-centric propaganda— she is cool and uses that to considerable effect.52 Shigenobu played a vital role as a Japanese-speaking revolutionary who explained, from the field, why the Palestinians’ struggle was directly relevant to the political struggle in Japan. In contrast, Wakamatsu and Adachi constructed a complete and highly effective (for its time) agitprop documentary that opens with the narrator speaking in a tone and cadence commonly used in Japan Broadcasting Corporation newsreels and ends with a series of black screens featuring short phrases written in large white characters that conveyed the central message of the film: World Revolution Revolution Revolution = World War Armed Struggle Take Up Arms Gun Bullet Muzzle Trigger Revolution Is World War While the call for revolutionary violence is explicit, perhaps more important is the film’s portrayal of scene after scene of PFLP volunteers, young women and men, handling the iconic weapons of the 1970s revolutionary—to an extent approaching phallic obsession. The portrayal of weapons would likely have appealed to an audience hungry for the paraphernalia of the guerrilla soldier, but it also allowed Wakamatsu and Adachi to conflate sex, violence, and femininity as a tool to capture the imaginations of the audiences—mostly young men—who saw the film on Japanese university campuses in 1971 and 1972. While SekigunPFLP was not pornography, Wakamatsu and Adachi nevertheless deployed tropes from their former toolbox in making the film.53 Wakamatsu and Adachi’s 1969 Jogakusei gerira (High school girl guerrilla) exemplifies how they used young female characters to introduce their audience

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to radical politics through porn. It portrays a small band of high school girls as they plan to hijack their graduation ceremony and avenge themselves against an education system they believe has betrayed them. The premise of the psychosexual fantasy is built around a short scene depicting the young girls’ declaration of their rejection of a school that functions as a marriage market and little else. It is a bizarrely compelling attempt to combine professional and political interests—porn and politics—through the portrayal of teenage girls engaged in a double-voiced rebellion (sexual and political) against the authorities enforcing social conformity. It nevertheless fetishizes guns by constructing a veneer of aggressive female sexuality that panders to the male gaze at the cost of female subjectivity. The superficial feminist premise—the girls rebel against the patriarchal social system disguised as mass education—is quickly dispelled by the way in which the director parades the actresses through a series of titillating “pink” scenes, during which the fictive guerrilla warriors, and actual actresses, engage in a series of graphic acts of submissive sex, first in trade for the school’s grade registers and diplomas (which they intend to hold for ransom) and then for a cache of military-grade weapons (to use in their rebellion against society). Half clothed and armed with hand grenades and automatic rifles, the ad hoc band of high school girl guerrillas escape into the mountains to establish their rebel commune beneath a mountain waterfall.54 Adachi and Wakamatsu’s politicized pornography was a prologue to how they deployed weapons and women—albeit fully clothed and not engaged in

FIGURE 2.4.  The revolutionary schoolgirls’ manifesto declares, “We didn’t come to school for marriage introduction classes!” Jogakusei gerira, directed by Adachi Masao, Wakamatsu Productions (1969). Reprinted courtesy of Wakamatsu Purodakushon.

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sex acts—in Sekigun-PFLP. Indeed, one result was that the long segment featuring Shigenobu became far more prominent and important to the rhetorical intent of the agitprop documentary. The film’s phallic obsession with guns and its conflation of sex with violence was a powerful medium for attracting the male gaze, which was, of course, the purpose of the film: it was made to recruit young male Japanese to join the world revolution. Indeed, while Wakamatsu returned to making politically themed and commercial pornographic films after finishing Sekigun-PFLP, Adachi’s personal experience making the film was transformative, such that he gave up filmmaking altogether and returned to Lebanon to join the JRA in 1974. Shigenobu Fusako had sought to use her role as propagandist for the PFLP to foster a liminal space within which young Japanese radicals could imagine revolution outside the provincial borders of Japan. She was ultimately convicted of, and eventually imprisoned for, planning the 1974 hostage siege at the French embassy in the Hague; however, her earliest and perhaps most significant impact was as a propagandist and the internationally recognized face of the JRA while it was under her leadership. Shigenobu’s political propaganda calling for a panracial, anti-imperialist world revolution was not, however, informed by the radical feminist critique of patriarchy emerging at this time, despite her experiences of a gender-segregated workplace and subsequent acquiescence to a gender bias in the radical political movements she joined. In the end, her appeals for world revolution were circumscribed by the gendered lenses through which her audience perceived her ideals. Shigenobu and her revolutionary Red Army cadres presented a hypersexualized image of the international guerrilla fighter—willing to take up a gun for world revolution—as the embodiment of what it meant to be a young Japanese radical.

The Red Army and the Birth of Punk Rock in Japan The JRA attracted only a few dozen members-under-arms, but its brief international moment between 1971 and 1976 had a significant impact on the cultural space of youth radicalism, evident in the launching of the punk rock movement in Japan. In March 1972, Victor Records released the first commercial album by the protopunk band Zunō Keisatsu (the Brain Police), which, for many of its songs, took inspiration from Red Army political rhetoric and its iconography of masculinist violence.55 Founded in 1969 by “garage rock” musicians Nakamura Haruo, Ishizuka Toshiaki, and Kikuchi Takumi, partly as an homage to the music pioneer Frank Zappa, Zunō Keisatsu’s performances were ubiquitous at

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RAF political meetings and associated political protests. Indeed, Nakamura later explained that his lifelong fascination with Shigenobu inspired much of his work as a lyricist and musician.56 Formed amid the political turmoil of 1969, Zunō Keisatsu often performed at small club venues, political rallies, and major demonstrations in the Tokyo area. The group debuted at the Kanda Kyoritsu Auditorium in April 1970, where Nakamura’s confrontational lyrics and wild, angry, and frenetic performance— which included dropping his trousers onstage—were widely criticized by the mainstream media, and their performances were often disrupted by police for violating public morality laws. The garage rock subculture out of which the punk movement emerged was far from uniform, but the punk genre was generally understood as a vocal lead engaged in loud, aggressive slogans, choruses, and terrace chants while accompanied by one or two guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer. Punk arrangements were generally short and laden with ideological lyrics. While histories of punk identify the first semicommercial punk labels as emerging in New York during the mid-1970s, Zunō Keisatsu signed with the very commercial Victor Records late in 1971; their first album was a compilation of live performances recorded in Kyoto in January 1972 and was released in March of that year. Despite its capitalist origins, the album borrowed heavily from the JRA’s political vision to articulate an antiauthoritarian, heterodoxic cultural practice that coemerged alongside, yet was distinct from, the New York Dolls (1971) and the Clash (1976). Victor Records caved to informal police pressure and voluntarily withdrew the album from publication after just three weeks, part of the record industry’s “voluntary censorship” of materials that the state authorities declared to be at odds with the public-welfare laws that also governed pornography and the sex trade.57 The album was indeed meant to be very provocative, and its release coincidently overlapped with Shigenobu’s communiqués from Lebanon imploring the youth of Japan to come join the PFLP’s global fight for liberation. The album’s first track, “Introduction: Declaration of World Revolutionary War,” featured lead vocalist Nakamura’s reworked version of the RAF’s September 1969 manifesto. Nakamura later explained that he sought to use his lyrics to explore the duality of coming of age in Tokyo during the late 1960s: the city resonated with the anger felt by youth who saw their mass mobilizations for social and political change crushed under the weight of police suppression and widespread apathy. Nakamura gave voice to a shared fury over the United States’ continued oppression of the Vietnamese people, the war against the Black Panther Party, and support for the Park dictatorship in South Korea.58 The recording begins with a string of firecrackers, which mimics the sound of gunfire, after which Nakamura rapidly screams his rage against the

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system: “Bourgeoisie Ladies and Gentlemen! We openly declare war on ourselves in order to purge and drown you in the World Revolutionary War.” He continues: If you have the right to kill our Vietnamese friends, we also have the right to kill you. If you have the right to murder our Black Panther comrades and crush the ghetto under tanks, we also will kill Nixon, Sato, Kissinger, de Gaulle, bomb the Pentagon, the Defense Agency, the Metropolitan Police Department, your houses. If you have the right to bayonet our Okinawan comrades, we also have the right to stab you with bayonets. If you have the right to build the Self-Defense Force in support of another war in Korea, arrest those who oppose it, and support the Park dictatorship, we too have the right to build the Red Army, make a declaration of revolution, arrest and condemn you to death. We fought against the [feudal] lords under the slogan of “freedom, equality, bravery” to break this framework and make ourselves free. But now we declare openly and decisively that we will not do your bidding. Your time is over. We will fight to the very end in order to kill you from this world in the name of the last war, the class war, to eliminate you from the earth, In the name of victory for the World Revolutionary War, we openly gun for the Self-Defense Forces, the Riot Police, and the US military. If you do not want to be killed, turn the gun around! Toward yourself and toward the bourgeoisie behind you. Anyone who will interfere with the project of liberating the world proletariat will inevitably be killed in the midst of the World Revolutionary War. Unchain the proletariat of the world! Our Declaration of the World Revolutionary War begins here.59 Overtly and loudly political, Nakamura’s lyrics railed against the Japanese state’s total capitulation to the whims of US imperialism. Like many musicians associated with the punk genre, Nakamura laid bare issues central to the global antiestablishment, countercultural youth movements of the Cold War era. Historians of the punk rock groups that emerged in London and New York during the mid-1970s have established that groups like the Clash, Screwdriver, and the New York Dolls were the vanguard of the working-class angst that arose from deindustrialization. Early punk ideologies spanned from the Far Right (Screwdriver)

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to the Far Left (the Clash), but they shared a common frustration with a political establishment that had failed to challenge the severe economic inequalities faced by urban working-class youth.60 Zunō Keisatsu’s sound and lyrics grew alongside an audience composed of the radical youth of the late 1960s, whose actions also helped to shape the music. Fanzines celebrated Nakamura’s “Declaration of World Revolutionary War” as the first in a revolutionary trilogy—the first three tracks on the group’s 1972 album—that was emblematic of the political rage felt by a generation of youth whom the state had blocked from exercising their demographic’s political majority. The second track, “Sekigun heishi no uta” (Song of a Red Army soldier), incorporates the work of the German poet Bertolt Brecht into a dark criticism of contemporary Japan’s role in “devouring the earth,” while the third track, “Jū o tore” (Pick up a gun!), ends somewhat predictably by calling on the audience to “pick up a gun, pick up a gun, pick up a gun.”61 While Nakamura explained to contemporaries—and the media—that his music was foremost an exploration of how to expand the expressive limits of the Japanese language, it is nonetheless significant that he made artistic use of Red Army ideology—and its masculinist lexicon for political violence—to express himself. His combination of vulgarity, fury, and political critique resonated with the historical moment: “Declaration of World Revolutionary War” and its accompanying tracks position the audience, and band, within the revolutionary rhetoric that Shigenobu Fusako sought to shape in her effort to persuade recruits to join the JRA.62 Five weeks after Victor Records withdrew Zunō Keisatsu’s album, Shigenobu’s twenty-seven-year-old “paper husband,” Okudaira Tsuyoshi, twenty-five-yearold Yasuda Yasuyuki, and Okamoto Kōzō, the twenty-five-year-old younger brother of the Yodogō hijacker Okamoto Takeshi, traveled via Rome to Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, where, on 30 May 1972, they launched what Shigenobu would be forced to rebrand as the first joint offensive by the PFLP and the JRA. The tie-up was the logical consequence of Shigenobu’s epic transformation from a pinkcollar worker into an international revolutionary, which was bolstered by her masterful orchestration of recruitment propaganda. Perhaps more significantly, the Lod Airport attack was the first in a series of hostage takings, hijackings, and mass shootings that helped shape the international media’s presentation of the early 1970s as the start of an age of global terrorism.

The Long March of Wakamiya Masanori While the deadly sensuality of Shigenobu and Nagata took center stage in media and police reports on the Sekigun movement, an equally colorful, yet much less

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known, character within the male Sekigun cohort was the blue-collar activist who was arrested for the bombing of a Tokyo police substation. Despite compelling evidence to the contrary, Wakamiya Masanori claimed sole responsibility for the bombing and served two years in prison. Shortly after his release, Wakamiya relocated to Kamagasaki, the day laborers’ slum of Osaka, where, in March 1972, he opened a small ramen shop. Wakamiya served up cheap bowls of noodle soup and curry rice alongside a never-ending master’s seminar in New Left thought. The noodle shop was well attended by his former comrades-in-arms, dead-broke university students, and the down-and-out residents of the day laborers’ neighborhood. Despite its official name, Katsūra Shokudō, the shop was known to its Kamagasaki patrons as “Sekigun Ramen.” Born in 1945, Wakamiya was the youngest of twelve children born to a fishing family living on the small, remote island of Kuroshima, which is off the coast of Uwajima on the southwest side of the island of Shikoku. Left behind by the rapid growth of the 1960s, Kuroshima’s production of fish and mandarin oranges was insufficient to support its four thousand residents, and most of Wakamiya’s age cohort left the island to find work in the major cities. After completing vocational high school training at the fisheries school in Uwajima, Wakamiya landed factory work in Osaka, where he encountered the anti–Vietnam War movement through a local chapter of the union-sponsored Hansen Seinen Iinkai (Antiwar Youth Committee). His work with the committee followed the organization’s trajectory that was examined in chapter 1, and as he grew disillusioned with Sōhyō’s and the Japan Socialist Party’s persistent attempts to assert control over the organization, Wakamiya shifted his political activities to what became the vanguard of the RAF, an affiliation cut short by his arrest in 1969.63 The historian Till Knaudt describes Wakamiya’s New Left salon in Kamagasaki (i.e., the noodle shop) as “a place of political agitation” where day laborers ate alongside students and activists while they paged through, discussed, and argued over an immense collection of New Left magazines, pamphlets, and books.64 Their critique focused on what they collectively agreed to be the New and Old Left’s chronic neglect of the emancipatory movements for ethnic and social minorities in Japan and abroad. The regulars in attendance at the salon-cumrestaurant rejected the approach of earlier mass social movements for their failure to address the extent to which Japan’s key role in supporting US imperialism also supported a system that bought the consent of Japan’s salaried blue-collar workers by exploiting the low wages and weak legal protections afforded to the peoples of the developing world. More important still was their critical observation that, within this global capitalist system, Japan’s workers were not only bought by their country’s collaboration with the machinations of US imperialism but were also, according to Knaudt, “themselves imperialists and colonizers

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who ruled over the ‘inner colony’ of Kamagasaki.”65 As the salon morphed into the vanguard of a movement, discussions homed in on how the group could engage the problem of self-liberation within Kamagasaki through a “struggle on the ground” (genba tōsō) that provoked an anti-imperialist sensibility for class liberation within the day-laborer neighborhood, one that was tailored specifically to what the salon members perceived as the most crushing problem of the community: the yakuza.66 The restaurant became the organizing locus for direct action within the neighborhood. In the early summer of 1972, a group of restaurant regulars, calling themselves Bōryoku Tehaishi Tsuihō Kamagasaki Kyōtō Kaigi (the Kamagasaki Joint Struggle Committee, or Kamakyōtō), engaged in direct actions against the yakuza gangs that controlled the money-lending and gambling rackets of Kamagasaki, which resulted in a series of violent clashes between members of Kamakyōtō, residents, yakuza thugs, and the police. In the wake of several waves of street violence in May 1972, police laid blame on Kamakyōtō and subsequently raided Wakamiya’s restaurant as well as the homes of local activists observed eating there. Local residents responded to the police crackdown by throwing rocks at police and overturning parked cars, which precipitated the decision by national police authorities to dispatch more than one thousand regular police and six hundred civilian reserves to suppress the violence. The mainstream press, both national and local, reported the Kamagasaki uprising as a riot instigated by extremist agitators affiliated with the RAF.67 Knaudt’s reconstruction of the events of May 1972 in Kamagasaki, which unfolded simultaneously with, but independent of, Shigenobu’s launch of the JRA in Lebanon, observes that both local and national media showed little interest in the reasons for the Kamagasaki uprising, much less the conditions experienced by the resident day laborers who often worked a full day of grueling manual labor for barely enough money to pay for a day’s food and lodging. Instead, according to Knaudt, the mainstream press labeled Wakamiya and the ramen salon a hotbed of agent provocateurs. On the morning of 28 June 1972, police once again raided the ramen shop, this time on the thin pretext of detaining six activists, who were known to gather there, on suspicion of attacking members of the local yakuza gang.68 That afternoon, Wakamiya and his fellow activist Funamoto Shūji (who, in 1975, would immolate himself in protest of an imperial visit to Okinawa) organized more than two thousand residents to assemble at the neighborhood police station to protest the apparent collusion between the police and the local criminal gang. The protesters demanded the release of the arrested activists. The police rejected their demand. Knaudt quotes Wakamiya’s biographer Takahei Masahito’s claim that local “civil servants, who had concealed themselves within

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the group of demonstrators, began to beat the protesters with batons called ‘Nazi Sticks’ (nachisu-bō),”69 which resulted in many injured protesters. The uprising continued until the early hours of 4 June, when police were able to reestablish the normative balance of power in Kamagasaki. Wakamiya did not return to the ramen restaurant he had founded. Instead, he decided to launch an attack independent of Kamakyōtō. Working with his colleague and paramour Miyamoto Reiko, Wakamiya constructed six improvised explosive devices with which, on the night of 3 September 1972, he and Miyamoto attempted to bomb a police substation (kōban) a half kilometer northwest of Kamagasaki. The improvised devices were defective, and only one exploded, but that one succeeded in injuring a police officer, for which the police retaliated by sweeping the neighborhood with brutal imprecision. Kamagasaki again erupted into chaos, which Wakamiya and Miyamoto used to escape to Nagoya. For reasons not entirely clear to Takahei, Wakamiya and Miyamoto soon returned to Osaka with the rest of their bomb-making supplies. While they were unable to launch a second attack, they did successfully evade capture until late October, when Wakamiya again claimed sole responsibility for the bombing. Miyamoto was not charged, and Wakamiya was convicted of the crime. He served his full sentence and was released from prison in 1986. Upon his release, Wakamiya briefly bummed around Japan on a secondhand motorcycle, visiting his former paramour Miyamoto in Hokkaido, as well his old haunts in Kamagasaki, but the Japan he experienced in the mid-1980s was vastly different from the one he had left when he entered prison. Like a time traveler, Wakamiya emerged from the isolation of prison into the futuristic opulence of the bubble economy. Takahei, his friend and biographer, found within Wakamiya’s personal notes a sense of his feeling alienated by the consumerism and selfindulgent conservatism that he thought then characterized the national polis. He felt disillusioned by the fossilized insularity of New Left political groups that had never broken out of their obsessive focus on ideological purity, nor engaged the needs of the urban precariat for whom Wakamiya had fought and lost his freedom in the early 1970s.70 No longer connecting with what remained of his old cohort, he eventually found his way home to Kuroshima in September 1989. During his cross-country ride, Wakamiya seems to have experienced a significant self-realization about his place in the world, as well as the different prospects for revolution in the industrialized and industrializing worlds. Reading from Wakamiya’s personal notes and correspondence with friends, Takahei observes that Wakamiya came to feel that the economic prosperity of rapid industrialization had clogged even the back roads of Japan with cars and tourists that were rushing to view the last visages of nature. He felt that modernity had robbed Japan and the industrialized world of

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a “true natural life and that there was no choice but to go to the ends of the earth to find what was old and natural.”71 During his road trip across Japan, Wakamiya heard stories from his friends and acquaintances about their travels through East Asia and concluded that economic development had gone ahead to the point that the natural environment he sought was already lost. Takahei reports that it was on the ferry crossing to Kuroshima that Wakamiya set his sights on seeing the natural wonders of South America, especially the Galapagos Islands and the Amazon River, before they too were destroyed by industrial modernity. Wakamiya spent the rest of 1989 earning money, by crewing on local fishing boats and doing odd jobs for island residents, to fund his travels. His friends commented that his preparations for the trip seemed to rejuvenate him with the passion and excitement for life he had lost in prison.72 Alberto Fujimori’s election to the Peruvian presidency in June 1990, however, drew Wakamiya’s attention away from his daydreams of environmental tourism. He reacted poorly to Fujimori’s election, asserting that Fujimori’s Far Right politics threatened to destroy the lives of the rural poor who, by the late 1980s, were migrating en masse to the industrial center of Peru. The experience of mass in-migration had created vast urban slums like that of Kamagasaki around the capital city of Lima—a byproduct of rapid industrialization and a prime example of the worker-on-worker oppression that Wakamiya had been inspired to organize against two decades earlier. In 1990, he left for Peru, hoping to join the Maoist revolutionary group Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). While this was a radical departure from his long-standing commitment to revolution in Japan, his decision had a logic to it if viewed from within the context of the organizing work he had attempted in Kamagasaki, the Sekigun Ramen salon’s global view of “struggle on the ground,” and the perceived successes of Shigenobu’s ability to continue the JRA’s struggle in the Middle East.73 On 9 October 1990, Wakamiya left Japan for Peru. During his first week in the capital city of Lima he was mugged twice: on his first night, when he lost his passport and much of his savings, and a few days later, by three police officers who detained him and took the rest of his cash. Still, Wakamiya found time and energy to send a postcard to his friends back in Kamagasaki on which he wrote of his intent to hike into the Andes to contact the Shining Path revolutionaries who were fighting the forces that had brought Fujimori to power. He was not heard from again. It was in mid-November that Peruvian authorities recovered his body from a small village in the foothills of the Andes. The Peruvian government reported that he had been executed by Shining Path guerrillas who mistook his ethnicity as evidence that he was an agent of Fujimori’s government—a bitter, tragic irony.74

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Wakamiya’s trajectory to Peru and Shigenobu’s to Lebanon both illustrate a transnational context and deeply felt commitment to radical politics, but they also exemplify how class and gender shaped the choices that were made by young people engaged in radical politics. Shigenobu Fusako and Wakamiya Masanori were exemplars of political commitment that extended beyond that of the mass movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. They were also young radicals whose political consciousness was, in part, formed by their family experiences, working environments, and labor unions, which they engaged with before, during, and even after their affiliation with the student groups that have been credited for birthing their political consciousness. Both were born to families forged by the economic and demographic forces that shaped blue- and pink-collar Japan, and both eventually grew alienated from a New Left politics that did not encompass worldviews such as theirs, which had been shaped by their experiences of class and gender in Japan and the world. The JRA’s propaganda for “world revolution” was forged in an environment where women were useful mainly as a sexualized vehicle for portraying revolutionary violence, which ultimately corrupted the organization’s radical political message and call for global class and racial liberation. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, revolutionary groups in Japan perpetuated gendered stereotypes of dangerous youth, which was tantamount to double jeopardy for women engaged in radical politics, violent or not. Furthermore, the sexualization of radical politics obstructed the realization of political agency by the women involved in the movement—a compromise that undermined the efficacy of their political message, which called for the liberation of Palestinians and all the postcolonial world. The temporal proximity of Red Army agitprop productions and the attack at Lod Airport, alongside the involvement of many of the same individuals and organizations in both, points toward a convergence of political interventions that contributed to an influential handful of young Japanese deciding to seek out and support, or join, revolutionary groups. More importantly, the media circus that followed in the wake of each JRA action shaped public perception of the early 1970s as an era of global terrorism perpetrated by Japanese youth. Between 1971 and 1976, the morning editions of the daily newspapers Yomiuri and Asahi published nearly 300 percent more reports on leftist political violence than they had during the whole decade spanning 1960 to 1969.75 Significantly, the influence of the RAF and the JRA spread across a cultural landscape that extended beyond their impact as perpetrators of global revolutionary violence. Shigenobu’s ideological vision for world revolution was eclipsed by her complicity in generating an iconography of women engaged in radical politics that undermined their presumed equality to men. Shigenobu and the JRA were not harbingers of global revolution so much as inadvertent exemplars

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of the grueling continuity of socially constructed notions of sex and gender and the power they had to impact (radical) political discourses and (counter)cultural forms. Indeed, Shigenobu and her revolutionary cadres achieved their greatest propaganda successes by reinforcing the gender hierarchy on which the hegemonic notion of a masculine polis—which defined the exercise of political power in the postwar era—was built.

3 POLITICAL ALIENATION AND THE SIXTIES GENERATION

By the early 1970s, many Japanese believed that the milieu of change that had characterized the postwar era precipitated significant shifts in core social values, which reflected a younger generation at odds with what older Japanese thought was central to their cultural identity. Most social commentators expressed their fears based on assumptions and personal observations, but the parastatal broadcaster, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, or NHK), commissioned a national survey to collect data pertaining to the perceived changes in attitudes toward core social and political institutions. This chapter reexamines the data collected by the NHK surveys to statistically reconstruct the trajectory of changes in social values reported by the age cohorts that formed the bulk of the Sixties Generation. The NHK data, collected by trained pollsters using a wellwrought instrument and survey method, triangulate a statistical approximation of the mentalité of young people in Japan during an era of youth politics that conflated generational conflict with popular culture trends. While political and social values generally coalesced around the Sixties Generation’s shared experience of the historical epoch of the late 1960s (their generational location), by the early 1970s, several critical indicators of political and social values correlated more strongly with gender and occupation for some cohorts, which marks significant fractures in the generational position on fundamental political and social attitudes. The data offer significant longitudinal insights into the political mentalité of the Sixties Generation—particularly where gender and class seemed to exert a more significant influence on political opinion than they did on the age cohorts of youth born after 1945. 68

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The NHK Value Orientation Surveys The NHK’s long-term survey of Japanese Value Orientations (Nihonjin no Ishiki), conducted twice per decade, tracked changes in personal attitudes toward life, society, economy, and politics. Pollsters asked a range of questions that were meant to gauge the extent to which core attitudes had changed—querying political party affiliation and individual perception of personal prospects for the future as well as personal attitudes toward social practices and political institutions. The NHK first conducted this survey in 1973 and has since produced a solid base of data that has enabled social scientists of the era, and historians ever since, to access a statistical representation of what most Japanese appeared to think about key social and political issues for the better part of fifty years.1 The NHK surveys also offer the only statistically valid cross section of the individual political perceptions and social values expressed by the Sixties Generation, demarcated by age cohort (here used to determine generational location), sex (understood as socially ascribed characteristics of gender), and primary occupation (used to locate economic class status). While the sixty-six core questions of the NHK surveys were fabricated out of concerns, and interests, specific to the quasi-governmental officials who commissioned and paid for the surveys, the sociologists responsible for the surveys deployed a methodology that ensured a longitudinal sample of social and political values that, when disaggregated by class and gender, reveals unique perspectives on the political mentalité during the 1970s. As such, the survey data reveal significant shifts in individual attitudes toward core cultural, social, and political institutions, which in turn provide a rare snapshot of the political consciousness of Japanese youth during the 1970s. The NHK commissioned a team of sociologists to construct the survey using a standard, two-step stratified method. Over a one-to-two-week period, survey teams traveled to 450 preselected public sites nationwide and sampled 5,400 people by randomly selecting twelve subjects at each site who were over the age of sixteen. Trained interviewers collected personal details from individuals who had agreed to the survey, which they completed on their own and returned to the project manager via prepaid post, with an average completed return rate of 78 percent (4,243 completed surveys in 1973 and 4,240 in 1978).2 The survey instrument was designed for the NHK by sociologists in order to ascertain a wide range of social and political attitudes that included the aggregate of respondents’ personal values in terms of life goals and means of life fulfillment, as well as attitudes toward authority and equality; personal heroes and ideal persons; knowledge of and attitudes toward the state of the economy and society; household and gender relations, including ideal family, marital, and in-law relations; and politics, including knowledge of political parties and events, attitudes toward

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the role of elections, the relationship between the government and citizens, and individual feelings toward the emperor.3 The survey questions reflected a set of concerns about changes in Japanese society and culture that were held by many pundits and politicians, but more significantly, the results presented a useful snapshot of social attitudes held by Japanese, both old and young, who had lived through some of the most politically tumultuous years of the twentieth century. Indeed, individual levels of educational attainment were at an all-time high and rising, with more young men and women graduating technical schools, two-year colleges, and four-year universities than ever before. Of the age cohort of sixteen-to-twenty-nine-yearolds that was surveyed in 1973, only 2.2 percent of young men and 2 percent of young women identified themselves as engaged in primary-sector (agricultural) labor; 27.5 percent of men and 8.7 percent of women indicated that they were employed in skilled or technical trades; 26.6 percent of men and 26.3 percent of women self-identified as students; and 30.3 percent of women identified their primary occupation as housewife.4 The data in the 1978 survey show that 120 percent fewer men and women identified themselves as being engaged in primary-sector (agricultural) work than in 1973; 33.3 percent fewer young men and 1.6 percent more young women said they worked in the retail service sector; 40.3 percent fewer young men and 50 percent fewer young women worked in the skilled or technical trades; 53.6 percent more young men and 35.71 percent more young women worked in general manufacturing; 7.2 percent fewer young men and 17.5 percent more young women worked clerical jobs; 65 percent more young men and 75 percent more young women identified themselves as holding management positions; 24.7 percent more men and 25.9 percent more women self-identified as students; and 20.2 percent fewer young women identified themselves as housewives. More significantly, in 1978, 3.6 percent fewer young men and 79 percent fewer young women reported they were unemployed than in 1973. By the mid-1970s, a broad-scale sense of social mobility had given most ­Japanese—young and old, blue- and white-collar—the perception that they were middle class. However, social mobility studies of the era revealed that the significant gains in incomes, from occupations ranging from rural farming to urban manufacturing, that drove the rise of the blue-collar, middle-class mentalité had ended. Most Japanese perceived their middle-class status independently of their material reality. During the early 1970s, the Japanese economy underwent considerable turmoil in the wake of the 1973–74 embargo on oil exports imposed by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and this was coupled with the massive reduction in US military procurements from Japanese companies that followed the United States’ withdrawal from South Vietnam, as

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well as the Nixon administration’s surprise normalization of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and its withdrawal of formal recognition of the government of Taiwan. Amid the economic aftermath of these global events, young Japanese women and men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine navigated a domestic job market that they perceived to be more difficult than the previous decade’s. When disaggregated by age, however, the unemployment data tell a more complicated story: employment prospects for young men and women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four were much worse than for older age cohorts. Broken down by gender, young women experienced a lower employment differential, which was offset by increasing numbers of women exiting the waged workforce after marriage, who were then tracked as housewives rather than job seekers. However, in 1973 the percentage of unemployed young men (not engaged in employment, education, or training) aged fifteen to nineteen was two-thirds higher than young men aged twenty to twenty-four, and the percentage of unemployed men between the ages of fifteen and nineteen was more than double that for young men between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine. By 1978, the percentage of unemployed young men aged fifteen to nineteen was four-fifths higher than that for men aged twenty to twenty-four and three times higher than that for men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine. Although all age cohorts saw a spike in unemployment rates during the post-oil-shock economic restructuring of the mid-1970s, the prospects of young job seekers during the late 1970s, and into the 1980s, never returned to the unprecedented levels of secondary-sector (industrial and manufacturing) employment experienced by young workers during the high-growth years of the mid and late 1960s.5 The pathway from school to work was carefully tended by school and local officials who were working in close collaboration with corporate human resource officers, but there was a short window of opportunity for those who left school to obtain a position within a company. Indeed, Mary Brinton has argued that human capital development in Japan since the 1950s has involved an elaborate collaboration between government bureaucrats, school authorities, and employers, all overseeing the transition from school to work that “essentially constituted Japanese society’s social contract with young men.” Heavy investment in vocational training by corporate managers and state officials offered significant opportunities for school leavers unable to, or unwilling to, access higher education. Higher levels of educational attainment for young people in the early to mid-1970s— a necessary precondition to entering into the kinds of tertiary-sector employment, and income levels, equated with middle-class life—correlated with higher levels of tertiary-sector employment opportunities. However, the late 1970s saw a drop in skilled-sector job opportunities for young people graduating from vocational

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schools, alongside an overall shift toward deskilled general-manufacturing jobs. Union publications like Gekkan Sōhyō and Kokurō bunka published opinion editorials and economic reports claiming that an overall decrease in wages for young workers forced to take lower-skilled jobs threatened to destabilize their dreams of joining the middle class.6 By the end of the 1970s, economic growth appeared to have improved the circumstances of most working-age youth, yet the aggregate responses to core questions included in the NHK survey indicated higher levels of political alienation. Melvin Seeman has defined alienation as “the expectancy or probability held by the individual that his own behavior cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes, or reinforcements.” He acknowledges “the notion of alienation as it originated in the Marxian view of the worker’s condition in capitalist society: the worker is alienated to the extent that the prerogative and means of decision are expropriated” by the ruling class, and thus alienation precludes the means to enact social change or achieve individual goals.7 Takahashi Kōichi and Aramaki Hisashi explain how the NHK survey data show a significant decline in the percentage of individual Japanese citizens who expressed a firm belief in the effectiveness of the influence of core political ­institutions—elections, political demonstrations, and public opinion—on national politics, a trend that abruptly worsened after the bubble economy burst in 1993. By 1998, only 41 percent of all respondents (of all ages) reported thinking that elections had an impact on national politics (16 percent less between 1973 and 1993 and 9 percent less between 1993 and 1998); 22 percent felt political demonstrations had an impact (20 percent less between 1973 and 1993 and 6 percent less between 1993 and 1998), and 11 percent felt that public opinion impacted the decisions made by the government (5 percent less between 1973 and 1993 and 5 percent less between 1993 and 1998).8 Indeed, the aggregate data point to a significant decline in the extent to which respondents believed the core political institutions of the postwar democracy had any effect on the course of national politics—a decline that had accelerated between 1993 and 1998 but then leveled off overall after 1998, with respondents’ attitudes toward elections recovering to 1993’s levels in 2008. Building on Takahashi and Aramaki, Itō Takashi’s multivariate regression analysis of the NHK data shows that—when taking into account age-group demographics, socioeconomic status, and the impact of urbanization—levels of distrust in political institutions (i.e., political alienation) began to decline for older age cohorts after 1998 but continued to increase for younger age cohorts, who reported significantly higher levels of political alienation after 1998. Itō uses his findings to demarcate discrete generational locations for postwar age cohorts born after 1944 and concludes that the experiences of the 1990s seem to have accentuated the trend toward a further stratification of postwar age cohorts.9

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      73

Attitudes toward Political Institutions Given the intensity of political protests at the start of the decade, it is no surprise that the NHK survey sought to ascertain Japanese attitudes toward the political effectiveness of the three core institutional practices (elections, public opinion surveys, and mass demonstrations). The results of the NHK surveys indicate the emergence of a cynical generation: in 1973, 56.7 percent of young men and 59.9 percent of young women aged sixteen to twenty-nine thought public opinion had little influence on political affairs, while among the sixteen-to-twenty age group, 30.1 percent of the male respondents and 25.1 percent of the female respondents thought that public opinion had no influence on political affairs at all. The survey data further show that 38.8 percent of young men and 36.8 percent of young women in the same age cohort indicated they thought national elections had little influence, while 9.7 percent of young men and 4.7 percent of young women felt they had no influence at all. Perhaps more significantly, the data show that in 1973, among the sixteen-to-twenty-nine age group, 51 percent Elections 3

2

1

0 1973

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

2003

2008

Age cohort born 1898–1928

Age cohort born 1929–43

Age cohort born 1944–53

Age cohort born 1954–68

Age cohort born 1969–83 FIGURE 3.1A.  Attitudes toward the effectiveness of political institutions by age cohort, 1973–2008. Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo.

Political protest 3

2

1

0 1973

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

2003

2008

Age cohort born 1898–1928

Age cohort born 1929–43

Age cohort born 1944–53

Age cohort born 1954–68

Age cohort born 1969–83 Public opinion 3

2

1

0 1973

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

2003

2008

Age cohort born 1898–1928

Age cohort born 1929–43

Age cohort born 1944–53

Age cohort born 1954–68

Age cohort born 1969–83 FIGURES 3.1B and C.  Attitudes toward the effectiveness of political institutions by age cohort, 1973–2008. Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo.

