“Not only have women’s participation in and contributions to the New Left in Japan been ignored, but a great deal of energy has been expended to ignore them… Female participation in student activism was quickly and persistently policed both from within the movement and from without by the actions of male activists and of the mass media.”
Chelsea Szendi Schieder. (2021). Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left. P4.
As the 1960s dawned, Japan was rocked by massive, highly energized popular uprisings led by the students of the country’s recently-coed universities. The target of this mass protest movement was the Japanese state, seen by the students as coercive and backsliding on the democratic ideals of the post-war era. As the first generation in Japan brought up to believe in democratic equality, egalitarianism, and anti-war ideology, the youth of Japan rankled at their government’s focus on extractive economics and its subordinate relationship with the United States – a relationship which saw Japan act as the launching point for the US’s war in Vietnam.
Throughout the 60s and early 70s, well over a million Japanese citizens were involved in protesting the state. The movement, which barricaded the nation’s universities, brawled with riot police in the streets, occupied government buildings, and gained and then loss public support as its violence turned inwards, was known as the New Left. In her excellent new book, Chelsea Szendi Schieder examines how this movement, which defined a decade of modern Japanese history, was far from revolutionary in its internal treatment of gender. Meanwhile, the mass media has adhered to gender-normative ways of thinking when repeating the narrative of these tumultuous years ever since.
Reframing History
In Coed Revolution, Schieder locates and explicates many of the bold women who fought for the ideals of the New Left, demonstrating the agency present in their actions and stated political beliefs. Just as importantly, she shows us how internal and external narratives can override the actual intentions and actions of public actors. Her book takes time to focus on notable women activists, portraying them both as individuals and as the objects of popular imagination which they became.
Most significantly, we come to know the stories of the “martyred” 22-year-old Kanba Michiko, feminist thinker Tokoro Mitsuko, the stave-wielding “Gewalt Rosa,” and the infamous URA leader Nagata Hiroko, among others. Their stories serve as launching points for wide-ranging discussions of the often discouraging female experience in the New Left, as well as the reactions of Japan as a whole to images of women on the barricades – reactions that continue to influence the country to this day.
The book serves as important scholarship, compellingly reframing the story of the Japanese New Left towards conceptions of the women involved in its struggle; at the same time, Schieder deftly manages to broaden the scope of her narrative. Simply put, this is a great book about the New Left as a whole, encompassing much of its history and context from the 1950s through the early 1970s. The orientation towards the “feminine” is anything but narrow, representing as it does such a major component of Japanese society.
Deep but Accessible
Indeed, in a recent discussion with Japan by River Cruise, Schieder mentioned that she worried about the accessibility of the topic — that even people interested in the topic would likely only ever read one book on the Japanese New Left, if that. Coed Revolution deals with this problem by contextualizing the whole of the movement. So, while the book is academic, and some concepts may at first seem difficult to those not used to scholarship on the topic, it can still serve as an introduction to the era while being of deep interest to those already versed in the New Left.
For example, Schieder does a great job of anchoring the narrative of women within Japanese politics as a whole. Not only do we come to understand peculiarities of the New Left, but also the trends of women’s involvement in imperialism in the pre-war years, and in the “naive” peace and consumer politics of the early postwar. This ability to provide a wider grounding than the specific subject might suggest is a hallmark of the book.
In fact, Coed Revolution is somehow the only book I’ve read on the subject that goes out of its way to actually define the global and local “New Left” itself. Often the New Left exists as a sort of actor carrying out specific actions in the historical timeline. Schieder takes pains to delineate what separated New Left activists from the old Left of the Japanese Communist Party; perhaps these could be defined as a desire to break entirely from the political structures which still reinforced non-democratic hierarchies, even in supposedly communist states like the USSR. These sorts of observations make the book valuable for anyone looking to understand the 1960s and 70s in Japan.
A Masculine Revolution?
The discussions within Coed Revolution of the place and conception of gender in the New Left are fascinatingly wide-ranging. In fact, the book is not just content to discuss concepts of femininity. After all, discussing the role of women and concepts of femininity within the student movement necessarily also means investigates what masculinity meant within these spaces. This means Schieder spends significant time on what “masculinity” meant in Japan in the period in question – and even today.
Masculinity, it turns it, was a paramount concept within the student barricades. Schieder details how strongly leftist activists associated the right sort of action with being “male.” The state, “rationalized” and focused on economic prosperity, was perceived as emasculated. In reaction to this, manliness and masculinity became a genuine ethos of the New Left student movement.
Posters and graffiti would label bold, action-oriented student bodies, sects, and universities as male. (Activists even referred to the elite University of Tokyo, site of many dramatic New Left events, as 男東大 – “Male Tokyo U.”) This fixation even bled over into what movies activists watched; Yakuza films experienced major popularity amongst radicals. Yakuza outlaws, muscular, action-oriented, and presented as true to a code, were seen as an antidote to the economic rationalization of the era, which required men to exist within a fixed and staid position as lifelong salarymen.
Feminine qualities, by contrast, were seen as weak and passive – everything the student movement wanted not to be. This created an awkward position for the many female activists, often passively relegated to gendered “maintenance” roles – cooking, cleaning, and caring for male activists behind the barricades. Male activists, outwardly for the abolition of gender roles, instead enforced such roles – all while lambasting feminine virtues.
Indeed, the desire to strike a masculine pose against the neutered government was shared by both the far-left and the far-right. This meant that there was little space for women and women’s issues within either political conception. In one especially memorable section, Schieder employs the famed debate between far-right militant/internationally famed author Mishima Yukio and the leftist students occupying the University of Tokyo to demonstrate this concept. Ideologically opposed, the leftist students and rightist Mishima still respected each other for their masculine posturing and willingness to use violence.
