We are fortunate to be in an era of increasing, if long overdue, scholarly interest in the culture of activism of Japanese during the 1960s.Footnote ¹ Nick Kapur's magnificent Japan at the Crossroads is, as the title would suggest, the place to start out. This is at once a political history and a cultural history. It begins with a simple claim—that the protests in the spring of 1960 against the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, commonly known (protests and treaty alike) as Anpo, marked a key moment that defined everything thereafter, not only in international relations and Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politics, but also for left-wing political organizations, unions, the arts, and mass media. Perhaps Kapur is too successful in his argumentation; by the end of the book, I wondered how it could ever have been thought otherwise. Remarkably, for a book that is chockablock with details of factions, intellectual and artistic schools, and splinter groups, Kapur manages never to get caught up in the weeds. The introduction is, simply put, the best short history of the Anpo protests that exists in English. It is only the prologue to Kapur's actual project, but I suspect it is already appearing on syllabi.

Chapter 1 rejects the too-easy truism that nothing of interest in US-Japan relations happened after Anpo. Kapur shows how US president John F. Kennedy and Japanese prime minister Ikeda Hayato hit the reset button to undo some of the bad blood of the Eisenhower/Kishi years. The Kennedy administration's appreciation of the fact that Japan felt it was not being heard by the United States led to reforms on several levels. Consultative committees that still exist today, including the US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange, were established during this period, and the appointment as ambassador of Edwin Reischauer—whose ability in the Japanese language, understanding of Japanese culture, and engagement with people across Japan was unparalleled among US ambassadors—is portrayed as a particularly wise move. In Kapur's telling, prime ministers Ikeda and Satō Eisaku made rather extraordinary gains in exchange for very little.

Chapter 2 turns inward to show how Ikeda reformed the LDP. Standard histories of postwar Japanese politics point to the 1955 System, named for the year the LDP locked down control of the Japanese government for nearly all of the subsequent sixty-five years and counting, but Kapur makes a compelling case for 1960 and Ikeda's response to the events of that year as being far more consequential. Ikeda adopted a “low posture,” essentially recognizing the limits of his power to accomplish what he could. Ikeda assembled a team of rivals from the various LDP factions in his first cabinet, ushering in a shift from personality-based to position-based politics. He changed the focus from global politics to economics with his declaration to double the national income in ten years’ time (as Kapur points out, a low bar considering the rate of economic expansion of the period) and a renewed emphasis on social welfare programs.

Chapter 3 details the disintegration of the left-leaning political parties after Anpo. The Japan Socialist Party (JSP) disintegrated into factionalism, a direct result of differences over responses to Anpo. The breakaway Democratic Socialist Party, the more moderate wing of the JSP, collapsed immediately in the 1960 elections. The rump JSP, more militant without its moderates, was unable to thread the needle between revolution and incrementalism, and faded by the end of the 1960s. The Japan Communist Party (JCP) had already suffered devastating losses in the early 1950s, during a brief period of ill-advised militant violence, following which it emerged during the Anpo protests as an unlikely voice of moderation. Despite the infamous purges of intellectuals during the early 1960s, the JCP hewed the moderate line and emerged as a modest node of resistance to the dominant LDP by 1972.

Chapter 4 is the counterpoint to chapter 3; whither the political parties, there, too, go the unions that support them. Kapur details two organizations. Sōhyō, founded at the behest of the US occupation in 1950, avoided the JCP but drew close to the Socialists by the mid-1950s. Under the leadership of Ōta Kaoru, it found a gentle path toward irrelevance, engaging in the annual farce of agitating for wage increases that it had already agreed to in advance. The Zengakuren national student organization, on the other hand, is a monster in Kapur's narrative, and the JCP that founded it something of a hapless Doctor Frankenstein. The students were on board with the JCP's violent tendencies in the early 1950s, and they saw the 1955 pacification of the party as a betrayal. The various student groups lurched toward destruction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, checking off every extreme tendency along the way: the factionalism, the self-criticism, and the obligatory “charismatic half-blind Trotskyist political philosopher” guru figure among them (p. 146). A brief and intriguing summary of three intellectuals turning their backs on progressive politics in the wake of Anpo reminds us how much more we would like to know about the careers of Shimizu Ikutarō, Maruyama Masao, and especially Yoshimoto Takaaki. Kapur ends the chapter on a bright note, with the surprising grassroots activism that arose in the 1970s as an ersatz Anpo that registered successes in environmental and consumer protections and women's rights.