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      75

of the male sample and 53.6 percent of the female sample thought that mass demonstrations and political protests had little effect in changing government policy, while 11.4 percent of young men and 7.1 percent of young women thought they had no effect at all. By 1978 the percentage of young people who did not think public opinion, elections, or political protest had a significant impact on national politics had risen significantly. Indeed, 67.7 percent of young men aged sixteen to twentynine (a 19.4 percent increase over 1973) and 66 percent of young women aged sixteen to twenty-nine (a 10.2 percent increase) thought public opinion played no major role in political affairs, while 20.6 percent of young men (a 31.6 percent decrease) and 18.8 percent of young women (a 25.1 percent decrease) thought that public opinion was an ineffective political tool. A similar trend is revealed in attitudes pertaining to representative party politics: 43.87 percent of young men (a 12.6 percent increase) and 39.8 percent of young women (a 8.2 percent increase) indicated they thought national elections had little influence, while 11.9 percent of young men (a 22.7 percent increase) and 7.4 percent of young women (a 57.4 percent increase) felt the parliamentary process influenced government decision making. The young had also lost faith in civic engagement and political activism: 59.1 percent of young men (a 15.9 percent increase) and 56 percent of young women (a 6.5 percent decrease) thought mass demonstration and political protests were ineffective. Importantly, the 7.7 percent of young women (a 69.3 percent decrease) who thought they were a waste of time and energy suggests a gain of faith in the political system among young women. Itō Takashi’s analysis of the NHK data also shows that, between the start of the 1970s and the end of the 1990s, aggregate levels of political alienation rose steadily across all age cohorts; however, Itō did not examine the data for correlations with gender or class.10 When an additional multiple linear regression analysis of the aggregate survey data (for the 129,186 respondents who completed the survey between 1973 and 2008) was calculated for seven key questions, it found that age, gender, and occupation were significant but very weak predictors of individual respondents’ attitudes toward the issues and subjects queried over the time span of the survey data.11 The NHK data show that between 1973 and 1978 there was an overall increase in the percentage of young men and women (born between 1944 and 1957) who felt that the most important role of government was the “development of the economy,” which the state had undertaken in earnest since the mid-1960s. This trend corresponded with a decrease in the number who thought the primary role of government was to foster the “improvement of the social welfare” and an overall increase in the number who understood their constitutional right to a “minimum cultured livelihood.” The shift in attitudes toward the government ran parallel to the government’s overall prioritization of industrial development

76       Chapter 3

over social-welfare support structures. Significantly, the data reveal an overall decrease in the percentage of young people who indicated they understood the breadth of their constitutional rights, including the right to political dissent. The NHK data illustrate significant changes in attitudes toward the influence of public opinion on national politics that were held by young Japanese men and women aged sixteen to twenty-nine, which correlates with the respondent’s gender and occupation. In 1978, the age cohort of blue-collar men and women born between 1954 and 1957 was less inclined to think public opinion had a significant influence on national politics than they had been in 1973, revealing a sense of political and economic disenfranchisement. In contrast, men and women from the same age cohort who were engaged in white-collar occupations were more inclined in 1978 to think that public opinion had a significant influence on national politics than they had been in 1973. Within the same age cohort, 50 percent more women who were engaged in skilled or technical blue-collar occupations thought public opinion had no influence on politics, while 143 percent more women who were engaged in clerical or skilled white-collar occupations thought public opinion had a considerable influence on national politics. Importantly, 100 percent fewer unemployed women thought that public opinion had considerable influence, while 50 percent more unemployed men and women thought that public opinion had no influence at all, which indicates decreasing trust in the state’s willingness to heed the voices of the people at the margins of Japanese society. In 1978, blue-collar men aged twenty-five to twentynine (born between 1949 and 1953) were more likely to think that public opinion had a strong influence on national politics than they had been in 1973, while white-collar men from the same age cohort were much less likely to think public opinion had a significant influence on national politics. In 1978, more than 50 percent more blue-collar men and more than 80 percent more blue-collar women in the age cohort twenty-five to twenty-nine (twenty to twenty-four years old in 1973) thought public opinion had a very big influence or a considerable influence on politics, while 77.8 percent more unemployed men, 67.9 percent more white-collar men, and 5 percent more white-collar women reported they thought it had a little bit of influence. The overall shift in the belief in the political efficacy of public opinion that was indicated by blue-collar men and women and white-collar men (and a smaller percentage of white- or pink-collar women) of that age cohort demonstrated an increased sense that the state, ruled by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 1955, represented the age cohorts’ political interests. The NHK survey also queried respondents about their attitudes toward political elections. The responses were surprising and revealed the significantly different attitudes held by male and female blue- and white-collar workers. The data

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      77

show a significant change in the number of young people who did not think elections had a significant impact on national politics between 1973 and 1978. In 1978, 76 percent fewer white-collar men aged twenty to twenty-four (aged sixteen to nineteen in 1973) reported thinking that elections had a big influence or a considerable influence on politics, while 95 percent fewer white-collar men reported they thought elections had a little influence or no influence at all. Bluecollar women aged twenty to twenty-four were also more likely to think elections had little or no influence: indeed, in 1978, twice as many thought elections had no influence at all than had in 1973. White-collar women in the same age cohort were less likely to think it had a considerable influence (a 25.7 percent decrease) and were more likely to think it had a little influence (a 42.9 percent increase). Perhaps more significant still was that 125 percent more unemployed men, and 5 percent fewer women, reported they thought that elections had a considerable influence on national politics. Significantly more blue-collar men aged twentyfive to twenty-nine in 1978 (aged twenty to twenty-four in 1973) thought that elections had a very big influence on national politics (a 73.1 percent increase), and 77.8 percent of unemployed men thought elections had a little bit of influence on politics, while slightly more white-collar men in the same age cohort (a 14.3 percent increase) also reported they thought elections had a very big influence. Importantly, 42.1 percent more blue-collar women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine also thought elections had a little influence, and 37.1 percent of unemployed women thought they had a considerable influence, while 184.2 percent more thought they had no influence at all, and 35.8 percent more whitecollar women thought elections had no influence on national politics. While employed women indicated significant trust in the efficacy of political elections under LDP rule, unemployed women not categorized as housewives indicated they felt elections gave them little influence over the course of national politics. While political expression through protest and demonstration was the normative experience for youth of the late 1960s and early 1970s, survey results from the same age cohort in 1978 indicate a lack of faith in active citizenship’s power to influence parliamentary politics. The data show significant shifts in the attitudes held toward political demonstrations over the course of the 1970s. Of bluecollar men aged twenty to twenty-four in 1978 (aged sixteen to nineteen in 1973), 191.7 percent more reported they thought political protest had no influence at all, while 20 percent more white-collar young men in this age cohort thought it had a little influence. Of blue-collar women in the same age cohort, 100 percent more reported that they thought it had influence, although in 1978, 33.3 percent fewer reported that they thought it had a very big influence than had in 1973. Of white-collar women, 9.5 percent more reported they thought demonstrations had a considerable influence.

78       Chapter 3

Significantly, 92.3 percent fewer housewives reported that they thought demonstrations had a considerable influence, while 62.5 percent fewer unemployed women reported that they thought demonstrations had no influence, and 125 percent more reported that they thought they had a little bit of influence on national politics. Of those aged twenty-five to twenty-nine (twenty to twentyfour in 1973), 277.8 percent more blue-collar men reported that they thought demonstrations had a very big influence, 433 percent more unemployed men thought demonstrations had “considerable influence,” and 33.3 percent more white-collar men reported that they thought demonstrations had no influence at all. Women in the same age cohort reported similarly: 136.8 percent more blue-collar women reported that they thought demonstrations had a very big influence and 44 percent more unemployed women thought they had a considerable influence, while 28.5 percent more white-collar women thought they had no influence at all on national politics. An additional multiple linear regression analysis of the aggregate survey data for the 129,186 respondents who completed the survey between 1973 and 2008 found a very weak statistical relationship between age, gender, and individual respondents’ attitudes toward politics and the political process, with younger respondents holding more negative views.12 Nevertheless, when examined by primary occupation, used as a marker of social and economic class, the NHK data reveal fascinating differences in the attitudes young Japanese held toward core political institutions in Japan’s postwar democracy. By 1978, the age cohort of blue-collar men and women born between 1954 and 1957 (aged sixteen to nineteen in 1973 and twenty to twenty-four in 1978) were much less likely to think public opinion had a significant influence on national politics, while white-collar men and women from the same age group were more likely to think public opinion had a significant influence on national politics than they had been in 1973. However, blue-collar men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine in 1978 (born between 1949 and 1953) were more likely to think public opinion had a strong influence on national politics than they were in 1973, while white-collar men from the same age cohort were much less likely to think public opinion had a significant influence on national politics. The data show that for men, class continued to correlate with attitudes toward the efficacy of political institutions, such as public opinion polling. However, there was an inverse correlation for the age cohorts born between 1954 and 1957 and those men born between 1949 and 1953. The NHK survey also reveals that significantly different attitudes toward political elections were held by young male and female blue- and white-collar workers. The survey data show that far more blue-collar women aged twenty to twenty-four thought elections had little or no influence in 1978 than had in 1973, while white-collar women in the same age cohort were less likely to think elections had a considerable influence and more likely to think they had a little

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      79

influence. More significant still was the fact that far more unemployed men, and far fewer unemployed women, reported that they thought elections had a considerable influence on national politics. Significantly more blue-collar men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine in 1978 (aged twenty to twenty-four in 1973) thought elections had a very big influence on national politics, and significantly more unemployed men thought elections had a little bit of influence. Slightly more white-collar men in the same age cohort also reported that they thought elections had a very big influence. Importantly, significantly more blue-collar women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine thought elections had a little influence, and more unemployed women thought they had considerable influence, while more whitecollar women thought elections had no influence at all. Attitudes held toward political demonstrations also shifted over the course of the 1970s. Significantly more blue-collar men aged twenty to twenty-four in 1978 (aged sixteen to nineteen in 1973) thought political protest had no influence at all on national politics, while more white-collar men in this age cohort thought it had a little influence. By 1978, significantly more blue-collar women in the same age cohort reported that they thought demonstrations had a considerable influence, but fewer reported believing they had a very big influence. Slightly more white-collar women, but significantly fewer housewives, reported that they thought demonstrations had a considerable influence, while fewer unemployed women reported that they thought demonstrations had no influence, and significantly more reported believing they had a little bit of influence. Nearly three times more blue-collar men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine (aged twenty to twenty-four in 1973) reported that they thought demonstrations had a very big influence, and over four times as many unemployed men thought demonstrations had a considerable influence, while a third more white-collar men reported that they thought demonstrations had no influence at all. More blue-collar women in the same age cohort also reported that they thought demonstrations had a very big influence, and significantly more unemployed women thought they had a considerable influence, while more white-collar women thought they had no influence at all on national politics.

Attitudes toward Social Hierarchy: Keigo The NHK survey instrument included a short series of questions designed to ascertain the respondents’ attitudes toward “authority” and “equality”—questions reflecting concern that the generation of young people born after 1945 were less inclined to accept customary hierarchical relationships based on age, gender, and social status. Indeed, the Sixties Generation was depicted by the mainstream media as rude and uncouth individuals who were unwilling to follow basic

80       Chapter 3

cultural norms for polite social exchange, such as the use of keigo. The countercultural and leftist movements of the 1960s and 1970s vociferously espoused their opposition to hierarchical sociocultural norms, especially the use of polite language forms like keigo. Comprising two specific language forms, sonkeigo (honorific) and kenjōgo (humble or deferential), keigo encompasses a large body of standardized expressions and Males aged 16–29 0.100

0.000

0.000

0.065 –0.338

–0.088

–0.100 –0.200

–0.156

–0.300

–0.173

–0.400

0.000

lle

ta il

or s

er d vi or c (b te e G lu ch en ec n er al ol ica lar l m an ) u Cl fa ct er ur ica in lo g (w r t hi ec te hn co ic l la a l H r) ou se wi fe St ud en t Un em pl oy ed

–0.017

Sk i

Re

Se lf-

Fa rm

in

go rf

ish

in g em pl oy ed

–0.500

–0.040

Increase

Decrease

Total

Males, all ages

0.100

0.043

0.050

0.036

–0.007

0.000

0.012 0.000

–0.050

–0.074

–0.100

–0.052

–0.017 –0.059

d ice o (b r te G lu ch en ec n er al ol ica l l m an ar) u Cl fa ct er ur ica in lo g (w r t hi ec h te n co ic l la a l H r) ou se wi fe St ud en t Un em pl oy ed

er v or s

lle Sk i

Re

ta il

em pl oy ed

Se lf-

Fa rm in

go rf

ish

in g

–0.150

Increase

Decrease

Total

FIGURES 3.2A, B, C, and D.  Changes in youth attitudes toward keigo by gender and occupation, 1973–88. Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo.

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      81

grammatical forms that are generally deployed to differentiate between the hierarchical status of the speaker and the addressee. In practice, it is an elaborate, often gendered and classed, language form that is used to reinforce status hierarchies in the school, the workplace, and public life. In my earlier work I found that like the women office workers studied by Yuko Ogasawara during the mid-1990s, some women working in unionized, pink-collar jobs in the early 1950s used keigo as a double-voiced tool to navigate their sexist workplaces.13 Thus, this survey’s query

Females aged 16–29

0.036

0.035

–0.073

or s

er d vi or ce (b te G lu ch en ec n er al ol ica l l m an ar) u Cl fa ct er ur ica in lo g (w r t hi ec h te n co ic l la a l H r) ou se wi fe St ud en t Un em pl oy ed

–0.019

lle Sk i

Re

ta il

em pl oy ed

Se lf-

Fa rm

in

go rf

ish

in g

0.000 –0.050 –0.100 –0.150 –0.111 –0.200 0.125 –0.250 –0.114 –0.300 –0.350 –0.124 –0.030 –0.400

Increase

Decrease

Total

Females, all ages –0.070

–0.035 –0.123

–0.042

–0.036 –0.071

d ice o (b r te G lu ch en ec n er al ol ica l l m an ar) u Cl fa ct er ur ica in lo g (w r t hi ec h te n co ic l la a l H r) ou se wi fe St ud en t Un em pl oy ed

er v or s

lle Sk i

Re

ta il

em pl oy ed

Se lf-

Fa rm

in

go rf

ish

in g

–0.074 –0.016 –0.017

Increase

Decrease

Total

82       Chapter 3

about the respondents’ attitudes toward the use of keigo with elders provides a unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how measurements of social attitudes toward this particular sociocultural norm may relate to generational changes in attitudes toward social hierarchy and equality.14 Respondents were asked to mark whether they strongly agreed with one of three statements: “It is natural to use honorific language and polite forms of language [keigo yateineinakotoba] when speaking with people who are older [toshiue]”; “It would be better to use the same language [onajiyōna kotoba] with those older and younger”; or “I cannot say either, I do not know, or no answer.”15 The series of questions on authority and equality within which the question on keigo was administered were intended to ascertain the extent to which there were generational differences in attitudes toward social hierarchy. Perhaps more significant is the fact that the survey questions themselves reveal a strong political anxiety that the core social values defining what it meant to be Japanese were being eroded by a generation of youth who were too heavily influenced by the contemporary counterculture. The question about the use of keigo was just one of several that reflected a concern among state bureaucrats, politicians, and social commentators that the antiauthoritarian, countercultural youth movements of the 1960s had negatively impacted the cultural norms that defined Japan. While the responses to these questions in 1973 reveal a perceived generational shift in values, a Spearman’s rho analysis revealed only a very weak statistical correlation between age and attitudes toward the use of keigo with elders. A multiple linear regression analysis of the aggregate survey data for the 129,186 respondents who completed the survey between 1973 and 2008 showed that age, gender, and occupation very weakly correlated with individual respondents’ attitudes toward the use of keigo with elders. A Spearman’s rho bivariate correlation analysis of the same aggregate survey data also revealed a very weak positive correlation between respondents’ ages and their positions on the use of keigo with elders and colleagues (ρ = .051, n = 129,186, p = .000), as well as a very weak negative correlation between respondents’ gender and their opinions on the use of keigo (ρ = -.051, n = 129,186, p = .000), with older age cohorts of women valuing keigo less than men of their same age cohort, and young women more than young men. Interestingly, the data revealed a slightly stronger negative correlation between educational attainment and the respondent’s position on the use of keigo (ρ = -.070, n = 129,186, p = .000), indicating that higher levels of education weakly correlated with higher valuation of the use of keigo. Importantly, a 10.9 percent differential between male age cohorts of sixteento-nineteen-year-olds and twenty-five-to-twenty-nine-year-olds seems to imply a significant intragenerational difference in individual attitudes toward social propriety and respect for elders. In 1978, however, the answers respondents

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      83

TABLE 3.1A  Attitudes toward keigo by age, gender, and occupation, 1973 MALE

FEMALE

 

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.000 0.095 0.149 0.262 0.250 0.088 0.000 0.192 0.063

0.271 0.168 0.188 0.191 0.212 0.128 0.000 0.192 0.275

0.111 0.114 0.176 0.115 0.000 0.068 0.100 0.040 0.073

0.183 0.117 0.197 0.157 0.193 0.106 0.139 0.040 0.206

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio*= greater number of respondents who indicated valuing keigo * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) / (R1+R2+R3)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported, “It is natural to use honorific language and polite forms of language when speaking with people who are older”; R2 = number of respondents who reported, “It would be better to use the same language with those older and younger”; R3 = number of respondents who reported, “I cannot say either,” “I do not know,” or “No response.”

TABLE 3.1B  Attitudes toward keigo by age, gender, and occupation, 1978 MALE

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

FEMALE

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.000 0.160 0.061 0.106 0.077 0.048 0.000 0.174 0.400

0.314 0.161 0.114 0.227 0.224 0.076 0.000 0.174 0.216

0.000 0.000 0.053 0.086 0.125 0.103 0.081 0.076 0.000

0.112 0.082 0.074 0.115 0.119 0.090 0.121 0.076 0.135

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio*= greater number of respondents who indicated valuing keigo * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) / (R1+R2+R3)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported, “It is natural to use honorific language and polite forms of language when speaking with people who are older”; R2 = number of respondents who reported, “It would be better to use the same language with those older and younger”; R3 = number of respondents who reported, “I cannot say either,” “I do not know,” or “No response.”

gave to the same question shows that, although after the age of twenty-five both men and women were progressively less likely to respond in favor of keigo over nonhierarchical language as they got older, there was an anomalous 7 percent increase in the number of men and women born between 1949 and 1953, who,

84       Chapter 3

TABLE 3.1C  Attitudes toward keigo by age, gender, and occupation, 1983 MALE

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

FEMALE

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.128 0.106 0.113 0.119 0.111 0.111 NA 0.111 0.123

0.314 0.303 0.288 0.291 0.291 0.286 NA 0.293 0.304

0.111 0.098 0.105 0.105 0.105 0.110 0.106 0.111 0.105

0.299 0.280 0.277 0.282 0.285 0.270 0.277 0.276 0.326

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio*= greater number of respondents who indicated valuing keigo * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) / (R1+R2+R3)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported, “It is natural to use honorific language and polite forms of language when speaking with people who are older”; R2 = number of respondents who reported, “It would be better to use the same language with those older and younger”; R3 = number of respondents who reported, “I cannot say either,” “I do not know,” or “No response.”

TABLE 3.1D  Attitudes toward keigo by age, gender, and occupation, 1988 MALE

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

FEMALE

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.142 0.102 0.114 0.115 0.130 0.112 NA 0.111 0.131

0.324 0.298 0.294 0.296 0.307 0.294 NA 0.303 0.316

0.095 0.098 0.117 0.107 0.107 0.108 0.109 0.097 0.114

0.295 0.298 0.297 0.286 0.295 0.269 0.281 0.288 0.328

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio*= greater number of respondents who indicated valuing keigo * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) / (R1+R2+R3)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported, “It is natural to use honorific language and polite forms of language when speaking with people who are older”; R2 = number of respondents who reported, “It would be better to use the same language with those older and younger”; R3 = number of respondents who reported, “I cannot say either,” “I do not know,” or “No response.”

in 1978, marked the statement in favor of the use of keigo with elders. The relatively rapid shift in attitude reported by this specific age cohort seems to imply the ­emergence—over a relatively short period of time—of a move toward nonhierarchical language for people under the age of fifty. In contrast, the generation

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      85

above the age of fifty showed a slight increase in the percentage of men, and a sharp increase in the percentage of women, who supported the use of keigo—an obvious trend given their generational position within the age-status hierarchy that the language form was meant to reinforce.16 While a very weak statistical correlation, it is nonetheless significant that a multivariate regression analysis of the NHK data also revealed a moderate correspondence between the increasing importance placed on nonhierarchical language and the age, gender, and occupation of respondents who identified themselves as engaged in wage-earning occupations. Students and housewives, whose primary occupation was subcategorized as nonwage earner, tracked quite differently. The percentage of students who valued the use of keigo decreased exponentially in correlation with them leaving school. In contrast, women who identified themselves as housewives tended to increasingly support the use of keigo between the ages of thirty and forty-four. No further correlations could be ascertained, but it seems reasonable to speculate that the pattern of students’ and housewives’ attitudes toward the use of keigo reflected the gendered basis of their generational positions within the process—keigo was replicated as a critical component of their social habitus.17 What also emerges from a close look at this one question on the NHK survey is a clear picture of how attitudes toward the use of hierarchical language forms correspond with the social status of the respondent’s primary occupation, albeit not precisely in the way imagined. Simple analysis of the survey data by age, gender, and primary occupation of all men and women reveals that in 1973, support for the use of keigo correlated with primary-sector occupations for 7.8 percent of men (of all ages) and 3.6 percent of women (of all ages). Support for the use of keigo also correlated with higher-status, white-collar clerical or technical employment for 13 percent of all men and 8.1 percent of all women. High-status, blue-collar skilled and technical occupations correlated with support for the use of keigo for 17.8 percent of all men and 5.4 percent of all women. Support for the use of keigo among respondents who reported themselves as unemployed was 4.7 percent for all men and 7.7 percent for all women. When examined according to the ratio of the mean support for nonhierarchical language for a specific age cohort to the mean support for the use of keigo in the same age cohort, the 1973 NHK data show that the relatively high percentage of support for the use of keigo among men of all ages engaged in blue-collar skilled or technical occupations was significantly offset by a higher level of support for nonhierarchical language (R2) at a ratio of 0.191 (0.157 for women). The ratio of male white-collar clerical or technical workers demonstrates the extent to which blue-collar and white-collar men within an age cohort valued nonhierarchical language over keigo; that ratio was significantly lower at 0.128

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(0.106 for women), which indicated stronger support for keigo among skilled white-collar workers than among skilled blue-collar workers. Although composing a much smaller percentage of the total survey sample (4.1 percent of men overall), men of all ages who were engaged in general-manufacturing occupations valued nonhierarchical language over keigo at a ratio of 0.212 (0.193 for women), and unemployed men reported similarly at a ratio of 0.275 (0.206 for women). While it is not surprising that blue-collar male employees would report that they valued keigo less than their white-collar, nonmanagerial counterparts, the 1973 NHK data reveal important contrasts between young people in the age cohort of sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds. The ratio of young, male, blue-collar skilled workers aged sixteen to nineteen who valued nonhierarchical language forms over keigo was, in 1973, significantly higher (0.262) than for male, blue-collar skilled workers overall (0.191), and slightly higher for young, male, general-manufacturing workers (0.250) than for male general-manufacturing workers overall (0.212), which demonstrates much stronger support for nonhierarchical language among young, male blue-collar workers. The ratio of young women in skilled blue-collar occupations who valued keigo over nonhierarchical language was lower than that for men (0.115) and lower than that for women in skilled blue-collar occupations overall (0.157), which demonstrates stronger support for keigo among young women than among young men in blue-collar skilled occupations. Surprisingly, the number of male primary-sector workers of all ages who valued nonhierarchical language (0.271) exceeded the number of young men in the age cohort of sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds (0.000). Male, white-collar clerical or technical workers (0.128 for all ages and 0.088 for sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds) and men who were self-employed (0.168 and 0.095) showed a similar trend. Of importance was the significant support for the use of keigo indicated by young unemployed men (0.063) relative to older cohorts of unemployed men (0.275) who strongly valued nonhierarchical language over keigo. Interestingly (although statistically insignificant), in 1978 a very small number of young men who self-identified as management reported significant support for nonhierarchical language (0.286), which was at odds with the majority of men and women of all ages who held management occupations and overwhelmingly reported that they valued the use of keigo. The data overall indicate that the extent to which an individual was likely to value the use of keigo correlated with his or her social status. Those in lower-status occupations, who would be expected to perform the ritual form of obeisance daily, valued keigo more than those who occupied positions closer to the top of the social hierarchy. This is not surprising considering the ubiquity of keigo as a means to mark social boundaries within the workplace.

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      87

More important still was that, by 1978, the ratio of young, male, blue-collar skilled workers who valued nonhierarchical language forms over the use of keigo was significantly lower (0.106) than for male, blue-collar skilled workers (0.227) and even lower for young, male, general-manufacturing workers (0.077) than for male general-manufacturing workers overall (0.224), which demonstrates much weaker support for nonhierarchical language among young, male blue-collar workers in 1978 than in 1973. The ratio of young women in blue-collar skilled occupations who valued the use of keigo over nonhierarchical language (0.086) was lower than that for young men (0.106) and lower still than that for women in blue-collar skilled occupations overall (0.115), which demonstrates stronger support for keigo among young women in blue-collar skilled occupations than among men from the same age cohort and among women overall. Even more so than in 1973, the overall number of male primary-sector workers who valued nonhierarchical language (0.314) greatly exceeded the number of young men in the age cohort of sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds (0.000). Young, male, whitecollar clerical or technical workers valued the use of keigo over nonhierarchical language (0.076 for men overall and 0.048 for young men), but young men who were self-employed tended to value nonhierarchical language over keigo (0.161 for men overall and 0.160 for young men). Of particular importance was the significant support for the use of nonhierarchical language indicated by young unemployed men (0.400) relative to older cohorts of unemployed men (0.216) who valued nonhierarchical language over the use of keigo. The data nevertheless reveal the emergence of several fundamental changes in attitudes toward the social hierarchy among young men and women. A significant shift in attitudes toward keigo among skilled blue-collar workers, both male and female, points toward a significant increase in the importance of the use of keigo in the workplace, which likely reflected either greater opportunity or fewer penalties for those who complied with a social practice that demarcated status boundaries between men and women, customers and employees, and management and labor. When considered alongside relatively even numbers of male respondents who reported themselves unemployed in 1973 and 1978, the significant spike in the numbers of unemployed young men who valued nonhierarchical language over keigo indicates that, although keigo was a highly valued social practice (habitus) in the workplace, there was nevertheless something about the use of it that was anathema to those young men who lived along the boundaries of regular employment. Equally important is that wage-earning women in younger and older age cohorts were generally more likely to value the use of keigo over nonhierarchical language in 1978 than in 1973. The data show that young women engaged in skilled blue-collar occupations, retail or service occupations, and fishing

88       Chapter 3

and farming reported valuing the use of keigo over nonhierarchical language to a much higher degree in 1978 (0.086 for skilled blue-collar women, 0.053 for female retail or service workers, and 0.000 for women engaged in farming or fishing) than in 1973 (0.115 for skilled blue-collar women, 0.176 for women retail or service workers, and 0.111 for women engaged in farming or fishing). However, young women engaged in general manufacturing (0.000 in 1973 and 0.125 in 1978) and white-collar clerical or technical occupations (0.068 in 1973 and 0.103 in 1978) reported valuing nonhierarchical language significantly more than keigo. Perhaps even more revealing is that the percentage of young women who reported that they were unemployed and valued the use of keigo over nonhierarchical language was significantly higher in 1978 (0.000) than in 1973 (0.073), while in 1978, young women aged sixteen to twenty-nine were nearly half as likely to report that they were unemployed than they were in 1973 (6.8 percent unemployment in 1973 and 3.8 percent unemployment in 1978). Women overall experienced a slightly smaller decrease in unemployment during the same period, from 11.1 percent to 8.7 percent, which also corresponded with an increasing percentage of unemployed women who valued the use of keigo over nonhierarchical language (0.206 in 1973 and 0.135 in 1978). By the 1980s, the number of men and women overall (all ages and occupations) who indicated that they valued keigo as a social practice had leveled off. Most young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine mirrored the population overall by generally indicating that they valued the use of keigo about the same as they had in 1978; however, in 1983 unemployed young men indicated a significantly greater value for the use of keigo (a 0.277 decrease) and unemployed young women indicated a moderately lower value (a 0.105 increase). The overall trend continued into the late 1980s, which was when the social value of the use of keigo seems to have leveled off for men and women of all age groups and occupations. While it is impossible to know respondents’ individual motivations, the data seem to indicate a correlation between employment status, gender, and attitude toward the use of keigo that saw younger age cohorts (aged sixteen to twenty-nine) of skilled blue-collar men and women (and women overall) valuing it as a critical social practice for the workplace in more significant numbers, while older age cohorts of skilled and unskilled blue-collar men valued it less. Keigo is a daily practice of dominance and submission, and there is sufficient evidence to speculate that unemployed men, and women employed in the pink-collar ghetto of white-collar clerical work and general manufacturing, found that keigo did not benefit them in, or was not necessary for, their occupation. As the men and women of the Sixties Generation aged, their attitudes toward a key social practice that was used to demarcate social status in the school, home, and workplace seemed to change no more, or less, than other age cohorts’ attitudes, thus indicating that attitudes toward social hierarchy were not a significant

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      89

aspect of generational location. While the data demarcate classed and gendered stratifications of language usage preference, this does not seem to have operated as a significant marker of generational experience or identity, despite widespread concerns expressed by the era’s elite and assertions by many members of that particular generation. The data demonstrate that, by the 1980s, the men and women of the Sixties Generation, like their parents’ generation, were willing to conform to a core social, hierachical practice that they claimed to have rebelled against.

Attitudes toward Social Hierarchy: The Emperor Leaders of the Far Right and Far Left wanted to mobilize Japanese youth to revolt against the status quo: political, social, and cultural. By the early 1970s, revolutionary movements in Japan were calling for changes that would turn the nation inside out and upside down—and such social anxieties were central to the construction of the NHK survey instrument. The most politically sensitive question posed by the NHK survey was how individual respondents felt about the emperor: the pinnacle of modern Japan’s sociopolitical hierarchy. The emperor question reflected social anxieties about residual responsibility for World War II as much as it reflected concerns about young people’s changing attitudes toward the imperial institution.18 In 1973, the age cohort of sixteen-to-twenty-nineyear-olds was the first to be born after the emperor’s renunciation of divinity and sovereignty, which presaged his constitutional role as “a symbol of the nation and unity of the Japanese people.” The transition of the emperor’s status did not sit well with conservative and ultranationalist commentators, who decried the emperor’s postwar downgrade from living God to a symbol of the unity of the people as a fundamentally un-Japanese act, one that was forced by the Allied Occupation and did not reflect the will of the Japanese polity. Kenneth Ruoff has argued that the postwar period saw considerable disagreement within Japanese society over whether or not the strictly symbolic role of the emperor that was enshrined in the postwar constitution was imbued with political power and authority. This debate was further complicated by the fact that the Showa emperor did not refrain from expressing his political opinions to cabinet ministers and politicians after 1945. These arguments helped to remake the post-1945 Japanese monarchy into a “monarchy of the masses,” an institution that embodied the political and cultural institutions of the postwar democracy without ever entirely divesting itself of its complicity in the Asia-Pacific War. This did not mean that the rehabilitation of the emperor went unchallenged. Indeed, the first three decades of the postwar era saw formidable political forces challenge the ways in which political elites continued to use the emperor to mask, justify, and forward their political machinations—right-wing activists who decried the

Males aged 16–29 0.100

–0.500 1973–78

1978–83

Unemployed

Clerical or technical (white collar)

–0.400

General manufacturing

Skilled or technical (blue collar)

–0.300

Retail or service

–0.200

Self-employed

–0.100

Farming or fishing

0.000

1983–88

Females aged 16–29 0.150 0.100

–0.250 –0.300 –0.350

1973–78

1978–83

Unemployed

Clerical or technical (white collar)

–0.200

General manufacturing

–0.150

Skilled or technical (blue collar)

–0.100

Retail or service

–0.050

Self-employed

0.000

Farming or fishing

0.050

1983–88

FIGURES 3.3A, B, C, and D.  Changes in youth attitudes toward emperor by gender and occupation, 1973–88. Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo.

90

0.000

–0.020

–0.040

1973–78 1978–83

1973–78

1978–83

91

0.100

0.080

0.060

0.040

0.020

1983–88

Unemployed

Females, all ages

Unemployed

0.120

Clerical or technical (white collar)

1983–88

Clerical or technical (white collar)

General manufacturing

Skilled or technical (blue collar)

–0.250

General manufacturing

Self-employed

Retail or service

–0.200

Skilled or technical (blue collar)

Retail or service

–0.150

Self-employed

–0.100

Farming or fishing

–0.050

Farming or fishing

0.100 Males, all ages

0.050

0.000

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state’s attempt to undercut the emperor’s natural relationship with the people, and leftists who outright opposed the monarchy in any form. And thus, how people “felt” about the emperor became an important measure of the successes, and failures, of the political forces in support of, and opposed to, parliamentary democracy under LDP rule.19 The NHK’s 2014 report on the cumulative results of the forty-year-long survey showed how, by 2008, most Japanese indicated feeling a positive sentiment toward the emperor.20 A multiple linear regression analysis of the aggregate NHK survey data from 1973 to 2008 found that age, gender, and occupation were significant, moderate predictors of individual respondents’ feelings toward the emperor. A Spearman’s rho bivariate correlation analysis of the same aggregate survey data revealed a moderate negative correlation between respondents’ ages and their reported feelings toward the emperor (ρ = -.445, n = 129,186, p = .000); a very weak negative correlation between respondents’ gender and their feelings toward the emperor (ρ = -.083, n = 129,186, p = .000); and a weak positive correlation between respondents’ levels of educational attainment and their feelings toward the emperor (ρ = .250, n = 129,186, p = .000). The aggregate data illustrate that, while educational attainment and gender had some impact on how respondents’ felt toward the imperial institution, age was the more significant factor, which correlated with how or whether a generation experienced the interwar or wartime eras. When disaggregated by age cohort, gender, and year, the data show that, in 1973, 74.1 percent of men aged twenty to twenty-four (71.6 percent of TABLE 3.2A  Attitudes toward emperor by age, gender, and occupation, 1973 MALE

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

FEMALE

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.192 0.158 0.185 0.187 0.228 0.174 NA 0.245 0.221

0.452 0.511 0.668 0.587 0.475 0.615 NA 0.735 0.384

0.800 0.875 0.902 0.828 0.889 0.868 0.827 0.897 0.859

0.450 0.471 0.563 0.533 0.493 0.597 0.526 0.689 0.407

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio* = the more highly valued the emperor * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) + (R4*4) / (R1+R2+R3+R4)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported feeling “respect” for the emperor, R2 = number of respondents who reported a “favorable feeling,” R3 = number of respondents who reported “no particular feeling,” R4 = number of respondents who reported “antipathy.”

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      93

TABLE 3.2B  Attitudes toward emperor by age, gender, and occupation, 1978 MALE

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

FEMALE

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.167 0.158 0.176 0.194 0.223 0.189 NA 0.230 0.220

0.415 0.518 0.609 0.600 0.554 0.615 NA 0.706 0.398

0.833 0.844 0.829 0.860 0.815 0.885 0.817 0.924 0.840

0.429 0.495 0.608 0.544 0.503 0.628 0.528 0.697 0.411

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio* = the more highly valued the emperor * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) + (R4*4) / (R1+R2+R3+R4)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported feeling “respect” for the emperor, R2 = number of respondents who reported a “favorable feeling,” R3 = number of respondents who reported “no particular feeling,” R4 = number of respondents who reported “antipathy.”