Sex and the Left
Schieder also demonstrates how such masculinized, gendered concepts existed throughout the sexual politics of the New Left. Media narratives, meanwhile, speculated endlessly about how activists spaces behind university barricades were surely dens of inequity; female activists, it was assumed, were “bad girls” who stereotypically engaged in vast amounts of sex. In reality, the famed “Free Love” of the 1960s came late to Japan, where Japanese activists either rejected it as a distraction or embraced it as revolutionary. When put into practice, however, such “free love” really seemed to mean free access for men to the bodies of the women around them.
Similar “revolutionary” attempts to portray sex on film by directors associated with the “pink” film wave (and by association, the Left) would tend to do so almost exclusively through a male gaze, often using sexual assault as a crutch. Such portrayals were excused by the belief that disrupting society and challenging the censors was in of itself “revolutionary”; Schieder rightfully takes this flawed idea to task. In a powerful statement, she writes that although “…such films, like the student-built barricades, attempted to disrupt the everyday of the state and authority, the content created within this disruption was not necessarily radical. In both cases, masculinist fantasy undermined the liberatory promises of the late 1960s New Left.”
This leads to a perhaps undermentioned, darker theme. Narratives about the New Left rarely engage with the sexual violence which occurred both within sects and during clashes between leftist groups vying for control; while this is far from my first time researching and writing about the New Left, it is in Schieder’s work that I first encountered this aspect of its history. According to a woman activist of the era, “using rape and sexual violence to punish women was an everyday thing.” Schieder points how, even amongst the eventually brutal and even murderous infighting of the New Left, this represented a specifically gendered sort of violent strategy. One example given is an attack made by the sect Kakumaru on a female member of their perennial rivals Chukakuha; here, a devastating sexual assault was deemed a sound strategy to shame the woman out of returning to activism.
Dealing with Essentialized Narratives
Another theme found throughout the book is the idea of essentialized concepts of feminine politics. Schieder takes time to demonstrate how activists thinker Tokoro Mitsuko, who insisted on women as inherently more peaceful and nurturing in their politics than men, was towing a similarly essentialist line as the post-war leadership in both the occupation and Japanese government to whom she was opposed. Said government had claimed that women’s enfranchisement would lead to a more moderate country. Shieder focuses on this concept of “naive politics” which considered women loving, nurturing, and uninterested in masculine modes of politics by nature.
Yet this idea that women were politically neutral betrayed the reality of how involved many women – indeed, even some activists – had been in supporting Japan’s earlier 20th-century imperialism. As Schieder says, “…an ahistorical ideal of women as the repository of sentimental politics is not only a fiction that subsumes distinctions of class, ethnicity, and nationality, but also a myth that can be mobilized to support larger projects of oppression as easily as it can be used to chip away at those projects.”
Such observations make Coed Revolution a complicated, rewarding read. The book does not strike a single tone or subject, requiring the reader to grapple with numerous layers of narrative at once.
On the JRA
Of special interest to readers of this website may be Schieder’s treatment of the Japanese Red Army, covered on Unseen Japan in my own five-part series. Two female leaders of the JRA (or its related groups) are amongst the most infamous figures in modern Japanese history; URA purge-leader Nagata Hiroko and international terrorist Shigenobu Fusako.
Fascinatingly, Coed Revolution relates the URA purge and the climactic siege of Asama Sanso Lodge as being rooted in anti-feminine masculine posturing. Indeed, the purge originated in URA leader Nagata Hiroko expressing displeasure with URA essayist Toyama Mieko’s use of makeup while training in the mountains of Gunma. This disdain of perceived femininity started a series of “self-criticism” sessions which eventually left 12 URA members dead, murdered by their own comrades. Shockingly, a pregnant mother was among those killed during the purge – motherhood itself was associated with this anti-revolutionary femininity.
Shigenobu Fusako, perhaps the most well-known Japanese New Left figure on the international stage, receives less attention. This may be because, having achieved infamy for acts done abroad, she is less of a topic in Japan than the more domestic Nagata. Yet there is an especially interesting comparison made between the two, demonstrating how the media latched on to Nagata’s perceived masculinity vs. Shigenobu’s purposefully feminine approach. Both women have been presented as dangerous to society, but their approach to their own femininity was viewed in different ways. While the book eschews focusing too much on these most sensational of New Left actors, what we get here is highly intriguing.
Required Reading
Despite its relatively short length (the main narrative concludes at 168 pages), there is too much variety and detail to discuss the whole of Coed Revolution in full in this review. It is a truly fascinating read, and one which helped me rethink a subject about which I’ve already read and written an appreciable amount.
If there is one complaint, it’s of the sort most books should be proud of: Coed Revolution left me wanting more. It covers an admirable amount of history and perspectives, and does so in such an interesting way that I would gladly have read another 168 pages. Perhaps the next logical step for a reader like myself, wanting more, this book would be to investigate the personal writing of the activists featured so vividly within this book.
Coed Revolution achieves its goal of reorienting New Left narratives, as well as of demonstrating the value in questioning dominant accounts of the era in general. In fact, Coed Revolution serves as a welcome antidote to some of the sensationalist depictions of activist women seen in previous English-language scholarship on the New Left.
Sadly, many of the assumptions about women that were at play at the time of the New Left have barely diminished at all. As Schieder demonstrates, the all-female liberation movements that emerged following the collapse of the New Left have been subject to similar treatment by the media and the general public. To this day, women activists are often the focus of much more ire than their male contemporaries and are often accused of “irrationality” in a way that men are not. Coed Revolution serves as a great resource for investigating both the captivating story of the 1960s in Japan, as well as for interrogating the way in which we perceive women in the political world.
Highly recommended.
Coed Revolution The Female Student in the Japanese New Left is available from Duke University Press.
