Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

Cover art: A woman throwing a rock at police in Kanda, Tokyo, September 12, 1969. Source: Mainichi News. In the 1960s, a new generation of university-educated youth in Japan challenged forms of capitalism and the state. In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women's participation in these protest movements led by the New Left through the early 1970s. Women were involved in contentious politics to an unprecedented degree, but they and their concerns were frequently marginalized by men in the movement and the mass media, and the movement at large is often memorialized as male and masculine. Drawing on stories of individual women, Schieder outlines how the media and other activists portrayed these women as icons of vulnerability and victims of violence, making women central to discourses about legitimate forms of postwar political expression. Schieder disentangles the gendered patterns that obscured radical women's voices to construct a feminist genealogy of the Japanese New Left, demonstrating that student activism in 1960s Japan cannot be understood without considering the experiences and representations of these women. "Violent events involving female students symbolized the rise and fall of the New Left in Japan, from the 1960 death of Kanba Michiko in a mass demonstration to the 1972 murders committed under the leadership of Nagata Hiroko in a sectarian purge, yet the movement at large is often memorialized as "male." Drawing on a wide range of contemporary mass media sources, activist accounts, and archival materials, Coed Revolution argues that the dramatic student activism of the 1960s in Japan cannot be understood without a consideration of the experiences and representations of the female student activist, whose contested political, social, and economic significance should be understood as central to many of the radical debates of the time about state power, knowledge production, nurturing, everyday life, and violence"-- Provided by publisher Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Gendering the Japanese New Left 1. Naive Politics: A Maiden Sacrifice for Postwar Democracy 2. “My Love and Rebellion”: The Politics of Nurturing, the Logic of Capital, and the Rationalization of Coeducation 3. Is the Personal Political? Everyday Life as a Site of Struggle in the Campus New Left 4. “When You Fuck a Vanguard Girl . . . ”: The Spectacle of New Left Masculinity 5. “Gewalt Rosas”: The Creation of the Terrifying, Titillating Female Student Activist Conclusion: Revolutionary Desire Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z "In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder examines the campus-based New Left in Japan by exploring the significance of women's participation in the protest movements of the 1960s."-- Provided by publisher