TABLE 3.2C  Attitudes toward emperor by age, gender, and occupation, 1983 MALE

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

FEMALE

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.199 0.227 0.220 0.225 0.204 0.223 NA 0.083 0.250

0.349 0.414 0.459 0.448 0.420 0.469 NA 0.567 0.349

0.181 0.210 0.199 0.208 0.196 0.220 0.208 0.125 0.201

0.331 0.411 0.433 0.401 0.367 0.480 0.375 0.514 0.284

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio* = the more highly valued the emperor * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) + (R4*4) / (R1+R2+R3+R4)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported feeling “respect” for the emperor, R2 = number of respondents who reported a “favorable feeling,” R3 = number of respondents who reported “no particular feeling,” R4 = number of respondents who reported “antipathy.”

women) stated that they had no particular feelings toward the emperor. Only 11.4 percent of young men in the age cohort of twenty-to-twenty-four-yearolds (14.9 percent of women) responded that they had esteem for the imperial institution. The 1978 survey showed several key shifts in the way younger age cohorts felt toward the emperor. In 1978, nearly half the number of young

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TABLE 3.2D  Attitudes toward emperor by age, gender, and occupation, 1988 MALE

Farming or fishing Self-employed Retail or service Skilled or technical (blue collar) General manufacturing Clerical or technical (white collar) Housewife Student Unemployed

FEMALE

16–29

ALL AGES

16–29

ALL AGES

0.226 0.211 0.223 0.214 0.188 0.224 NA 0.250 0.167

0.366 0.406 0.490 0.434 0.411 0.464 NA 0.568 0.357

0.222 0.196 0.217 0.214 0.203 0.220 0.203 0.208 0.189

0.341 0.399 0.466 0.431 0.391 0.482 0.382 0.534 0.292

Source: Data courtesy of the Center for Social Research and Data Archive, Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. Note: Lower ratio* = the more highly valued the emperor * Calculated as ((R1*1) + (R2*2) + (R3*3) + (R4*4) / (R1+R2+R3+R4)), where R1 = number of respondents who reported feeling “respect” for the emperor, R2 = number of respondents who reported a “favorable feeling,” R3 = number of respondents who reported “no particular feeling,” R4 = number of respondents who reported “antipathy.”

women aged sixteen to nineteen reported that they respected the emperor than had in 1973, with the majority of the difference being split between those who held a favorable feeling and those who reported holding no particular feeling. In 1978, approximately 14 percent more young men aged sixteen to nineteen indicated that they felt respect, but nearly double indicated that they held a favorable feeling than had in 1973. In the age cohort of young men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, 35 percent fewer felt respect and 33 percent fewer held a favorable feeling. By the end of the 1970s, young men felt more favorably toward the imperial institution while young women felt significantly less favorably. During the 1970s, Far Right pundits often decried the political apathy of that generation’s youth, which they equated with lower levels of reverence for the emperor. In aggregate, the 1973 and 1978 survey data reveal that most young men and women held an overall ambivalence toward the emperor. Importantly, their lack of any particular feelings toward the emperor was bracketed by a historically significant 14.6 percent of young men in the age cohort of twenty-to-twenty-four-year-olds and 14.4 percent of young men in the age cohort of sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds who expressed either esteem or antipathy—positions understood by authorities to be held by those characterized as the Far Left or Far Right.21 However, the NHK survey data show a much more complex tapestry when disaggregated by age, gender, and primary occupation. When examined according to the ratio of the mean value for the emperor (with 0.000 representing the

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      95

strongest level of respect and 1.000 representing the strongest level of antipathy), the NHK data for 1973 show that the relatively low level of respect for the emperor among all ages of men engaged in blue-collar skilled or technical occupations in 1973 (0.587) was significantly offset by a higher level of respect for the emperor among blue-collar men aged sixteen to twenty-nine (0.187), while white-collar men aged sixteen to twenty-nine also reported higher levels of respect for the emperor (0.174) than the average for men of all ages (0.615). Importantly, white-collar men aged sixteen to twenty-nine reported a slightly higher level of respect for the emperor than blue-collar men from the same age cohort, but less so than men of all ages. In 1973, both blue-collar and white-collar women aged sixteen to twentynine reported very high levels of antipathy for the emperor (0.828 for blue-­collar women and 0.868 for white-collar women)—indeed, much higher levels of antipathy than blue- and white-collar women of all ages (0.533 for blue-collar women and 0.597 for white-collar women). Unemployed men aged sixteen to twenty-nine reported much higher levels of respect for the emperor (0.221) than unemployed women (0.859). Importantly, the data for 1978 indicate only moderate shifts in the attitudes that young people held toward the emperor. Bluecollar men and women aged sixteen to twenty-nine reported similar levels of respect (0.194 for men and 0.860 for women) as white-collar (0.189 for men and 0.885 for women) and unemployed (0.220 for men and 0.840 for women) men and women from the same age cohort. When the NHK deployed the survey in 1983, the data showed a significant convergence of attitudes toward the imperial institution across all age groups, classes, and genders. The 1983 data revealed that blue-collar women in the age cohort born between 1943 and 1957 were significantly more likely to report a positive feeling (0.208 for skilled and technical and 0.196 for general manufacturing) toward the emperor in 1983 than they had been in 1978 (0.860 for skilled and technical and 0.815 for general manufacturing). Women engaged in pinkcollar occupations showed the most significant shift in attitude by holding more socially conservative values. Women working in the retail and service sector valued the emperor significantly more in 1983 (0.199) than in 1978 (0.829), and women in white-collar (pink-collar) clerical or technical occupations also valued the imperial institution significantly more in 1983 (0.220) than in 1978 (0.885). Indeed, women from the age cohort born between 1943 and 1957 across the board were far more likely to value the emperor than they had been in the 1970s. However, skilled blue-collar men were slightly less likely to value the emperor (0.225 in 1983 and 0.194 in 1978), while blue-collar men in general manufacturing occupations were slightly more likely to value the emperor in 1983 (0.204) than in 1978 (0.223). The most striking feature of the data was the extent to

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which men’s and women’s attitudes across all age groups converged at holding a generally positive attitude toward the emperor. The NHK data in 1988 yielded similar responses for both men and women in an age cohort. Indeed, social attitudes toward the two institutions of keigo and the emperor, which the NHK pollsters considered to be representative of core Japanese values, seem to have solidified and varied little through the 1990s, even as approval of key political institutions, elections, opinion polls, and political demonstrations continued to decline. The fact that Japan became more conservative in the 1980s is neither a surprise nor the point of this exercise. The data underscore the significant variation in social and political attitudes experienced during the 1970s as a counterpoint to those attitudes that were espoused by political pundits and social commentators as normative—even traditional—since the start of the postwar period.

A Snapshot of Youth Consciousness The NHK public opinion survey data showed significant shifts in attitudes held by Japanese youth toward key political institutions, including the monarchy, social hierarchy, political protest, elections, and even public opinion. The 1970s data showed that, as individuals grew older, they demonstrated a higher degree of belief in the efficacy of political institutions and a higher degree of respect for conservative social values. When disaggregated by age, gender, and primary occupation, the data showed significant variation in the attitudes that Japanese between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine held toward social hierarchy and political institutions. Younger blue-collar men were significantly more skeptical of the efficacy of political demonstrations overall, while older blue-collar men were significantly less trustful of the efficacy of political elections. More significantly, younger white-collar men were slightly more likely to think that political demonstrations influenced national politics, while the older white-collar men within the age group of sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds were significantly less likely to think that political protests and demonstrations had a political effect. For men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine, class seemed to be the primary determinant, and age a secondary determinant, of attitudes toward the efficacy of political institutions. For young women, gender was the stronger determinant of individual respondents’ attitudes toward core political institutions. In 1978, blue-collar women in the age group of sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds expressed significantly higher levels of trust in the efficacy of political demonstrations and significantly lower levels of trust in the ability of elections to affect national politics. Importantly,

Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation      97

white-collar women aged sixteen to twenty-nine were significantly more skeptical of the efficacy of political elections, but also significantly more skeptical of the ability of demonstrations to affect national politics. Importantly, by 1978, 685 percent more housewives aged twenty to twenty-four and 124.8 percent more aged twenty-five to twenty-nine reported that they thought elections had no political impact at all. Indeed, women between the ages of sixteen and twentynine seemed significantly less trustful of political institutions in 1978 than they had been in 1973. Youth attitudes toward keigo and the emperor also showed significant variation in comparison to the population overall, and in particular they showed that class and gender were specific determinants of attitudes toward social institutions among respondents from the age cohort of sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds. In 1978, young blue-collar women were significantly more likely to value the use of keigo than young blue-collar men, while young white-collar men were more likely to value the use of hierarchical language than young white-collar (pinkcollar) women. Importantly, young white-collar women respondents reported valuing the use of keigo significantly less in 1978 than they had in 1973, while young blue-collar women reported valuing it more. While gender certainly had a significant impact on attitudes toward the use of hierarchical language among the adult population overall, among young women, class appeared to be the more significant determinant of respondents’ attitudes toward the kinds of social hierarchy buttressed by the use of keigo. By the 1980s, however, attitudes toward the use of keigo that were held by the age cohort born between 1943 and 1957 had settled toward the favorable, with modest exceptions exhibited by men in the primary sector (farming and fishing) and women holding general-manufacturing jobs, who valued the use of keigo slightly less than they had in 1978. Much more significant was the complexity revealed by young people’s shifting attitudes toward the imperial institution. The data revealed that individual attitudes toward the emperor were most influenced by gender: young women, both blue collar and white collar (pink collar), were far more likely to report feeling antipathy toward the emperor, while young blue-collar and white-collar men were more likely to report feeling respect. Young people’s attitudes were the inverse of those reported by older adults: women over thirty reported feeling much higher levels of respect than women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine, and older men reported feeling much higher levels of antipathy than younger men. Interestingly, surveys show that during the period between 1973 and 1978, young women’s sense of antipathy slightly strengthened, while young men’s sense of respect slightly weakened. More significant still was that, compared to 1973, in 1978 young blue-collar and white-collar men showed a higher level of respect than men overall, while young women’s sense of antipathy

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was much stronger than that of women overall. Stratified by class and gender, a generation that might have seemed ripe for radicalization at the start of the 1970s was, by the end of the decade, exhibiting a tendency to value normative social practices, institutions, and the political status quo. Itō Takashi notes that, since the late 1990s, the age cohorts of the Sixties Generation have expressed lower levels of alienation and higher levels of trust in core political institutions; however, this book has found that when disaggregated by gender and class, the data indicate that attitudes toward key social values, which were linked to political attitudes, had begun to shift by the late 1970s. Whitecollar men of the Sixties Generation in particular expressed lower levels of social alienation despite a persistent lack of faith in political institutions. The 1970s saw an overall increase in the percentage of young people aged sixteen to twenty-nine who did not believe that the core democratic institutions (public opinion, elections, and political protest) had a significant impact on national politics. Importantly, when disaggregated by occupation and gender, the NHK data show that not all age cohorts of the Sixties Generation held similar views on whether or not overtly political institutions had any impact on the course of national politics. The NHK data specifically indicate significant variance between age cohorts that correlates more strongly with gender and occupation than with the generational location of the events experienced by the age cohort, which calls into question the narratives of generational collectivity that are often portrayed in memoirs and television documentaries on the 1960s. While there are some significant variances, in general, blue-collar men and women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four (born between 1954 and 1957) indicated greater levels of political alienation in 1978 than they had at the start of the decade. In contrast, men and women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four who were engaged in white-collar (pink-collar) occupations held more positive views of politics, while unemployed twenty-to-twenty-four-yearolds reported even lower levels of trust in politics than they had at the start of the decade. However, the age cohort born five years earlier held quite different views toward the efficacy of politics. In 1978, blue-collar men and women aged twentyfive to twenty-nine (born between 1949 and 1953) were more likely to think that the three overt political institutions had significant influence on national politics, while significantly more white-collar and unemployed men, as well as pink-collar women, from the same age cohort thought they had less influence. Less obviously, but nonetheless touching on political issues, the NHK data on attitudes toward the emperor and the use of keigo offer significant insight into the extent to which members of the Sixties Generation felt alienated from the social and political norms of mainstream society. A multivariate regression analysis showed that individual attitudes toward the use of keigo did not

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contribute to generational location, despite vociferous complaints by politicians and social commentators about the lack of good manners exhibited by the Sixties Generation. While the measure of attitudes toward the use of keigo is useful, the NHK data on attitudes toward the imperial institution show a more overtly generational attitude toward indirect questions about a key political institution that had changed significantly after the war. When disaggregated by age cohort, gender, and occupation, the NHK data on the emperor show significant variations in attitudes within the age cohorts of the Sixties Generation—positive and negative—that more closely correlate with a respondent’s gender and class than with their membership in a generation. Blue-collar men born between 1954 and 1958 indicated significantly higher levels of antipathy for the emperor in 1978 than they had in 1973, while far fewer white-collar men expressed antipathy, and a slightly higher percentage indicated no particular feeling. Male service-sector workers were significantly more likely to report no particular feeling and significantly fewer reported a favorable or respectful feeling. Significantly fewer unemployed and blue-collar women born between 1949 and 1953 reported negative feelings toward the emperor in 1978, while significantly larger numbers of women in the service sector who were born between 1954 and 1958 reported positive feelings. Overall, blue-collar, service-sector, and unemployed members of the two generational age cohorts trended in opposite directions: the younger cohort tended to feel more positively toward the imperial institution than the older cohort. Their attitudes toward the emperor presaged the lower levels of political alienation that began to emerge in subsequent surveys. Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations would frame the cultural and political epochs of the late 1960s as having fostered the formation of a generational identity among young people born to the Sixties Generation.22 While in aggregate the larger age cohort (sixteen to twenty-nine) appears to operate from a common generational location, the NHK data point to significant differences in political attitude that (though still distinctive to the age cohort) correlate more strongly with gender and class than with age. As early as the late 1970s (not the late 1980s indicated by Itō), white-collar men born between 1943 and 1957 were more likely to favor normative political and social institutions, like keigo and the emperor, than they had in the early 1970s, even as they reported feeling that their political voice had less influence on national political affairs. Importantly, the older cohorts of Sixties Generation blue-collar men and women reported higher levels of alienation from the normative political and social institutions measured by the survey instrument, while also feeling that young men and women had no influence on national politics or political institutions.

4 COLD WAR WARRIORS

NHK’s interest in the changing sociocultural environment explored in chapter 3 overlapped with more consequential concerns about the future of the nation held by powerful men of the transwar political elite. Independent of the NHK survey, but with their own gut-level sense of social crises, politicians, power brokers, and philanthropists acted during the early 1970s to counter what they interpreted to be a Communist insurgency at work among Japanese youth. This chapter explores the machinations of several key nonstate actors—men from the transwar generation who had been active in prewar- and interwar-era fascist politics. It examines how a tight coalition of prominent Far Right activists sought to address the youth problem they thought plagued postwar Japan, and builds on the previous chapter’s statistical snapshot of political attitudes during the 1970s to narrate how the coordinated suppression of leftist radicalism encouraged strange alliances between former war criminals, Far Right politicians, mob bosses, and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Not all radicals were leftist. This chapter shifts the focus from the Far Left to the Far Right by examining how a close coalition of prominent members of Japan’s transwar Far Right led a coordinated effort to mobilize youth in support of their Cold War agenda. Operating in loose collaboration with better-known veterans of the interwar-era Far Right, Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryōichi reemerged after 1945 as leaders of ultranationalist organizations that claimed that Japanese youth could be saved from the global Communist threat through a renewed focus on traditional moral values and the emperor’s restoration to his proper place as sovereign. Their call to arms had limited appeal to the Sixties 100

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Generation, whose political and social values did not easily conform to those espoused by the transwar generation. While it is no surprise that the New Left gave no quarter to Kodama or Sasakawa, those two men were also denounced by the young men who formed the vanguard of the Japanese New Right and decried their relations with the US and Japanese governments. Kodama and Sasakawa individually and unsuccessfully sought to bridge the generation gap through rhetorical offensives—and financial incentives—aimed at harnessing the postwar generation to their own, more collusive political purposes.1 During the early years of the Allied Occupation, Kodama and Sasakawa headed a coalition of prominent businessmen, politicians, and philanthropists— themselves active in ultranationalist politics during the 1920s and 1930s—who were determined to see Japan overcome the ways in which the US-Japan Security Treaty stripped Japan of its sovereignty, while still wanting Japan to remain within the US anti-Soviet sphere. Working in affiliation with better-known transwar figures, including Kishi Nobusuke (who would ascend to the office of prime minister in the late 1950s), Kodama and Sasakawa pursued their goal by offering services to the Americans that leveraged relationships they had forged as imperial soldiers and colonial bureaucrats in East Asia. By the late 1960s, and through the early 1970s, Kodama and Sasakawa also sought to influence the political imaginations of young men. The enigmatic nature of their relationships with the Japanese and US governments was not lost on the younger generation of New Right youth, who decried the transwar Far Right for building their anti-Communist struggle on what the young New Right activists perceived to be a much more severe threat to Japanese sovereignty—US imperialism in East Asia.

The Transwar Far Right The emergence of the Cold War in Japan intersected with the global process of decolonization within former European colonies and the reordering of global institutions that defined the Cold War global balance of power. Most historians of postwar Japan locate Japan’s place in the Cold War political order within the context of the mutual defense treaties and informal financial support from the United States that underpinned the rise of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). These had a significant impact on the way in which party politics after 1945, on the floor of parliament and behind closed doors, resembled the practices of party politics before 1940. Indeed, during the decade that followed the end of World War II, former wartime bureaucrats and politicians used the new constitutional right to freedom of speech to espouse their unhappiness with the emergent postwar political order. The historian Andrew Levidis observes that their discourse on

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“Japan’s post-colonial political order looked back to the failures of party government and nonparty elite governments” as the formative “experience of a generation of politicians, bureaucrats, and military men who took it upon themselves to restore Japan in the 1950s.”2 New Right activists, young university-educated men of the Sixties Generation, did not think highly of the transwar generation’s relationship with the United States. The disregard was mutual. Indeed, the transwar generation of mostly selfmade men did not see the New Right radicals as their younger brothers-in-arms. The Far Right establishment, represented by Kodama and Sasakawa, disapproved of the New Right’s ideological platform, which vociferously decried Japan’s ersatz client-state status vis-à-vis the United States and which threatened to destabilize the status quo that Kodama and Sasakawa had salvaged from the personal capital they had acquired before and during the Asia-Pacific War. Both Kodama and Sasakawa had worked relentlessly to establish their place as the go-to power brokers in postwar Japan. Significant postwar politicians like Kishi Nobusuke and Shigemitsu Mamoru, with support garnered by the Far Right political fixers Kodama and Sasakawa, emerged from Sugamo Prison, where suspected war criminals were incarcerated by the Allies in the late 1940s, to enter into an alliance with the United States to mount a cold war against Communism in Asia for pragmatic as well as ideological reasons. Kodama and Sasakawa’s status as political fixers, however, relied heavily on an informal arrangement with US intelligence services. Kodama was the first to establish himself at the helm of the postwar ultranationalist movement. He arose during the 1950s as a man with the influence, and will, to fight Communism across Japan and its former empire. US intelligence agencies initially suspected Kodama, along with his former Sugamo Prison cellmate Sasakawa, of being unrepentant imperialists. They were relieved when informants told them that Kodama and his associates were primarily moving to thwart the rise of Communism in Japan, China, and South Korea. In pursuit of its own Cold War agenda, the CIA decided to help fund state-run and private counterinsurgencies across the globe. An essential US ally during the Cold War, the Japanese government nevertheless pursued an independent anti-Communist agenda by tacitly authorizing Kodama’s domestic interventions against militant unions and leftist political parties in Japan. While many conservative politicians had discreet, private relationships with Kodama, they threw their full public support behind Sasakawa by granting him control of a state-authorized monopoly on motorboat gambling. Sasakawa had deployed his significant charm and wealth to leverage relationships with parliamentarians he had known before the war to foster the birth of a national gambling syndicate that he would use to promote his personal political agenda.

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A significant part of that agenda included the creation of dozens of youth education and training programs that focused on developing the political purity of Japanese youth and promoting a revival of traditional Japanese values, which had been dormant since the US-dominated Allied Occupation had suppressed them. Public opinion backlash and increased police scrutiny in the wake of the assassination of Japan Socialist Party leader Asanuma Inejiro by a right-wing youth in 1960 pushed the Japanese Far Right to reduce its public profile. The ultranationalist organizations connected with Kodama and Sasakawa were well financed and highly motivated to undercut leftist student activism.3 In March 1969, Kodama shared with an unnamed CIA informant that he believed the anti-American demonstrations reacting to the anticipated extension of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1970 would “bring about the downfall of the Japanese government.”4 The informant further reported that Kodama “anticipated a civil war” between the government and leftist youth who were trained and armed by the radical student group Zengakuren. Indeed, some young leftists were preparing for revolutionary action, but so was the Japanese Far Right.5 In a January 1968 issue of the popular lowbrow men’s sports gambling, pornography, and politics magazine Shūkan taishū (The masses weekly), Kodama aired his concern that contemporary youth culture, which he argued was too focused on personal, rather than national, aspirations, was corrupting the spiritual purity of Japan. Already in 1961, Kodama and his associates had established the Seinen Shisō Kenkyūkai (Youth Thought Study Society) to purify “future politics by educating young Japanese in the true meaning of the imperial restorationist movement” and enable the reestablishment of an emperor-centered nation-state similar to the one that had existed in the nineteenth century.6 In a series of essays published by the Far Right monthly magazine Nihon oyobi Nihonjin (Japan and the Japanese) between 1967 and 1969, Kodama further condemned the “epidemic of youth deviance in postwar society” while simultaneously espousing many of the fascist ideals he had propagated as a founding member of the Black Shirts organization Kokusui Taishūtō (National Essence Masses Party) in the early 1930s. At that time, the Kokusui Taishūtō had been under the leadership of Sasakawa Ryōichi.7 US intelligence officers reported in 1969 that Kodama’s postwar political ascent was due to his connections with a variety of influential politicians—in particular, Hatoyama Ichiro, who was to become prime minister in 1954, and Shigemitsu Manoru, the wartime foreign minister who later held the same position under Hatoyama. Kodama’s connection with Hatoyama and Shigemitsu began when they were remanded by the Allied Occupation as suspected war criminals in Sugamo Prison. CIA reports also indicate that Kodama operated as a moneyman for Hatoyama and associated politicians throughout the 1950s and

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1960s. Indeed, a 1969 CIA brief, which synthesized over twenty years of close surveillance, asserted that Kodama had “regained the ground lost after the war [and was] once again the undisputed leader of the Japanese right.”8 Kodama was well known for using his connections with the LDP and the Japanese underworld, including personal relationships with the principal figures of the yakuza syndicates Matsubakai (Pine Needle Society) and Kokusuikai (Japan National Essence Association), to influence the course of national elections and international politics. Born in 1911, Kodama was the son of a bankrupt businessman. At an early age, he was sent to live with his married sister in Seoul. Hardscrabble economic circumstances and an abusive, coercive home environment led him to begin working as a laborer in a steel plant while attending night school. At the age of fifteen, he cut ties with his family’s household and made his way back to Tokyo, where he first came into contact with the underworld crime figures, secret societies, and rightist organizations that would define the trajectory of his adult life. Trying to make it on his own in Tokyo, Kodama associated with low-level members of the criminal underworld who recruited and deployed him to help suppress strikes and political demonstrations. The CIA dates his involvement in rightist politics to the mid-1920s, when he joined the ultranationalist Kenkokukai (National Constructionist Society), which was founded in 1926 by Takabatake Motoyuki, Uesugi Shikichi, and Akao Satoshi, leading prewar ultranationalist and pan-Asianist ideologues.9 Although not formally educated beyond middle school, he was a voracious reader and rose to the top of the Kokukukai’s Youth Department. Kodama’s prose was well informed by a command of ultranationalist philosophy and literature, which was acquired through disciplined self-study and close association with some of Japan’s most influential prewar-era ultranationalists. His long prewar engagement with the Far Right was a perfect fit with his continued, obsessive engagement with fighting suspected Communist insurgencies after 1945.10 Beginning in 1929, Kodama began serving a series of short incarcerations for political activities, including participation in a plot to petition the emperor to provide unemployment relief for working-class Japanese still suffering from the economic depression that followed in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. He was released in 1930 and immediately resumed his political activism. Among his many prewar activities, Kodama credited himself with having cofounded the paramilitary, imperial-restorationist youth group Dokuritsu Seinensha (Independent Youth Society) in 1932, which investigative journalists Alec Dubro and David Kaplan alleged used profits from smuggling opium between Japan and its colonial territories in East Asia to fund counterinsurgency operations against Chinese resisters in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.11

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Kodama was rearrested in 1934 for his involvement—in collaboration with members of the imperial-restorationist, ultranationalist Tenkōkai (Society for Heavenly Action)—in a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Saitō Makoto, who had sought to limit the influence of the military on the government.12 During one of these stints in prison, Kodama came into contact with a close associate of Sasakawa Ryōichi, then president of the Kokusui Taishūtō, a connection that eventually helped Kodama become the party’s division chief for East Asia (China).13 He was released in 1937 at the behest of the Imperial Army general Doihara Kenji, a China expert.14 The shift in national politics to the right following successive, failed coups d’état enabled the army to orchestrate Japan’s fullscale invasion of China in 1937, which provided Kodama with the opportunity to build his black-marketeering operation in North China into a profitable procurement and intelligence service for the army, and eventually also for the foreign ministry. He also used his new official status to found the ultranationalist advocacy group Taishi Mondai Kaiketsu Kokumin Dōmei (National League for the Settlement of the China Problem) as a means to expand his business connections while also pushing the government to authorize further expansion into China.15 According to Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s path-breaking history of the political and financial relationships between the criminal underworld and Far Right politicians, in December 1941, on Sasakawa’s recommendation, Kodama reluctantly left his profitable procurement post with the army in North China to establish a purchasing agency for the Naval Air Force Headquarters in Shanghai, an agency later known to US intelligence officials as the Kodama Kikan (Kodama Organization). In Shanghai, Kodama rebuilt his procurement business and expanded it into a full-scale trade in rare metals, a cover for what US intelligence officers later reported was a very profitable business in gold, diamond, and opium smuggling.16 US intelligence officials later reported that while working for the Naval Air Force in Shanghai, Kodama was able to amass a personal fortune by smuggling raw materials and trading intelligence with both the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists.17 In 1942, Kodama briefly returned to Japan, where he ran an unsuccessful campaign for a seat in parliament while also serving as the managing editor of the rightist newspaper Yamato shimbun. In 1944 he leveraged his network of connections into an appointment as the head of a major mining group (Nichinan Kōgyō, or the Japan Southern Mining Company). By the war’s end, Kodama had ascended to a post on the prime minister’s Cabinet Advisory Council, which prompted his arrest by the Allied Occupation as a suspected war criminal in October 1945. One often-cited US intelligence report claimed that, during the last few weeks of the war, Kodama repatriated $175 million USD in valuables from Shanghai to warehouses rented by Sasakawa in Japan. It was this

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war plunder that Kodama and Sasakawa used to fund conservative politicians after the war.18 An Allied Occupation report compiled in 1947, while Kodama was in prison following his arrest, concluded that Kodama’s “long and fanatic involvement in ultranationalist activities, violence included, and his skill in appealing to youth make him a . . . grave security risk if released.”19 Indeed, Kodama’s wartime machinations in China and Manchuria had involved significant trading in rare metals, munitions, and—allegedly—opium. Allied intelligence indicated that the business was lucrative. Kodama, on the other hand, claimed it was “an organization with no thought of profit.” It was, he said, “composed of a group of selfsacrificing youths,” whose “sincere efforts” allowed him to continue his selfless work for the sake of Japan.20 Allied intelligence in 1947 alleged that Kodama also leveraged his wartime black-marketeering interests to finance the Shanghai office of the Kempeitai (military police), as well as to be a front for army intelligence.21 Kodama was released from Sugamo Prison in December 1948, uncharged. Dubro and Kaplan speculate that Kodama may have earned his release by making a deal with US intelligence officers to share his network with a US-dominated Allied Occupation increasingly obsessed with quelling the spread of Communism in East Asia. They claim that his network included significant connections with the criminal underworld and that he coordinated with the Hokutan Mining Company’s executive Hagiwara Kitaro to arrange for a band of young yakuza— “violence specialists” from the the Akiraku crime family (Akiraku-gumi)—to confront union members at the company’s mines in Hokkaido during high-profile strikes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The arrangement was allegedly made at the request of a subordinate of General Courtney Willoughby, a virulent antiCommunist. Although the gang failed to break the Coal Workers’ Union (Tanrō) in Hokkaido, Kodama nevertheless, according to Kaplan and Dubro, “solidified his position as a principal go-between for G-2 and the various yakuza bands.”22 In 1960, according to CIA surveillance reports, Kodama allegedly brokered an agreement between a confederated group of more than thirty Far Right organizations, all of which had a keen interest in propagating ultranationalist ideals among Japanese youth. By the late 1960s, the Seinen Shisō Kenkyūkai (Youth Thought Research Group) had garnered 2,700 members, for whom Kodama organized military training exercises in a remote mountain resort area of Nagano. Adopting a slogan attributed to Kodama—“One man, fifty kills”—the organization’s goal as articulated by Kodama was to “consolidate into a federation capable of [carrying out] a decisive confrontation with leftists and labor organizations.”23 Indeed, CIA informants reported that, from the late 1960s onward, Kodama underwrote the training of private militias he intended to deploy to support the regular Japanese forces during a “communist uprising.”24

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Kodama reinforced his usefulness as the primary go-to guy by arranging for young thugs to confront protesters during the anti-security-treaty and antiwar protests of 1960, 1968, and 1970. Recruiting from the petty gangster underclass of urban Japan, low-level crime bosses maintained close relationships with local rightist groups, often interchanging membership. According to Siniawer, “violence specialists,” whom she defines as “nonstate actors who made careers out of wielding physical force in the political sphere, or who received compensation for performing acts of political violence,” were regular fixtures at political events throughout the twentieth century. These small gangs of thugs collected fees for their participation in voter intimidation and strike-breaking schemes, and those who demonstrated quick wit and ideological commitment—as Kodama and Sasakawa had when they were young men in the 1920s and 1930s—were recruited up the ranks.25

Political Profiteer During the 1950s, Kodama advocated for the robust promotion of nationalistic sentiment among Japanese youth, an end to Japan’s subordination to US foreign policy, and “a joint racial movement involving right-wing associations in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.”26 Kodama, who spent some of his childhood and teenage years living in colonial Korea, kept close relations with military acquaintances in the former empire. CIA intelligence identified Kodama as a key conspirator in rightist mobilizations to build a pan–East Asian anti-Communist movement in the 1950s. CIA informants alleged that he channeled funds and personnel to the Rhee and Park regimes in South Korea and the Chiang regime in Taiwan.27 Kodama’s published writings indicate that his childhood among the underclasses of the colonial Korean city of Seoul (Keijō), as well as his wartime experiences as a black marketeer in China and Manchuria, likely emboldened him to imagine a shared ethnic-national heritage between East Asians and the Japanese. Whatever the case, his connections with East Asia—imagined and real—informed his subsequent efforts to provide support for Far Right leaders across East Asia, even while asserting Japan’s preeminence within a trans–East Asian ethnic bloc.28 Kodama’s writings during the social and political turbulence of the late 1960s included a series of articles for the nationalist journal Nihon oyobi Nihonjin. Written against the tempest of student radicalism that defined the late 1960s, Kodama’s essays decried the corrupt spirit of Japan’s youth, which he attributed to the contemporary youth culture’s failure to accept the emperor as the sovereign ruler of Japan.29 His essays railed against union leaders, teachers, and public intellectuals, who he argued were little more than Communist agitators

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corrupting Japanese youth with lies and ideological drivel. He chastised leftist youth groups for misreading the Chinese Cultural Revolution (the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966–76), which he asserted was a brazen attempt to recruit Japanese youth into a global youth movement coordinated from Beijing. Kodama positioned himself as an expert on China and claimed that his experiences during the 1930s and 1940s gave him unique insight into the true feelings of the Chinese, who had made common cause with their brother East Asians.30 During the early 1950s, Kodama attempted to reintroduce the notion of Japan’s shared ethnic-national heritage with all East Asians as the last bastion against the rise of Communism in Asia. He justified his support for a close relationship between Japan and the United States by asserting that Japan’s common ethnicnational heritage (minzoku) with China and Korea offered a unique opportunity for Japan to be both the United States’ primary ally and the principal leader of a transethnic, anti-Communist alliance in East Asia. He fashioned his dream of a Japanese-led trans–East Asian alliance as a fight against Communism while he and his associates were in league with their wartime collaborators in South Korea and Taiwan. He sought the means to overcome the threat of Western colonial hegemony and Japan’s seemingly inescapable place as the United States’ East Asian lackey by organizing individuals around the pan-Asiatic ideals of the interwar and wartime eras.31 Kodama was quick to assert that the Chinese Communist Party had no love for the Chinese people, much less the Japanese, and decried leftist youth. He further argued that the specter of Chinese Communism, combined with the long-­standing threat posed by the Soviet Union, required the reassertion of the authority of the emperor, and that Japan’s national sovereignty should be unshackled from the restraints of a US-authored postwar constitution. Kodama saw the solution to be the resurrection of “national pride built around the traditional values embodied by the ‘Imperial Way’ [kōdō].”32 A key feature of Kodama’s emperor-centered nationalism was a critique of the Meiji constitution of 1889, which he contended artificially separated the people and the emperor. Kodama argued that postwar Japan would be better off by scrapping the US-imposed 1947 constitution and replacing it with a document reinstating the emperor as the eternal “spiritual center of the Japanese race.”33 Tim Weiner’s popular history of the CIA asserts that, during the Korean War, Kodama was a principal player in a covert operation arranged by the Office of Strategic Services veteran John Howley to move tungsten—necessary for the production of armor-piercing ordnance—from wartime Japanese caches onto US military bases.34 Howley explained that the money garnered from Kodama’s sales to the United States was “pumped into the campaigns of conservatives during Japan’s first post-occupation elections in 1953. . . in an effort to put the right

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money in the right hands.”35 Citing declassified CIA documents, Weiner asserts that “the CIA provided $2.8 million in financing to underwrite the operation,”36 and that Kodama likely profited by as much as $2 million from the deal, prompting the CIA’s Tokyo station chief to call him “a professional liar, gangster, charlatan, and outright thief.”37 The CIA similarly funded pro-American politicians and political parties in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and South America to ensure that Communist candidates were not elected, but the CIA concluded that, unlike its anti-Communist assets elsewhere, Kodama had “no interest in anything but the profits.”38 In 1968, Kodama’s flair for political rhetoric permeated a feature he wrote for Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, in which he recalled how he and his cohort of young radicals traversed the world during the interwar and wartime eras. Serialized in three issues of the monthly magazine, Kodama’s “Waga seishun” (Our youth) narrates how he and his generation of prewar-era ultranationalists perceived themselves as an ideological and financial resource for the postwar generation of rightist youth. While neither police nor intelligence records offer a clear sense of rightist demographics by organization, Kodama’s rhetorical agenda at the end of the 1960s indicates his concern with recruiting younger members.39 Kodama’s rhetorical flair communicated his intense desire to “teach by example” while also aggrandizing the activities of a generation of Far Right activists who, by the late 1960s, were just beginning to emerge from the disgrace of defeat but were simultaneously getting to be “of an age” where they were expected to make room for the next generation.40

