Political Thought and Japan's New Left Movements

Christopher Perkins is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The United Red Army on Screen (2015) and The Tokyo University Trial and the Struggle Against Order in Postwar Japan (2024), as well as numerous journal articles and translations on the pre and postwar Japanese student movement.Ferran de Vargas is UKRI Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, having previously been Juan de la Cierva Early-Career Postdoctoral Fellow at the Open University of Catalonia. He is the author of a book on the history of the Japanese New Left, Izquierda y revolución. Una historia política del Japón de posguerra (1945-1972) (2020) and of articles in academic journals such as positions: asia critique, Japan Forum, and Modern Asian Studies.

• List of ContributorsAcknowledgementsNot on the text/translationIntroduction: The Japanese New Left and the Politics of Rupture, Ferran de Vargas and Christopher Perkins, both University of Edinburgh, UKSection 1. Exploring the Limits of Marxism1. Umemoto Katsumi, the New Left and the Critique of Civil Society, Viren Murthy, UW-Madison, USA2. Kakehashi Akihide: From the Philosophy of Nature to The Philosophy of Capital, Ferran de Vargas, University of Edinburgh, UK3. Legitimacy and Leeway: The Resonance of Uno Kozo’s Thought in Japan’s New Left, Mario Malo, Universidad de Granada, Spain4. Hani Goro and the New Left, Takemasa Ando, Musashi University, Japan5. Inoue Kiyoshi and the Post-Anpo Student Movement, Curtis Anderson Gayle, Waseda University, JapanSection 2. Developing a New Marxism6. Kuroda Kan’ichi’s Anti-JCP Marxism: Theorizing The “True” Vanguard Party, Ferran de Vargas, University of Edinburgh, UK7. Hiromatsu Wataru: Theory and Practice of Relationalism and the Critique of Reification, Raji Steineck, University of Zurich, Switzerland8. Takita Osamu: A Rogue Reconsidered, William Andrews, independent scholar Tokyo, Japan9. Ota Ryu: the “Black Mirror” of the Japanese New Left, Till Knaudt, Kyoto University, JapanSection 3. Moving Beyond Marxism10. Yoshimoto Taka’aki, Radical Intellectual of the Multitude, Manuel Yang, Japan Women?s University, Japan11. Tanigawa Gan: Poetic Metaphor as Political Action, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, University of Utah, USA12. Tokoro Mitsuko: love, revolution, and political activism in the long 1960s, Anna-Viktoria Vittinghoff, University of Sheffield, UK13. Tanaka Mitsu and ribu: liberation begins with me, Yanagiwara Megumi, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, translated by Christopher Perkins, University of Edinburgh, UK14. Nagasaki Hiroshi: Liberating Rebellion, Christopher Perkins, University of Edinburgh, UK15. Karatani Kojin: learning from defeat and catastrophe, Carl Cassegård, University of Gothenburg, SwedenIndex

An indispensable volume on Japan’s New Left. It reveals how intellectuals creatively reinterpreted Marxism through locally specific contexts of student movements, subjectivity, war responsibility, and US hegemony. Through fifteen thinkers, it affirms Japan’s New Left as a major theoretical endevour in its own right, not merely derivative of Western thought.