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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation by Christopher Gerteis Joelle Nazzicone Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation. By Christopher Gerteis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. x + 181 pp. Christopher Gerteis's Mobilizing Japanese Youth presents a multifaceted look at relations between Japan's first post–World War II generation and "nonstate" [End Page 319] institutions or individual actors, particularly as both parties tried to articulate, mold, and advance the former's political position and activities. Gerteis approaches these relations through case studies of institutions and actors pulled from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Accordingly, the first half of the book examines the tensions and sympathies between leftist youth groups, labor unions, and revolutionary groups, while the latter half spotlights the ways in which "transwar" far-right individuals worked to instill and propagate their views among postwar generations of children and youth. The two halves are bridged by the third chapter, which presents detailed, if largely quantitative, analyses of public opinion and the shifts therein, using nationwide surveys to track generational cohorts' attitudes towards political institutions, symbols, or systems of social convention and authority. Covering an impressive range of materials that includes print magazines and posters, documentary and pink films, punk music, television commercials, and manga, Gerteis contextualizes and critically analyzes, in chapter 1, the disconnect between Sōhyō (Nihon rōdō kumiai sōhyōgikai; the General Council of Trade Unions) and a younger, increasingly more militant generation of labor advocates; in chapter 2, the ties between radical youth organizations in Japan and revolutionary movements across the world, as facilitated by the print and audiovisual media that also helped them connect with the wider public; in chapter 3, the diversity of sociopolitical attitudes reflected in the nationwide NHK (Nippon hōsō kyōkai; Japan Broadcasting Corporation) surveys of youths over the postwar decades; in chapter 4, the transwar far right's inability to mobilize both new right radicals and the "young men from the post-war, urban lower classes" (109), who had formed the base of recruitment for the far right's ranks of membership during the Second World War; and in chapter 5, the multisite, multimedia efforts to promote social values—posed as "traditional" Japanese values, but effectively reproducing wartime priorities and social order—through ostensibly philanthropic initiatives. Throughout these different case studies, Gerteis underscores persistent tensions between the transwar generation and the "Sixties Generation," whereby the former insisted on older forms of political organization and advocacy fundamentally incompatible with the latter's priorities and experiences, especially as shaped by gender and class. Attention to this disconnect in view and methodology—not only between the transwar and sixties generations but also, as chapter 3's reading of the NHK surveys indicates, between different groups under the greater umbrella of the "Sixties Generation"—drives Gerteis's key intervention, that is, to interrogate [End Page 320] prevailing characterizations of the "Sixties Generation" and its political activities as driven by "an ennui born of middle-class affluence" (41). As Gerteis illustrates in his account of the bōsōzoku's (motorcycle gangs') rejection of far-right activists' attempts to recruit them, as well as in Japanese Red Army founder Shigenobu Fusako's leveraging of her own image and 1970s revolutionary motifs, neither a middle-class upbringing nor an education at one of Japan's elite universities was the common denominator or defining influence behind youth or revolutionary groups in the "Sixties Generation." Indeed, with each case study, Gerteis demonstrates how the common assumption of generational collectivity—usually figured as male, middle-class, and university educated—precludes a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Japan's youth or revolutionary groups, their views of and relations with other groups and institutions, and the articulation and advancement of their priorities and goals. At the same time, the recurring return to the "Sixties Generation," particularly in the final outline of how its members' views underwent major shifts in later decades, raises questions about the conceptualization, application, and implications of generational collectivity. In the last third of the book, Gerteis recounts not only how the "Sixties Generation" recycled narratives...