Delinquents and Dropouts Kodama was recruited into Far Right politics from the ranks of the interwar-era lumpen proletariat. He was a criminal entrepreneur whose moral flexibility and easy movement amid the lower-class neighborhoods of Japan made him a highly desirable recruit for criminal gangs, emergent fascist parties, and even the wartime state. After the war, Kodama sought to mobilize young men from the postwar, urban lower classes who had dropped out, or flunked out, of the school-towork transition programs created for them. Kodama perceived common cause with this social stratum of youth gangs and petty criminals, which was similar to the one he had successfully recruited members from during the interwar era. Social commentators in the late 1960s identified one such group, the motorcycle gangs known as bōsōzoku, as alienated urban youth susceptible to rightwing appeals, while newspaper accounts were reporting street violence between motorcycle gangs, gang members, and police, and occasionally between gang

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members and local yakuza. A bōsōzoku crisis was reported by the press, and this publicized a youth subculture that had been in motion since the early 1950s. The early biker gangs were perceived more as a local nuisance than a social crisis, but by the early 1970s, the press was reporting that the increased number and deportment of young bikers were threatening Japanese social values. Andreas Riessland observes that the number of young people interested in participating in the biker subculture grew alongside the affordability of small-to-medium-sized motorcycles. By the late 1960s, even a part-time income was sufficient to support a young driver, which was “most apparent in Japan’s inner city areas where on the weekends, hundreds of young drivers began to congregate with their cars and motorbikes, to show off their vehicles and their driving prowess, to engage in informal (and illegal) racing competitions, to see and to be seen.”41 Slow and loud, bōsōzoku rallies were a circus, a chaotic spectacle on wheels that according to Riessland were an important opportunity for young gang members to escape the “narrow confines of their everyday life, to join in the competition for recognition among their peers and, maybe, to score with the opposite gender.”42 Intensive media attention in the early 1970s made the gangs’ disorderly and adolescent rebellion more popular among young people and precipitated crackdowns by the police, who tried various means to interdict the bōsōzoku convoys that were springing up in towns across Japan. Riessland observes that larger, more popular gangs also sought better ways to provoke the ire of police, which led to long, slow, and loud convoys that caused “serious disruptions, if not the complete breakdown, of all regular traffic.”43 For law enforcement as well as the general public, the defining characteristic of the bōsōzoku was their collective speed rides along the major boulevards of metropolitan Japan, during which riders revved the throttles on their “uncapped” engines (with noise and emission controls removed), swerved in and out of traffic while swinging weapons or waving the national flags or historically significant military banners, and honked horns and yelled obscene language at pedestrians and motorists. Their antics tied up traffic and occasionally caused accidents, and while the bōsōzoku have been accused of supporting their activities with petty crime, police statistics report that the majority of arrests and detentions were for traffic safety and speed violations.44 Despite their social disaffection and moral flexibility, the bōsōzoku were not ripe for easy recruitment by political groups like those funded by Kodama. Frustrated by how the Sixties Generation had rebuffed his and Kodama’s many overtures, by the early 1970s Sasakawa Ryōichi regularly decried the postwar generation, and sometimes the bōsōzoku specifically, as moral degenerates who exemplified all that was wrong with contemporary Japanese society. The targets of a considerable amount of scorn and derision, the bōsōzoku were, alongside

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student radical groups, subject to intense media commentary, police investigation, and legislative attempts to stamp out what was, by the mid-1970s, perceived as a major social problem. Newspaper and television news reports detailed waves of youth crime perpetrated by ever-expanding gangs of seventeen-year-old high school dropouts taking over the streets of urban Japan. Police authorities reported that tens of thousands of young men belonged to motorcycle gangs, while newspapers asserted that the disaffected youth who ran with the bōsōzoku threatened to undermine the foundations of Japanese society. Independent and state-commissioned sociological studies from the late 1970s through the mid1980s characterized gang members as criminal deviants whose extroverted personalities correlated with poor academic performance. Unable or unwilling to move up within the educational hierarchy that defined the postwar employment system (or just uninterested in doing so), these youth expressed considerable estrangement from society.45 Global film sensations like Easy Rider (1969), starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, alongside inexpensive mass-produced motorcycles, made the biker lifestyle an appealing and affordable option for young blue-collar men seeking the thrill of coordinated, high-risk group activity.46 Perhaps the best example of the Japanese bōsōzoku’s adaptation of the global Easy Rider phenomenon is a 1976 documentary film directed by Yanagimachi Mituo, God Speed You! Black Emperor (Goddo supīdo yū! Burakku enperā), which depicts the bōsōzoku of 1970s Tokyo. Founded in the late 1960s, by the mid-1970s the motorcycle gang was an icon of Tokyo’s young and restless youth and their day-to-day desire to feel the freedom and significance conjured while riding en masse through the streets of the Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku. Paul Spicer argues that God Speed You! “is a stark portrayal, not just of a generational sub-culture, but of Japanese society itself. The disenfranchised nature of the Black Emperor’s membership sees teenagers who have been misunderstood by parents and abandoned by the authorities.”47 Yanagimachi made God Speed You! amid media fury over the rampant “social problem” posed by gang members who terrorized the streets of Japan’s urban centers. In cinéma vérité, Yanagimachi portrays the lives of “second-generation” members of the motorcycle gang the Black Emperors, as they struggle to maintain their autonomy from educational and employment systems that make little accommodation for their fascination with the speed and flow of the ride. Yanagimachi’s film follows the dual lives—within his gang and his home—of nineteenyear-old Honma Yūji as he navigates between the banalities of his daily life and the excitement of being a prospective member of the Shinjuku chapter of the Black Emperors.48 Ironically, Honma’s role as himself in Yanagimachi’s documentary led to a fairly successful career being typecast in roles as dropouts, bōsōzoku, and related

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FIGURE 4.1.  The Black Emperor gang members incorporated into their clothing, banners, and graffiti a left-facing swastika (manji), which usually marks the location of a Buddhist temple, though it is often mistaken by non-Japanese for its German cousin, associated with National Socialism. Goddo supı¯do yu ¯! Burakku Enpera¯, directed by Mitsuo Yanagimachi, GUNRO Productions (1976).

bad boys in cinema and television dramas until the late 1980s. His breakout role was as the central character of Yanagimachi’s 1979 adaptation of Nakagami Kenji’s short story “The Nineteen-Year-Old’s Map” (Jūkyū sai no chizu), for which he won the Best Newcomer award at the 1980 Yokohama Film Festival. Yanagimachi cast Honma to portray the bleak life of a young student living alone in a rooming house and surrounded by the unsympathetic dregs of society. Honma’s character, simply known from the first-person perspective as Boku (I or me), struggles to cover his monthly expenses delivering newspapers while living without any means to express his building anger at the world. Although Honma’s character is seemingly ripe for recruitment by one of the Far Right or Far Left groups active during the 1970s and early 1980s, it is particularly significant that Yanagimachi portrays his alienation in isolation from the ideologically divided world of the era. The film ends with no release for the protagonist, no way to express his building rage. Film critics interpreted the devastatingly bleak conclusion as Yanagimachi’s commentary on the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity in 1970s

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Japan—a central theme throughout Yanagimachi’s filmmaking career. However, the ambivalent, unresolved status of Honma’s “Boku” can also be read as a stunning, albeit accidental, indictment of the political movements that claimed to represent the plight of young men exactly like “Boku”—claims made without ever reaching out to them. Spicer observes that Yanagimachi’s God Speed You! is a surprisingly compelling examination of social class and precarity among the urban blue-collar youth of 1970s Japan. The film, he says, depicts “families who are in a kind of ‘sociallimbo.’ They exist in a fragmented and ignored underclass and are stranded in a country where being part of a group is an expected social norm.” Spicer argues that what made the film unique among the superfluity of youth gangster bōsōzoku films that exploded onto the marketplace after 1972 was that “there is no sense of the violent but sensitive Brando in The Wild One (Benedek, 1953), or the freedom and hedonism of Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969). In contrast, God Speed You! Black Emperor is a soulless, claustrophobic commentary on the rigid hierarchal social structures, and the lengths that people will go to belong.”49 God Speed You! portrays the lives of gang members and their families as they struggle to navigate the double hierarchy of 1970s Japan: the education-toemployment hierarchy that left them behind and the internal gang hierarchy by which older members forcibly subordinated those junior to them. But the Black Emperors were a gang of young men, mostly native to the Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku, who invoked an inflammatory visuality and verbal vulgarity in order to voice a response to class immobility and social alienation. The film conveys the gang’s collective “fuck you” to contemporary Japanese society. Critics of the film were divided in their skepticism as to whether its depiction of a handful of representatives of what was then considered a major “social problem” was too sympathetic or too synthetic. Certainly, media depictions, but also scholarly accounts, of the bōsōzoku of the 1970s precipitated similar critiques by recreating Honma’s dichotomy: media narratives of “bad boy” bōsōzoku produced a self-perpetuating notion of collective identity. Yanagimachi’s narrative is a sympathetic portrait of a gang of social outcasts just trying to ride and live free, but most media depicted the biker gangs as part of the youth problem that had been plaguing Japanese society since the end of the 1960s. Bōsōzoku were portrayed as a problem associated with social rebellion; they were a rejection of the normative course of life, which focused exclusively on the aspirations of marriage, children, and lifetime employment punctuated by rampant consumerism and regular vacation travel. A hyperbolic discourse on bōsōzoku summarized police reports and newspaper accounts characterizing motorcycle gang members as “responsible for an overwhelming 80 percent of all serious youth crimes,” which police authorities

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further attributed to “their involvement with the yakuza.”50 According to Alec Dubro, the bōsōzoku are “a mirror of yakuza society, but their members are often no more than . . . dropouts from Japan’s fiercely competitive school system who soon find themselves frozen out of the country’s rigid job market.”51 However, the sociologist Ikuya Sato, the only researcher to conduct in-depth fieldwork with the gangs, observes that the bōsōzoku were essentially not criminals but were instead engaged in an “extreme expressiveness and playfulness” that borrowed from a medley of fashion iconographies, such as hairstyles, clothing, and accoutrements, associated with the stylized presentations of the yakuza and the Far Right. Indeed, Ikuya’s argument is underscored by Yanagimachi’s God Speed You! when one member shouts to the camera that he hates the yakuza and Far Right activists who come around trying to recruit them.52 By the mid-1970s, bōsōzoku appeared to represent a significant segment of youth culture. In 1975, the National Police Agency reported that they were aware of 571 bōsōzoku groups nationwide, which had an estimated twenty-three thousand members who were primarily made up of teenagers. There were significant demographic differences between bōsōzoku in large metropolitan areas and those in the regional peripheries. The largest percentage of bōsōzoku members in the greater Tokyo area were seventeen-year-olds (34.5 percent in Tokyo and 24.2 percent in Kanagawa Prefecture), but in Osaka it was nineteen-year-olds (31.6 percent), and most members in the peripheral northwestern region of Akita Prefecture were twenty years old and younger (65.8 percent) and at distinctly different life stages than gang members in the metropole. The majority of bōsōzoku sampled in the greater Tokyo area were still listed as enrolled in high school (45 percent), while 46.4 percent of bōsōzoku in Akita were employed at small- and medium-sized firms, and less than 10 percent were still in school. Regional bōsōzoku also included an unsurprising percentage of agricultural workers (11.8 percent), but, significantly, posted six times as many unemployed gang members (11.9 percent of Akita gang members, versus the 2 percent who were unemployed in Tokyo), and nearly four times the national unemployment rate for young men aged twenty to twenty-four (3.1 percent) in 1975.53 While school enrollment did not necessarily entail school attendance, and employment did not necessarily equal economic security, life for a seventeenyear-old evading truancy officers was nevertheless distinct from the nineteenyear-old skipping out on a life of repetitive, menial labor. Ultimately, social commentators and police officials still considered both groups of bōsōzoku to be well on their way toward, and perhaps even having already achieved, dropout or delinquent status. However, dropping out meant very different things for ­seventeen-year-olds and nineteen-year-olds living in the Tokyo metropole

0 10 24.2 0 1.5 10.8

35.4

19.3 16

17

31.6

21.6

15.1

23.8

13.8

13.7

13.5

12.2

9.8

18

19

20

8.8 15.1 20.8

Tokyo

10 17.9

9.1 7.9 3.3 4.1 4.9 2.8 14 2 22 23 24

7.6 4.3 21

Kanagawa

Akita

2.8 1.5 0.5 0.2

2.2 2 0.2 0.5 25

Osaka

FIGURE 4.2.  Bo o¯so¯zoku membership by age and city, 1975. From police interviews with 4,994 bo¯so¯zoku in Tokyo, 1,201 in Kanagawa, 391 in Akita, and 320 in Osaka. See the National Police Agency white paper Keisatsucho¯, “Dai yon sho¯: Seinen no hodo¯ hogo,” Keisatsu hakusho, 1975, http://www.npa.go.jp/ hakusyo/s50/s500400.html.

Unemployed 2 Domestic service

11.8 6.4

Agriculture

11.8

Civil engineering employee 3.6 12.8 Factory worker 9.2 9.2 Driver 3.9 5.6 Shop clerk 11.4 Company employee 12.8 Civil service employee

17.6 15.8

0.3

University student 5.4 High school student

1.5 45 Tokyo

9 Akita

FIGURE 4.3.  Bo¯so¯zoku membership by occupation and city, 1975. From police interviews with 4,994 bo¯so¯zoku in Tokyo and 391 in Akita. See the National Police Agency white paper Keisatsucho¯, “Dai yon sho¯: Seinen no hodo¯ hogo,” Keisatsu hakusho, 1975, http://www.npa.go.jp/hakusyo/s50/s500400.html.

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and those from regional cities—different enough that these two subgroups were often in conflict with each other. Brawls between mobsters and bōsōzoku filled headlines for a brief period in 1975 and 1976. Originally, rightist groups thought that the disaffected youth of the bōsōzoku would be ripe for recruitment. Indeed, the ultranationalist and fascist ephemera boldly and brazenly displayed by bōsōzoku on parade had every appearance of political symbolism. However, contrary to the hopes of the leaders of Japan’s Far Right organizations, the bōsōzoku were not young rebels looking for a cause. They were angry, young, and mobile, but gang life, the ride especially, was the perpetual search for a fleeting thrill to overcome the mundane meaninglessness of daily life. Dropping out was an act of momentary agency within the context of precarity—the everyday economic contingency of Japan’s “underachieving” underclass. Wild, loud, and despised by everyone, bōsōzoku were who they were and did what they wanted, showing that they too could live beyond mere existence. This was their act of agency. Yanagimachi’s God Speed You! offers a portrait of precarity that, although quite different from that of the Kamagasaki workers whom Wakamiya Masanori had sought to mobilize in the early 1970s (see chapter 2), nevertheless still overlapped with it. The cultural forms of self-presentation preferred by bōsōzoku gangs implied a predisposition to Far Right causes, and they seemed the ideal type of recruits for men like Kodama, who himself rose from similar circumstances forty years earlier. Yet Yanagimachi also documents how most bōsōzoku rejected all attempts at political recruitment and decried those who thought they could politicize their identity as bōsōzoku. Being bōsōzoku was a renunciation of everything except the brotherhood of riding slow and loud.

The Rise of the New Right Much to Kodama Yoshio’s chagrin, Japan’s new generation of Far Right activists did not emerge from the disaffected lumpen proletariat the bōsōzoku represented. Indeed, the New Right in Japan was born from a small group of disaffected university activists who saw Japan’s Cold War alliance with the United States—­exemplified by Kodama’s epiphytic relationship with the US ­government—as little more than a shameful surrender of sovereignty to a Western imperial power.54 Looking closely at the inner operations of the organization the Issuikai (the First Wednesday Society), Nathaniel Smith observes that the young Far Right founder Suzuki Kunio built his orgaization around his claim of direct ideological descent from Mishima Yukio’s 1970 call for military insurrection. Smith recounts how Suzuki adopted the name Issuikai, which was the name

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of a defunct ultranationalist organization disbanded by the Allied Occupation in 1945, to challenge the transwar generation of Far Right politicians and activists, whom Suzuki accused of having used the two and a half decades since 1945 to feather their nests by collaborating with the Americans.55 Suzuki was born in Fukushima in 1943, and as an undergraduate in the mid1960s, he led the Waseda chapter of a student organization, from which he organized opposition to radical student groups. In a life trajectory parallel to that of Shigenobu Fusako’s across town at Meiji University, Suzuki began postgraduate studies in the late 1960s but quit in spring 1970. Like Shigenobu, Suzuki concluded that academic studies were insufficient to his calling, and, at first, he dropped out of Waseda to help relaunch the conservative newspaper Sangyō keizai shimbun. By 1972, he had again grown restless and called together a handful of his Waseda cohort in order to found the neonationalist Far Right group the Issuikai. The self-styled New Right youth of the Issuikai declared their independence from the established Far Right by calling for an end to the US-Japan Security Treaty, the decampment of all US military forces in Japan, and the abrogation of the US-imposed 1947 constitution and its replacement with a Japanese-authored document. The founders of the Issuikai decried the established Far Right as complicit in US imperialism and defined their struggle in opposition to a postwar state that had betrayed the Japanese people by tying the future of the Japanese nation to the fortunes of American capitalism, in trade for little more than the golden crumbs doled out for being the United States’ unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Smith observes that New Right student groups recruited from “the relatively apolitical martial arts clubs, sometimes at the behest of the administration. Some were youth from conservative families or member of rightist clubs. Others simply resented the wave of student activism and strikes disrupting their campuses.”56 Although never representative of more than an extremist minority, New Right organizations like the Issuikai had a significant impact on 1970s Japan. They published magazines, books, and newspapers, gave speeches, and staged “confrontations” in order to extoll neotraditional justifications for populist rebellion. They sought to disambiguate the popular conflation of nation, emperor, and the postwar state by accusing the transwar Far Right of having betrayed the emperor and people in their capitulation to becoming a subordinate partner to a US Cold War alliance. Indeed, Smith’s ethnology of the Issuikai shows how the antistatism turn of the New Right led some young radicals to perceive a common cause with the New Left, which also rejected Japan’s alliance with the United States.57 More importantly, after their rejection of the established Far Right, the New Right sought out new idols to follow, which ironically led them to the very same interwar-era ultranationalists who had inspired the transwar Old Right

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and whom Suzuki and his followers had rejected to work arm in arm with the United States. Suzuki modeled his call for the restoration of imperial rule in Japan after that of Yukio Mishima. Although Mishima was irrelevant to the mainstream Far Right, the fact that young men like Suzuki were inspired by Mishima’s death irked the transwar generation of Far Right leaders. Mishima’s failed military mutiny and dramatic ritual suicide in November 1970 inflamed the transwar Far Right’s ire over the extent to which Japan had been degraded by a countercultural youth movement hijacked by leftist student radicals. The renowned author’s path to seppuku (ritual suicide) began with his submission of the final installment of his tetralogy Sea of Fertility (Hōjō no umi). Accompanied by four of his closest followers, members of the Far Right group the Tatenokai (Shield Society), on November 25 Mishima made his way to the Self Defense Forces (SDF) command building in the Ichigaya neighborhood of Tokyo, where they captured the base commandant and took possession of his office. Mishima stepped out onto the commandant’s office balcony, where he addressed an assembly of nearly one thousand SDF soldiers who had been summoned for that purpose. In an uncompelling rant, Mishima implored them to overthrow a constitutional government he felt had betrayed the emperor and did not reflect the essence of what it meant to be Japanese. He screamed, “Are you not bushi? Are you not samurai warriors? . . . We see Japan reveling in prosperity and wallowing in spiritual emptiness. . . . We shall give it back its image and die in doing so. It is possible you value life, given a world where the spirit is dead. . . . Our fundamental Japanese values are threatened. . . . The Emperor no longer has his rightful place in Japan.”58 Although Mishima’s prisoner, the commandant, was very familiar with the Tatenokai cohort who had trained with his troops by special permission from the prime minister, and who had now been summoned to assemble by their base commander at the behest of Mishima, the professional soldiers were unsympathetic to Mishima’s call for mutiny. Indeed, some jeered and heckled him from below. Mishima’s path to Ichigaya began in 1966—with financial support from the businessman and strident anti-Communist Sakurada Takeshi—when Mishima undertook to create a private militia dedicated to the protection of Japanese values, the emperor, and the imperial way. The founding meeting of the Tatenokai took place around a table at a Tokyo café in October 1968; Mishima’s first five recruits hailed from university campuses around the Tokyo metropolitan area. By the end of 1968, the Tatenokai’s core consisted of more than twenty young men regularly engaging in paramilitary training in public and private spaces around Tokyo. Then, in 1969, Mishima persuaded the prime minister’s office to pressure the commandant of the SDF in Ichigaya to allow up to fifteen Tatenokai

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members, under Mishima’s command, to train alongside the garrisoned SDF soldiers.59 After his speech failed to incite mutiny, Mishima left the balcony and reentered the commandant’s office, where he got down on his knees, removed his coat and shirt, and disemboweled himself with a short stabbing sword. As Mishima’s appointed second (kaishakunin), twenty-five-year-old Morita Masakatsu unsuccessfully attempted to complete the seppuku ritual by decapitating Mishima. The decapitation was eventually completed by the junior Tatenokai member Koga Hiroyasu, who also performed the role of kaishakunin for Morita with a swift strike from Morita’s historical katana (the sword customarily carried by the samurai class). The surviving Tatenokai members surrendered to authorities, the SDF soldiers did not revolt, and the media fury that followed rebuked Mishima and his young Far Right followers for their dramatic attempt at a coup d’état just a decade after Yamaguchi Otoya’s televised assassination of JSP secretary general Asanuma Inejirō. In 1970 the nation was still far from being ready to reembrace the kind of ultranationalist militancy advocated by Mishima and his followers, but his suicide was a clarion call for a small cadre of rightist university students who felt that national pride was being stifled by the leftist politics that dominated popular representations of the Sixties Generation. Suzuki and the three other founding members of the Issuikai—Tsutomu Abe, Hirohide Inuzuka, and Masaki Shinomiya—regularly commemorated the sacrifice of their classmate, Morita Masakatsu, alongside Mishima. In 1972, they founded the monthly magazine Gekkan rekonkisuta (Monthly reconquest), which they bizarrely named after the medieval European military campaigns to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic kingdoms of the Ummayyad (756–1031) and Nasrid (1230–1492), rather than a Japanese medieval equivalent.60 Suzuki’s early political consciousness appears to have been influenced by his parents’ membership in the new religious organization Seichō no Ie (House of Growth), which was founded in the 1930s by Taniguchi Masaharu. Although Seichō no Ie was banned very late in the war, Taniguchi nevertheless spent the majority of the war years preaching what he called “patriotic scriptures” (aikoku seiten) that extolled the war’s role in the expansion of Greater Japan (Dai Nippon Koku). Taniguchi reemerged relatively free of wartime associations, and in 1946 his postwar preaching explained that Japan’s defeat was the result of the corrupt nature (nise no Nippon) of a wartime state that had failed to honor the true nature of the “Land of the Gods” (Shinshu Nippon Koku). The Seichō no Ie youth auxiliary (whose Waseda chapter Suzuki ran as a student during the 1960s) aimed to provide an alternative voice within a student movement it believed was dominated by Communists. Like most of the transwar ultranationalists,

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Taniguchi believed that the student militancy of the late 1960s was the latest wave of an international Communist conspiracy to take control of Japan, which his anti-Communist youth group was intended to help stop by promoting respect for parents, service to society, and reverence for the emperor.61 Amid the turmoil of the late 1960s, as a young man Suzuki found Taniguchi’s religious youth movement a meaningful foil for honing his politics, but he was expelled from Seichō no Ie in 1969 for his quick propensity to engage in political violence. By the time of Mishima’s death, Suzuki had graduated from university and taken a sales position for the conservative daily newspaper Sankei shimbun. After being ousted from Seichō no Ie, he and a small cadre of discontented university graduates rented a small office near Waseda University and began to build their organization. Kodama Yoshio’s career as the public face of the postwar Far Right took an unexpected turn in 1972, when he was caught arranging bribes from the US aerospace firm Lockheed to Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuhei. Kodama allegedly paid Tanaka, and/or members of the Tanaka cabinet, on behalf of Lockheed in order to gain their approval for the parastatal All Nippon Airlines (ANA) purchase of twenty-one Lockheed L-1011 Tristars. The very public, very dramatic scandal made association with Kodama toxic and subsequently sank several high-profile political and bureaucratic careers. By the mid-1970s, Kodama, no longer able to move without scrutiny in public circles, retired from public life. Moreover, as we have seen, the young men who formed the vanguard of New Right politics in the early 1970s decried the former rightists like Kodama whom they saw as sacrificing Japan’s sovereignty for personal gain and in the interests of Cold War antiCommunism. The vacuum Kodama left behind was filled by his Sugamo Prison associate Sasakawa Ryōichi, who succeeded him as the primary fixer and funder of the Japanese Far Right. During the 1960s, Kodama had found it increasingly difficult to connect with the young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four that he and his associates needed to recruit in order to maintain, not to mention build, their Far Right movement. Of the few young radicals not attracted to the Far Left, most preferred the New Right’s radical vision over Kodama’s: the young New Right radicals perceived the transwar generation’s cozy relationship with US officials, as well as their willingness to put money before ideology, as anathema to their reified understanding of the interwar intellectuals who wrote the core philosophy of the Japanese ultranationalist movement. Kodama represented the establishment the New Right opposed, and Nihon oyobi Nihonjin—the venerable magazine of an earlier era—was irrelevant to the Sixties Generation.

5 MOTORBOAT GAMBLING AND MORALS EDUCATION

The older generation of Far Right activists responded to their understanding of Japan’s youth crisis by declaring that the corruption of Japan’s youth could be reversed by the adoption of a national educational curriculum centered on traditional Japanese moral values, respect for tradition and culture, and love for nation and native place. This chapter examines the propaganda efforts undertaken by Sasakawa Ryōichi and his substantial philanthropic empire as they sought to normalize Far Right political discourse and marginalize leftist political positions as anathema to Japanese values. Sasakawa sought to reshape the social values of young people and promote the reintroduction of Confucianbased morals education curricula for Japanese youth. His campaigns encouraged postwar Japanese of all ages to accept the reintroduction of mandatory morals education into the state curriculum. Born in 1899, Sasakawa was a decade older than Kodama and his senior within the Far Right movement of the interwar era. By the early 1970s, abandoning earlier attempts to directly influence the Sixties Generation, the Sasakawa network of philanthropic institutions helped to fund and build privately funded morals education programs that aimed to foster a stronger sense of Japanese identity among youth, similar to the shūshin (neo-Confucian morals education) curriculum that had underpinned the wartime state’s total mobilization of the 1930s and 1940s.1 Sasakawa first entered national politics in 1931 when he was a pilot with the Imperial Navy; without resigning his commission he joined the fascist Kokusui Taishūtō (National Essence Masses Party). He later claimed to have increased 121

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membership to as many as fifteen thousand during his tenure as party head, despite being jailed for three years (1935–38) on suspicion of extorting several high-profile corporations. Though he was not acquitted of the charges until 1941, his close relationships with the military nevertheless enabled him to leverage sufficient capital to purchase rare mineral and metal mines in Japan, Manchuria, and North China, from which he further profited by supplying war materiel to the government. As his extortion trial dragged on in the courts, Sasakawa flamboyantly promoted his political cause. He built a small private air squadron, with which he flew to Rome in 1939 to meet his personal hero, Benito Mussolini, and in 1940 he flew to Manchuria as a representative of the Kokusui Taishūtō. There, he allegedly became romantically involved with the renowned “genderbending” intelligence operative, restaurateur, and alleged assassin Kawashima Yoshiko, who reportedly introduced Sasakawa to Chiang Kai-shek’s underworld funders and suppliers, who would become central to his network in China for the remainder of the war. His wartime political machinations intertwined with his network of business associations such that at the Japanese surrender in 1945, Sasakawa was both purveyor to the Imperial Army and an elected representative of the Kokusui Taishūtō.2 Despite his close association with the fascist movement and service to the wartime state, Sasakawa was not included in the Allied Occupation’s initial roundup of suspected war criminals in 1945 and 1946. He was, however, arrested in 1947 after delivering a series of public speeches defending Japan’s decision to go to war, apparently intended to provoke his own arrest. He was remanded to Sugamo Prison, where he joined Kodama on suspicion of “crimes against peace” (Class A war crimes). US investigators collected hundreds of pages of documents that detailed Sasakawa’s and Kodama’s wartime activities. Yet neither was ever charged; both were released without trial in 1948. Their release was the result of a major shift in US policy, whereby Sasakawa and Kodama, and their wide range of associations, were seen as potential allies in the United States’ efforts to contain the spread of Communism in the emerging Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union.

Gambling on Philanthropy While Japan’s postwar establishment figures kept their relationships with Kodama private, they embraced the affable Sasakawa. He claimed that upon his release from Sugamo Prison, he was inspired by an American marine sports magazine to develop hydroplane motorboat racing as a form of legalized gambling in Japan. In 1951, Sasakawa was able to persuade his political associates in parliament, new

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and old, to back and pass legislation legalizing his gambling operations. By the mid-1950s, his gambling syndicate was sufficiently profitable to finance a diverse range of organizations and initiatives that focused on developing the moral and spiritual strength of Japanese youth.3 During the 1950s, Sasakawa directed the 3.3 percent of gambling revenues earmarked to support the maritime industry into grants and preferential loans to rebuild Japan’s cargo-carrying merchant fleet. He also channeled significant spending to the communities across Japan that hosted the marine racetrack facilities. However, concerns about the accounting transparency of Sasakawa’s operations, and corruption scandals popularized by the press, led the National Diet to pass a revised bill in 1962. The new legislation bifurcated the gambling and philanthropic enterprises by establishing the Japan Ship Promotion Association (JSPA) as a philanthropic organization independent of the Japan Motorboat Racing Association (JMRA),4 which continued to manage the day-to-day sports gambling operations.5 The revised motorboat-racing law directed the JSPA to distribute gambling revenues in roughly equal amounts to two distinct beneficiaries: businesses related to the maritime industry and projects that “aimed at promoting social welfare, education, culture, tourism, physical education and other public interests.”6 While the Ministry of Transportation retained administrative oversight and required more stringent annual reporting on how the sport’s gambling revenues were spent, the revised law also granted Sasakawa a greater degree of independence when it came to deciding which philanthropic missions he would pursue. By the end of the 1960s, the JSPA had funded a range of new social initiatives that promoted social welfare, public health, youth education, disaster readiness, and cultural education.7 Over the next three decades, grants grew from $3.2 million in 1963 to $713 million in 1991 as gambling revenue expanded in tandem with the national economy.8 The focus of Sasakawa’s social and cultural philanthropy sharpened during the 1970s with a series of block grants funding projects that fit both the maritime and social welfare categories mandated by law. Beginning in 1975, block grants funded the Okinawa International Maritime Exposition, the Blue Sea and Green Land Foundation, the Foundation for International Science and Technology Exposition, the International Association of Transportation Expositions, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (which included marine science in its philanthropic mission statement), the International Leisure Expo Association, the International Flower and Green Exhibition Association, and the Hanshin Earthquake Disaster Recovery Project. The key advantage to the establishment of this network of daughter organizations—often run through the offices of the JSPA or its commercial property holdings, and with Sasakawa or a close associate at the

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helm—was their ability to redistribute motorboat-gambling funds independent of direct parliamentary scrutiny.9 Ever the self-promoter, Sasakawa once bragged to a Time magazine reporter that he was the “world’s richest fascist.”10 Whether or not he actually thought of himself as a fascist is unclear, but Sasakawa did distribute a lot of money to a wide variety of organizations and individuals with ties or agendas that closely paralleled the goals of the postwar Far Right. The historian Reto Hofmann has observed how, in the late 1920s, Japan experienced a kind of “Mussolini Boom” in which a “critical view of Mussolini coexisted with a more positive interpretation” where Il Duce (i.e., the Leader) possessed leadership qualities that 1920s Japanese politicians lacked.11 Sasakawa’s attraction to Italian fascism coemerged alongside the political philosophy of Shimoi Harukichi, who explained to his followers that Italian fascism overlapped significantly with Bushido, an idealized vision of the ancient code of the ideal-type samurai warrior.12 Importantly, Sasakawa never publicly advocated political violence as a means to national rejuvenation. In fact, his public political positions, albeit reactionary and laden with wartime ideology, fell well short of the major defining characteristics ascribed to “fascism”; however, Sasakawa did maintain close relationships with those who subscribed to such positions. Perhaps more significant still was how his global philanthropic enterprise had the secondary effect of helping to normalize much of the fascist worldview he had espoused since the 1930s. Rumors, popular innuendo, and US intelligence reports linked Sasakawa to involvement in covert contributions to the campaign coffers and personal finances of numerous politicians in Japan and around the world. But even more significant was the extent to which his very public philanthropy helped to cement his power-brokering empire. Sasakawa used his personal wealth, as well as funds from his network of foundations, to construct a public image of himself as a lavish international philanthropist. He gave substantial donations to universities throughout Asia, the United States, and Europe and made significant personal donations to several offices of the United Nations, including the World Health Organization and UNESCO. He was also a key organizer, and funder, of Cold War anti-Communist initiatives, such as the International Federation to Defeat Communism and the World Anti-Communist League. Sasakawa also gave generously to ultranationalist and Far Right organizations in Japan, such as the coalition of businessmen and imperial-restorationist war veterans who in 1981 founded the anti-Communist nongovernmental organization Nippon o Mamoru Kokumin Kaigi (National Congress to Defend Japan), a conservative coalition that linked Sasakawa with Taniguchi’s Seichō no Ie and the Nippon wo Mamoru Kai (Society to Defend Japan), which was founded in 1974. The National Congress to Defend Japan was

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a product of collaborative efforts since the 1960s to unify the Far Right movements seeking to roll back the reforms mandated by the Allied Occupation and to join forces to push for the revision of the 1947 constitution and reelevate the imperial institution.13 By the end of the 1970s, Sasakawa could claim honorary chairmanships in a wide range of organizations, from veterans’ groups such as the Nippon Shōigunjin Kai (Japan Disabled Veterans Association) to martial-arts training organizations like the All-Japan Kendo Dojo Federation. He was also active internationally. As honorary consul general for the recently decolonized South Pacific nation of Tonga, he used his influence to thwart a Soviet offer to build an airstrip for the Tongan government. A close personal friend of Ferdinand Marcos, he served as chairman of the Japan-Philippine Association, and, in his capacity as chairman of the Japan-Oman Society, he helped facilitate closer relationships between Japan and the oil-producing states in the Gulf of Oman. Transcending the perennially complex postcolonial relationship between Japan and South Korea, Sasakawa became a benevolent patron and lifelong friend of the religious fundamentalist and notorious anti-Communist Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. While some of the many organizations he headed were little more than shell organizations run from his offices in Tokyo, Sasakawa’s philanthropic activities impacted Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.14

Grandpa Sasakawa’s Monday Evening Reminder In the early 1970s, Sasakawa dedicated his philanthropic empire to the promotion of a morals education curriculum for children, the likes of which had not been seen since 1945. But instead of pushing the state to revise its curriculum, a move that would engender direct, vocal opposition from teachers’ unions and local chapters of the PTA, Sasakawa put his support behind privately funded television programming that promoted neo-Confucian moral values to children. Every Monday evening at seven thirty, throughout the mid and late 1970s, millions of children across Japan tuned their family’s television to Net TV to watch the twenty-five-minute animated serial Ikkyū-san.15 The popular television series ran for 294 episodes. Its primary sponsor was a fire safety organization run from a desk in the offices of Sasakawa’s JSPA. The organization’s memorable television commercial titled “One Good Deed a Day” exemplified Sasakawa’s “soft” campaigns to promote conservative social values to postwar Japanese youth. The commercial featured a smiling Sasakawa surrounded by a throng of happy, energetic primary-school-age children as they sang the “Fire Safety Song” (Hinoyōjin no uta) composed by Yamamoto Naozumi, who also appeared in the commercial.

