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

Long obscured by the more dramatic activities of post-World War II student activists, the history of the Japanese left-wing student movement during its formative period from 1918 until its suppression in the 1930s is analyzed here in detail for the first time. Focusing on the Shinjinkai (New Man Society) of Tokyo Imperial University, the leading prewar student group, Henry DeWitt Smith describes the origins and evolution of student radicalism in the period between the two World Wars. He concludes with an analysis of the careers of the Shinjinkai members after graduation and with an explanation of the importance of the prewar tradition to the postwar student movement.

In 1960 millions of Japanese citizens took to the streets for months of protest against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) and its forcible ratification by the Kishi government. In the decades that followed, the Anpo era citizens' movements exerted a major influence on the organization and political philosophies of the anti-Vietnam War effort, local residents' environmental movements, alternative lifestyle groups, and consumer movements. Organizing the Spontaneous departs from previous scholarship by focusing on the significance of the Anpo protests on the citizens' drive to transform Japanese society rather than on international diplomacy. It shows that the movement against Anpo comprised diverse, at times conflicting, groups of politically conscious actors attempting to reshape the body politic.

After World War II, Japanese intellectuals believed that world history was moving inexorably toward bourgeois democracy and then socialism. But who would be the agents—the active "subjects"—of that revolution in Japan? Intensely debated at the time, this question of active subjectivity influenced popular ideas about nationalism and social change that still affect Japanese political culture today. In a major contribution to modern Japanese intellectual history, J. Victor Koschmann analyzes the debate over subjectivity. He traces the arguments of intellectuals from various disciplines and political viewpoints, and finds that despite their stress on individual autonomy, they all came to define subjectivity in terms of deterministic historical structures, thus ultimately deferring the possibility of radical change in Japan. Establishing a basis for historical dialogue about democratic revolution, this book will interest anyone concerned with issues of nationalism, postcolonialism, and the formation of identities.

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

The author argues that interactions between the movement and US Cold Warriors had a profound and lasting impact on Japanese society and Japan–US relations.