In this fascinating study spanning the critical years of the postwar Japanese student movement from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Naoko Koda provides a vivid and compelling account of the ways that student activists helped shape Japan's budding postwar democracy, along the way influencing US elites’ approaches to their East Asian Cold War protégé as well as public attitudes toward peace and social protest within Japan. An innovative aspect of the book is the dual-track approach that Koda adopts. On the one hand, the narrative succinctly traces the development of student activism from its emergence in the early years after the war to its explosive conclusion in the violence of the early 1970s, while on the other hand, it provides an innovative insight into the ways American political elites became concerned about Japanese student radicalism and subsequently took action to bring it under control. The narrative of the postwar student movement will certainly be familiar to many readers; however, Koda does a terrific job of utilizing fascinating new source materials that will be of great interest even to experts in this area. The other focus on American approaches to the Japanese student movement is new and quite eye-opening, inasmuch as we get a clear sense of elites’ genuine concerns about the “dangerous” possibilities of Japanese student activism in terms of American policies for the country.

Koda sets all of this against the backdrop of the wider American Cold War strategy that Japan was a key part of and, indeed, played a role in shaping. As Koda puts it, the book “hopes to deepen our understanding of US power within a specific local context and the complex social and political processes in Japan which were shaped by America's Cold War” (p. 6). In terms of social movements, the book also attempts to situate the Japanese student movement in the “global 1960s” by showing how “radical movements in the West and elsewhere transformed the Japanese student radicals into global players in combatting the structures of oppression which they saw as resulting from capitalist imperialism” (p. 232).

Koda's book offers a very welcome comprehensive narrative of the student movement, beginning with the early postwar formation on university campuses of self-governing associations aimed at democratic revolution (ultimately leading to the creation of Zengakuren), and thereafter movements to defend democratic education and expunge fascism in the late 1940s, protests against the expansion of a US military facility in the small town of Sunagawa in the mid-1950s, mobilizations against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 and the Vietnam War from 1965, and large-scale student radicalism from the late 1960s until the early 1970s. Presenting the full historical arc of the student movement in a single narrative is very useful indeed because we not only see the ebb and flow of this activism more clearly, but also get a very clear picture of how it fits into the wider postwar history of Japan, Japan-US relations, and the Cold War.

Although student activists—like many others on the left—began with the intention to cooperate with the US drive for democracy in the country, with the onset of the Cold War and the resulting shift in American policy, as Koda shows, students slowly became more alienated from their country's overlord. By the 1950s, this alienation found expression in violent protest at US military bases like the one at Sunagawa in Tokyo, which, in turn, paved the way for mass student mobilizations during the 1960 Security Treaty crisis and the growing radicalism among students in anti–Vietnam War protests, the campus explosions of 1968 and 1969, and the self-destructive violence of the early 1970s. Although many issues motivated and helped develop the student movement (such as university administration), Koda's book reveals just how important the United States was in its growth. Though elites in Washington would have preferred quiet campuses with diligent youth, American policy in Japan, Okinawa, and throughout Asia ironically produced the exact opposite.

Of course, the Americans did not sit by idly watching as the Japanese student movement became larger and more radical. As Koda shows in the second narrative running through the book, US elites adopted a number of strategies to try and bring wayward Japanese students under control. During the occupation years, this meant “suggesting” to Japanese officials how they “should handle the leftists in schools,” including authorizing the discharge of politically active students and teachers (p. 38). Here Koda documents the efforts of Walter Crosby Eells, advisor on higher education to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, who in the later years of the occupation led anti-communist campaigns in Japanese universities and, through a series of campus lectures, (unsuccessfully) tried to convince Japanese students of the “incompatibility of communism and democracy” (p. 7). But the methods adopted by the Americans were not always so heavyhanded and appear to have become more nuanced over time.

Moreover, under the John F. Kennedy administration, a new cadre of relatively more progressive American political elites attempted to woo students through open engagement and outward expressions of genuinely listening to students. In this connection, Koda discusses the important role of Edwin O. Reischauer, US ambassador to Japan in the early 1960s, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who visited Japan in 1962. As Koda explains, both came with a mandate to try to improve the image of the United States in Japan, especially through direct engagement with groups such as workers and students who were often ignored for more “important” business and political elites. Koda's discussion of these efforts by Reischauer and Kennedy is the highlight of the book for me because it offers a fascinating insight into just how much emphasis the Americans put on winning the “hearts and minds” of Japanese youth and the actions they were willing to engage in for this end.

The great irony, of course, is that ultimately it would not be such initiatives that undermined the radical aspects of the student movement, but a combination of state suppression and the all-important shift in public opinion. As Koda notes, by the end of the 1960s, ordinary citizens were even “collecting signatures on petitions calling Zengakuren a problem in their neighborhoods” (p. 223), and public opinion was beginning to align with the foreign policy perspective of conservative leaders: namely, “collaborating with US foreign policy” (p. 7). In such a political climate, it is not surprising that only the most radical of students remained (with tragic outcomes for some) while the majority either turned away from activism altogether or sought other forms of more palatable activity. It is at this early 1970s point of decline in the student movement that Koda ends her study.

In sum, Naoko Koda's book offers a fascinating and richly documented postwar history of the student movement in Japan, greatly enriching our understanding by linking the development of this movement to American Cold War policy and by revealing the various strategies US elites adopted to try and limit Japanese student radicalism that was often triggered by America's global entanglements.