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The fire safety jingle encouraged children to beware of fire, and it also promoted a set of core social values that since the 1960s Sasakawa had asserted were a key part of what it meant to be Japanese.16 The commercial ran well into the 1990s, but had its greatest impact as a regular part of Net TV’s weekly broadcast of Ikkyū-san. It achieved substantial popularity among a generation of young children whose love of Ikkyū-san included fond recollections of “Grandpa Sasakawa” (Sasakawa Ojīsan).17 Ikkyū-san was the ideal vehicle for Sasakawa’s commercial message. The protagonist, Ikkyū, was a smart and playful primary-school-aged Buddhist monk who often found himself in situations where he was forced to outwit the immoral machinations of adults. The series was loosely based on the life of a fifteenthcentury Buddhist monk, whose mischievous childhood as a monk had been enshrined within a tradition of folk tales during the Edo era (1603–1868) and collated and published in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as a means to educate young people in fundamental moral values. Many of Ikkyū’s antics illustrated basic Buddhist tenets, which underpinned the support that the series received from educators.18 The television series, launched in 1975, achieved its highest viewership in March 1976 when it grabbed a 27.2 percent share of the Tokyo viewing audience and 42 percent of the Osaka/Kyoto-area audience.19 Indeed, producers were able to further leverage their success through several animated feature films and live-action television dramas, and they even licensed the Ikkyū-san character as a logo for several companies and product lines. Ikkyū-san’s commercial success made the character a ubiquitous icon of contemporary Japan and an easy exemplar of moral values. Although a for-profit syndicate, the animated television series was well regarded by professional educators and educational associations for its weekly demonstration of how wisdom and intelligence could be wittily applied to defend the innocent from the predations of the corrupt and greedy. Ikkyū-san’s historical location within the Buddhist religious estate of fifteenth-century Kyoto, as well as the animators’ artful recreations of key historical and cultural artifacts of the era, also attracted considerable support from politicians and social commentators, who valued the ways in which the series helped their efforts to preserve Japanese traditions, cultural prewar virtues of loyalty, fidelity, thrift, courage, modesty, and lawfulness, and supreme love of, and devotion to, the nation.20 Viewed in the broader context of the Cold War, however, Ikkyū-san appears less benign. Reto Hofmann argues that international collaborations with the Morals Rearmament Movement—a Cold War–era bridge for moral reform movements in the United States, Europe, and East Asia—functioned in Japan “to reconstruct a politics of the right on the ashes of fascism and empire.”21 Influencing prominent Japanese politicians like Yoshida Shigeru and Kishi Nobusuke,

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a global morals revival orchestrated in Japan through the US-sponsored Asia Center nominally promoted itself as a space for international debate on the importance of moral values. According to Hofmann, however, Japan’s political leaders “found in the political language of MRA a register to reconfigure prewar principles as postwar values, updated to safeguard democracy from the Left, and a decolonizing Asia from the spread of international communism.”22 In the early 1970s, Sasakawa was bringing considerable resources to the table as he set his focus on what he decried as a crisis of morals among Japanese youth. Sasakawa was himself the product of a prewar, state-centered morals education curriculum that had been a cornerstone of wartime assertions of the supremacy of the Japanese people, the divinity of the emperor, and the duty of unbridled self-sacrifice for the empire. Beginning in the early 1960s, the LDP-dominated parliament was able to leverage the popular fear of a perceived upsurge in juvenile delinquency, which was seen as a direct consequence of the leftist student movement, and successfully pass legislation calling for the reintroduction of morals education in the form of a discrete, weekly one-hour course within the curriculum for primary- to secondary-level students.23 The ability of the leftist national teachers’ union, Nikkyōso, to stave off further revision to the state curriculum only helped to galvanize Sasakawa’s resolve. From the mid-1960s onward, the moral education of youth (dōtoku kyōiku) became a philanthropic focus of Sasakawa’s associated network of organizations. Sasakawa himself invested heavily in media campaigns and education programming while also leveraging his considerable influence to create a wide array of organizations and programs tailored to promote a loosely articulated moral vision that resonated with morals campaigns from the prewar and wartime eras. Riding the popularity of the Ikkyū-san series, Sasakawa’s “One Good Deed a Day” commercial influenced the millions of children who watched the series. While the commercial featured a variety of visually entertaining characters— including chimpanzees and a marching sumo wrestler beating a bass drum—the primary vehicle for promoting Sasakawa’s morals education agenda was the “Fire Safety Song.” The tune and lyrics resonated with children, who were entertained by the lyrical silliness of its wordplay even as they were admonished to undertake specific moral actions acted out by a pair of chimpanzees dressed in children’s clothing who appeared alongside one or two children who mimicked the chimpanzees as they performed the prescribed behavior. Each verse of the fire safety jingle began by warning children to be on guard against fire and ended with the line “Do one good deed a day.” The seven verses of the song suggested a good deed for each day of the week: children were instructed to cherish their parents on Monday, be on guard against fire on Tuesday, conserve water on Wednesday, care for the environment on Thursday, be thrifty on Friday, exercise their bodies

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on Saturday, and make someone smile on Sunday. The commercial ended with Sasakawa and his children reciting Sasakawa’s trademark moral imperative: be kind to others and respect your elders.24 During the late 1970s, Sasakawa’s network of foundations launched a series of similar television commercials that implored Japanese children to respect their parents, their national flag, and their traditional cultural values. While not nearly as well known as the “Fire Safety Song,” there was another television commercial that Sasakawa’s JSPA was particularly proud of, which featured Sasakawa and a band of children demonstrating their physical health and filial piety. The thirty-second segment—remembered in official histories as the “Marathon” ­commercial— depicted Sasakawa accompanied by a band of merry children dressed in jūdō gi and running along a placid coastline while chanting with Sasakawa in call-back cadence. In a voice-over narration, the marathon-running Sasakawa instructed the audience, “Be kind to your parents, the sick, and the elderly.” The commercial opens with a group shot of Sasakawa and the children, who are facing the camera and holding up a sign written in large characters declaring, “Let’s use good manners!” (Reigi tadashiku shiyou!). This is followed by a quick cut to a similar scene, with a similar sign and declarative statement, but this time all the children are outfitted in the bamboo armor used in traditional fencing (kendō) and are chanting, “Let’s cherish our fathers and mothers!” After another quick cut, the camera focuses on a hand-drawn color portrait purported to depict Sasakawa at the age of fifty-nine as he carries his then eighty-two-yearold, handicapped mother on his back as he walks up a set of stairs. The commercial then ends with a new voice-over narration by the television voice actor Hirokawa Taichirō—narrator of the animated television series Uchūsenkan Yamato (Space battleship Yamato)—whose closing statement reminds the viewer that “motorboat racing profits are used to build correct minds and strong bodies.” Hirokawa’s words are framed by a flapping Japanese flag and a pack of race boats rounding a marker at full throttle as the commercial fades out and ends.25 The “Marathon” commercial’s use of sports, martial arts, and patriotic symbolism plainly present Sasakawa’s agenda. Indeed, the Japanese martial practices of kendō and judo, as well as the neo-Confucian concept of reigi, were all integral components of the educational curricula that the postwar teachers’ union Nikkyōso fought to keep out of the state schools on the basis that these “lessons” had previously taught Japanese students to blindly support aggressive war in East Asia. Sasakawa’s support for morals education and nationalist rituals, such as the singing of the national anthem and the flag-raising ceremony at the start of the school day, was a coordinated attempt to instill a national pride and love of nation that were anathema to many postwar Japanese. One goal of Sasakawa’s television sponsorships seems to have been to overcome what he perceived to be

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the weakening of the national spirit that resulted from Nikkyōso’s ability to influence how many Japanese remembered the fifteen-year war on the Asian mainland and in the Pacific.

Blue Sea and Green Land Television in the 1970s was a powerful vehicle for Sasakawa’s social missions and played an essential role in the launch of his Blue Sea and Green Land movement in 1972. Funded entirely by motorboat-gambling revenues, the Blue Sea and Green Land Foundation (Burū Shī ando Gurīn Rando Zaidan, also known as the B&G Zaidan, or B&G Foundation) was charged with the mission to provide facilities and curricula for marine education centers across Japan. The central purpose of the organization, which Sasakawa preferred to call a social movement, was to provide Japanese children with the opportunity to develop their minds and bodies away from what Sasakawa and his supporters believed to be the insidious grip of the Communist teachers’ union Nikkyōso. Sasakawa, who was chairman of the B&G Foundation until his death, declared that the goal of the organization was “to help develop young people who are mentally and physically healthy, polite, respectful, and willing to work for other people.”26 The foundation’s official mission statement, the B&G Plan, advocated a grand design for the pursuit of its overarching goal of helping citizens live fit, healthy, and happy lives. The preamble of the plan explained that the foundation’s goal was to encourage “our nation’s young generation to experience nature and actively participate in marine sports, in order to develop physical fitness as well as healthy, rich minds.”27 These objectives were to be fulfilled in four phases: an initial capital investment phase, during which the foundation would build the necessary facilities, followed by a second phase that included programs aimed at “leadership development,” then an “organization building” phase, and then ultimately a final phase and program “providing marine recreation” for youths aged ten and up.28 But it was the economics of the B&G Plan that had the greatest appeal to local government officials. The plan called for local communities, in partnership with the B&G Foundation, to bolster Japan’s natural position as a maritime nation by building sports and recreation centers where children were taught swimming and boating skills to improve their physical health and build spiritual strength. Between 1973 and 1995, the foundation funded 480 regional marine centers (chiiki kaiyō sentā) and 293 Ocean Clubs (Kaiyō Kurabu), which featured an assortment of canoeing and sailing marinas and swimming pools—all staffed at the expense of local governments, whose leaders were eager enough for

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infrastructure to enthusiastically support the curricular recommendations that accompanied B&G funding. Beyond teaching water and boating safety, the B&G Foundation taught moral cultivation. In his introduction to the B&G Plan, Sasakawa asserted that “there are too many children whose spirit has been corrupted by selfishness and laziness as well as youth who are drug addicts and belong to motorcycle gangs. We must stop spoiling our children and teach young people the importance of ceremony and form [rei and setsu], duty and human relations [giri and ninjō], patriotism and filial piety [aikokushin and oyakōkō].”29 He went on to explicitly embed his vision for moral education in the program by explaining that “the particular work of this foundation” was “to teach young people the importance of courtesy [reisetsu], punctuality, and strict observance of the rules.”30 In his zeal to protect the nation from Communism, Sasakawa became a selfproclaimed advocate for traditional Japanese moral values and identified Japan’s martial philosophy as the embodiment of values unique to Japan—particularly the praxis embedded within terms such as rei (manners and etiquette) and setsu (integrity, honor, and chastity). Shawn Bender encapsulates Sasakawa’s commitment to a politicized program for cultural promotion in a quote from Oguchi Daihachi, founder of a taiko (traditional drumming) group that relied on Sasakawa funding. Oguchi saw Sasakawa as “the kind of person who represented the spirit of old Japan,” adding that he “believed strongly in respect for one’s ancestors and in piety toward the gods of Shinto and Buddhism” and “accepted the Imperial Rescript on Education without question.” According to Oguchi, Sasakawa was “the embodiment of kokusui [ultranationalism].” Sasakawa’s support for his taiko group fit with the broader social mission to inoculate Japan against dangerous ideologies and cultural influences through a renewal of traditional values and commitment to the imperial way.31 The B&G maritime education curriculum, adapted from European and American models, was designed to foster sportsmanship, self-confidence, and a clear understanding of the chain of command. In the 1980s, the foundation also sponsored youth excursions to historic ships that had been refitted as museum exhibits that replicated the kind of training once offered to naval cadets. B&G study tours to the Yokohama-berthed sail-training vessel Nippon-maru and the interwar-era cruise ship Hikawa-maru included training simulations, such as a disaster drill, sail hoisting, or loading and dry-firing a naval cannon, and introduced students to the core concepts of command and control embedded within the nationalist, paramilitary atmosphere of shipboard life. The educational programming and permanent exhibits offered youth the additional opportunity to learn some of Japan’s maritime history while aboard a ship steeped in the simulacra of historical artifacts and technology.32

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In 1978, the B&G Foundation launched its highest-profile experiential maritime education program, Youth Boat (Wakōdo no Fune), which ran thirty-seven voyages for more than twelve thousand participants before the foundation ended the program in 1993. The Youth Boat program was heavily subsidized by Sasakawa’s JSPA. The organizers chartered the cruise ship Shinsakura-maru biannually for excursions of up to two weeks to high-profile destinations that included parts of Southeast Asia as well as the South Pacific islands of Guam, Iwo Jima, Australia/New Zealand, and Hawaii, with upwards of several hundred participants whose ages ranged from ten to the midtwenties. According to the B&G Foundation’s official history, the Youth Boat program was designed “to enable young people to experience the wonders of the sea and also to give them a broad outlook extending beyond the boundaries of Japan.”33 Participants were entertained during the voyages by a corps of young adults who taught classes on topics as far-ranging as environmental science and naval etiquette, which were accompanied by vague introductions to the foreign cultures and social customs the participants would encounter during the voyage. Youth Boat voyages also visited Japanese Pacific War memorial sites on the various islands where major battles occurred, and participants and the crew performed memorial services specifically for the Japanese war dead. Yet on the whole, most onboard activities were geared toward keeping participants entertained, and they included “on-deck” science classes that examined freshly caught marine specimens, hula classes prior to docking in Hawaii, sheep shearing for trips to New Zealand and Australia, and naval-themed activities that celebrated equatorial crossings, celestial events, and modern naval traditions.34 While the B&G Foundation reported annually on the number of students who participated in its programs, the number of youth exposed to these sorts of educational programs was less important than the propaganda value gained from their participation. It was the public display of children engaged in foundationsponsored educational enterprises, on television and in print media, that seemed to be the primary measure of Sasakawa’s success and that may have also been the central purpose of the whole endeavor. Sasakawa’s interest in building marine education centers across Japan was partly to use them as a tool to undermine Nikkyōso, which he asserted was Communist controlled and a de facto agent of the Soviet Union. However, there was another dimension to Sasakawa’s advocacy for morals education: it was also an attempt to protect Japan against US cultural hegemony. Sasakawa’s specific interest in the social values that supported the curricular recommendations made by the B&G Foundation dovetailed with many of his other cultural programs and demonstrated his concern for protecting Japanese national culture and the central tenets of Japanese imperial philosophy. Sasakawa’s associates used their television commercials to subtly advocate

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for morals education through carefully selected sponsorships and well-crafted media propaganda. Sasakawa’s network of foundations deployed television commercials nationwide through the sponsorship of more than twenty high-profile television programs, including the popular animated series Doraemon, which was broadcast on the up-and-coming, privately owned networks TV Tokyo, TV Asahi, NNN Television, Fuji Television, and later even TBS Japan. Indeed, from 1975 to 1984, the JSPA was also a major sponsor of the NNN Television evening news program Just News, which broadcast nightly at six thirty. Sasakawa’s television commercials and wide array of television sponsorships gave him significant access to the living rooms of Japan’s growing middle class. The kinds of educational programs favored by Sasakawa’s funding reflected the prewar archetypes for childhood that Mark Jones argues were central to the elite discourses that defined the emerging middle class of the Meiji era. During the late nineteenth and midtwentieth centuries, lay and professional educationalists advocated idealized notions of childhood that reflected the changing ideals considered desirable for Japan’s Meiji-era middle class by portraying the idealtype child as a “little citizen” (shōkokumin) possessed of “moral fortitude and physical vigor.” Taisho-era educationalists reshaped the notion of the Meiji “little citizen” into the ideal “superior student” (yūtōsei), in whom parents, specifically mothers, were encouraged to instill the value of educational achievement for the sake of the family, or the good of the nation. During the early Showa era, the ideal again shifted, this time to advocate for the “childlike child” (kodomorashii kodomo), whom parents were briefly encouraged to teach to abjure material or academic success in favor of cultivating the child’s emotional life through experiential learning.35 Peter Cave and Aaron Moore observe that the call for “children to be younger versions of disciplined adult citizens” intensified significantly as the needs of the wartime state shifted toward preparing younger age cohorts for total war.36 More significantly, according to Reto Hofmann, in the 1930s, Japanese biographers of Benito Mussolini deployed the notions of the “little citizen,” the “superior student,” and the “childlike child” as classed tropes for charting the life trajectory of the young Mussolini for their Japanese audience. According to Hofmann, Il Duce “represented both the ideal of a talented boy who strove to make it in the modern world and that of a child who was reared with the ‘traditional’ family values and who therefore was an exemplary citizen.”37 While Sasakawa did not make a direct call for Japan to return to wartime standards for children’s education, the mission and curricula produced by the B&G Foundation not only rejected many of the pedagogical agendas present in the post-1945 state schools’ curricula but also reflected many of the ideas of childhood that had been omnipresent during the prewar era. Perhaps just as important was Sasakawa’s long-standing fascination with Mussolini, which was

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reflected in his fondness for military uniforms and ceremony. Sasakawa also liked to document his public ceremonies and works on film. The JSPA regularly commissioned short documentaries that promoted a philanthropic connection between motorboat racing and the social values that the kaichō (chairman) advocated in speeches given at carefully orchestrated events across Japan and around the world. Shot by professional film and television crews contracted by the foundation, the documentaries often depicted Sasakawa officiating events in a full-dress admiral’s uniform designed specifically for his role as head of the JSPA. Presen­ tation events often resembled a military review, and attending employees often wore uniforms that distinguished them according to rank and gender. The Sasakawa documentaries had limited distribution, and although they were occasionally cannibalized for commercials and public-relations releases, their primary purpose appears to have been internal edification. The documentaries provided Sasakawa’s extended network of associations with the opportunity to view the chairman promoting their shared philanthropic endeavors as he toured Japan and the world. The extensive collection of films also illustrates the importance Sasakawa placed on ceremony, through their conspicuous display of uniforms, military salutes, formal bows, flag etiquette, and martial drills and music. Indeed, the films are an ample record of the role that proper decorum (reigi) played in Sasakawa’s social mission. Masao Miyoshi’s close reading of the diary of the nineteenth-century Tokugawa Shogunate’s vice ambassador to the United States, Muragaki Norimasa, offers significant insight into the Confucian moral tradition referenced by Sasakawa and his associates when deploying and practicing their notion of reigi. Miyoshi explains that rei, alone or with the character gi, can be translated using an array of English-language equivalents, including “good manners, propriety, ceremony, ritual, rite, courtesy, decorum, etiquette, politeness, gratitude, or honorarium. The word means all these, and much more. One of the most fundamental Confucian terms, it points to the social order from which such ceremonial expressions emanate. In Mencius, rei is taught as ‘a way whereby one enters into communion with others,’ a ‘process of humanization,’ human relatedness. In Hsün Tzu, however, such relatedness is more specifically defined in terms of hierarchy. Rei is ‘politicized.’ ”38 As with the Tokugawa-era statesman, the political and social structure that Sasakawa sought to emulate was defined by what Miyoshi calls a “meticulously formulated hierarchy” in which the “inferior bows to his superior in a prescribed fashion, because this bow confirms the order in which the two understand how to relate.” Sasakawa prescribed that his subordinates be “dressed in a certain formal attire, because the particular habiliments” define “the nature of the occasion” and “the relative positions of the participants.” Indeed, like the Tokugawa-era

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diplomat about whom Miyoshi is writing, Sasakawa seemed driven by a very Confucian concern that “a society lacking this ritual expression of hierarchic distinction, as well as such distinction itself (meibun), was doomed to anarchy and demise.”39 According to the moral education advocate and scholar Iwasa Nobumichi, the problem faced by shūshin advocates after the end of the Allied Occupation was that it “lacked any solid legislative recognition as a subject,” despite its partial reintroduction as an ungraded course in 1958. Iwasa further asserts that “substantial numbers of school teachers never seriously engaged with moral education,” which morals education advocates attributed to “strong opposition from left-wing teachers who insisted that it would lead the country to war again.”40 While Sasakawa’s morals education agenda was not overtly articulated in any of his social welfare programs, there was sufficient evidence that his social philosophy was profoundly influenced by the kinds of social values endorsed by shūshin advocates. Yet it was not until the early 1980s that a fully articulated criticism of the B&G program appeared in the press. In 1982, the magazine of the Public Service Sector Workers’ Union (Jichirō) published a scathing criticism of the B&G Foundation’s attempt to supplant the local government’s role in children’s welfare and recreation programming. The special issue of Gekkan Jichiken outlined the various aspects of B&G programming, with specific criticism regarding the extent to which the foundation had undermined the autonomy of local governments in small towns across Japan by providing them with money to build a large number of swimming, sailing, and boating centers. The authors, who were mostly core leaders and activists of the national public-sector union, expressed concern about the corrupting influence the B&G infrastructural investments, which were sizable, had on local politicians. The issue revealed that local politicians were happy to grant the B&G Foundation representation on committees convened to govern the B&G-built facilities. Indeed, the public employees’ union had encountered similar problems when attempting to include the employees of the subcontractors that ran the municipally owned motorboat-racing facilities in their bargaining unit.41 Though never directly named, it seems likely that the crux of the issue was that staff at the B&G-built, community-operated facilities were paid out of municipal funds but were not categorized as permanent public employees eligible for representation by the union. Indeed, the staffing arrangement mirrored the union’s earlier experience with the JMRA-licensed, city-owned racetracks, which the union asserted foreshadowed an agenda to advocate for further recategorizations of local public-service jobs as lower-paid, nonpermanent (irregular) positions ineligible for union representation. Importantly, the B&G marine centers were not Sasakawa’s first experience with the kind of local politics that surrounded

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local infrastructural investments, nor were local communities unfamiliar with Sasakawa’s reputation as a philanthropist and political activist. Indeed, the municipally owned racecourses at the center of the legal gambling syndicate, built in economically distressed communities that were within easy travel distance to major urban centers, had not encountered significant local opposition— except from the unions Sasakawa already reviled. The plan, however, had elicited only minor comment from the national press. Skeptical voices asked whether small-bet sports gambling facilities, though profitable for the municipality, might not exacerbate the social problems already plaguing the neighborhoods in which they were built. With the exception of debates within the elected assemblies of Tokyo and Osaka over whether or not to divest their municipal gambling monopoly during the early 1970s, Sasakawa’s flamboyant charm and willingness to lavish money on his opposition, as well as his allies, successfully redirected the public narrative of motorboat racing. By the mid-1960s, local race facilities in particular, and the sport in general, were presented within a carefully tended media narrative as having created a sound economic base for local development.42 Despite union opposition, the 1970s B&G programs were popular at the local level—indeed, very few communities could resist the offer of a free swimming pool and boat marina—and while an investment by the B&G Foundation was accompanied by a concomitant morals education program, by the end of the 1970s, it was difficult for most Japanese to discern “Grandpa” Sasakawa’s agenda as anything other than an innocuous attempt to encourage the children of Japan to respect the elderly, clean up after themselves, be on time, be thrifty, and have good manners. Indeed, it was easy to overlook Sasakawa’s morally dubious past. His prewar and wartime life was seldom discussed publicly. It was tied too closely to details that many Japanese did not wish to remember or had never learned.

Flying on the Water While the primary function of motorboat gambling was to generate revenue for the philanthropic activities of the Japan Ship Promotion Association, the sport also played an essential role in promoting Sasakawa’s vision for Japanese society. In 1980, the film production arm of the newspaper and publishing company Mainichi Shimbun released a four-and-a-half-minute newsreel that tracked the daily routine of the motorboat “racer girl” ( joshi rēsā) Tanaka Yumiko during her final weeks as a student in the forty-sixth class of the JMRA racer training school (Motosu Kenshūsho) on the scenic shores of Lake Motosu in Yamanashi Prefecture. 43

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Tanaka’s position as the first woman in nearly a decade to matriculate at, and graduate from, the racer training school at Lake Motosu underscored a general trend in the sport: by the end of the 1970s, the number of female racers had dwindled to less than half that in the early 1960s. The JMRA used the occasion of Tanaka’s being the first woman admitted to the school in nine years to allow the Mainichi news crew full access to her, her classmates, and the school. The focus of Mizu ni tobu (Flying on the water) was Tanaka’s humble sense of her role as a woman in direct competition with men, but the story also served the purpose of promoting a sport whose popularity was waning. The total revenue from boat-race gambling had plateaued in 1977, and racing executives, accustomed to higher rates of growth, were concerned that the increasingly affluent base of blue-collar male gamblers was losing interest and might instead seek out other forms of amusement. The newsreel by Mainichi, the first major news service to show more than a passing interest in the sport since the mid-1960s, offered JMRA officials an opportunity to resituate the public perception of motorboat racing and perhaps find new audiences for the gambling sport. Indeed, the final production was an excellent public-relations puff piece.44 The 1980 Mainichi newsreel follows Tanaka Yumiko during an average week at the JMRA training academy during the weeks before her graduation in 1979. Simultaneously with Tanaka’s matriculation into the sport, JMRA-sponsored racing fan publications were fed storylines about the sport’s newest female racers, stories likely to appeal to gamblers as well as race enthusiasts. The dominant racing magazine, Shūkan Rēsu (published weekly starting in 1959), deployed a ­narrative—cultivated by the JMRA—that borrowed from the trope used for young women who left home to take factory work in the textile mills during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The JMRA presented the motorboat “racer girls” as a twentieth-century embodiment of self-sacrifice

FIGURE 5.1.  Tanaka Yumiko in the Mainichi News No. 1250 documentary short Mizu ni tobu (January 1980). Reprinted courtesy of the Mainichi News film archive. Reprinted with permission.

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and respect for parents: winnings helped to support their fathers, mothers, and siblings. Their victories were not theirs, but for their parents and their hometowns. This narrative framed the mostly rural adolescent girls as filial daughters who took up a career in the sport to help their families overcome economic hardship. Young female racers like Tanaka were held up as moral exemplars of the true spirit of young Japanese womanhood, dedicated to service to their families and nation. Motorboat racing nevertheless offered a well-paying career for even the midranked female racer, and unlike in most professional sports, women not only competed on equal footing against men but were also often ranked in the topten highest incomes from winnings. Indeed, their income security was enhanced by a pay-per-race system that guaranteed all racers, no matter how they placed, a modest salary in addition to a minimum purse (so long as they finished the race). The number of female racers during the 1950s and 1960s had never grown beyond a few dozen, and had dropped off entirely during the 1970s. Tanaka’s debut was followed by a steady stream of female entrants to the sport, such that, by the end of the 1980s, women made up 10 to 12 percent of all racers nationwide. Promoters touted motorboat racing in Japan as the only professional sport in which women competed equally with men. The JMRA rules were written to allow female racers ( joshi senshu) to compete against men because the small, highpowered racing boats favored racers who were slight of build. The managers of the newly created sport, in immediate competition with better-established horse and bicycle racing, needed to ensure their ability to quickly fill sufficient ranks of racers during the rapid pace of expansion planned by the JMRA.45 Tanaka debuted as a professional racer in April 1980, was celebrated as the top-winning newcomer in 1981, took first place on the list of race winnings in 1982, and went on to win the gender-segregated Queens’ Championship in 1987. However, despite her considerable successes as a competitor, Tanaka is best remembered by fans for her 1988 defeat of her boyfriend, the star male racer Suzuki Yukio, whom she married upon her retirement the following year. After her marriage, Tanaka’s surname was stricken from JMRA records and changed to Suzuki. When she was named to the Racers’ Hall of Fame in 2007, the female former racer Takahashi Atsumi—ten years Tanaka’s junior—applauded Suzuki née Tanaka as the “racing world’s own Momoe-chan,”46 a reference to the life trajectory of the pop idol, singer, and screen actress Yamaguchi Momoe, whose short career (from 1972 to 1980) preceded her retirement from public life upon her marriage to her on-screen romantic partner, Tomokazu Miura. Takahashi’s comparison of Tanaka to Yamaguchi underscores the source of Tanaka’s celebrity and the reason for her elevation to the Racers’ Hall of Fame. Although Tanaka was ranked as the highest-earning female racer in 1982, and

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applauded as one of the most competitive newcomers to the profession that decade, the JMRA cultivated a public narrative of Tanaka’s life story that had more to do with her status as an ideal template for Japanese womanhood than with her success as a racer. Indeed, 1980s fan magazines portrayed Tanaka as having achieved the ideal life: her short racing career led her to find and marry her true love, for whom she retired to raise a family—as she was expected to do.47 Released in 1980, Mizu ni tobu was the media narrative that introduced Tanaka to the public. Such short films were a relic of the pretelevision era that, by the late 1970s, were produced and sold to television producers to fill short gaps between programs. Mizu ni tobu opens with a close-up of a small hydroplane speedboat racing past the camera, a rooster tail of water coursing behind it. “Water, waves, and spray, and speeds exceeding eighty kilometers per hour.” says the narrator. “Motorboat racing is a man’s sport. Yet even within this world of speed, there is a young woman. Born in Toyokawa, Aichi Prefecture, the eighteen-year-old Tanaka Yumiko is a student at the Mototsu Motorboat Racer Training Institute.”48 The film follows this introduction by first cutting to a close-up of Tanaka on shore as she changes a spark plug on the specialized outboard motor that powers the small racecraft. Next comes a shot of Tanaka attending a classroom lecture on small-engine theory while the narrator explains that each year, several dozen young men aged sixteen to twenty are admitted to the Mototsu School to learn the skills for professional motorboat racing. “But of course,” he continues, “the school is, except for this one young woman, entirely young men.”49 To add emphasis to this assertion, the film narration shifts to Tanaka’s demure voice, as she introduces scenes of herself engaged in competitive sports with her male classmates by explaining, “Even though I compete with men, I do not want to be thought of as only a woman who competes with men.”50 The film then follows Tanaka through her evening routine—from dinner in dress uniform with her classmates in the school canteen to a late-night strategy chat in the dormitory lounge before mandatory lights out at ten o’clock. Picking up the story before dawn the next morning, the narrator explains that the school operates as a military academy, as the film shows the students as they scramble out of their dormitory to the parade area for the morning flag-raising ceremony and military roll call and inspection. The school required its students, male and female, to follow a strict regimen, which led to a 50 percent washout rate for students who aspired to become boat drivers. In the film, Tanaka explains that although the physical routine and academic studies are grueling, it is her “dream to do [her] best at becoming a motorboat racer” so that she “could take care of [her] parents back home.”51 The centrality of Sasakawa’s moral vision of traditional Japanese social relations required scripting women’s reentrance into motorboat racing to fit within

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gender norms that reconciled his interwar-era ideals with the postwar era. The promotional narratives of “racer romances,” which were for motorboat racing primarily racer-to-racer romances (unlike the highly publicized racer–pit girl romances of automobile and motorcycle racing), served to mediate the blurring of gender roles that resulted from the strong finishes and high earnings of female boat racers. Indeed, like that of the women who played male roles in the all-female Takarazuka Revue, the androgyny performed by female racers while wearing their prescribed racing uniforms served to reinforce existing gender norms, along with tacit conditions for employment that required female racers to perform a self-effacing, chaste, and submissive form of femininity on the race course. Well-publicized racer romances, alongside strong performances on the racetrack, were de rigueur for life as a kyōtei joshi rēsā (motorboat racer girl).52 Sasakawa’s support for the inclusion of women in the cohort of active boat racers resonated with his fascist notion of the ideal type of womanhood. Bret de Bary notes that fascist notions of the ideal woman were coproduced alongside maternalistic feminism as a means to “overcome Western individualism.”53 Importantly, de Bary asserts that once “locked into a framework of reverse Orientalism (the rejection of the Western model in search for a Japan-specific one),” leading feminists “felt obliged to demonstrate a positive contribution” to a wartime state that idealized women as producers of children and vessels of cultural preservation.54 Importantly, wartime-era gender mores also included social roles for young women who were expected to dedicate their productive labor before marriage to the benefit of their patrilineal families. The motorboat-gambling empire needed young recruits to race the boats, and the sport relied entirely on the fastest racers’ being slight of build. While the number of female racers never exceeded 10 percent, racing magazines persisted in portraying female racers within a narrative trope it had borrowed from prewar gender norms for rural, adolescent girls, an institutional trope perhaps best developed within two comic book series from the 1990s.55

Racer Girl Meets Monkey Boy The motorboat-racing monopoly that underpinned the JSPA and JMRA’s joint philanthropic enterprise required a continuous stream of fans to ensure sufficient gambling revenue, which decreased steadily with the aging of the sport’s base of blue-collar male gamblers. Most of the JMRA’s promotional campaigns portrayed the immediate gratification of motorboat gambling, while Sasakawa’s philanthropic enterprises also indirectly promoted the racing enterprise. After Sasakawa’s death in 1995, the JSPA (now called the Nippon Foundation) and the

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JMRA invested in alternative media, comic book series, and animated films that blurred the distinctions between their organizational missions. The motorboat-racing-themed comic book series Kyōtei shōjo (Motorboat racer girl) and Monkii taan (Monkey turn) featured storylines promoting traditional values while showing young readers how boat racing could be a viable profession for the primarily working-class youth who trained to compete in it. Written by Terajima Yū and illustrated by Koizumi Hiroyuki, Motorboat Racer Girl functioned as a kind of vocational edutainment for young comic book fans— ostensibly female ones—whose interest in motorboat racing overlapped with their interest in reading young girls’ comics (shōjo manga). The series ran for fourteen volumes between 1996 and 2003 and traced the daily life and adventures of Hayami Akira, from her first encounter with kyōtei and as a young ruffian escaping personal debt to her professional career as a successful racer. Despite strong opposition from her parents, Hayami overcomes many personal and social obstacles to matriculate at the elite racer school at Lake Motosu, where she endures hard training to become one of the most active racers to graduate in her class. Unsurprisingly, her rise in the profession is fraught with personal and professional challenges as she competes on equal footing with many boys who do not take her as seriously as they should, but her successes are always dedicated to her family, whose many sacrifices she credits—and to whom she always sends her winnings. Motorboat Racer Girl was more popular than expected and attracted a relatively broad base of male and female readers, whom the artists and writers sought to offer a subgenre of graphic novels that reflected “what girls want.” Jennifer Prough argues that the “shōjo manga business produces stories and images for girls that reverberate throughout shōjo culture. Networked with candy companies and toy manufacturers, as well as animation and video game companies, the manga industry underwrites girls’ consumer culture” by turning the perception of gender preference (“what girls like”) into a commodified “system of texts that describe and circumscribe their subjects.”56 The girl-focused shōjo industry, working in tandem with the boy-centered shōnen industry, was built on commodified gender roles that it simultaneously reflected and created. The effort to create a kyōtei-themed shōjo-graphic-novel platform was successful enough to prompt the creation of what became an even more successful spin-off series that featured the experiences of a young male protagonist. Illustrated by Kawai Katsutoshi, and first published in Shūkan shōnen Sandē (Weekly youth Sunday) in 1996, Monkey Turn ran for 385 issues. It follows the story of Hatano Kenji—both his career and a personal life full of overwhelming challenges, devastating defeats, and glorious victories. In his last year of high school, Hatano is unable to achieve his dream of playing for his team at the high school baseball championships (koshien) because his

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coach thinks he is too small to be competitive. After Hatano indulges in much teenage angst over his perceived failure as a baseball player, his homeroom teacher, himself a former kyōtei racer and master of the difficult and dangerous “monkey turn” racing maneuver, approaches him to tell him that his size makes him the perfect candidate for motorboat racing. Hatano experiences an intense personal conversion and declares his commitment to becoming a motorboat racer. He quits baseball altogether and dedicates himself to a frenzy of textbook study and physical training in preparation for the rigorous entrance examination to the Mototsu Training Institute. Hatano passes the exam, and the first issues cover his many challenges adjusting to the hard work and harsh discipline of paramilitary life at the institute, all the way through to his graduation and entrance into the racing profession. Both Monkey Turn and Motorboat Racer Girl were, in a highly diversified marketplace, successful enterprises. The total share of the comic book market captured by these particular product lines (comics, animated films, and related collectible ephemera) was modest, but Monkey Turn was sufficient to support a ten-year run of animated films produced for mainstream theaters, television, and VHS/DVD. The Mototsu Institute even made the first several issues of Monkey Turn part of its official training curriculum, a circumstance both the school and the publisher integrated into their marketing and promotional materials. It is quite telling that the Mototsu Training Institute managers did not adopt Motorboat Racer Girl—despite the sport’s long tradition of “favoring” women. While a key goal of the series was to sell books, films, and ephemera, the series also functioned as a promotional device for motorboat racing by seeking to drum up interest in the sport among young people. The Monkey Turn storyline begins with a teacher reaching out to a young, athletic student from an impoverished family and suggesting a career pathway that would enable him to be a responsible son and take care of his family. The story reflects the morals advocated by the Sasakawa group’s educational outreach missions and functions as a parable of how the employment and school systems were supposed to keep an eye out for the interests of Japanese youth. While the male protagonists in both Monkey Turn and Motorboat Racing Girl generally compete for personal gain, the female racers are repeatedly charac­ terized as competing to help their families overcome rural economic hardship. These publications operated alongside a regular flow of similar stories that were embedded within racing and betting sports magazines and newspapers and provided a rose-tinted view of boat racing as a viable profession for workingclass youth. Sponsorship from the network of interrelated Sasakawa organizations supported the publishers and also underwrote them with advertising purchases that promoted motorboat racing as a leisure pastime for fans or a career

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trajectory for youth looking for a way up the socioeconomic ladder in an era that saw decreasing opportunities for social mobility.57 While it is significant that the inclusion of young women at the paramilitary racing academy could be retrofitted to accommodate transwar notions of traditional moral standards, more significant still is that the racing academy’s curriculum included mandatory morals education embedded within its regular martial drills. Judo, kendō, and even morning assembly included important obeisance rituals that embraced Meiji-era adaptations of the neo-Confucian principles that Sasakawa also promoted through his philanthropic enterprises. The total number of academy-trained racers totaled no more than a few thousand, but the morals education mission of the racer training school had a wider purpose. Sasakawa insisted that the permanent staff of the JSPA also attend the academy as part of their new-hire training. This directive ensured that Sasakawa’s flagship philanthropic enterprise—from which he distributed millions of dollars each year—was highly tuned to resonate with his moral vision. The 1980s saw Sasakawa’s network of associates launch their most ambitious public relations campaign to date, with the alleged intent of securing him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. In her 1981 biography of Sasakawa, Paula Daventry deploys a well-worn narrative of Sasakawa’s life: from his difficult youth to his postwar rise as an international philanthropist. Daventry suggests that the hardships Sasakawa faced in his youth informed a later life defined by altruism. She asserts that all Sasakawa wanted was to make the world a better place for the needy and lost, which is why he strove to bolster the moral spirit of Japanese youth, build museums, support the arts, and invest heavily in programs aiming to ameliorate looming world health crises. It is no great surprise that Daventry’s portrait of a visionary philanthropist has since been upheld as the official public narrative of his memory. The death of Sasakawa Ryōichi in 1995 occurred amid several years of institutional turmoil, which resulted in the selection of the author and Far Right activist Ayako Sano to head the Nippon Foundation from 1996 until 2005. Under Sano’s leadership, the foundation expanded its international and domestic social missions even as the persistent economic recession of the post-bubble economy resulted in shrinking domestic revenue.58 Sano’s remaking of the foundation into a channel for international development aid, in close collaboration with the government, enhanced the foundation’s international influence and smoothed over the domestic memory of the financial scandals that had embroiled the organization during Sasakawa’s last few years at the helm. Sano’s international focus also leveraged a decreasing revenue stream against the Japanese yen’s increasing international exchange value. While overseas Sasakawa’s philanthropic activities made for excellent public relations with Japanese audiences more than with

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those overseas, more significant was that the money, because of preferential exchange rates, could buy more goodwill abroad than it could at home, well into the late 1990s. Sasakawa’s international impact was muted by scandal and frivolity, yet he nevertheless controlled material resources sufficient to accomplish many of his goals.59 Perhaps more significantly, the ideals that underpinned his philanthropic legacy overlapped with the right-leaning swing of mainstream domestic politics and the resurgent acceptability of ultranationalist ideals, as well as with individuals who regularly slung insults and innuendo across the East Asian stage. The political machines enriched by Sasakawa’s largesse indebted sympathetic politicians, public figures, scholars and artists, local schools, prefectural governments, and global institutions to him—relationships that further reinforced the popular notion back in Japan that “Grandpa Sasakawa” was a well-intentioned and sweet old man.

