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Protests and Democracy in Japan: the Development of Movement Fields and the 1960 Anpo Protests

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Protests and Democracy in Japan: the Development of Movement Fields and the 1960 Anpo Protests Protests and Democracy in Japan: The Development of Movement Fields and the 1960 Anpo Protests by Hiroe Saruya A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor George P. Steinmetz, Chair Associate Professor Kiyoteru Tsutsui Associate Professor Geneviève Zubrzycki Professor Jennifer E. Robertson Professor Michael D. Kennedy, Brown University © Hiroe Saruya 2012 To my family and In memory of Mayer N. Zald ii PREFACE This dissertation is the end of a long path that began when a student seeking to become a sociologist and an independent scholar first came to the United States. It is also very much a collaborative work, produced through scholarly encounters and critical conversations I have enjoyed throughout my graduate study both in the United States and Japan. As a work of sociology, the dissertation analyzes a historical event through the lens of theory, specifically Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. This theory shapes the analysis, but is also informed throughout by my conversations with the people who actually participated in these events. The dissertation focuses on the protests against the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in Japan in 1960, the so-called 1960 “Anpo protests,” named after the Japanese acronym of the treaty. As a student of historical sociology, my original plan was to conduct a comparative historical analysis of the groups constituting the protests. However, I soon realized that a rigid comparison of movement groups such as of students, intellectuals, workers, and citizens’ groups posed many problems. To begin with, the groups, as units of analysis, differed significantly not only in terms of size, but also in terms of structures and boundaries. Some were informal groups, others took the form of formal organizations, and still others constituted multi-level organizations. Second, the volume, details, and contents of historical records pertaining to these groups varied considerably. Intellectuals themselves wrote much about their thoughts, but little about what they actually did; students wrote about their own thoughts and actions equally, including critiques of rivals; but the histories of workers and labor unions were often written by others, and few historical records offered insight into what rank-and-file workers actually thought and did. iii My fieldwork in Japan lasted for 18 months between 2008 and 2010. From the moment I began meeting and talking with those who participated in these events, I began realizing things that I had not predicted. Interviewees saw me as a student who was thirty or forty years younger than them, so they often began by telling me about the history of Japan, particularly the devastation and poverty that followed World War II, even before I began asking any questions. I asked the same questions of all my interviewees, but their reactions varied considerably. Some responded to the questions, others would not, and still others became frustrated, even upset. Meetings with former university faculty members generally went smoothly, whether I met them in their offices or at their homes. They offered their views and responses to the questions, and few, if any, awkward moments arose. In my interviews with former student activists, however, frustrations sometimes accumulated for both parties. For example, these participants did not understand why I asked them about topics such as “democracy” and even challenged my legitimacy as an interviewer when I continued to ask about it. I was perplexed at first, but eventually I realized that, from their perspective, I was not asking the “right” questions or focusing on the relevant aspects of history. For them, these included events such the 6th Conference of the Japanese Communist Party in 1955 and Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin in 1956. It soon became clear that, although I was asking all my interviewees about the same period of time (1945-1960) and the same event (the 1960 Anpo protests), beyond similar accounts of postwar devastation and poverty, their versions of history varied greatly. There was significant variation even in terms of which other individuals and groups they considered relevant and about whom they expressed opinions. Slowly, I began tracing out the boundaries of the events themselves and compiled a list of relevant players. Some people referred to specific events and names, while others did not refer to them at all. It became increasingly clear that learning the terminology of each of the groups themselves was crucial, for if I did not know the right names of individuals or incidents, it often created an awkward moment in the interview or elicited a non-response. One notable example was Kan’ichi Kuroda, a charismatic independent thinker of New Left groups who became influential in student New Left movements especially after 1960. iv His original name was Hirokazu Kuroda, but following the convention of leftist groups, his first name was read as Kan’ichi, using a Chinese phonetic reading, not a Japanese one. Intellectuals at the time of the protests seemed to know of Hirokazu Kuroda and occasionally referred to him. Former student activists, both then and today, definitely knew who he was, but referred to him as “Kuro Kan,” a nickname derived from the first two syllables of his last and first names. But among former workers, I did not meet anyone who knew who he was, unless they had participated in student movements prior to their union activism. Understandings of who was an important figure, as well as what to call him or her, served to mark people’s group memberships, which had distinct boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and demonstrated one’s proximity to that figure. At an informal party organized by leftist and left-leaning former student movement groups that I participated in during my fieldwork, I asked people why Kuroda had been so important, but they only smirked, though they did reply, kindly, that he was indeed important. Subtly, their response indicated the inappropriateness of my question and confirmed that I was an outsider to their groups. As I met with more and more current and former activists, I began to recognize that they were acting within a highly demarcated social space—one that did not just “house” their respective movements, but actively shaped their organizations and how they consciously and strategically mobilized resources and members. Activists knew within their group who had power, what kinds of power they had, and where their skills lay—for example, whether this was giving speeches, writing articles, writing flyers, directing people, or doing paperwork. They also knew who had power in rival groups, and what leaders and members in these others groups were doing. Importantly, it also became clear that groups in close proximity to one another within this movement space were more likely to view each as rivals. Indeed, it seemed that activists had little knowledge about or interest in people or groups outside the boundary of their own specific movement. For example, former university faculty members tended to know little about conflicts among student group factions and, likewise, student activists were indifferent to struggles among intellectuals and even to intellectuals themselves. Not surprisingly, my standardized set of questions thus worked for some groups and not v others, and I increasingly felt as if I was crossing the boundaries of different social spaces composed of the different movement groups. Once I realized this, I began to learn how to position myself better within these spaces, depending on who I was meeting with, in order to better interact with them. It was in this way that I discovered “field” as an empirical unit of analysis. Despite the fact that the 1960 Anpo protests constituted the largest protests in post-WWII Japanese history and mobilized millions of people to take to the streets, theirs is a largely forgotten history. During my fieldwork, my informants sometimes wondered aloud why I was bothering to research these events that took place over fifty years ago. In 2010, I organized a conference panel discussion on the 1960 Anpo protests with another graduate student in Japan. During the discussion, a Japanese scholar asked us what the historical significance of the protests was, and related that they were rarely taught in schools—something I already knew from my own experience. I had at least heard about the protests, yet it was still only after I came to the United States that I, myself, really learned about these protests and their historical and theoretical importance. My research also led to discoveries about my own family history. At a reception celebrating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Bund (a New Left group), a participant in his sixties asked me if I knew Yaosaku Saruya, a name I had not heard until then. When he learned where I was born, the man insisted that Yaosaku was my great- grandfather, whom he had known when he was small and from whom he had learned waka poetry. The man’s name was Itaru Yui; he had been a student and labor union activist, and his brother, Chikai Yui, was a well-known communist activist. The Yui brothers were from Kawakami, a neighboring village to Minami-Aiki, the village of my forefathers. Both villages are located in Nagano (a central part of mainland Japan) and surrounded by mountains. When I interviewed him, Itaru said that Yaosaku came to visit by passing a mountain that crosses over two villages. He also told his own story that he and his brother turned “red” when they were young, even though most of villagers were conservative. Despite this conservatism, Itaru explained that these villages in Nagano provided many of the radical farmers responsible for the Chichibu Incident, a peasant vi revolt against the Meiji government in 1884 that was influenced by the Freedom and People’s Rights Movements, which sought people’s representation in government.
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