Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. ix, 192 pp. (Illustrations.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 9781501756313.
In this original work, Christopher Gerteis examines efforts to mobilize the 1960s generation in Japan by both the Far Left and Far Right. He focuses on how non-state institutions’ leaders shaped youth political consciousness. The book is innovative by focusing on the propaganda produced by these groups with attention to gender, generation, and class. Using the tools of social and cultural historians, Gerteis draws from a fascinating set of materials ranging from Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) surveys through seemingly benign children’s cartoons to pink exploitation films and everything in between. What emerges is a portrait of the transwar-generation’s leadership in both the Far Left and Far Right, reinforcing rather than challenging gender and class norms that ultimately alienated the very youth they sought to recruit. Moreover, the insights provided about the sixties generation are remarkably relevant to understanding protest politics today.
Gerteis begins with the labour movement. In chapter 2, “Unions, Youth, and the Cold War,” he explores the conflict between the transwar-generation union leaders with young workers in the 1960s. The General Council of Trade Unions’ (Sōhyō) leadership prioritized raising wages while remaining politically neutral during the Cold War. The effect was that high economic growth significantly improved workers’ lives, spurring middle-class aspiration. Yet, the compromise also reinforced socially conservative values by effectively marginalizing women and stratifying male workers’ wages along generational lines through the seniority-wage system. Politically, the opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty, anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and demands for the reunification of Okinawa caused a rift with younger radical members dissatisfied with the leadership’s nonviolent stance. Through analysis of union propaganda, Gerteis illustrates how the transwar-generation’s outdated notions of gender and class undermined the labour movement’s ability to remain relevant to the youth.
Gerteis next examines Far-Left political violence. In chapter 3, “The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Red Army,” he surveys how some Japanese activists, inspired by other global radical left-wing youth movements, embraced political violence to hasten their desire for revolution. In the process, activists drew on masculine forms of political agency, essentially reinforcing patriarchal norms. Instead of challenging gendered stereotypes, this undermined female political agency driving a wedge between male and female activists.
There was a sense in the 1960s that social values in Japan were shifting. In chapter 3, “Political Alienation and the Sixties Generation,” Gerteis uses NHK’s national surveys to investigate how attitudes were inscribed in public opinion polls. Through analysis of the statistical data, Gerteis reveals that by the 1970s, attitudes towards such issues as political institutions, social hierarchy, political protest, and the emperor were indeed changing. Yet, it was gender and class that correlated most strongly with these shifting attitudes by challenging the common assumption that generational difference alone was the principal driving force behind the changes.
Notably, Japan’s Far Right was also actively mobilizing youth during the same period. In chapter 5, “Cold War Warriors,” Gerteis presents a fascinating tale of how two prominent right-wing non-state actors in the 1970s, Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryōichi, sought to mobilize disaffected youth by focusing on traditional moral values and nationalism to counter a feared global Communist threat. Gerteis illustrates how these powerful dealmakers, and convicted war criminals, organized a pact between Far-Right politicians, gangsters, and the US Central Intelligence Agency to suppress leftist radicalism for their personal enrichment and ideological inclinations. However, the Far-Right’s ultranationalist ventures had limited influence, ultimately contributing to the New Right breaking with the older generation.
Japan’s Far Right interpreted leftist activism as a form of moral corruption, and they aimed to reverse it through campaigns emphasizing values, respect for tradition, and nationalism. In chapter 5, “Motorboat Gambling and Morals Education,” Gerteis examines how Sasakawa Ryōichi leveraged his vast wealth—mainly generated through controlling motorboat gambling—to fund moral education programs to normalize Far-Right political values.
Since the bursting of the economic bubble in the late 1980s, economic precarity has profoundly shaped youth experiences. In the epilogue, “Life and Democracy in Postwar Japan,” Gerteis connects the legacy of the sixties generation to the rightward shift in national politics. Once at the vanguard of changing attitudes and values, the sixties generation has grown politically conservative. The consequence, Gerteis proposes, is that while the sixties generation assumed increasing dominance over political institutions, it has undermined younger generations by limiting employment prospects and stifling their political influence. Youth have still mobilized against laws governing privacy, censorship, and the right to assemble, but to limited effect in blocking controversial legislation.
Gerteis’ argument that the sixties generation has constrained contemporary Japanese youth’s working lives and political potentialities is insightful. I suggest that his argument extends beyond structural constraints in its applicability to further explain current mobilization difficulties at a more granular level. Even with significant public attention about precarity, union efforts to mobilize freeters and other irregular workers in the 2000s largely failed. Despite some limited successes, union politics, rhetoric, and tactics alienated most young irregular workers, squandering an opportunity to attract a new generation to the labour movement. Emergent protest forms since the 2000s using art, music, and dance have attempted to soften the negative and violent associations of street protests associated with the sixties generation. Some have described these tactics as feminized to counter the stigmatized masculine confrontational demonstrations that led to the violence in the sixties generation protests. Yet these more playful forms of protest, meant to attract a more diverse crowd, are frequently derided and dismissed as ineffectual. Even when the Student Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALDs), as the most publicly visible youth protest movement since the 1970s, attempted to position themselves as regular students taking a stand to defend Japan’s constitution from hawkish revisionists, they found themselves relentlessly attacked by both the Far Left and Far Right as being too bourgeois, immature, and disconnected. The Far Right, in particular, displayed extreme misogyny in their online harassment of female SEALDs members. The few examples above suggest that gender, class, and generation continue to bedevil youth mobilization efforts in contemporary Japan in ways not too dissimilar from the past.
Robin O’Day
University of North Georgia, Dahlonega