The Red Years
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The Red Years

Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68

Gavin Walker

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The Red Years

Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68

Gavin Walker

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The analysis of May 68 in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world has been widely reconsidered. But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Milan. It is also the pivotal year for a new anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics to erupt across the Third World - Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Japan's position - neither in "the West" nor in the "Third World" -provoked a complex and intense round of mass mobilizations through the 1960s and early 70s. The Japanese situation remains remarkably under-examined globally. Beginning in the late 1950s, a New Left, independent of the prewar Japanese communist moment (itself of major historical importance in the 1920s and 30s), came to produce one of the most vibrant decades of political organization, political thought, and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century. In the present volume, major thinkers of the Left in Japan alongside scholars of the 1968 movements reexamine the theoretical sources, historical background, cultural productions, and major organizational problems of the 1968 revolutions in Japan.

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Publisher
Verso
Year
2020
ISBN
9781786637239
1
Revolution and Retrospection
Gavin Walker
Hegel once famously wrote that “what is well known, precisely because it is well known, is not known at all.”1 This line sums up, in effect, our “knowledge” of the global 1960s—we know the story around the world so well, too well in fact, but it is this “little knowledge” that leads us continually into error, that tells us that this period and chain of events is just another period, with a timeline, with principal actors, with an easily summed up “moral of the story.” Like so many historical moments when revolution was on the agenda, the moment we enter this retrospective knowledge into our general encyclopedia of a closed and achieved history, we have lost all the contingency, openness, and possibility of the era. But history has a way of surprising us, not with novelty in its immediacy, but with the novelty of what has never yet been properly entered into the seemingly immovable structure of the existing knowledge. In this sense, this volume of critical and theoretical reflections on the “red years,” the Japan of the long ’68—and we might call it the longest ’68 on earth, stretching from 1960–73, or even polemically from 1955–73—aims to unsettle what little knowledge already exists in English and other European languages dealing with this phenomenon. Above all, this volume and its contents refuse the dominant mode of approaching such “facts,” refusing first and foremost to relegate the “non-European” ’68s to mere “data sets” of political upheavals that still locate their “thought” in French-, German-, and English-language documents, instead choosing actively to see this moment and its terms as itself an instance of thought, of another emancipatory universal, a chain of signification as relevant conceptually and politically for North America and Western Europe as it was for Japan.
Rather than a year as such, we ought to think of 1968 in Japan as a period of nearly thirteen years, from the experience of the first mass movement against the renewal of the United States–Japan Joint Security Treaty (Anpō, in its Japanese abbreviation) in 1960 through to the bloody and grim end of the United Red Army in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture in 1972. The following volume of critical reflections and essays on the experience, thought, and political legacy of the Japanese 1968 appears over a half-century after this pivotal global moment. In the ensuing years, the geopolitical order has transformed in ways that could never have been foreseen from its vantage point, and the global level of technical development has been revolutionized. In numerous ways, the thought and concepts of 1968 predicted in part the transformations of our world, while in others, they remain linked to a world that no longer exists, especially since the epochal moments of 1989–91.
In the final analysis today, the historical process situates us further from the global 1968 than ever; in fact, we ought to remember that 1968 is now closer to the epochal moment of 1917 and the global impact of the October Revolution than we currently are to the changes brought about by ’68 and its political culture. Do we then need to speak of an “end of 1968”? The present volume follows a different logic. In Kristin Ross’s crucial May ’68 and Its Afterlives, she calls instead for a reflexive doubling of this question, a call, in a sense, for “an end to … the end of May.”2 Like the French May, the notion of the Japanese ’68—or the longer Japanese 1960s—has been the product of innumerable endings: the bloody end of its utopian character, with the descent into internal terrorism of certain armed-struggle organizations, its end in the Japanese ’70s, conditioned by the international oil crisis and growing speculative bubble economy, an end to radical thought as much of the former left settles into old-age liberalism. But perhaps what we need the most is an end to these endings, an end to the melancholic treatment of the radical postwar Japanese years, whereby they are remembered, but only in the style of commemoration. To commemorate is also to entomb. In a moment of global crisis, an end to the end of the Japanese “red years” would provide us with a powerful body of thought, knowledge, struggle, organization, the exercise of power, the reflection on the tasks of politics, and the spirit of rebellion.
