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

Abstract

In Mobilizing Japanese Youth, Christopher Gerteis examines how various leaders in Japan sought to connect with and influence the generation growing up in the immediate postwar, a process he dubs ‘the making of the Sixties generation.’ Gerteis’ analysis focuses on non-state institutions that he identifies as representing the political ‘Far Left’ and ‘Far Right’ and concludes that their efforts to mobilize youth generally faltered, in no small part because of their inability to adjust to new class and gendered realities. The five chapters of the book focus on the poster campaigns of S ohy o (Nihon R od o Kumiai S ohy ogikai; General Council of Trade Unions), the rise and fall of the Japan Red Army, NHK public opinion surveys, and the postwar activities of interwar-era rightists Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ry oichi. As this range of organizations suggests, the discussion is far-ranging and Gerteis includes diverse sources as well: from activist magazines to punk music lyrics and manga, which give a sense of the wide array of media in which generational identity and mission was defined and expressed. Perhaps the most important question addressed in this book is that of how the interwar and wartime generation defined the postwar generation. In Chapter One, on S ohy o’s failure to connect with a younger generation of blue-collar and pink-collar workers, as in Chapter Four, on shady right-wing Kodama Yoshio’s inability to recruit from either b os ozoku biker gangs or younger Far Right activists, we get a sense of how the ‘Sixties generation’ was forged relationally with members of an older generation, whom they often rejected, even as their general ideological concerns would seem to align. For example, Kodama had been recruited into Far-Right politics ‘from the ranks of the interwar-era lumpenproletariat,’ but he found that the postwar b os ozoku he attempted to engage was not ‘rebels looking for a cause.’ Similarly, right-leaning youth were disgusted by how the transwar generation on the Far Right, including Kodama, had cooperated with the Americans to maintain personal influence in the postwar period (116–117). The Chapter Two discussion of young leftist radicals, and the splits among them, likewise offers a sense of how some youth interpreted their relation to society and the older generation. Gerteis focuses on the Japan Red Army, the punk band Z uno Keisatsu, and postwar blue-collar activist Wakamiya Masanori’s trajectory from New Left radical to proprietor of a noodle shop that also functioned as a kind of ‘salon’ for day laborers and students, all of them critical of ‘the New and