Epilogue

LIFE AND DEMOCRACY IN POSTWAR JAPAN

By the late 1980s, Japan was enthralled by the hubris of Hayekian economic discourses that had seemed since the 1960s to promise a nation defined by middle-class affluence. Since the economic bubble burst in 1993, successive government administrations have failed to solve the cascade of economic problems. For Japanese born after 1960, the continually ailing economy has made it difficult to attain the “minimum cultured living,” which the 1947 constitution guaranteed, and it has been nigh impossible for those born since 1980. Young people, for whom the condition of precarity has been most pronounced since the bubble burst, have been left to fend for themselves—unprepared, untrained, and ­unsupported—while they learn on their own how to bear all the risks of economic decline through an endless string of impermanent jobs that have only limited or no social benefits or statutory entitlements. Discourses of Japanese uniqueness (nihonjinron) promote a mythology of satisfied, hardworking, middle-class salarymen who support suburban families managed by dedicated “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo). This is an invented set of “traditional” social aspirations for men and women that was first inscribed into state ideology during the late nineteenth century. While it did not take long to begin to perceive that the white-collar nation of male salarymen was supported by the denizens of a pink-collar ghetto, there were a great many aspects of the political economy that led many “Japan watchers” to believe that other foundational myths associated with “harmonious workplace relations” belied a long history of conflict and confrontation that presaged the affluent society in which the Japanese then lived. 144

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It was thought that Japan’s spectacular economic growth after 1945 made it an exemplar of modern capitalism. Business leaders in the Americas and Europe, and especially those in Pacific Asia, frequently held up Japan as a model for the development of East and Southeast Asia. Malaysia was among the first to adopt a “look East” policy, explicitly rejecting the “Western model” in favor of one attributed to Japan. In 1979, the American sociologist Ezra Vogel published Japan as Number One, which was subtitled Lessons for America.1 A cascade of similar studies followed, and soon executives from the United States were visiting their former pupils and junior strategic partners to learn the secrets of Japan’s success. Meanwhile, Japanese hubris was reflected in the bits of gold foil one could order sprinkled on sushi at exclusive restaurants. Japan was seen—and saw itself—as the successful pioneer that was solving the problems of late-industrial capitalism, including urban crowding, labor-management relations, and even industrial pollution. The rapid economic growth from the 1950s to the early 1970s dramatically increased the standard of living of most Japanese households. Chapter 1 of this book showed how by the end of the 1960s, the three Cs—car, “cooler” (air conditioning), and color television—were the longed-for icons of Japan’s new material wealth. By the mid-1970s, most blue- and white-collar families had them, or would have them soon. Moreover, by then, most Japanese considered themselves middle class. Unprecedented economic growth during the 1960s enabled government bureaucrats, who were anxious not to return to the social and economic disruptions caused by labor militancy in the 1950s, to encourage corporate managers to refrain from mass layoffs, even when individual firms were losing money. Their companies demanded ever-greater commitments of cheerful labor from workers in return; a grand bargain provided full employment for Japan’s male breadwinners. Pundits, as well as more than a few scholars, often asserted that national economic policy was the secret to Japan’s postwar economic success, in particular Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato’s 1960 income-doubling policy. Less often did they discuss the extent to which state policies were frequently a co-optive response to organized labor and citizens groups’ strong showing in the social protest movements of the 1950s—including a mass mobilization of housewives.2 The “long 1990s” were an era characterized by cycles of workforce restructuring that included mass layoffs and an increasing ratio of part-time to full-time employees. By the start of the twenty-first century, the national unemployment rate exceeded 5 percent for the first time since the early 1950s. When disaggregated, however, employment data revealed a much more troubling concern: the average unemployment rate for persons aged fifteen to twenty-four was nearly double that for the overall population. Despite chronic youth underemployment and persistent sex discrimination in the workplace, unions focused on reviving employment stability and regular wage increases, popularly understood as the

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“Japanese employment system,” which had never been the norm for more than a third of the regular, full-time workers employed by large and medium-sized firms. While established labor unions have generally kept to platitudes of gender equity, a few local groups took a radical turn in the 1990s when they began organizing women-only and community-based unions. According to Kaye Broadbent and Anne Zacharias-Walsh, unlike the women’s departments that had existed within established, male-dominated unions since 1916, since the late 1990s women-only unions developed from locally focused, autonomous organizations of women for women. These new-style groupings built their ground-level struggle utilizing close-knit communities of wage-earning women who felt their feminist ideals were not reflected within the mainstream labor movement. Charles Weathers observes that community unions grew from neighborhood activist groups— like Wakamiya’s ramen shop in chapter 2—that were based in neighborhoods experiencing exceptionally high levels of chronic job insecurity.3 Also developing amid the economic distress of the 1990s, and unlike conventional unions, was the notion that eligibility for union membership and representation was not determined by trade, company, or employment status. Both woman-only and community-based unions reflected the notion of “struggle on the ground” (genba tōsō), articulated in the Osaka slum of Kamagasaki (where Wakamiya opened his ramen shop), by focusing their activities on the protection of individual workers’ rights through collective action directed toward the individual grievances reported by the unions’ members. Although representative of a very small minority of workers, women-only and community-based unions are nevertheless indicative of how, even under the “new management” of the Sixties Generation, mainstream institutions failed to precipitate enough change to improve the economic and social conditions of Japanese at the bottom of the employment hierarchy.4 Part of the reason for this may be that they ran out of time to fix the social and economic inequalities that had propelled them into action as youth. The economic bubble burst just as the Sixties Generation had reached the age and rank where they could oversee the whole program. Between 1991 and 1993, housing prices plummeted and suicide rates skyrocketed. The collapse of the mammoth real estate and stock market bubbles launched Japan on a path leading to more than two decades of economic stagnation, which was punctuated by episodes of fitful growth, deflation, and soul searching. The hubris and certainty that drove the 1980s—“We have all the answers”— was gone: the bubble burst, the Cold War ended, the population aged, rural areas hemorrhaged their populations and struggled to stay alive. Also known as the Lost Decade, this period, in fact, stretched well into the twenty-first century. Unemployment rates hovered around 5 percent all through the century’s first decade (the highest sustained levels of unemployment since the early 1950s),

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while the average unemployment rate for individuals between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four exceeded double that for the overall population. Perhaps more troubling still is that the year-on-year aggregate wages for young people declined, and the ratio of part-time temporary to full-time regular employment rose. Both of these scenarios are the result of an employment system that favored adults who already had jobs over those who sought them.5 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, hundreds of thousands of Japanese youth engaged with national politics through mass public protest, and through this they aimed to change the course of a parliament mired in the political mud of business as usual.6 Indeed, it appeared as if the system, as well as the bureaucrats, politicians, and business leaders who ran it, was incapable of adapting to a changed world, and young people in particular feared that since the 1990s, the system, and the social bargains that had enabled it, had closed off rather than created the kinds of social and economic opportunities that had defined the early postwar era. While social critics and political pundits blamed the state for not developing practical welfare strategies for the future of the nation, many of those same critics and pundits also insisted that it was the filial duty of this Lost Generation of “lazy” young people to buckle down and work harder. These lazy young people, in reality, were the victims of a political mugging; the postwar pathways from education to work that made Japan affluent were replaced by wave after wave of ill-prepared youth with little or no economic prospects. Mary C. Brinton defines Japan’s Lost Generation as individuals who completed their formal education and tried to enter employment between 1997 and 2003. It was during this period that unemployment rates among youth averaged between 8 and 10 percent, and the demand for full-time workers precipitously dropped. Indeed, the crux of this generation’s precarity is irregular (hiseiki) employment, which more than 40 percent of young men and women in the age cohort of fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds relied on by 2003. Importantly, the Abe administration has sought to use this generation’s inability to achieve the “normal” measure of permanent employment as a lever for relabeling unconventional youth as the lazy, unmotivated adult children of affluent families, despite significant evidence that the problem lies with the state’s withdrawal of the workto-employment guarantee that had underpinned the unprecedented economic growth of the postwar period.7

Morals Education and the Imperial Rescript Writing for the Diplomat, the historian Reto Hofmann observes that by the late 2010s, the Far Right in Japan had “found an institutional home within the traditional conservatism of a Liberal Democratic Party that aims for an authoritarian

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transformation of the political system.”8 One way that Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s Far Right supporters transformed political influence into hegemony was by supporting the reintroduction of prewar-era morals education into the postwar national curriculum. Hofmann asserts that Abe’s Far Right agenda—in part evidenced by his close associations with noted Far Right figures as well as his leadership roles within several key Far Right groups, whose lobbying efforts significantly shaped Abe’s morals education agenda—resulted in the reintroduction of a curriculum barely distinguishable from that of the prewar era.9 In 2006, during his first term as prime minister, Abe successfully pushed for a revision of the Fundamental Law of Education (Kyōiku Kihon Hō) to include the requirement that educators “foster an attitude to respect our traditions and culture, love the country and region that nurtured them.” But he failed to achieve a full-scale reimposition of a morals education curriculum that was remarkably similar to the recommendations espoused by organizations underwritten by the Nippon Foundation. Abe’s educational reform included a much more controversial screening of history textbooks to ensure that they reflected the government’s views, under the pretext of advocating the centrality of nationalist sentiment in the curriculum. After a short interregnum (when the opposition party briefly gained control of the government), in 2013 Abe tasked a panel of handpicked experts with the mission of reintroducing morals education as part of the formal school curriculum for grades one through nine.10 Morals education was nothing new in postwar Japan; it was reintroduced as an informal subject in the early 1960s. However, without official textbooks or assessments, teachers were relatively free to teach the suggested curriculum as they saw fit—and often viewed this as an opportunity to teach what the teachers’ union Nikkyōso suggested were alternative “peace” lessons. Abe charged his 2013 committee with the task of creating a standardized, formal subject for mandatory study with written assessments, the results of which would be part of each student’s permanent record. Unsurprisingly, the curriculum recommendations reflected the conservative values espoused by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) members most interested in the issue of “Japanese values”—the Far Right. Perhaps more important than the curriculum reform, however, was Abe’s change to the system of local control over boards of education, which had been installed by the Allied Occupation as an additional bulwark against the resurgence of militarism. While the original powers of these local boards were rescinded by the Japanese government in the mid-1950s, Abe administered the coup de grâce to local control by expanding the power of prefectural governors to appoint and dismiss the heads of local boards of education without the consent of the prefectural legislature. This is particularly important because local boards of education determine the textbooks used in local classrooms as well as the appointment,

Life and Democracy in Postwar Japan      149

and dismissal, of teachers—a power that the leaders of Nikkyōso feared would be abused by local politicians seeking to promote their political agenda in the classroom.11 Since 2007 the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has distributed an instructional text for morals education, “Notes of the Heart” (Kokoro no nōto), which Sven Saaler argues amounts to little more than an admixture of “simple instructions regarding ‘manners,’ of lessons on the importance of ‘tradition’ and the family, as well as guidance regarding values such as honesty, diligence, compassion and solidarity.”12 The guidebook, a byproduct of the LDP’s 2007 revision of the Fundamental Law of Education, has refocused morals education for children into fostering a “deepening love for the nation” as a central objective of education, a shift that Saaler identifies as a “resurgence of prewar approaches regarding the education of nationhood.”13 Encouraged by Abe’s nationalist values revival, in 2016 the Osaka-based private school operator Moritomo Gakuen directed teachers in its primary schools to include in their daily instruction the mandatory routine of reciting the “twelve virtues” prescribed by the 1890 Meiji Imperial Rescript on Education. School owners, later alleged to have benefited from a preferential deal on the purchase of public lands,14 claimed that the practice would serve to inculcate traditional Japanese values in the hearts and minds of the school’s primary-grade students. The prescribed virtues included the Confucian moral directive to be filial to one’s parents, as well as to cultivate learning and the arts and to advance the public good. However, the Meiji Rescript is a modern tradition that from its inception was used to mobilize youth to subsume their individuality into the state. Recited before 1945 by schoolchildren every morning while bowing to a portrait of the emperor, the rescript also called for young imperial subjects to “offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial state; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.”15 The rescript, which was promulgated by an emperor constitutionally invested with the divine right of absolute sovereignty (and who was in fact lawfully considered as divine), also directed students to offer themselves in sacrifice to the needs of the state and embrace the emperor as the rightful sovereign. Neither of these last virtues is in accord with the 1947 constitution, which invests sovereignty in the people and declares the absolute protection of an individual’s fundamental right to live a life of his or her own determination. An artifact of the nineteenth century and an earlier constitutional monarchy, the rescript was fundamentally an assertion of the emperor’s right to require all members of a nation to be willing to sacrifice their interests to his divine rule. Its reintroduction in a private school in Osaka was followed by Abe specifically declaring in

150       Epilogue

March 2017 that the rescript should be taught in state schools, which the Japan Times condemned for giving the “impression the government is endorsing the prewar document that, among other things, dictates unquestioning devotion to the Emperor.”16 Notions of gender and class are fundamental to the operational function of the Meiji Rescript. Its recitation inculcated students, before 1945 and after 2016, with acceptance of a hereditary social hierarchy premised on a normative neo-Confucian patriarchal family structure, which had been advocated since the early 1970s by Sasakawa’s network of affiliated organizations. From television commercials to an animated film franchise, the Sasakawa agenda was able to reach into a remarkable percentage of Japanese homes on a weekly basis. While Sasakawa’s well-funded cultural interventions did not directly lead the Abe government to pursue a morals agenda, three decades of youth programming, philanthropic sponsorship, and political lobbying laid some of the groundwork for what was, in the 2010s, a dramatic shift in state policy with relatively few political consequences. Indeed, the aging Sixties Generation overwhelmingly recorded its support for the Abe administration with election victory after election victory for the LDP.

Dampening Dissent The longevity of the Abe government was underpinned by a political agenda that saw parliament approve his government’s reinterpretation of the constitutional renunciation of the state’s right of belligerence in 2015 and allow the deployment of Japanese troops overseas. Despite seventy years of popular opposition, Abe claimed that the deployment of military force abroad brought Japan one step closer to becoming a “normal nation” unencumbered by the USimposed constitutional restrictions on Japan’s ability to make war. However, it is particularly important to note that Abe’s LDP governed Japan with the consent of an electoral majority dominated by the generation of Japanese born between 1945 and 1957. Equally significant is the way that the generations of Japanese born since the early 1970s came of age amid economic recession, persistent unemployment, and diminishing socioeconomic prospects, which were compounded by state policies that limited the choices for political expression. The multigenerational antinuclear protests that followed in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami seemed to incite the LDP to further restrict civil liberties that were theretofore believed to be guaranteed by the 1947 constitution. David Slater, Nishimura Keiko, and Love Kindstrand argue that the social and political crises of 2011 precipitated significant youth activism against the

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rightward turn of the Japanese state.17 Slater and Patrick Galbraith further suggest elsewhere that the scarcity of work and educational opportunities since the end of the 1990s has created a generationally stratified precariat comprising the first Japanese since 1945 to face the prospects of a lifetime of diminishing opportunity and economic disadvantage.18 Japan experienced a brief resurgence of youth activism in the mid-2010s after it became clear to a significant number of young people that the Special Secrecy Law (Tokutei Himitsu no Hogo ni kansuru Hōritsu), introduced by Abe in 2012 and passed by parliament in 2013, infringed on their basic right to information. Abe claimed that the law, which came into effect in December 2014, was needed to enhance national security by providing all government agencies and ministries with the power to reclassify information as state secrets at will, and without judicial review. The Abe administration forced the law through parliament despite significant public opposition; according to one public opinion poll conducted by Kyodo News in 2013, respondents were more than 80 percent opposed to the law as written. The new law significantly restricted access to pertinent information about the activities of the state, threatening incarceration of up to ten years for anyone caught trying to provide information dubbed secret. For anyone trying to obtain such material—particularly journalists—the penalty was up to five years in prison. One leader of the protest movement Students Against Secret Protection Law (SASPL) commented, “Depending on how we interpret the law, I believe it’s pretty much possible that we could be arrested or interrogated for merely ‘trying’ to access information designated as a state secret. If that’s the case, it would definitely quash our right to freedom of speech.”19 The movement, which protested a law already passed by parliament, was also popularized by new and old media as a fashionable moment for youth to emulate, consume, and discard like any other accoutrement. The Japan Times reported that the young protesters boasted “that their protests are ‘cool’ and meant to be aesthetically appealing. In this, they are confident no adult-led protest organizations can ever match them. Standing atop a moving truck, member students shout slogans punctuated with catchy English phrases, dancing and rapping to DJ-style background music. In response, the participants following the truck get into the rhythm, as if clubbing. The fliers they hand out are stylish as well, meticulously thought out down to the tiniest details, including the fonts.”20 Indeed, the moment was a twenty-first-century “happening” akin to those of the late 1960s. As one young, fashionably dressed, and self-professed club-loving protester explained to the reporter, “We’re very much thankful for all of our predecessors who have passed on the demo (demonstration) culture to us. But when it comes to visuals, let us handle them.”21 As the movement frittered to a halt in early 2015, the law remained on the books, unchanged.

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Yet the movement did not die out. Abe’s next major policy initiative, asserting executive power to deploy Japanese military forces abroad, sparked a transgenerational coalition in 2015 that, at its peak, mobilized upward of one hundred thousand men and women every week to rally against the Abe administration’s plans to deploy Self-Defense Forces overseas—which would have marked the first authorization of Japanese soldiers to use deadly force abroad in any capacity other than self-defense since 1945. Founded by the SASPL activist Okuda Aki, the Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (Jiyū to Minshu shugi no tame no Gakusei Kinkyūkōdō, or SEALDs), was overwhelmingly responsible for mobilizing the age cohorts under thirty. According to the historian Jeff Kingston, the SEALDs movement was “part of a post-3.11 continuum of protests by citizens angered by the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdowns, Abe’s 2012 secrecy legislation that undermined transparency, accountability and democratic values, government inaction in the face of racist assaults on the rights of resident ethnic Koreans and rightwing vigilantism targeting the liberal media that in 2014 Abe publicly applauded in the Diet.”22 Okuda has argued that if “government can change things just with their interpretation, then the Constitution itself is altered and the government can do whatever it wants.”23 While the movement began as a coalition, working under a previously extant organizing umbrella funded by the labor federation RENGO (the successor to Sōhyō) and the Japan Socialist Party, the autonomous youth start-up SEALDs very quickly took center stage, where its youthful, fashion-aware mobilization attracted significant domestic and international media attention. Indeed, media attention was the focal point of the SEALDs movement. Kingston (who was present for the protests) observed that “SEALDs cooperates with the media by holding press conferences, offering interviews, and orchestrating eye-catching events that attract readers and boost television ratings. They appear polite, thoughtful and articulate, cultivating a reassuring image that makes their rightist detractors appear more unhinged than usual. They have also wooed the international press, knowing that fame abroad can translate into legitimacy and coverage at home. It almost seems professional, but strong self-presentation and multimedia skills come naturally to 21st-century youth.”24 Tom Gill, another Tokyo-based academic observer of the movement, told Kingston that one member of SEALDs explained to him “that the idea of adopting an English acronym, ‘was to make themselves more identifiable to international media’ on the premise that ‘getting mentioned abroad is a good way to get local media to start taking you seriously.’ ”25 This approach became all the more important after September 2014, when the Abe administration’s communications minister, Sanae Takaichi, emphasized the government’s preference that the parastatal broadcaster NHK report news reflecting the official position of the

Life and Democracy in Postwar Japan      153

government, a move that the editorial committee of the Japan Times decried as a “shocking lack of respect for press freedoms.”26 Nevertheless, the SEALDs movement was a day late and a dollar short. Parliament had already approved Abe’s policy shift, and the next by-election returned to parliament not just an LDP majority but a supermajority. SEALDs disbanded in August 2015 with the conservative hegemony still intact. The political unimportance of the contemporary younger generations was further underscored by a persistent scarcity of employment and educational opportunities for young people. Nevertheless, Japan was several steps closer to achieving its status as what the neoconservative Ozawa Ichirō called a “normal nation” with the ability, and willingness, to pursue foreign policy goals through military force despite a constitution that renounced war and foreswore the state’s right of belligerence.27 Yet, since the early 1950s, the Far Right has sought nothing less than a complete revision of the postwar social contract. It wants a new document—a constitution loosely based on the one promulgated by the emperor in 1889—that would reestablish state sponsorship of values and institutions banned in 1945 because they were thought to be at odds with the maintenance of a healthy democracy. Sending troops overseas was a start, and mandatory morals education in state schools, underscored by the taught affirmations of patriotism and filial piety, was another significant steppingstone on that path. But this is not all the Far Right wants to achieve, and it seems that there is more to come. The number of young radicals in Japan has never been large, yet the historical impact of their acts of political violence is front and center in popular notions of right- and left-leaning politics, and it is commemorated by an array of electronic and print-media forms that have not precipitated levels of political violence greater than those experienced in the 1970s. Indeed, the 1970s were experienced as a global era of revolutionary terrorism in which Japanese youth played a major role. Memoirs, television serials, video games, novels, comic books, and animated films have given rise to a nostalgia boom commemorating several historical eras of extremist political violence in Japan, including films and novels celebrating the shishi (men of high purpose) of the mid-nineteenth century, and docudrama films, personal memoirs, and internet blogs maintained by the surviving members of the JRA. Indeed, these phenomena have conveyed celebrity status to the daughter of Shigenobu Fusako: Shigenobu Mei built a media career out of sensationalist reporting on her mother’s capture and incarceration. Perhaps more significant is that the nostalgia boom, and the contemporary political climate, has also encouraged the Far Right to abandon the decades of secrecy surrounding annual ceremonies honoring the deified Yamaguchi Otoya as a war god (ikusagami) by publicly commemorating his “patriotic” assassination of the socialist politician Asanuma Inejirō.

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The 1960s and 1970s were eras characterized by conflict between transwar and postwar generations. The five chapters of this book have explored the contours of these generational conflicts by focusing on how nonstate actors tried to mobilize youth who were living along the social margins to join their political cause. This book has triangulated the typologies of gender identity that underpinned Far Right and Far Left rhetoric by arguing that gender discourses, deployed to solicit a political response from young people during the late 1960s and early 1970s, shaped the lived realities of the men and women living the roles prescribed for them by the deeply gendered social hierarchy on which postwar Japan was built. The resulting ideal-type notions of work, family, and political participation invoked attributes associated with manliness and femininity that are more publicly associated with those advocated by the Far Right, while also underpinning the gender roles that constrained the political and economic trajectories available to men and women of the Far Left. Much more significantly, the failure of the leaders of Japan’s state and nonstate institutions to foster sufficient economic and political opportunities for young people have created a bleak future for the succeeding generations of Japanese, who face unrelenting underemployment and political irrelevance in a society likely to be dominated by a generation that will maintain its demographic majority well into the 2020s. Radical or not, the democratic voice of the contemporary generation of Japanese youth is muted by the political and demographic longevity of the Sixties Generation—a generation that, once it was in charge, was quite satisfied with the political status quo.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

  1. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Kazuyo Yamane, Grassroots Museums for Peace in Japan: Unknown Efforts for Peace and Reconciliation (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009); James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); Mari Yamamoto, Grassroots Pacifism in Post-War Japan: The Rebirth of a Nation (New York: RoutledgeCurzon/Taylor & Francis, 2004); and Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010).   2. Thomas R. H. Havens, Fire across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and F. Roy Lockheimer, Vietnam through a Japanese Mirror: The Impact of the Vietnamese War in Japan (Hanover, NH: American Universities Field Staff, 1969).  3. Wesley Makoto Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); Kenji Hasegawa, Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan (Singapore: Palgrave, 2019); Yoshiyuki Tsurumi and Yūichi Yoshikawa Beheiren (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 2002); and Nihon Kyōsantō, Betonamu Indoshina mondai: Nihon Kyōsantō no kenkai to shuchō (Tokyo: Nihon Kyōsantō Chūō Iinkai Shuppankyoku, 1974).   4. Gerteis, Gender Struggles.   5. See Gerteis, Gender Struggles; and Christopher Gerteis, “Losing the Union Man: Class and Gender in the Postwar Labor Movement,” in Recreating Japanese Men, ed. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 135–53.   6. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the SpanishAmerican and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Mire Koikari, “Re-masculinizing the Nation: Gender, Disaster, and the Politics of National Resilience in Post-3.11 Japan,” Japan Forum 31, no. 2 (2017): 143–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2017.1378698.  7. Oguma Eiji, Uzuoka Kennichi, and Takahashi Naoki, 1968: Wakamonotachi no hanran to sono haikei (Tokyo: Shinnyōsha, 2009), 301–2.   8. Till Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung: Studentenbewegung, Antiimperialismus und Terrorismus in Japan (1968–1975) (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2016); Oguma Eiji, “Japan’s 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13, issue 11, no. 1 (23 March 2015): 1–27; Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Ueno Chizuko, Sai no seiji-gaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015); and Chelsea Szendi Schieder, “Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left, 1957–1972” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014).

155

156       NOTES TO PAGES 6–19

  9. David R. Ambaras, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday life in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and David R. Ambaras, Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 10. Robert S. Yoder, Youth Deviance in Japan: Class Reproduction and Non-conformity (Melbourne: Trans Pacific, 2004). 1. UNIONS, YOUTH, AND THE COLD WAR

  1. See Christopher Gerteis, “Political Protest in Interwar Japan—1: Posters & Handbills from the Ohara Collection (1920s–1930s),” in Visualizing Cultures: Image Driven Scholarship, ed. John W. Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT OpenCourseWare, 2013), https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/protest_interwar_japan/index.html.   2. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Miriam Rom Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).   3.  Shinoda Toru, “ ‘Kigyōbetsukumiai wo chūshin toshita minshūkumiai’ to ha (ge),” Ōhara Shakaimondai Kekyūjo Zashi 561 (November 2005): 12–14; and Kokumin Bunka Kaigi, Kokumin bunka kaigi no yonjūnen (Tokyo: Kokumin Bunka Kaigi), 3–15.   4. Miyake Akimasa, Reddo paaji to ha nanika—Nihon senryo no kage (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1994).   5. See Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-­ Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), 15–17.   6. The political position advocated in this poster is at best naive given the intentions of the United States to continue to dominate Japan’s international relations policies, writ into the legal framework of the treaties that ended the occupation. The United States also provided the finances and military security for Japan’s national defense in the event of foreign invasion. But the poster is understandable given the harsh treatment that many labor activists had endured during the Red Purge of 1950, and the general optimism that Japanese leftists felt about the role that Communist China would play in the region through most of the 1950s. But while the New China offered a political vision for Japan’s left-wing labor activists, the Japanese government’s alliance with the United States had set the nation in a completely different direction.   7. Miyake, Reddo paaji to ha nanika; Kevin Doak, “What Is a Nation and Who Belongs? National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in 20th Century Japan,” American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (1997): 295.   8. Curtis Anderson Gayle, Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002); and Victor Koschmann, review of Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism, by Curtis Anderson Gayle, Journal of Japanese History 31, no. 2 (2005): 489.   9. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 87; Gayle, Marxist History; and Koschmann, “Review.” 10. Tom Havens reports that between 1967 and 1970, more than eighteen million students and intellectuals, housewives, and workers joined demonstrations to voice their opposition to US foreign policy for the Far East. Thomas Havens, Fire across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 55. 11. Asada Sadao, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the A-Bomb Decision, 1945–1995,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4, no. 2 (1995): 95–116.

NOTES TO PAGES 20–33      157

12. Kaikō Takeshi, Kaikō Takeshi zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1991); Kaikō Takeshi, Into a Black Sun (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1980); Honda Katsuichi and John Lie, The Impoverished Spirit in Contemporary Japan: Selected Essays of Honda Katsuichi (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993); Honda Katsuichi, Honda Katsuichi shū (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1993); and Honda Katsuichi, Vietnam War: A Report through Asian Eyes (Tokyo: Mirai-sha, 1972). 13. Takemasa Ando, Japan’s New Left Movements (London: Routledge, 2016), 63–65. 14. “Big Japanese Riot at US Base,” Chicago Tribune, 22 January 1968. 15. The folder “Hansen, 1965.7–1969.5,” in the papers of Sōhyō Organizing Department, Ōhara Institute for Social Research, Hōsei University; and Takami Keishi, Hansen Seinen’iinkai (Tokyo: San’ichishobō, 1968), 132–84. 16. Takami, Hansen Seinen’iinkai, 72–106, 132–84; and Yui Ryōko, Shigenobu fusako ga ita jidai (Tōkyō: Sekaishoin, 2011). 17. Takami, Hansen Seinen’iinkai, 132–84. 18. From notes filed in “Hansen, 1965.7–1969.5”; Mizuno Aki, Ōta Kaoru to sono jidai: “Sōhyō” rōdō undō no eikō to haitai (Tokyo: Dōmei Shuppan Sābisu, 2002), 110–15; and Sōhyō Seinenbu, “Seinenbu katsudō no genjō to mondaiten: Zadankai,” Gekkan Sōhyō 4 (1968): 39–71. 19. Takahei Makō, Kamagasaki sekigun heishi Wakamiya Masanori monogatari (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2001), 13–24; and Takami, Hansen Seinen’iinkai, 24–71. 20. Sōhyō Seitai Iinkai, “Hansen tōsō to seinen rōdōsha no yakuwari,” Gekkan Sōhyō 4 (1968): 18–27; and Enda Genzō, “Seinen rōdōsha to shaseidō no tachiba,” Gekkan Sōhyō 4 (1968): 28–38. 21. Takahei, Kamagasaki sekigun heishi, 13–24; and Takami, Hansen Seinen’iinkai, 132–84. 22. From notes filed in the folder labeled “Antiwar Youth Committee, 1965.7–1969.5,” in the papers of the Sōhyō Organizing Department; Mizuno, Ōta Kaoru to sono jidai, 88–95; Havens, Fire across the Sea; Takagi Masayuki, Zengakuren to Zenkyōtō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1985); and “Hansen, 1965.7–1969.5.” 23. “Document on Secret Japan-U.S. Nuclear Pact Kept by Ex-PM Sato’s Family,” Kyodo News, 23 December 2009. 24. Air crash statistics are commonly tracked by retired military personnel. See the website Project Get Out and Walk, accessed 12 December 2016, http://www.ejection-history. org.uk/project/year_table.htm; and the collaboratively edited Wikipedia page “Lists of Accidents and Incidents Involving Military Aircraft,” accessed 12 December 2016, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_military_aircraft. 25. Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sōrengō, Tatakau Zengakuren (Tokyo: Dō Jōsenbyu, 1968–74), 4–7; and Takagi, Zengakuren to Zenkyōtō, 90–99. 26. Ōmachi Keisuke, “Seinen wo gisei to shite keizai ha seichō shita—kōdoseichō to teichingin,” Gekkan Sōhyō 3 (1964): 65–73. 27. Ōmachi, “Seinen wo gisei,” 68. 28. Doi Daisuke, Betonamu shashin o torimodosu kai: Kodomo o mamoru sekai kaigi junbi-kai (Shijinkaigi: Nihon kikan-shi tsūshin-sha, 1969), 37 cm x 51 cm, Ōhara Digital Archive: PB3141. 29. Takami, Hansen Seinen’iinkai, 132–84. 30. Importantly, patriarchy is the assertion of authority not only of males over females but of male family heads over younger males. 31. Japanese Social Values Survey, 1973–2008, Public Opinion Research Department of NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute, University of Tokyo Social Research and Data Archive Research Center SSJ Data Archive. 32. The magazine does not tell us the actual work that Suzuki did at the Ōmiya Workshop.