The present volume of essays and investigations does not purport to be a comprehensive history; it cannot be. The events of the long 1968 in Japan are too manifold and made up of too many interdependent storylines to be told as one. And if anything, what we have too much of today is a type of history-as-trivia of 1968. There is no shortage of conceptually impoverished writing on 1968 across the world, more or less simply recounting a timeline of supposed “events” in narrative form, as if chronology would give us access to what happened. The majority of “’68 histories” today have done nothing but overwhelm us with the trivia of another time, in that sense functioning only to neatly seal off ’68 into the entombed past, where it safely and comfortably buttresses our weary, nostalgic disavowal. As a historical object, 1968 is subtly erased by the positivist “history” done around it, its danger eliminated by its melancholy relegation to a long list of “failed experiments.” If we are to try to imagine what was—and what is—this uncanny thing called 1968, we must take it as a problem of the present, as our problem. In essence, what we lack around 1968—with a few notable exceptions—is thought.
It is in this sense that Ross also powerfully characterizes what she calls the two “confiscations” of the Parisian May ’68: on one hand, the tendency toward biography or personalization of this period; on the other, the reduction to the merely sociological or empirical. Perhaps Ross, more than any other contemporary thinker on the aftermath and afterlife of ’68, is the one who has attempted to restore to us exactly this element: the possibility of ’68 as thought in the present, and, in a sense, her work serves as a kind of lodestar that a new generation of thinkers, inspired by ’68 but living through its ambivalent aftermath, has used to orient itself (ourselves). It is this project that the present volume attempts to assist, a project of rethinking the actuality of ’68 rather than buttressing its status as a mere “fact” of the past. Yet we must wager on a flirtation with the empirical, if only to emphasize that we have not yet gained a global grasp of ’68, because our world and its globalization remains a globalization of capital and of institutions, not a globalization of resistance or a globalization of forms of thought. Even fifty years after the simultaneous world revolutions of the long ’68, the left remains fragmented and parceled into linguistic enclosures that hinder a consciousness of the common historical actuality of our struggles.
The analysis of May ’68 in Paris, the impact of the Prague Spring, and the mobilizations in West Germany have been widely disseminated in the fields of intellectual and social history, social theory, and political thought. May ’68—both its actuality and its mythology, as the conceptually iconic or metonymic year of the 1960s—is by now a canonical moment of modern European history or, perhaps, the history of “the West.” But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Berkeley: it is also, in some sense, the pivotal year for a new anticolonial and anticapitalist politics to erupt across the Third World, a crucial and central moment in the history, thought, and politics of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Today, over fifty years after 1968, this broader global legacy of “the other ’68” is crucial for us to rediscover, in thought, in histories, and in the memory and actuality of another combative left that asserted itself in the wake of decolonization and the great Third World uprisings (the Chinese revolution of 1949, the Cuban revolution of 1959, and the connections and links of both Bandung nonalignment and new proletarian internationalisms).
The Japanese case is perhaps the least known—outside of Japan, at any rate—but one of the most expansive and important moments of the global insurrection that goes under the name of 1968. After the end of World War II, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) returned to the forefront of Japanese society, bolstered by the sacrifice and legitimacy of its main leaders, Tokuda Kyūichi (imprisoned for eighteen years under the fascist government) and Nosaka Sanzō, who had spent the bulk of the war years in clandestine operations for the Comintern, and with the Chinese Communist Party in Yenan and the liberated base areas, fighting his own country’s imperialist expansion on the front lines. Hailed as uncorrupted by the war years, the JCP and the Japanese Socialist Party undertook a concerted electoral effort in 1946 and ’47. Alarmed at the wide favor these parties enjoyed, MacArthur and the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) made a pivotal decision: what came to be known among historians as the “reverse course,” changing strategy to prevent the spread of socialism rather than principally attempt to rid the Japanese state of fascism. Thus, the so-called “red purges” of the late 1940s attempted to destroy the sudden resurgence of the prewar Japanese communist tradition, once the strongest in Asia (in the 1920s and ’30s), and the source of major theoretical work in Marxist thought. This drove the JCP underground and led to a short period (late ’40s to 1955) of emphasis on armed struggle, underground clandestine work, and a renewed proximity to the Chinese line. In 1955, however, at the Sixth Congress of the postwar JCP, this line of armed struggle in the countryside was repudiated, its supporters expelled, and a new “historic compromise” (along the lines of the Italian Communist Party) was installed, paving the way for the JCP’s full transition to reformism and participation in government.
