Chelsea Szendi Schieder's accessible and eloquently written book Coed Revolution is an extremely welcome addition to the scholarship on postwar Japan. Until now, no book-length publication existed in English on Japan's place in the “global revolutions” of 1968. This meant that scholars attempting comparative research on 1968 without knowledge of Japanese had to rely on a few short articles on the Japanese case or else leave Japan out of the story entirely. While Schieder's book focuses on the role of female student activists, it also provides a concise historical overview that will be of interest to scholars across many disciplines.
The core of Schieder's study is her excavation of the lived experiences of female activists, such that they become the heroes of their own stories as told through their own words, rather than having their actions filtered through the male-centered narratives of the mass media, or even, Schieder argues, previous historical scholarship. However, Schieder seeks to write not just a gender history but a “gendered history” (p. 4), and to this end, she skillfully interweaves her excavations of women's voices with expository passages providing broader historical context and summarizing key events.
Chapter 1 examines early New Left activist Kanba Michiko, a member of the radical Communist League who was killed battling police at the height of the 1960 protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty. Schieder argues that Japanese media, in collusion with Kanba's parents, largely succeeded in erasing her radicalism and recasting her as an innocent “maiden sacrifice” who died so that Japanese democracy could live. In a series of evocative juxtapositions, Schieder contrasts this false media narrative of a passive martyr practicing a “naïve” women's politics with the radical politics found in Kanba's posthumously published writings.
Chapter 2 recovers the often-overlooked role of pioneering activist Tokoro Mitsuko, whose calls to reject hierarchy and pursue a radical egalitarianism proved highly influential on the 1968 student protesters. While taking Tokoro seriously in her earnest efforts to construct an organizational theory for New Left activism that would not replicate the structures of oppression that she saw as inhering in “Old Left” organizations, Schieder acknowledges that Tokoro's attempt to ground her theory in a “women's logic” of caring replicated a broader historical amnesia about women's participation in Japan's wars of aggression as well as essentialist notions of a uniquely female nurturing instinct.
In chapter 3, Schieder takes readers behind the barricades of the 1968 campus rebellions to document how ostensibly revolutionary and antihierarchical New Left movements nevertheless reproduced the traditional gender hierarchy and deeply gendered divisions of labor. Drawing on memoirs and interviews, Schieder movingly recounts how female activists’ expectations of liberation were dashed as they realized that their male compatriots expected them mainly to undertake cooking, cleaning, secretarial duties, and other “care work” traditionally gendered female while valorizing traditionally masculine tasks such as constructing barricades and battling police. As in other nations, Schieder tells us, these core contradictions within the Japanese New Left paved the way for the emergence of the women's liberation movement.
In chapter 4, Schieder turns to the other side of the equation, charting how a sort of toxic masculinity emerged in the Japanese New Left, whereby one's worth as an activist was increasingly measured by one's willingness to both commit and submit to physical violence. This allowed male activists to find common ground with the masculinist right-wing nationalist Mishima Yukio in a famous 1969 “debate,” even as they systematically devalued the work of women in their own movement who supported them and shared their ideology. Schieder argues that the masculinist drive to appear strong and to commit ever more violent acts ultimately undermined the student movement, since popular support had been predicated on the students appearing as innocent victims of state violence.
Finally, in chapter 5, Schieder explores portrayals of female activists in the mass media. In a story that will be grimly familiar to female activists everywhere, the male-dominated media created a no-win scenario in which female activists, when they were not written off as naïve and irrational, were portrayed as hypersexualized man-eaters who threatened to overturn the “normal” gender hierarchy and lured men into acts of violent extremism. As Schieder points out, women were consistently read only in terms of their gender, with their own subjectivity elided or ignored.
Schieder's skills as a writer are prodigious, and her artful, jargon-free prose is a joy to read. Nevertheless, scholars should approach this book with a few cautionary notes in mind. First, Schieder repeatedly draws a sharp distinction between the Japanese term shinsayoku (New Left), which she says refers only to specific Japan Communist Party splinter groups, and the English transliteration nyū refuto (also New Left), which she claims had a much broader application. However, this purported distinction accords neither with recent secondary scholarship in Japanese nor with my own reading of primary source materials from this period, in which these terms seem to be used more or less interchangeably.
Second, while Schieder's abjuration of extensive scholarly apparatus is generally a strength, detail-oriented researchers may find themselves frustrated with the parsimoniousness of Schieder's source citations. Some substantive claims go entirely uncited, and many specific claims are cited to an entire book without exact page numbers, rendering verification of Schieder's research more difficult than necessary.
Finally, one wishes Schieder had more fully acknowledged some of her intellectual debts, even if only in the endnotes. For example, Guy Yasko's unpublished 1997 dissertation has a lengthy chapter on Tokoro Mitsuko's writings that Schieder does not acknowledge, although she cites Yasko's dissertation elsewhere.Footnote 1 Similarly, whereas Schieder contends that Kanba Michiko was a “maiden sacrifice,” Hiroko Hirakawa argued that Kanba was a “maiden martyr” in a pioneering 2002 essay that Schieder cites only once in passing, but clearly drew inspiration from.Footnote 2 We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and while Schieder adds significant new research to these earlier findings, a slightly more generous accounting of debts would not have lessened her achievement.
Indeed, the magnitude of Schieder's achievement should not be understated. Schieder has not only recovered and recentered the voices of Japan's pioneering female activists; she has also written a field-defining book that immediately becomes required reading for scholars of postwar Japan and the global protests of 1968 yet remains highly accessible to students and general readers. Moreover, at a time when political movements around the world continue to grapple with how to incorporate women's voices on a basis of equality, Schieder's book is relevant far beyond the field of history.