158       NOTES TO PAGES 33–44

33. The Ōmiya facility, which serviced rolling stock for a half dozen major railway lines, was, despite appearances, the heart of Kokurō’s cultural and political enterprises intended to promote concepts and ideals thought to help build a socialist consciousness among rank-and-file workers. Wesley Sasaki-Uemura more fully explores how the hardworking makkuro papa (soot-covered fathers) of a similar Japanese National Railways workshop in the 1950s composed their poetical expressions of work, life, and union. Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 81–111. 34. Nihon Tōkei Kyōkai, Nihon tōkei nenkan (Tokyo: Nihon Tōkei Kyōkai, 1975), 71. 35. Kumazawa Makoto, Portraits of the Japanese Workplace: The Labor Movement, Workers, and Managers, trans. Andrew Gordon (London: Routledge, 1996), 125–58. 36. Like their prewar predecessors, Japan’s postwar unions also were in close collaboration with sympathetic artists and intellectuals to create what they hoped would become the basis of a socialist national culture for Japan. Shinoda, “ ‘Kigyōbetsukumiai wo chūshin toshita minshūkumiai,’ ” 13–31; and Kokumin Bunka Kaigi, Kokumin bunka kaigi, 3–15. 37. Yamada Akihiko, “Kōsekishō,” Kokurō bunka 1 (1975): 3–4. 38. Onimaru Hiroyuki, “Roppyaku nen to yonhyaku nen,” Kokurō bunka 1 (1975): 2–3. 39. Kasuya Yuko’s gold medal was the first won by a Japanese national. Ōki Kiyoshi, “Chōmirai’ no sukōbai,” Kokurō bunka 1 (1975): 4–5; and Organizing Committee for the XIth Olympic Winter Games Sapporo 1972, ed., The XI Olympic Winter Games Sapporo 1972: Official Report, http://www.olympic.org/uk/games/past/index_ uk.asp?OLGT=2&OLGY=1972, accessed 18 June 2008. 40. Kamakura Takao and Sakai Ichizō, “Infure to tatakau,” Kokurō bunka 1 (1975): 8–19. The railway workers’ union Kokurō was far weaker than it had been at the start of the postwar period. In part precipitated by the rise of the trucking industry, conservative factions in government and management initiatives to break the union had for all intents and purposes ended the railway union’s primary means of wielding political power—the ability to control the nation’s primary transportation modes—and split the railway workplace into three distinct bargaining units. Charles Weathers, “Reconstructing Labor-­Management Relations in Japan’s National Railways,” Asian Survey 34, no. 7 (1994): 621–33. 41. See Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 44–106. 42. Kamakura and Sakai, “Infure to tatakau,” 9. 2. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE JAPANESE RED ARMY

  1. Takazawa, Kōji, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Lina Terrell, Ryoko Yamamoto, Kazumi Higashikubo, Shinji Kojima, Eiko Saeki, Kazutoh Ishida, Midori Ishida, Destiny: The secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017).   2. Jeremy Peter Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 20–21.   3. Sara M. Evans, “Sons, Daughters, and Patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 Generation,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (2009): 331–47.   4. Oguma Eiji, “What Was and Is ‘1968’? Japanese Experience in Global Perspective,” Asia-Pacific Journal 16, issue 11, no. 6 (21 May 2018): 1. This article is substantially revised from Oguma Eiji, “ ‘1968’ towa Nande Attaka, Nan de Arunoka,” Shiso, no. 1129 (May 2018): 6–19.   5. Oguma, “What Was and Is ‘1968’?,” 1.   6.  Oguma Eiji, Uzuoka Ken’ichi, and Takahashi Naoki, 1968 [jō/ge] (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2009), 160; and Oguma Eiji, “Japan’s 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic

NOTES TO PAGES 44–48      159

Growth in an Age of Turmoil,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13, issue 12, no. 1 (23 March 2015): 2. Oguma’s stunning two-volume history of 1968, even as it meticulously documented the political moment, nonetheless reified “Western” youth as more authentically radical than their Japanese contemporaries. Oguma’s dissatisfaction with “Sixties” youth in Japan aptly rests with those unwilling to go the full distance by uniting into a social movement capable of making serious political change—a high standard never achieved elsewhere either. His critique nevertheless reflects his disdain for the tendency for Sixties scholarship in Japan to uncritically, blindly celebrate the historical moment in a fashion too often bordering on nostalgia.   7. Oguma, “ ‘1968’ ”; and Chelsea Szendi Schieder, “Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left, 1957–1972” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 207–9.   8. Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 139–70.   9. Schieder, “Coed Revolution,” 210; Morisaki Kazue, Daisan no sei: Haruka naru erosu (Tokyo: Kawadeshoboshinsha, 2017); and Morisaki Kazue, Tatakai to erosu (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1976). 10. Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 4. (November 1989): 724–40. 11. Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers,” 726; Yui Daizaburō, Ekkyō suru 1960-nendai = The Transborder Sixties: Beikoku Nihon Seiō no kokusai hikaku (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2012); Takaya Shiomi, Sekigunha shimatsuki: Moto gichō ga kataru 40nen (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2009); Fusako Shigenobu, Haruo Wakō, Masao Adachi, Kōji Wakamatsu, Takaya Shiomi, and Kuhachirō Koarashi, Nihon Sekigun! Sekai o shissōshita gunzō (Tokyo: Toshoshinbun, 2010). 12. Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers,” 727. 13. Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers,” 727. 14. “Saigo no hitori, Haneda-gi notto-ki no jōkyaku ‘Yodo’ Pyon’yan-gi,” Asahi shinbun, 5 May 1970; “Sōru zanryū no beijin shinpu kinichi—Nikkō-ki Yodo-gō haijakku jiken,” Yomiuri shinbun, 5 May 1970; “Yodo-gō no mimai-kin,” Yomiuri shinbun, 9 May 1970. 15. The plan for the hijacking had been captured in advance by accident but was not fully decrypted until afterward, when its primary architect, Takaya Shiomi, was arrested on an unrelated charge. Takaya’s notes revealed that the motive had been to turn their very public defection into a clarion call for others who would join them in a global revolution based in North Korea. Takaya Shiomi, Sekigunha shimatsuki: Moto gichō ga kataru 40nen (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2009). 16. Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers,” 730. 17. Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows, 144–45. 18. Schieder, “Coed Revolution,” 207–9. 19. She offers no specific reason for her embrace of violent revolution, but her pathway to radicalization follows a trajectory of a small number of like-minded young radicals who by the late 1960s had experienced a decade of the state’s extralegal machinations to undermine the political will of the demographic majority—Japanese under aged thirty. See Shigenobu Fusako, Waga ai, waga kakumei (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1974), 15. 20. Shigenobu, Waga ai, waga kakumei, 164–202; Shigenobu Fusako, Nihon sekigun shishi: Paresuchina to tomoni (Tokyo: Kawadeshobōshinsha, 2009), 18–22. 21. Shigenobu, Waga ai, waga kakumei, 168; Shigenobu, Nihon sekigun shishi, 20–22. 22. Shigenobu, Waga ai, waga kakumei, 164. 23. Shigenobu, Waga ai, waga kakumei, 167. 24. Shigenobu, Nihon sekigun shishi, 18. 25. Shigenobu, Nihon sekigun shishi, 20. 26. Shigenobu, Nihon sekigun shishi, 19.

160       NOTES TO PAGES 48–50

27. Shigenobu, Nihon sekigun shishi, 22. 28. Shigenobu’s first protest march was an anti–Vietnam War demonstration sponsored by the antiwar citizens’ movement Beiheiren (Betonamu ni Heiwa o Shimin Rengō [the Alliance of Citizens against the Vietnam War]), where, she said, “I loudly chanted with classmates and made a sign: ‘Please stop the American bombing of North Vietnam!’ [which on the flipside read] ‘USA out of Vietnam!’ It was a fun first experience.” Shigenobu, Waga ai waga kakumei, 164–202; and Shigenobu, Nihon sekigun shishi, 19. 29. Shigenobu, Nihon sekigun shishi, 18–22. 30. Onishi examines the extent to which an ideology of racial liberation overlapped first with the struggle for Okinawan independence and then with demands for Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty. After the reversion to Japan became the de facto reality, popular support in Okinawa disappeared precipitously once it became clear that US military bases would remain in Okinawa. Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Twentieth-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 115–16; Matthew D. Johnson, “From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949–1979,” Past & Present 218, no. S8 (2013): 233–57. 31. The off-base clubs and bars that catered to the US marines in Okinawa were racially segregated, and Ishikawa’s photographs upset a great many Japanese, Okinawans, and Americans for their raw depiction of life inside off-base, black-only establishments in the mid-1970s. Ishikawa Mao, Atsuki Hibi in Kyampu Hansen (Naha, Okinawa: A-Man Shuppen, 1982); and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 32. Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 10–15. 33. Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 115–17; David Obermiller, “Dreaming Ryūkyū: Shifting and Contesting Identities in Okinawa,” in Japan since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble, ed. Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S. George (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 69–88; and Keisha N. Blain, “On ‘Transpacific Antiracism’: An Interview with Yuichiro Onishi,” Black Perspectives, 26 February 2015, http://www.aaihs.org/ on-transpacific-racism-an-interview-with-yuichiro-onishi-2/. 34. Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the First Age of Terror (New York: Penguin, 2015); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993); and Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories, 2011). 35. While fundamentally a domestic movement defending black Americans from the predations of white capitalist exploitation, Black Panther delegations who toured recently decolonized countries of North Africa and East Asia witnessed firsthand how US capitalist imperialism had similarly impacted the lives of third-world peoples. See Sean L. Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Jason Christopher Jones, “The Black Panther Party and the Japanese Press,” Journal of African American Studies 21 (2017): 42–47, https:// doi.org/10.1007/s12111-016-9337-1; and Cristina Mislan, “From Latin America to Africa: Defining the ‘World Revolution’ in The Black Panther,” Howard Journal of Communications 25 (2014): 211–30. 36. Quoted in Billy X. Jennings, “Huey P. Newton Returns from China—1971,” It’s About Time, accessed 22 December 2017, http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Inter national/Returning_from_China.html. 37. Jennings, “Huey P. Newton.” 38. Jennings, “Huey P. Newton.” 39. Jones, “Black Panther Party,” 65. 40. Jones, “Black Panther Party,” 66.

NOTES TO PAGES 50–57      161

41. William Tucker, “Yellow Panthers: Black Internationalism, Interracial Organizing, and Intercommunal Solidary” (BA thesis, Brown University, 2004), 52; and Huey P. Newton, “Speech at Boston College,” 18 November 1970, Democracy and Class Struggle, http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/huey-newtons-speech-at-bos ton-college.html. 42. Jones, “Black Panther Party,” 42–44; Mislan, “From Latin America to Africa,” 225; Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 155–56; and “Message to UFAF Conference from Japan,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 26 July 1969, 2. 43. Jones, “Black Panther Party,” 47. 44. The visit prompted the director Ogawa Shinsuke, who accompanied the Black Panther delegation to Sanrizuka, to make the agitprop “bullet film” (dangan eiga) Sanrizuka: Daisanji kyosei sokuryo soshi toso (Sanrizuka: The three-day war), documenting three days on the struggle site as Narita riot police battled several thousand protesters amid the fortresses, tunnels, and barricades they built to stop the government’s forced eviction of farmers who did not want to leave their land. Elbert Howard, “All Power to the People,” Black Panther, 11 October 1969, 8; Elbert Howard, Panther on the Prowl (self-pub., 2002); “America Shinsayoku no Chouryuu,” Asahi jānaru 11, no. 41 (5 October 1969): 106–12; “America Shinsayoku no Chouryuu,” Asahi jānaru 11, no. 42 (19 October 1969): 37–42; and Yasukazu Amano, Zenkyōtō Keiken no Genzai (Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 1997). 45. Adrienne Carey Hurley, Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 46. [Shigenobu Fusako], Sekigun: 1969–2001 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2001), 2–8, 68–125. 47. The PFLP advocated a Marxist-Leninist variation on “Pan-Arabism” that positioned the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination as a cornerstone of the worldwide struggle against Western imperialism, and was the only Marxist member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). 48. “Imahamukashi Sekigun = PFLP sekai sensō sengen no senden basu = tsūshō ‘aka basu’ ni notte ita,” accessed 5 July 2019, https://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/kugayama322/65194 609.html. 49. Wakamatsu Koji (director) and Adachi Masao (writer), Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai sensō sengen (Wakamatsu Purodakushon, 1971); Wakamatsu Koji (director) and Adachi Masao (writer), Seizoku (Wakamatsu Purodakushon, 1970); and Isolde Standish, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (London: Continuum, 2011), 106–7. 50. Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Ideology, Identity, and Political Violence in Four Linked Japanese Groups” (paper presentation, European Consortium on Political Research 2015 General Conference, session titled “The Role of Ideology in Violent Politics: Mobilization, Strategy, and Targeting,” Montreal, 28 August 2015), https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/ PaperProposal/3b0075c4-d1d9-4715-8d35-1601e784d61f.pdf. 51. Wakamatsu and Adachi, Sekigun-PFLP. 52. The Tupamaros (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros) was a Uruguayan Maoist revolutionary group. 53. Anne Walthall argues that in Japan, guns and gunmanship were historically linked to notions of masculinity in that “unlike in other countries such as India, Britain, and the United States where women handled guns, Japanese women in early modern Japan did not fire guns.” Anne Walthall, “Do Guns Have Gender?,” in Recreating Japanese Men, ed. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 25–26. 54. Adachi Masao (director), Jogakusei gerira (Wakamatsu Purodakushon, 1969).

162       NOTES TO PAGES 58–72

55. Lead singer, lyricist, and group founder Nakamura Haruo explained that the band name was an homage to the A-side track on Frank Zappa’s 1966 single for Verve Records, “Who Are the Brain Police?” 56. ZEZE Takahisa (director), Dokyumentarī zunō Keisatsu (Transformer, 2009). 57. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 3–10. 58. Takahisa, Dokyumentarī zunō Keisatsu. 59. Nakamura Haruo, “Intorodakushon: Sekai kakumei sensō sengen,” Zunō Keisatsu 1 (reissued by Hyabusa Landings/Flying Publishers, 2012). 60. Liner notes to Zunō Keisatsu, Zunō Keisatsu 1 (Bikutā entateinmento, 1972); and Suda Yuichi, Zunō Keisatsu (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2004), 119–20. 61. Nakamura “Intorodakushon.” 62. Liner notes to Zunō Keisatsu 1; and Suda, Zunō Keisatsu. 63. Takahei Masahito, Kamagasaki Sekigun heishi Wakamiya Masanori Monogatari (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2001), 13–15. 64. Till Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung: Studentenbewegung, Antiimperialismus und Terrorismus in Japan (1968–1975) (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2016), 127–29. 65. Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung, 127–29. 66. Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung, 127–29. 67. Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung, 127–29. 68. Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung, 177–79. 69. Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung, 190–92. 70. Takahei, Kamagasaki Sekigun Heishi, 203–4. 71. Takahei, Kamagasaki Sekigun Heishi, 205–8. 72. Takahei, Kamagasaki Sekigun Heishi, 205–8. 73. Takahei, Kamagasaki Sekigun Heishi, 210–15. 74. Takahei, Kamagasaki Sekigun Heishi, 220–25. 75. Newspaper analysis used the average annual occurrence of specified keywords in headlines published between 1960 and 1979, compiled from the online databases of Yomiuri shimbun (Yomiuri daily news) and Asahi shimbun (Asahi daily news). Yomidasu reskishikan dētabēsu, accessed 24 December 2016, http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/database/ rekishikan; and Asahi shinbun jinbutsu dētabēsu, accessed 12 January 2017, https://data base.asahi.com. 3. POLITICAL ALIENATION AND THE SIXTIES GENERATION

  1. Takahashi Kōichi and Aramaki Hisashi, “Nihonjin no ishiki—40 nen no kiseki (1): Dai kyū kai ‘Nihonjin no ishiki’ chōsa kara,” Hōsō kenkyū to chōsa 64, no. 7 (2014): 2–39.   2. The survey team shifted to telephone interviews in the late 1990s.   3. The data for this secondary analysis, “Nihonjin no ishiki chōsa, 1973–2008, Nihon hōsōbunkakenkyūjoseronchōsa-bu,” was provided by the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Center for Social Research and Data Archives, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo; and Takahashi and Aramaki, “Nihonjin no ishiki—40 nen no kiseki (1),” 2–5.   4. “Nihonjin no ishiki chōsa.”  5. “19–6 Unemployed Persons and Unemployment Rate by Age Group and Sex (1968–2010),” August 1, 2018, Statistical Survey Department, Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.   6. Mary C. Brinton, Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 34–37.   7. Melvin Seeman, “On the Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review 24, no. 6 (December 1959): 788, 790.

NOTES TO PAGES 72–99      163

  8. Takahashi Kōichi and Aramaki Hisashi, “Nihonjin no ishiki—40 nen no kiseki (2): Dai kyū kai ‘Nihonjin no ishiki’ chōsa kara,” Hōsō kenkyū to chōsa 64, no. 8 (2014): 2–3.   9. Itō Takashi, “Nihonjin no seidjiteki sogai ishiki—seidjiteki yūkōsei kankaku no kōhōto bunseki,” Fōramu gendai shakaigaku, 2017, 15–28; Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 10. Itō, “Nihonjin no seidjiteki sogai ishiki,” 17. 11. “Nihonjin no ishiki chōsa.” 12. “Nihonjin no ishiki chōsa.” 13. See Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and MaleDominated Unions in Postwar Japan, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010); and Yuko Ogasawara, Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 14. More recently, a corporate version of keigo (an exaggerated deferential variation known as “manual keigo” or “part-timer keigo”) has grown to dominate the service-sector workplace. Most service-sector employers, Japan’s ubiquitous convenience stores in particular, require their employees to learn the company’s version of keigo from companypublished manuals (hence the name “manual keigo”) and use it as a demonstration of extreme deference to higher management as well as customers. Horasawa Shin and Oka Eriko, “The Uses of ‘Baito’ Keigo by Young People in Part-Time Jobs: The State of Mind of Speakers and the Impressions of Listeners,” Bulletin of the Faculty of Regional Studies, Gifu University 19 (31 August 2006): 1–31. See also Barbara Pizziconi, “Japanese Honorifics: The Cultural Specificity of a Universal Form,” in Politeness in East Asia, ed. Sara Mills and Dániel Z. Kádá (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 45–70. 15. “Nihonjin no ishiki chōsa.” 16. “Nihonjin no ishiki chōsa,” 1973 and 1978. 17. As a core social practice, keigo is embedded within the externality of expression, accent, and tone of voice—as well as within the internal mental habits, forms of perception, and tendencies toward classification—that shapes the life chances of individuals and their position in the social structure of Japan. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Culture: Critical Concepts in Sociology, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003), 63–99. 18. Indeed, variations on this type of question appeared in national surveys in many postwar European countries where younger populations during the 1960s and 1970s seemed to be trending toward support for the abolition of their constitutional monarchies, the United Kingdom especially. See National Centre for Social Research, “British Social Attitudes 33,” accessed 29 December 2016, http://www.bsa-data.natcen.ac.uk; Jim Mann, “Britain Uncovered Survey Results: The Attitudes and Beliefs of Britons in 2015,” Guardian, 19 April 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/19/britainuncovered-survey-attitudes-beliefs-britons-2015; and Mark Easton, “Why Does the UK Love the Monarchy?,” BBC News, 29 May 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18237280. 19. Kenneth Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945– 1995 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 112. 20. Takahashi and Aramaki, “Nihonjin no ishiki—40 nen no kiseki (2),” 22–23. 21. Of men aged sixteen to nineteen, 8.8 percent responded “I feel antipathy” and 5.6 percent responded “I have respect,” while 7.3 percent of men aged twenty to twentyfour reported “antipathy” and 7.3 percent “respect.” 22. Karl Mannheim,  Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 286–320.

164       NOTES TO PAGES 101–106

4. COLD WAR WARRIORS

  1. In accordance with my ethical obligation as a researcher, I am reporting that I have benefited from significant financial support from the Nippon Foundation and its affiliate the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. This research has not been sponsored by either organization and does not represent their perspective or point of view.   2. Andrew Levidis, “Politics in a Fallen Empire: Kishi Nobusuke and the Making of the Conservative Hegemony in Japan,” in In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia, ed. Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020), 161–63.   3. These included the Japanese Disabled Veterans Association, the Association for Consolation of the Spirits of the War Dead (Yasukuni Shrine), the International Federation to Defeat Communism, the World Anti-Communist League, and the Unification Church (led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon).   4. “Japan, Rightist Leader: Yoshio Kodama,” Central Intelligence Agency/CIA Records Search Tool, 25 March 1969, 1–2, https://archive.org/details/KodamaYoshio/.   5. “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969, 1–2.   6. Summarized in “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969, 1–2.   7. Kodama Yoshio, “Arubeki sugata wo anoreni motomeyo,” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1154 (October 1967): 112; and Kodama Yoshio, “Dare ga shiru chūgoku no kokoro (seishun wasure tokubei),” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1477 (September 1969): 140–43.   8. “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969, 1–2.   9. Akao Satoshi (also known as Akao Bin) would reemerge after 1945 as a prominent parliamentarian and leader of the Far Right Dai Nippon Aikokutō (Greater Japan Patriotic Party). 10. Kodama Yoshio, I Was Defeated (Tokyo: Booth and Fukuda, 1951), 150; David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan’s Criminal Underworld (London: Robert Hale, 2003), 64; and “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969, 2. 11. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 189. 12. Saitō was assassinated by military insurrectionists during the February 26 (1936) Incident, for much the same reason. 13. Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), loc. 175–78 of 6105, Kindle. 14. Doihara was executed as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1948. “SUBJECT: Kodama Yoshio (alias: Musakoji Takeharu),” Central Intelligence Agency/CIA Records Search Tool, declassified 2005, accessed 9 December 2016, https://archive.org/details/KodamaYoshio; and Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 51. 15. Citing US intelligence reports, Kaplan and Dubro assert that Kodama was also able to use these associations to funnel money, and allegedly traffic narcotics, between Shanghai and Tokyo, the profits from which he allegedly used to fund his schemes to promote further Japanese expansion into China. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 64. 16. Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, loc. 180–81; and Iguchi Go, Kuromaku kenkyū (Tokyo: Shin Kokumin Sha, 1977), 226–27. 17. “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969, 3. 18. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (reprint, New York: Anchor, 2008), 117; and Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, loc. 3474 of 6105. 19. G-2 report, 24 May 1947, marked to the attention of Col. R. E. Rudisill, cited in Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 52. 20. G-2 report, 24 May 1947, in Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 52. 21. G-2 report, 24 May 1947, in Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 52. 22. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 54–55. 23. “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969, 2–4.

NOTES TO PAGES 106–109      165

24. “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969, 2–4. 25. Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, loc. 178–79. 26. “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 25 March 1969; Nathaniel Smith, “Right-Wing Activism in Japan and the Politics of Futility” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2011), 236–37; and Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, loc. 178–79. 27. Smith and Siniawer separately observe that after 1945, former colonial subjects residing in mainland Japan became highly visible as members of organized crime syndicates, partly because crime syndicates drew their members from the lower classes, where former colonials, ethnic minorities, were disproportionately represented. As a consequence, Far Right groups, organized crime, and conservative politicians made common cause with ethnic “others,” according to Smith, through Far Right “activism along with the outsider subject position of the gangster. The outlaw finds solidarity with others outside the law.” Smith, “Right- Wing Activism,” 236–37; and Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, loc. 178–79. 28.  Kodama Yoshio, “ ‘Kōdō’ ha shinryaku shisō de ha nakatta,” Tōhō Keizai 13 (1952): 82–86; and “Japan, Rightist Leader,” 15 October 1963 and 25 March 1969. 29. Kodama Yoshio, “Yomikaeraseyo minzoku no kiyōji—Kodama Yoshio no shinen to teigen (Zadankai),” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1437 (June 1966): 70–94; Kodama Yoshio, “Arubeki sugata wo anoreni motomeyo,” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1454 (October 1967): 107–13; Kodama Yoshio, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro (waga seishun—jō),” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1463 (July 1968): 94–105; Kodama Yoshio, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro— chu—hyakusen no aida, shisei wo kanzuru (waga seishun),” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1464 (August 1968): 126–35; Kodama Yoshio, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro—ge— shosei ni ōdonashi wo satoru (waga seishun),” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1465 (September 1968): 138–49; Kodama Yoshio, “Dare ga shiru chūgoku no kokoro (seishun wasure tokubei),” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1477 (September 1969): 140–43; Kodama Yoshio, “Ajia no minzokuteki shimei nitsuite (Shinshun gūsei),” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 1505 (January 1972): 2–5. 30. For a contemporary discussion of student radicalism in Japan, and its perceived relationship to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, see Fuse Toyomasa, “Student Radicalism in Japan: A ‘Cultural Revolution’?,” Comparative Education Review 13 (1969): 325–42. Also see Erik Esselstrom, “Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 74 (2015): 953–76. 31. Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Pan-Asianism as an Ideal of Asian Identity and Solidarity, 1850–Present,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, issue 17, no. 1 (25 April 2011): 1-30, http://apjjf.org/2011/9/17/Christopher-W.-A.-Szpilman/3519/article.html. 32.  Kodama, “  ‘ Kōdō’ ha shinryaku shisō”; and Kodama, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro—ge,” 139. 33. Kodama Yoshio, “Watakushi no unichinaru tennosei,” Seiron, August 1975, 82–88, as cited in Kenneth Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 139–40. 34. In April 1950, National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) presented to President Harry S. Truman a fifty-eight-page plan for containing the perceived Soviet threat to US interests abroad and became the springboard for Joseph Keenan’s grand strategy for prosecuting the Cold War in Europe and Asia. John Lewis Gaddis, “NSC-68 and the Problem of Ends and Means,” International Security 4, no. 4 (Spring 1980): 164–70. 35. “Background on J.I.S. and Japanese Military Personalities,” 10 September 1953, National Archives, Record Group 263, CIA Name File, box 7, folder “Kodama, Yoshio.” Cited in Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, loc. 2079 of 12782. 36. “Background on J.I.S.,” cited in Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, loc. 2081–84 of 12782. 37. “Background on J.I.S.,” cited in Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, loc. 2085–86 of 12782.

166       NOTES TO PAGES 109–118

38. “Background on J.I.S.,” cited in Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, loc. 2091 of 12782. 39. Kodama, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro (waga seishun—jō)”; Kodama, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro—chu”; and Kodama, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro—ge.” 40. Kodama, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro (waga seishun—jō)”; Kodama, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro—chu,” 96; and Kodama, “Yomikaeru Nihon no kokoro—ge,” 140. 41. Andreas Riessland, “The Public Perception of the Bōsōzoku in Japan,” Jinruigaku kenkyūjo no kenkyū, no. 1 (2013): 201–4; and Endō Natsuki, Tōkyō furyō shōnen densetsu—CRS rengō tanjō no jijitsu (Tokyo: Mirio no Shuppan, 2010). 42. Riessland, “Public Perception,” 202. 43. Riessland, “Public Perception,” 202. 44. Riessland, “Public Perception,” 202. 45. Yohji Morita, “Personality Traits and Underachievement of Deviant Adolescent Hot Rodders: Cultural Orientations toward Introversion and Juvenile Delinquency,” Japanese Sociological Review 36 (1985): 48–65, https://doi.org/10.4057/jsr.36.48; and Ōmura Hideaki, “Satō Ikuya saku ‘Bōsōzoku no esunogurafuii—modo no hanran to bunka no jyubaku’ ‘yanki—bōsōzoku—shakaijin—itsudatsuteki raifusutairu no shizenshi,’ ” Japanese Journal of Sociological Criminology 10 (1985): 187–90. 46. Jeffrey Alexander, Japan’s Motorcycle Wars: An Industry History (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), 65–84. 47. Paul Spicer, “Bōsōzoku: Society, Politics, and Terror,” Think, 26 February 2018, https://think.iafor.org/bosozuku-society-politics-and-terror/. 48. Honma was perfect for the role. His discovery and the launch of his acting career were not an uncommon result of the documentary-making process, but Yanagimachi’s role in furthering Honma’s postdocumentary career does cast some doubt on the veracity of God Speed You! 49. Spicer, “Bōsōzoku.” 50. Keisatsuchō, “Keisatsu hakusho, dai 4-shō shōnen no hodō hogo,” National Police Agency, 1975, http://www.npa.go.jp/hakusyo/s50/s500400.html; Robert D. Hanser, Community Corrections (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), 396; Walter L. Ames, Police and Community in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 77–93; Elmer H. Johnson, Criminalization and Prisoners in Japan: Six Contrary Cohorts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 169–73. 51. Alec Dubro, Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan’s Criminal Underworld (London: Robert Hale, 2003), 132. 52. Ikuya Sato, Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Ikuya observes that among bōsōzoku of the 1980s, the majority “are from middle-class families . . . and are rarely involved in illicit underworld activities as groups” (169). Sato’s Kyoto-based informants further assert that they rebuffed advances from yakuza scouts because they thought the short-term reward for criminal activities as youth was outweighed by the risk to their longer-term economic opportunities as adults engaged in regular employment. 53. Keisatsuchō, “Keisatsu hakusho”; and “19–6 Nenrei-sō betsu danjo betsu shitsugyōsha-sūoyobi shitsugyō-ritsu (Shōwa 43–2010),” National Police Agency, accessed 23 December 2016, http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/chouki/19.htm. 54. Smith, “Right-Wing Activism,” 35–37. 55. Smith, “Right-Wing Activism,” 42–43. 56. Smith, “Right-Wing Activism,” 40–45. 57. Smith, “Right-Wing Activism,” 35–37. 58. See “Mishima Yukio,” Japan Interpreter, Winter 1971, 71–85; and “Yukio Mishima (25-Nov-1970),” YouTube video, 2:52, 5 November 2010, https://youtu.be/ fvdZv7q3fJM?t=128.

NOTES TO PAGES 119–124      167

59. Mishima Yukio, “ ‘Tatenokai’ no koto,” in “Tate no kai” kessei ichi shūnenkinen panfuretto, November 1969, 720–27. 60. Endō Makoto, Shin uyoku to no taiwa: “Rekonkisuta” o kiru (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 1991). 61. Smith, “Right-Wing Activism,” 40–45; Suzuki Kunio, Shin uyoku: Minzoku-ha no rekishi to genzai (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 1988), 75; Kimura Mitsuhiro, Otegaru aikoku shugi o kiru: Shin uyoku no ronri to kōdō (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2013); Inuzuka Hirohide, “ ‘Minzokuha gakusei undō’ ‘shin uyoku’ kara ‘ma uyoku’ e no hensen waga taiken-teki ishin undō-shi (dai 23-kai) ‘nihonkaigi’ būmu no haikei to aikoku kyōdan ‘Seichōnoie’ no henshitsu,” Dentō to kakushin: Opinion-shi, 2016, 157–67. 5. MOTORBOAT GAMBLING AND MORALS EDUCATION

  1. In accordance with my ethical obligation as a researcher, I am reporting that I have benefited from significant financial support from the Nippon Foundation and its affiliate the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. This research has not been sponsored by either organization and does not represent their perspective or point of view.   2. Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri koran watakushi no hansei (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1990), 11; and Sasagawa Ryōichi and Sakura Yōichirō, eds., Sasagawa ryōichi no mita Sugamo no hyōjō: Senpan gokuchū hiwa (Osaka: Bunkabito Shobō, 1949).   3. The 1951 Motorboat Racing Law, which established the Japan Motorboat Racing Association (JMRA) to manage operations and appointed the Ministry of Transportation as its government overseer, required that 3.3 percent of total revenue be earmarked specifically to fund philanthropic projects. The JMRA put the funds set aside for philanthropic endeavors under Sasakawa’s direct, or indirect, control, and for the first decades Sasakawa generally saw those funds distributed to support projects associated with the maritime industries of Japan. Nippon Zaidan toshokan (denshi toshokan), “Kyōtei enkaku-shi,” Nippon Foundation Digital Library, 2006, https://nippon.zaidan.info/seika butsu/2006/00005/mokuji.htm.   4. The Japan Ship Promotion Association, renamed the Nippon Foundation in 1995, was created in 1962 by mandate of parliament as an independently operated organization, overseen by the Ministry of Transportation, with the explicit mission of distributing the profits of the Japan Motorboat Racing Association. Sasakawa was appointed the association’s second chairman in the mid-1950s, a post he held until his death.   5. Mōtābōto kyōsō-hō. Dai 25-jō dai 1-kō dai 2-gō. Mōtābōto kyōsōhō, Showa Law Number 242, Motorboat Racing Law, accessed 28 November 2020, https://elaws.e-gov. go.jp/document?lawid=326AC1000000242; and Nippon Zaidan, Nippon Zaidan 50-nenshi: Bōtorēsu jigyō to tomo ni (Tokyo: Nippon Zaidan, 2012), 137.   6. Mōtābōto kyōsōhō, Showa Law Number 242, Motorboat Racing Law.”  7. Nippon Zaidan san jū-nen no ayumi (Tokyo: Nippon Zaidan, 1992), https://nip pon.zaidan.info/kinenkan/history30/history30_list.html.   8. What was a modest revenue stream of $3.2 million in US dollars in 1963 (the equivalent of $25.2 million in 2015 when adjusted for inflation) jumped to $21.1 million in 1968 ($147 million); $107 million in 1973 ($594 million); $223 million in 1978 ($844 million); $426 million in 1988 ($856 million); and $713 million in 1991 ($1.25 billion). The numbers make it clear that Sasakawa’s ersatz monopoly on a highly lucrative gambling franchise made him the best-financed philanthropist in the world. Nippon Zaidan, Nippon zaidan 50-nen-shi, 137.   9. The greatest beneficiary of this largesse was the Blue Sea and Green Land Foundation, which received a total of $136 million ($304 million adjusted for inflation to 2015) between its founding in 1974 and Sasakawa’s death in 1995. Nippon Zaidan, Nippon Zaidan 50-nen-shi, 147.