But as the 1950s drew to a close, a new social mass of students, intellectuals, workers, peasants, and the popular classes was once again rising, in particular around the 1960 renewal of the Anpō treaty. The inaugural mass demonstrations of the 1960s around this issue mobilized immense numbers: a single one of the three major general strikes called by the unions brought 6.2 million onto the streets in June 1960. With this intense level of mobilization, a new combative left had formed, heralding a new social arrangement: no longer beholden to the JCP, who were by now regarded by many on the left to have betrayed their politics, this New Left in Japan came to produce one of the most intense decades of political organization, political thought, and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century.
However, in recent years, the retrospective evaluation of 1968 in Japan has become something of a “sad passion” in the Spinozist sense. The outright enemies of 1968 are no longer the problem: the key problem is the “decent” academic, democratic liberal, for whom ’68 remains important but who is now resigned to a sad, melancholic nostalgia for “engagement” and “participation”—or, even worse, for the possibilities of “civil society.” This “sad passion” inhabits such a wide array of figures and discourses in contemporary Japan that it is almost ubiquitous, culminating in the phone-book sized text of Oguma Eiji, titled simply 1968.3 This text, which can be internationally compared to the interventions of Todd Gitlin and others, is an exhausting/exhaustive bibliographic summary of 1968 as trivia, in a double sense. On the one hand, it is literally a trivial book, full of trivial ideas, liberal platitudes, and pre-critical conceptions of politics. On the other hand, it is also a book devoted to flattening an irreducible concept-period into the realm of pure trivia, a collection of somewhat interrelated facts, events, testimonies, and archival texts, to produce an utterly meaningless whole, eviscerated of any conceptual problems. The reduction to trivia is a gesture within history, a historical act to eliminate the historicity of 1968, the fact that it remains present to us as a challenge of thought.
The present volume intervenes against such readings. It is not a question of upholding 1968 as some fetishistic object against its betrayers and apostates, but a question of refusing to give up on its potential. To refuse to give up on ’68 is not to treat it uncritically, nor is it to simply worship at its feet, as if the period had not been one of extraordinary heterogeneity and intense contestations. Nor is it to posit a unitary, univocal ’68, one in which the very term “’68” would come to deliver a clear and obvious meaning. Having said that, there is also here an important and critical lesson in the discipline of history. So much recent social history of the radical politics of the twentieth century has found itself reduced to a rather sad and generalized liberalism, constantly emphasizing that the work of history is to “complicate” and “make ambiguous” the supposedly simple dialectic of reaction and resistance. Such social history—now more or less hegemonic in “empire studies” or histories of the global 1960s—has replaced the older political commitments with a new kind of bureaucratic or administrative project: making sure to render political clarity into motivational “complexity” or “ambiguity.” For instance, should we take seriously the primacy of politics for the FLN in Algeria? The contemporary social historian will reply: yes, but we ought to also know what the militants ate, the clothes they wore, the sexual relations between them, the social dramas of their internal culture, and the style of their aesthetic life. Importantly, however, this turn toward the everyday has not been one firmly situated within a political concept of everydayness—like that deployed in Ross’ important and pivotal May ’68 and Its Afterlives, a notable exception. Over the past thirty years, but particularly in the most recent decades, the historical profession has seen a dramatic new turn toward the social sciences: virtually all of the currently dominant trends within the discipline—the new social history, new urban histories, new forms of political history, historical demography, and historical sociology—all take a point of departure in their “return to the archive,” so to speak, emphasizing a new materiality of the past beyond an exclusive focus on institutions and achieved situations. This “return” has yielded extraordinary new histories of global projects, of political belonging, of social upheaval, and so forth. In a sense, it has revolutionized the work of the professional historian to a remarkable degree—often nearly singularizing it as a discipline proximate to the other “archival” social sciences. But history in particular has a remarkably multivalent status as a discipline of knowledge.