Chapter 5 moves at the same pace over literature and the arts following Anpo. Kapur begins with brief nods toward performance artists using the Anpo protests as their backdrop and points to prominent allegories of Anpo in theater, literature, and manga. Although he provides informative close analyses of paintings in a nonrealist mode, here again, Kapur is primarily concerned with systems. Kapur shows how hierarchies in literature, art, and film were undermined as a result of Anpo. In art, the Neo-Dada Organizers and Hi-Red Center engaged in “happenings” that put into question the very nature of artistic production. In theater, the calcified shingeki organizations were rejected by younger performers who—as in the graphic and plastic arts—worked at the horizons of what the artistic could contain, including Satō Makoto, Kara Jūrō, and Suzuki Tadashi.

It is awfully difficult to make the same kinds of claims for literature that appear elsewhere in this book—the institutions simply do not control the individual actors to the same degree by the nature of the art. A full accounting of the period would surely need to include the many writers who dodged organizational strictures well before Anpo, including the Third Generation of New Writers who came on the scene in the early 1950s, for whom political disengagement (as I have argued elsewhere) was a form of resistance. Perhaps sensing the quicksand below, Kapur's section titled “Literature” focuses on critics (and writers and politicos with their critic's hats on) debating the nature of literary fiction (junbungaku), postwar literature, and political literature. It is only one thread through Japanese letters of the 1960s, perhaps even a minor one, but surely the most pertinent one for this study's purposes. It is of particular interest as an extension of recent research in early Japanese postwar literary criticism.Footnote ²

In many ways, chapter 6 is the most compelling of all, as we see what is surely Anpo's most visible lasting effect on Japanese society: restrictions on freedom of assembly and a steady accretion of police powers, a media turned to milquetoast, and the growth of an out-of-control right-wing movement engaging in various acts of terrorism. The uproar over Fukazawa Shichirō's story published in Chūō Kōron depicting the beheading of the imperial family, “Fūryū mutan,” hits the trifecta: when a right-wing youth attempts to assassinate the president of Chūō Kōron, the publishing company completely capitulates to terror and the LDP is about to enact a new lèse-majesté law until the indignant media talks itself into creating a de facto ban on criticizing the imperial family. Kapur's endnotes, a wealth of information throughout the book, are unusually sparing here, but he appears to have relied on a Japanese-language book-length study of the Shimanaka Incident. I will note that the fullest narrative of it in English is a 1994 article by John Treat that predates the source cited by Kapur; it is worth reading in tandem with this chapter.Footnote ³

Needless to say, Kapur's terrain is unusually vast. There is a trade-off between breadth and depth, and Kapur—wisely, I think—sees his charge as a broad one. This is, like all groundbreaking studies, a road map to further inquiry, and I hope we will see studies in the future that explore in greater depth any number of paths laid out here. I further hope that when such manuscripts do appear, publishers in our field, journal review sections, and tenure committees will remember that single-author studies and archival deep dives on narrow topics—especially on subjects that do not fit neatly into or actively resist institutional frameworks such as those explored by Kapur—are equally important to our understanding of the intellectual churn of postwar Japan and fulfill the promise of polymathic histories such as this. A map is useful only insofar as it is used.

Until then, this book is essential reading for anyone hoping to explore the aftermath of Anpo in Japan, and indeed the culture of the 1960s and beyond. Kapur writes with admirable clarity and enthusiasm for everything he finds; advanced undergraduate classes across fields can make use of this book as well as scholars in the field. Harvard University Press would be wise to issue a paperback version.