168       NOTES TO PAGES 124–130

10. “Japan: The Godfather-san,” Time, 26 August 1974, http://content.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,944948,00.html. 11. Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 43. 12. Bushido was in fact a modern philosophy built on ancient ideals. It was first articulated as an ethos by Nitobe Inazō in 1900, in English for a foreign-language audience. Nitobe Inazo, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 5th ed. (Tokyo; Simpkin, Marshall, 1901). 13. “Sasakawa Ryoichi,” Central Intelligence Agency/CIA Records Search Tool, doc. no. 519cd821993294098d516ee6, June 1974, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/ document/519cd821993294098d516ee6. 14. “Sasakawa Ryoichi.” 15. Net TV was rebranded as TV Asahi in 1977. 16. Koichi Takefu, who did not appear in the commercial, wrote the lyrics, and the song was recorded by the Arakawa Boys and Girls Choir. The commercial also featured Japan’s first foreign-born sumo wrestler, the Hawaiian Takamiyama Daigorō (active 1964–84). 17. Special thanks to Fujiwara Tetsuya of the University of Fukui for introducing me to the Ikkyū-san series and the extent to which the cultural figure of “Grandpa Sasakawa” impacted young people during the 1970s. 18. The series’ creators claimed that the show was first and foremost conceived as children’s entertainment and that any educational value was purely accidental. 19. Shōgakukan, Animēshon nenkan: 1983 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1983), 111. 20. The postwar Ministry of Education reintroduced morals education for primary and lower-secondary students during the early 1960s despite opposition from the Left-led teacher’s union Nikkyōso (Nihon Kyōshokuin Kumiai). Nikkyōso, a pillar of the postwar peace movement and a core member of the Left-led federation Sōhyō, argued that morals education in the schools would merely be the first step in the reintroduction of the ultranationalist state ideology that had steered the nation to total war, and that it would see Japan regress back to its militaristic past. Michiya Shimbori, “A Historical and Social Note on Moral Education in Japan,” Comparative Education Review 4 (1960): 97–101; and Ministry of Culture, Sports, Education and Technology, “White Paper on Education Standards in Japan,” 1965, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/html/hpae196501/index.html. 21. Reto Hofmann, “The Conservative Imaginary: Moral Re-armament and the Internationalism of the Japanese Right, 1945–1962,” Japan Forum 33, no. 1 (2019): 77–102, https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2019.1646785. 22. Hofmann, “Conservative Imaginary.” 23. Benjamin C. Duke, “The New Guide for Teaching Moral Education in Japan,” Comparative Education Review 8 (1964): 186–90; and Ministry of Culture, Sports, Education and Technology, “3 Revisions of the Courses of Study and the Development of Teaching Method,” accessed 9 December 2016, http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/html/ others/detail/1317440.htm. 24. “1980-Nendai CM nihonbōkakyōkai ichinichiichizen ‘suisui suiyōbi’-hen sasagawa r yōichi Takamiyama,” YouTube video, :30, 28 April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Bj3J0RQUhEY. 25. “CM Nihon senpaku shinkō-kai,” YouTube video, accessed 9 June 2018, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozfkd5qRzy0. 26. Burū Shī ando Gurīn Rando Zaidan, B&G puran (Tokyo: Burū Shī Ando Gurīn Rando Zaidan, 1984), 1–7. 27. Burū Shī ando Gurīn Rando Zaidan, B&G puran, 1–7. 28. Burū Shī ando Gurīn Rando Zaidan, B&G puran, 1–7 29. Burū Shī ando Gurīn Rando Zaidan, B&G puran, 1. 30. Burū Shī ando Gurīn Rando Zaidan, B&G puran, 1.

NOTES TO PAGES 130–137      169

31. Shawn Bender, Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion, Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 182. 32. K. McCulloch, P. McLaughlin, P. Allison, V. Edwards, and L. Tett, “Sail Training as Education: More than Mere Adventure,” Oxford Review of Education 36 (2010): 661– 76, https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2010.49546; and “Nipponmaru yokohama minato hakubutsukan,” accessed 26 February 2017, Nippon Maru Memorial Park and Museum. http://www.nippon-maru.or.jp. 33. Kōdeshi B&G Kaiyō Sentā, Jidō shōnen wakōdo no fune’ kansō bunshū: B&G kokunai kaigai taiken kōkai Shōwa 56-nendo ~ Shōwa 61-nendo (Tokyo: Kōdeshi B&G Kaiyō Sentā, 1988), 180; B&G Zaidan, “1999-nen katsudō kiroku,” accessed 28 March 2017, https://www.bgf.or.jp/about_us/1999/taiken/991111.htm; B&G Zaidan, “Chūmoku no hito,” accessed 28 March 2017, https://www.bgf.or.jp/andly/content/070228r.html; and Paula Daventry, Sasakawa: The Warrior for Peace, the Global Philanthropist (Oxford: Pergamon, 1995), 71–74. 34. B&G Zaidan, “1999-nen katsudō kiroku”; and Daventry, Sasakawa, 73. 35. Mark Alan Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), 4, cited in Peter Cave and Aaron W. Moore, “Historical Interrogations of Japanese Children amid Disaster and War, 1920–1945,” Japanese Studies 36, no. 3 (2016): 240–49. 36. Cave and Moore, “Historical Interrogations,” 287–98. 37. Hofmann, Fascist Effect. 38. Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2005), 87. 39. Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, 87. 40. Iwasa Nobumichi, “Children’s Everyday Experience as a Focus of Moral Education,” Journal of Moral Education 46, no. 1 (2017): 59. 41. Suzuki Aki, “B&G no kuroi te,” Gekkan Jichiken 24, no. 11 (1982): 2–19; Jichirō Hokkaido Honbu, “B&G Chiki kaiyō sentaa yūchi hantai tōsō,” Gekkan Jichiken 24, no. 11 (1982): 25–37; and Suzuki Aki, “B&G kankei shiryō,” Gekkan Jichiken 24, no. 11 (1982): 74–88. 42. “Toei gyanburu haishi nittei desorō 47-nendo-chū ni keiba kyōtei,” Asahi shimbun shukusatsuban, 27 June 1970, 3; “Togikai de zehi kaketsu o Minobe tochiji no hanashi toei gyanburu haishi,” Asahi shimbun shukusatsuban, 27 June 1970, 3; “Kyōtei no gyanburu kyaku aite ni hibu ichi-wari no kōrikashi bōryokudan-in taiho bōryokudan,” Asahi shimbun shukusatsuban, 30 October 1971, 24; “(Kaisetsu) nanmon kakaeru kōei gyanburu haishi katagawari kaisai de keizoku Tōkyō hoshō kōshō de gyō tsumaru Ōsaka gyanburu haishimondai,” Asahi shimbun shukusatsuban, 18 November 1971, 4; “Gyanburu haishi honbu kara kyōtei kaisha ni shūshoku-to no moto kanbu tosei datsu gyanburu,” Asahi shimbun shukusatsuban, 12 March 1972, 18; “ ‘Amakudari’ to iu keredo . . . morarude wa kutte ikenai kyōtei kaisha-iri no moto tochō kanbu tosei datsu gyanburu,” Asahi shimbun shukusatsuban, 1 March 1972, 24. 43. The JMRA closed its first racer training facility at Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture in 1956 and transferred responsibility for recruitment and training to the twenty-four racing facilities across Japan. Several high-profile racing deaths in the mid-1960s led the JMRA to conclude that racer training needed to be recentralized, and in 1966 it opened a new training facility along the very scenic shores of the remote vacation spot of Lake Motosu in Yamanashi Prefecture. In 2001 the facility was relocated again to Fukuoka Prefecture and renamed the Yamato Boat Race School. 44. Nippon Zaidan, Nippon Zaidan no 50-nen-shi, 134–35. 45. The lack of official comment on the declining number of women racers prior to 1979 seems to indicate that JRMA officials were not at first alarmed by the change. Brief

170       NOTES TO PAGES 137–142

allusions in official histories of the sport point to economic affluence discouraging young women from entry into the physically demanding career pathway, yet the reason for the decline in female racers is not apparent. Women racers active before the 1980s left no published personal narratives of their racing careers that were not mediated by the JMRA’s authorized discourse. Even the women racers’ mutual support association, Beni no Suikai (Crimson Water Society), formed in 1967 for active and retired female racers, left no published records of their meetings other than the occasional greeting message sent by Sasakawa or a JMRA official. And while a handful of retired women racers have posted intermittently on social media sites, the only consistent public documentation of female racers is their official win-loss record. Zenkoku Motaboto Kyōsōkai Rengōkai, Mōtābōto kyōsō 30nenshi (Tokyo: Topitsuku, 1981). Takahashi Atsumi’s personal blog Atsumi nēsan burogu, http://ameblo.jp/atsumi3289/; and the semiofficial fan blog Kyōtei burogu, http:// kyotei.cocolog-nifty.com/kyotei/, are particularly active sites. 46. Takahashi Atsumi, “Kyōtei-kai no Momoe-chan,” Atsumi nēsan burogu, 13 May 2016, http://ameblo.jp/atsumi3289/entry-12159379956.html. 47. Tanaka and Suzuki raised three children together, and while Tanaka’s post-racing life included a very competitive amateur career as a marathon runner, the JMRA makes no mention of it in her Hall of Fame entry. Takahashi, “Kyōtei-kai no Momoe-chan”; and “Bōtorēsu tokushū kyōtei: Kyōtei dentōiri 10-mei, kettei!,” Kyōtei burogu (blog), 10 March 2007, http://kyotei.cocolog-nifty.com/kyotei/2007/04/10_3693.html. 48. Mizu ni tobu Mainichi Eiga, producer (Mainichi Nyusu, January 1980). 49. Mizu ni tobu. 50. Mizu ni tobu. 51. Mizu ni tobu. 52. Founded by the industrialist and politician Ichizo Kobayashi in 1913, the Takarazuka Revue featured Western song-and-dance shows featuring an all-female cast as an antithesis to the all-male casts of the traditional Kabuki theater. Takarazuka performances were over-the-top melodramas with lavish set design, choreography, and costuming. Young women trainees attended the Takarazuka Music School, where they received two years of training under strict discipline. Trainees’ performative genders were assigned by their older classmates and teachers. Those playing otokoyaku (male roles) cut their hair short and cultivated a highly stylized masculine identity at school. Jennifer E. Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 169–76. 53. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2, 1600 to 2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 498. 54. de Bary, Gluck, and Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2: 500. 55. Elyssa Faison,  Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Sharon H. Nolte, Women, the State, and Repression in Imperial Japan (East Lansing: Office of Women in International Development, Michigan State University, 1983). 56. Jennifer Prough, Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and Cultural Production of Shojo Manga (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), 3–4. 57. Tominaga Kennichi, “Studies of Social Stratification and Social Mobility in Japan: 1955–1967,” Rice University Studies 56 (1970): 133–49; and Tominaga Kennichi, “Trend Analysis of Social Stratification and Social Mobility in Contemporary Japan,” Developing Economies 7 (1969): 471–98. 58.  Sano was an even stronger advocate for ultraconservative social values than Sasakawa had been. At the time of her appointment as Sasakawa’s successor, she was a well-known

NOTES TO PAGES 143–149      171

advocate against legal protections for women in the workplace as well as for revision of the 1947 constitution. More recently, in 2015, she publicly asserted the need for Japan to create a racial segregation law akin to South Africa’s apartheid regime, in which a white racial minority ruled the country through systematic racial segregation and oppression until the early 1990s, as a means of controlling its foreign residential population. “Author Sono Calls for Racial Segregation in Op-Ed Piece,” Japan Times, 12 February 2015, https://www.japan times.co.jp/news/2015/02/12/national/author-sono-calls-racial-segregation-op-ed-piece. 59. Daventry, Sasakawa. EPILOGUE

  1. Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).   2. Bureau of Statistics, Office of the Prime Minister of Japan, “Labour Force and Labour Force Participation Rate by Age Group and Sex (1948–2010),” Japan Statistical Yearbook (Tokyo: Japan Statistical Association, 2015), http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/ chouki/19.htm.   3. Kaye Broadbent, “ ‘For Women, by Women’: Women-Only Unions in Japan,” Japan Forum 17, no. 2 (2005): 213–30; Anne Zacharias-Walsh, Our Unions, Our Selves: The Rise of Feminist Labor Unions in Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); and Charles Weathers, “The Rising Voice of Japan’s Community Unions,” in Civic Engagement in Contemporary Japan, ed. H. Vinken, Y. Nishimura, B. L. J. White and Masayuki Deguchi (New York: Springer, 2009), 67–83.   4. Broadbent, “ ‘For Women, by Women,’ ” 214; Zacharias-Walsh, Our Unions, Our Selves, 82; and Weathers, “Rising Voice,” 67–83.   5. Bureau of Statistics, Office of the Prime Minister of Japan, “Unemployed Persons and Unemployment Rate by Age Group and Sex (1968–2010),” Japan Statistical Yearbook (Tokyo: Japan Statistical Association, 2015), http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/ chouki/19.htm.   6. David Slater, Robin O’Day, Satsuki Uno, Love Kindstrand, and Chiharu Takano, “SEALDs (Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy): Research Note on Contemporary Youth Politics in Japan,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13, issue 37, no. 1 (14 September 2015): 1–4.   7. Mary C. Brinton, Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 230; and Tuukka Toivonen, review of Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan, by Mary C. Brinton, Journal of Japanese Studies 38, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 493–98.   8. Reto Hofmann, “Why Steve Bannon Loves Japan,” Diplomat, 22 June 2018, https:// thediplomat.com/2018/06/why-steve-bannon-admires-japan.   9. Hofmann, “Why Steve Bannon Loves Japan.” 10. Fundamental Law of Education (Act No. 120 of 22 December 2006), Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, http://www.mext.go.jp/en/policy/educa tion/lawandplan/title01/detail01/1373798.htm; “Editorial: A Slippery Slope in Education,” Japan Times, 10 December 2014, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/12/10/ editorials/slippery-slope-education; and “Editorial: Moral Education’s Slippery Slope,” Japan Times, 26 October 2014, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/10/26/ editorials/moral-educations-slippery-slope. 11. “Editorial: Moral Education’s Slippery Slope.” 12. Sven Saaler, “Nationalism and History in Contemporary Japan,” Asia-Pacific Journal 14, issue 20, no. 7 (2016): 15–16.

172       NOTES TO PAGES 149–153

13. Saaler, “Nationalism and History,” 2–4. 14. Lily Nonomiya, “School Scandal Surrounding Japan’s Abe Gathers Steam,” Bloomberg News, 9 March 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018–03–09/abeschool-scandal-gathers-steam-as-tax-agency-chief-steps-down. 15. Kikuchi Dairoku, “The Imperial Rescript on Education (1890),” in Japanese Education (London: John Murray, 1909), 2–3. 16. Osaki Tomohiro, “Imperial Rescript on Education Making Slow, Contentious Comeback,” Japan Times, 11 April 2017, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/04/11/ national/imperial-rescript-education-making-slow-contentious-comeback. 17. Shibuichi Daiki has shown the extent to which right-wing hate groups continued to attract a small but vocal minority. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency to equate youth politics with mass movements in opposition to the state, or state policy, which has skewed studies toward those that focus on large groups of young people engaged in collective action. Shibuichi Daiki, “Zaitokukai and the Problem with Hate Groups in Japan,” Asian Survey 55, no. 4 (July/August 2015): 715–38; and David Slater, Nishimura Keiko, and Love Kindstrand, “Social Media, Information, and Political Activism in Japan’s 3.11 Crisis,” Asia-Pacific Journal 10, issue 24, no. 1 (11 June 2012): 7–9. 18. David Slater and Patrick W. Galbraith, “Re-narrating Social Class and Masculinity in Neoliberal Japan: An Examination of the Media Coverage of the ‘Akihabara Incident’ of 2008,” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 30 September 2011, http:// www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2011/SlaterGalbraith.html; and Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 180. 19. Osaki Tomohiro, “Young Protesters Rap State Secrets Law as Movement Gains Rhythm,” Japan Times, 29 October 2014, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/10/ 28/national/young-protesters-rap-state-secrets-law-movement-gains-rhythm. 20. Osaki, “Young Protesters.” 21. Osaki, “Young Protesters.” 22. Jeff Kingston, “SEALDs: Students Slam Abe’s Assault on Japan’s Constitution,” AsiaPacific Journal 13, issue 36, no. 1 (7 September 2015): 3. 23. Quoted in Kingston, “SEALDs,” 4. 24. Kingston, “SEALDs,” 6. 25. Quoted in Kingston, “SEALDs,” 6–7. 26. “Editorial: NHK Must Maintain Independence,” Japan Times, 25 January 2015, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/01/25/editorials/nhk-must-maintainindependence/#.W0cPANIzZPY. 27. Article 9 of the 1947 constitution declares that the “Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” The Constitution of Japan, Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet (website), accessed 25 June 2018, https://japan.kantei.go.jp/constitu tion_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html; see Ozawa Ichirō, Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1994), 43.

Index

Abe Shinzō, 147 – 53 AK-47, 46 Akahata (Red flag), 14 Akiraku-gumi (crime family), 106 alienation, 8 Allied Occupation, 3, 13, 14, 16, 101, 134 anti-colonialism, 16, 21 anti-Communism, 2, 14, 16, 100, 102, 106, 107, 108, 118, 120, 124, 127, 130, 164 anti-imperialism, 2, 18 anti-security-treaty protests, 20 – 21, 30, 107 Antiwar Youth Committee, 21 – 23, 28, 30, 62 patriarchal values in, 32 Asahi Shinbun, 50 Asanuma Inejirō, assassination of, 103, 119 Asia-Pacific War, 46, 89, 102 black nationalism, 2 Black Panther Party, 43, 48 – 50 Alexander, Roberta, 51 Anthony, Earl, 50, 51 Howard, Elbert, in Japan, 50, 51 internationalism of, 48 – 51 Black Shirts organization, 103 Blue Sea and Green Land Foundation. See Sasakawa Ryōichi bōsōzoku (motorcycle gang), 109 – 11, 113 and rightist groups, 116 and social class, 113, 116 and yakuza, 113 bubble economy, 9, 64, 99, 146 bushido, 124, 168 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 8, 100 “childlike child” (kodomorashii kodomo), notion of, 132 Chinese Communist Party, 108 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 7 class, social construction of, 6 Coal Workers’ Union (Tanrō), 106 Cold War, 4, 7, 8, 14, 18, 100, 101, 126 – 27 Communications Workers’ Union (zendentsu), 18 Constitution of Japan, 3, 16, 30, 117

decorum (reigi), 128, 133 Doi Daisuke, 28 Easy Rider, 111 Edo era, 126 ethnic national heritage (minzoku), 18, 108 Expansion of Greater Japan (Dai Nippon Koku), 119 Far Left, 1, 7 communications apparatus of, 12 – 13 Far Right, 1, 7, 8, 9, 100, 101 – 7 and youth crisis, 121 See also Kodama Yoshio; Sasakawa Ryōichi Funamoto Shūji, 63 Gekkan Jichiken, 134 Gekkan rekonkisuta (Monthly reconquista), 119 Gekkan Sōhyō, 25, 26, 27, 32, 33, 72 gender, construction of, 4 – 5, 14, 28, 32, 42, 135 – 39 “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo), 144 global political movements, 2, 7, 42, 43, 44, 49. See also names of individual movements and activists God Speed You! Black Emperor, 111, 113 Habash, George, 53 habitus, 87 Haneda Airport protests, 20, 23 Hikawa-maru, 130 Hofmann, Reto, 124, 126, 127, 132, 147, 148 Honda Katsuichi, 20 Honma Yūji, 111 – 12 honorific language, 79 – 89 Horii Toshikatsu, 22 Ikeda Incomes Doubling Policy, 40, 145 ikusa-gami (war god), 153 Ikuya Sato, 114 imperial Japan, 6, 12 Imperial Rescript on Education, 130

173

174       INDEX

irregular (hiseiki) employment, 147 Ishikawa Mao, 49 Issuikai (The First Wednesday Society), 116, 117, 119 Itō Takashi, 72, 75, 98 Japan Communist Party, 14 Japanese Imperial Army, 20 Japanese Red Army (JRA, also Nihon Sekigun), 2, 7 – 8, 42, 44 and Black Panther Party, 43 Japanese punk music, influence on, 58 – 61 and Lebanon, 46, 52 – 58 and Lod Airport massacre, 42, 43 and North Korea, 43, 53 patriarchal aspects of, 53 Sekigun-PFLP, 54 and sexualized violence, 42, 44, 46, 54 world revolution, 42, 49, 52 Japanese Value Orientations. See NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai or Japan Broadcasting Corporation) survey Japan Motorboat Racing Association (JMRA), 123, 135 Japan National Railways (JNR), 36, 40 Japan Ship Promotion Foundation (later Nippon Foundation), 9, 123, 135, 139, 142, 148. See also Sasakawa Ryōichi Japan Socialist Party (JSP), 20, 22 Japan–South Korea Peace Treaty, 22 Japan Times, 150, 151, 153 “Japan watchers,” 144 JNR Manga Collective, 36 Johnson, Lyndon B., 19, 21 Kamakura Takao, 40 Kawashima Yoshiko, 122 keigo (honorific language), 79 – 89 kendō, 125, 128, 142 Kenkokukai (National Constructionist Society), 104 Kishi Nobusuke, 101, 102, 126 Kodama Yoshio, 8, 100 – 101 Allied Occupation report on, 106 anti-Communism, 106, 107, 108 bōsōzoku, failure to attract, 110 broker of Far-Right alliances, 106 Cabinet Advisory Council, ascension to, 105 Chinese connections, 105, 106, 108 CIA, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109 Dokuritsu Seinensha (Independent Youth Society), 104 early years, 104

emperor-centered nationalism, 108 fall of, 120 Far Right and New Left, clash between, 103 incarcerations, 104 Liberal Democratic Party, connections to, 104 Matsubakai (Pine Needle Society), 104 media activity as channel for morals education, 103, 107 pan–East Asian racial consciousness, 107 Saitō Makoto assassination plot, involvement, 105 Sasakawa Ryōichi, relationship with, 102, 105, 120 strikebreaking activity, 104, 106 student movement, view of as decadent, 107 Sugamo Prison, 102, 106 ultranationalism, 101, 102, 104, 105 “violence specialists,” 107 yakuza/organized crime, connections, 104 – 6 Kokurō bunka (railway culture), 33, 34 Kokurō Central Committee, 40 Kokusui Taishūtō (National Essence Masses Party), 103 – 5, 121, 122, 123 Korean War, 14, 16 Lake Motosu (Yamanashi Prefecture), 135 – 36, 140, 169 Levidis, Andrew, 101 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 3, 4, 101, 104, 127 long 1990s, 9, 145 Lost Decade, 146 lumpen proletariat, 109 MacArthur, Douglas, 14, 16 Mao, Chairman, 43, 49, 54, 65 McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, crash at Kyushu University, 26 Meiji era, 2, 3 mentalité, 2, 8, 14, 68 middle class, 7 aspirations and values of, 11, 36 Miike Mines strike, 18 military police (Kempeitai), 46 Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, 149 Mishima Yukio, 116 anti-Communism, 118 attempted coup and ritual suicide, 118 – 19 Sea of Fertility (Hojo no umi), 118 Tatenokai (Shield Society), 118 monarchy, 89 – 96

INDEX      175

moral citizenship, 5 morals education, 9, 100, 103, 112, 124, 125 – 28 in context of Cold War, 127 “Notes of the Heart” (kokoro no nōto), 149 See also Sasakawa Ryōichi Moritomo Gakuen, 149 Mototsu Motorboat Racer Training Institute, 138, 141 Mussolini, Benito. See Sasakawa Ryoichi National Congress of Culture (Kokumin Bunka Kaigi, or NCC), 12 – 14 neo-Confucian moral values, 121, 125, 128, 142, 150 neofascism, 2 New Left, 2, 5, 7 – 8, 20 New Right, 2, 9, 101, 116 1970s Japan, impact on, 117 Far Right, independence from, 117 Gekkan rekonkisuta (Monthly reconquest), 119 and university activism, 116, 119 US-Japan Security Treaty, opposition to, 117 See also Mishima Yukio; Suzuki Kunio NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai or Japan Broadcasting Corporation) survey, 7, 33, 68, 100 and 1970s conjunctural change, 71 aims and methodology, 69 – 70 changing social attitudes, measure of, 70 emperor, attitudes toward (by age, gender, and employment), 89 – 96 generational shifts from 1970s – 1990s, 96 – 99 Japaneseness, anxiety regarding erosion of, 82 keigo, attitudes toward (by age, gender, and employment), 79 – 89 political institutions, attitudes toward (by age, gender, and employment), 73 – 79 Sixties Generation, changing attitudes of, 98 social mobility, 70 Nihon oyobi Nihonjin (nationalist journal), 103, 107, 109, 120 Nikkyōso (Nihon Kyōshokuin Kumiai, leftist national teachers’ union), 127 – 29, 131, 148 – 49 Non-Aligned Movement, 16, 18 North Korea, 43, 45 Oguma Eiji, 5 – 6, 44 oil shock (1973), 40, 70

Okinawa, 4, 20 – 21, 23 Black Power movement, affinity for, 48 – 49 Kadena Air Base, 21 Old Left. See unions Ōmachi Keisuke, 27 Onimaru Hiroyuki, 37 OPEC oil embargo, 33, 70 organized crime, 100, 104 and Far-Right politics, 105 See also Kodama Yoshio; yakuza Ōta Kaoru, 21, 28 Ozawa Ichirō, 153 pan-Asianism, 2, 16, 18 – 19 patriarchy, 32 Peace Constitution. See Constitution of Japan Peace Economy Conference of 1953, 18 People’s Republic of China, 18. See also Kodama Yoshio political alienation 1990s, 72 definition of, 72 See also NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai or Japan Broadcasting Corporation) survey political cartooning. See propaganda: visual political violence, 7, 8 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 43, 53 – 58 and China, 53 and North Korea, 53 See also Japanese Red Army; Shigenobu Fusako; Wakamatsu Kōji and Adachi Masao propaganda, 1, 7, 9 visual, 11 – 13, 23 – 24, 28, 32, 33, 34, 36, 54 – 58 (see also Sasakawa Ryōichi) Public Service Sector Workers’ Union (Jichirō), 134 punk music, 58 – 61 radical politics, 1, 2, 7, 8 Red Army Faction (Sekigunha), 44 – 46 revolutionary movements, 8, 42 gender roles in, 42, 43, 44 See also individual organizations Riessland, Andreas, 110 Saitō Makoto, 105, 164 Sakai Ichizō, 40 Sakurada Takeshi, 118 salaryman myth, 144 Sanae Takaichi, 152

176       INDEX

Sasakawa Ryōichi, 9, 100 – 101, 110 anti-Communism, 124, 130, 131, 134 B&G Plan, 130 Blue Sea and Green Land Foundation (B&G), 123, 129 – 35 Buddhist values, 126 childhood, promoting prewar archetypes of, 132 corruption scandal, 123 crimes against peace (Class A war crimes), 122 criticisms of, 135 death of, 139 early years, 122 fascism, 121, 124 “Fire Safety Song,” 125, 127 – 28 Foundation for International Science and Technology Exposition, 123 gender ideals, vision of and promotion, 135 – 39 “Grandpa Sasakawa,” 125 – 26, 135 Ikkyū-san (television series), 125 – 26 Imperial Rescript on Education, 130 Japan-Oman Society, 125 Japan-Philippine Association, 125 Japan Ship Promotion Association (JSPA), 123, 131, 133, 135, 139 Japan Motorboat Racing Association (JMRA), 123, 135, 136, 137, 138 Japan establishment, embrace of Sasakawa, 122, 126 Kawashima Yoshiko, relationship with, 122 manga as propaganda (Monkey Turn and Motorboat Racer Girl), 139 – 42 marine centers, 129, 131, 134 military, relationship with, 122 Mizu ni tobu (Flying on the Water), 136, 138 morals education/promotion of conservative values, 121, 123, 124, 125 – 28, 129 – 31, 139 – 42 motorboat racing as channel for, 128, 133, 135 – 39 motorboat gambling, source of philanthropic funding, 122, 135, 139 Mussolini, Benito, as influence, 122, 124, 132 “One Good Deed a Day” commercial, 127 philanthropy, 121, 123, 125 “racer girls,” 135 – 39, 140 – 41 reigi, 133 reputation, 125 Sugamo, imprisonment, 122 televisual propaganda, 125, 132, 133, 135 – 39 ultranationalism, 121, 124, 128, 130

Unification Church (Korea), 125 violence, stance on, 124 Satō Eisaku, 20, 26 Schieder, Chelsea, 44, 46 Second World War, 1 Seichō no Ie (House of Growth), 119 – 20, 124 Sekigun movement, 44 – 45 “Sekigun Ramen.” See Wakamiya Masanori Self Defense Forces (SDF), 118, 119 setsu (integrity, honor, and chastity), 13 Shigemitsu Mamoru, 102 Shigenobu Fusako, 8, 44, 46, 117 anti-Vietnam war movement, 47, 160 Beiheiren (or Citizens’ League for Peace in Vietnam), 160 Black Panther Party, 48, 51, 56 early life, 46 – 47 feminist consciousness, 47, 58 French embassy siege, Hague, 58 Lebanon and PFLP, 51, 53 – 58 Meiji university, 47 office lady, as, 46 sexualization of violence, 54 US imperialism, 55 – 56 US-Japan Security Treaty protests, 48 Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao (filmmakers), 54 – 58 world revolution, vision of, 51, 55 – 56 Zunō Keisatsu, influence on, 61 shōnen, 140 Showa era, 2, 89, 132 Shūkan Rēsu, 136 Shūkan Shōnen Sandē (Weekly Youth Sunday), 140 Shūkan Taishū (The Masses Weekly), 103 Sixties Generation, 1, 5 – 6, 7, 8, 19 – 33, 42- x, 68, 69, 110. See also NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai or Japan Broadcasting Corporation) survey Socialist Youth Alliance (Nihon Shakaishugi Seinen Dōmei, or Shaseidō), 21 – 22 Sōhyō (Nihon Sōhyō Gikai Rōdō Kumiai, General Council of Trade Unions), 13, 16, 18, 21 – 22, 28, 32, 33 radical youth movements in relation to, 30 – 32 Young Workers’ Department, 21 Soviet Union, 16, 18, 53, 108, 122, 131 Space battleship Yamato (Uchūsenkan Yamato), 128 student radicalism, 20 – 23 as bourgeois, 28 failure of, as prompt for revolutionary violence, 44

INDEX      177

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 48 “superior student” (yūtōsei), notion of, 132 Suzuki Akuzō, 34 Suzuki Heihachi, 25 Suzuki Kunio, 116, 119 – 20 rise as New Right activist, 117 and Sangyō Keizai shumbun, 117 Tanigachi Masaharu, influence of, 119 Suzuki Yukio, 137 Taishi Mondai Kaiketsu Kokumin Dōmei (National League for the Settlement of the China Problem), 105 Takano Minoru, 18 – 19 Takeshi Kaikō, 20 Tanaka Kakuhei, 120 Tanaka Yumiko, 135 – 39 Taniguchi Masaharu, “Patriotic Scriptures” (aikoku seiten), 119 Tenkōkai (Society for Heavenly Action), 105 Three Nonnuclear Principles, 26 transwar Far Right. See Far Right; Kodama Yoshio; Liberal Democratic Party; Sasakawa Ryōichi Tupamaros, 56 ultranationalism, 2, 8 – 9, 46, 101, 102, 104, 116, 119, 124 unions, 3, 5, 7, 11, 12, 18, 134 “family man as union man” trope, 34 gender inequality within, 27 generational schism, 18, 20 – 22, 27, 30, 32, 33, 36, 40 “graying” of the labor movement, 27 – 28 middle-class aspirations in, 36 – 40 patriarchal attitudes, 28, 34 reinvention of the “union man,” 33 – 38 See also individual organizations United Red Army (Rengo Sekigun), 44, 46 United States Civil Administration for the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR), 23 US-Japan Security Treaty, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 26, 30, 48, 101, 103, 117 Vietnam War, 3 antiwar movement, 11, 19 – 26, 28, 30, 107 Japanese economic interests, 30 Japanese sense of racial victimization related to, 19 Okinawa question, link to, 20, 26 – 27

violence, sexualization of, 56 – 58 Vogel, Ezra, 3, 145 Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao, 53 – 58 Jogakusei gerira (High school girl guerrilla), 56 – 57 “Sekigun Bus,” 54 Wakamiya Masanori, 8, 22, 61 – 66 after prison, 64 – 67 bombing at Kamagasaki, 64 bubble economy, critique of, 64 early life, 62 Kamagasaki Joint Struggle Committee, 63 “Sekigun Ramen,” 62 – 64 “struggle on the ground” (genba tōsō), 63, 65, 146 Shining Path, 65 trajectory through Old Left into RAF, 62 yakuza, opposition to, 63 Weather Underground, 43 Willoughby, General Courtney, 106 women’s liberation movement, 6, 44 yakuza, 63, 104 Yamaguchi Otoya, 119, 153 Yamato Shimbun, 105 Yamazaki Hiroaki, 20 Yanagimachi Mitou, 111, 112, 113 Yodogō hijackers, 45 – 46, 53 Yoshida Shigeru, 14, 126 youth deviance, 6. See also bōsōzoku youth employment crisis in 1970s, 71 deskilling, 71 precarity post-1993, 9, 144, 147 “youth problem,” 8 Zengaku Kyōtō Kaigi (Zenkyōtō or All-Campus Joint-Struggle Committee), 50 Zengakuren, 20 – 22, 26 – 27, 51, 103 Zenrōren, 14 Zunō Keisatsu (Brain Police), 58 – 61 critique of US imperialism, 60 “Declaration of World Revolutionary War,” 59 public morality, 59 Red Army political rhetoric, 58 – 61 Shigenobu Fusako, 61 suppression by Victor Records, 59

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University

Selected Titles (Complete list at: http://weai.columbia.edu/publications/studies-weai/) Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China, by Nicholas Bartlett. University of California Press, 2020. The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, by Benno Weiner. Cornell University Press, 2020. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China, by Arunabh Ghosh. Princeton University Press, 2020. Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, by Andrew B. Liu. Yale University Press, 2020. Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism, by Tatiana Linkhoeva. Cornell University Press, 2020. Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940, by Eugenia Lean. Columbia University Press, 2020. Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand, by Duncan McCargo. Cornell University Press, 2020. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, by Sören Urbansky. Princeton University Press, 2020. Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China, by Fei-Hsien Wang. Princeton University Press, 2019. The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media, by Nathan Shockey. Columbia University Press, 2019. Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City, by Haydon Cherry. Yale University Press, 2019. Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education, by Raja Adal. Columbia University Press, 2019. Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China, by Mary Augusta Brazelton. Cornell University Press, 2019. Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, by Franz Prichard. Columbia University Press, 2019. The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961, by Sidney Xu Lu. Cambridge University Press, 2019. The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism, by Robert Culp. Columbia University Press, 2019. Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam, by Claire E. Edington. Cornell University Press, 2019. Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China, by Martin Fromm. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia, by Wen-Qing Ngoei. Cornell University Press, 2019. 179

Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1949, by Alyssa M. Park. Cornell University Press, 2019. The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, by Jeremy A. Yellen. Cornell University Press, 2019. Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, by Max Ward. Duke University Press, 2019. Statebuilding by Imposition: Resistance and Control in Colonial Taiwan and the Philippines, by Reo Matsuzaki. Cornell University Press, 2019. Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies, by Sayaka Chatani. Cornell University Press, 2019. Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges, by Corey Byrnes. Columbia University Press, 2019. The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, by Emily Baum. University of Chicago Press, 2018. A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949–1976, by Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia. Columbia University Press, 2018. The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China, by Jia-Chen Fu. University of Washington Press, 2018. Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire, by David Ambaras. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961, by Cheehyung Harrison Kim. Columbia University Press, 2018. Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945, by Kerim Yasar. Columbia University Press, 2018. Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965–1975, by Olga Dror. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development, and the Cold War Order, by Hiromi Mizuno, Aaron S. Moore, and John DiMoia. Bloomsbury Press, 2018. Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History, by Ethan Mark. Bloomsbury Press, 2018. Navigating Semi-colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937, by Anne Reinhardt. Harvard University Asia Center, 2018. Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests, by Yao Li. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Raising China’s Revolutionaries: Modernizing Childhood for Cosmopolitan Nationalists and Liberated Comrades, by Margaret Mih Tillman. Columbia University Press, 2018. Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea, by Juhn Y. Ahn. University of Washington Press, 2018. Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan, by Robert Tuck. Columbia University Press, 2018. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965, by Philip Thai. Columbia University Press, 2018. Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet, by Max Oidtmann. Columbia University Press, 2018. The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China, by Charlene Makley. Cornell University Press, 2018. Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan, by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Asia Center, 2018.

180

Where the Party Rules: The Rank and File of China’s Communist State, by Daniel Koss. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives, by Chad R. Diehl. Cornell University Press, 2018. The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder, by Jess Melvin. Routledge, 2018. China’s Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century, by Ori Sela. Columbia University Press, 2018. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan, by Yulia Frumer. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Mobilizing without the Masses: Control and Contention in China, by Diana Fu. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Post-fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War, by Laura Hein. Bloomsbury, 2018. China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949, by Brian Tsui. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945, by Hikari Hori. Cornell University Press, 2018.

181