Rejecting the Radical New Left: Transformations in Japanese Social Movements

From Firenze University Press Journal: SocietàMutamentoPolitica

David H. Slater, Sophia University

Patricia G. Steinhoff, University of Hawaii

After a period of New Left political violence in the late 1960s and ear-ly 1970s, followed by two decades of abeyance, Japan has experienced a renewed era of social movement activity since the 1990s. These new move-ments explicitly seek to avoid what they see as contamination by the earlier period, even when their participants know nothing about it except for fear perpetuated by media portrayals of senseless violence. They range from small informal groups in Japan’s invisible civil society; groups trying to mobilize laborers who fall outside Japan’s traditional enterprise unions; and groups reviving and revitalizing older movement networks to deal with new threats; to new right-wing challengers and their counter-movements; and those making innovative use of cultural resources. These quite different groups all actively seek alternatives to earlier movements in Japan that engaged in political violence. As was true of the New Left social movements in the mid-20th cen-tury, these new groups are closely attuned to movement developments around the world, even as they craft their responses to specific historical conditions in Japan. This article analyzes a dozen ethnographic accounts of contemporary social movement groups engaged in collective action, based on our own research and that of younger scholars we have worked with (Slater and Steinhoff 2024). We examine the cases through the lens of current research on social movements and memory. Building on Halbwachs’ seminal work on collective memory (1992 [1925; 1950]) social movement scholars have been examining the intersection between socially constructed memories of social movements and their impact on later social movements. Work by Olick and Levy (1997) and Olick and Robbins (1998) has exam-ined how collective memories of cultural trauma impact the future, while Fine (2001) and Zamponi (2018) have emphasized how negative collective memories constrain the options available to contemporary movements. We ask two questions: why does this stigmatized period of activism half a century ago remain such a power-ful negative reference for contemporary young activists in Japan? How do contemporary activists steer around the stigmatized past to find new ways to legitimize their protest activities?

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-15497

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/smp/article/view/15497