From classical thought through the canonical figures of the Western philosophical tradition—say, through Hegel or Vico—history and its writing remained generally understood as a division within the broad field of rhetoric. That is, historiography—a contested and slippery term, to be sure, but let us use it here to signify history writing—was understood first and foremost as a form of knowledge conditioned principally by its written character. In such a sense, history exhibited an entirely different proximity: rather than to social-scientific inquiry, the natural or expected proximity exhibited here was instead to literature and especially to literary forms. Hayden White often quoted Jacques Barzun to the effect that history, strictly speaking, does not exist—cannot exist—in any way without being written. Such an emphasis, while seemingly obvious (and certainly Barzun’s original point served simply to differentiate history from myth, from ideology, from sentiment, from sheer knowledge), nevertheless contains a crucial point: that historiographical writing exists under the condition of writing as such. To exist under the condition of writing opens up a space of infinite regress: the condition of writing implies the specific history of writing systems, it implies structural features of a grammar, the conceptual features of sentences, the position of subjects, objects, verbs, but also narrative structures: metaphor, metonymy, allegory, analogy, and so on. Benedetto Croce famously argued that history was the product of the combination of philology and philosophy, and only through this combination could what lay in the archive (which he termed the “certain”) be converted into the “true,” the task of historiography itself, and our task in the present collection.
The texts in this volume consist of reflections on the legacy, thought, and social, historical, and political context of this era, all of which take seriously the thought of ’68 as a problem for us. In 1969, Hiroshi Nagasaki wrote one of the most important theoretical texts not just “on” the movement, but of the movement, in the form of his Hanranron or “Theory of Rebellion.” Developing at length a powerful reflection on the category of rebellion itself, Nagasaki’s piece here is a new intervention, commissioned solely for this volume. Providing a formidable overview of the historical development of the Zenkyōtō movement, in which he himself was a major figure, Nagasaki gives the entire volume a structuring historical grasp that culminates in his call to create for ourselves a new inheritance of ’68—to enact it again, a powerful call to arms from one of the most important thinkers of this moment. Yoshihiko Ichida likewise takes up Nagasaki’s work, on the questions of the party and the “agitator,” a subjective disposition that is powerfully cross-read with European developments in the same period, in figures such as Mario Tronti and Louis Althusser. Drawing our attention back from the philosophical to the historical register, William Marotti extends his own wide-ranging work on the Japanese ’60s to give us an intense history of the struggles—both on the street and immediately mediatized—of the “Japanese” ’68 and also to insist that there is no specific “particularity” or “Japaneseness” to this global moment, but a local inflection of a broader world process. Marotti takes influence from—like Nagasaki—Rancière’s “dissensus,” a conception of the political that militates at all times against an obvious, given, immediate experience of politics solely delimited to “what appears political.” This leads Marotti to touch on the arts—his specialization—an analysis that is echoed in the piece by his collaborator, Yoshiko Shimada. Shimada, in her own right an important figure of post-’60s art and its feminist inflection, analyzes the role played by radical publishing company Gendai Shichōsha on the aesthetic front, providing avenues and spaces of intervention for the organizations of the left in the wake of the 1969 occupation of the University of Tokyo. Taken together, Marotti and Shimada also provide a crucial roadmap for the “afterlives” of the Japanese ’68 and the pathways by which its thought, concepts, and forms of movement permeated into post-’68 publishing, the arts, and activist circles.
Setsu Shigematsu, known for her important work on the women’s liberation movement in 1960s Japan, offers to this volume a crucial overview of both of the radical feminist currents that emerged at this moment, but also a powerful corrective to the frequent tendency in the history of radical politics in Japan (and everywhere, frankly) to minimize the contributions of nonhegemonic groups and leaders. Shigematsu reminds us of the long, complex, and still-resonant critiques that radical feminism of the ’60s made of its liberal counterparts. “Women’s liberation” was the battle cry, a demand that has today been eclipsed by new liberalisms of the “lean-in” variety. Complementing Shigematsu’s synthetic grasp of feminism in these “red years” is the text of Chelsea Szendi Schieder, whose recent work has given us a crucial historical analysis of the category of the female student in the 1960s New Left. To say that the global New Left was unable to avoid the broader social determinations of the moment, including an often radical rhetoric of feminism and women’s liberation coupled to regressive gender politics at the organizational level (male cadre theorizing, female cadre cleaning up), is to simply state the obvious. Any historical rethinking of the experience of the global ’60s must reckon with the gendered organizational legacies that this moment often produced.
Hidemi Suga, one of the most prolific writers of the radical left on the legacy of 1968 and a former participant in the movement himself, here provides a synthetic analysis of the development of ’68 and its place within postwar Japanese history, a history in which certain institutions—chief among them the “Emperor system”—remain fixtures of the political landscape. Suga’s analysis takes in both an organizational grasp of the 1968 movements and their political party formations as well as an intellectual historical analysis lin...

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