Who is a citizen and how is citizenship expressed? Is it all about qualifi cation, or is citizenship just as much a performance—as much doing as it is being, to borrow from one of Japan’s great thinkers?¹ For Matsushita Keiichi, a local government reformer and author of the above observation, democratic citizenship certainly depends on the robustness of institutions, but he also saw citizenship in a performative way, as a creation of ordinary people engaging in the public sphere and making politics their own. Such performative citizenship was especially important for Matsushita and others because its supposed earlier absence—...

Conventional treatments of theshiminidea and civic activism—especially in Japanese-language scholarship—usually begin with the anti-security-treaty protests of 1960 or just before.¹ This starting point is quite understandable: before this event the termshiminwas hardly used in political discourse, and when it was the connotation was most often negative or, at best, qualified. For most Marxists,shiminandshimin shakai(civil society) amounted to no more than the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society and, as such, could—at best—be a step on the pathway to somewhere better. The fact that many of Japan’s major cities lay in...

Reaching its apex in the summer of 1960 , the struggle against renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo tōsō) witnessed some of the largest mass protests in modern Japanese history. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded into the streets to express their anxieties about the treaty, the prime minister, and the apparent threat to peace and democracy in the country. As the pledge above evidences, some understood their protest as a moral crusade for democracy, a kind of definitive clash between the progressive forces of the future and those who would draw Japan back into its ill-fated past. Indeed,...

For many, Beheiren the Citizens’ Alliance for Peace in Vietnam is the quintessential Japanese new social movement.¹ Beginning in early 1965 after the commencement of U.S. bombing in North Vietnam, the movement diversifi ed into over three hundred local chapters in its nine years, making it one of the most broad-based and high-profi le civic mobilizations in the postwar era. Building on the model of the conscientious civic activism of the Anpo struggle, Beheiren promoted nonalignment, organizational pluralism, individual autonomy, small-scale mobilization, and single-issue politics. Participants intentionally avoided hierarchical organization in the mode of the old left, forming instead a...

The history of Beheiren reveals how a conscientious model of civic activism born during the Anpo struggle could be married to more parochial and deep-seated commitments to the ethnic nation and the Pan-Asian struggle against so-called U.S. imperialism. Detaching (and purifying) the nation from the state freed movement intellectuals to remake theshiminas a patriot, a good-willed internationalist, and an envoy for other “colonized” Asians. This was certainly a vision with broad appeal in 1960s Japan, but it was by no means the only vision: while Oda and others plumbed their primordial impulses to fashion a movement of Asian...

In the mid-1970s, citizen activism in Japan was at a crossroads—or, at the very least, many at the time seemed to have thought so.¹ Pointing to the waning of local protest, some observers predicted a period of decline(taichōki)and even the onset of an ice age(fuyu no jidai)for citizens’ movements.² In 1976 , theAsahi Yearbooknoted how people had begun to speak of the bells of winter(fuyu no furin)for residents’ movements, as though a glorious age of protest was slowly drawing to a close.³ There is no doubt that civic activism began to...

In 1992 a group of Japanese scholars published an unassuming volume on political strategy and civic autonomy in contemporary Japan.¹ Although by no means a best seller, the book is interesting historically, because it represents a conjuncture in the theory, history, and politics of civic activism in Japan at that moment. Conceptually, the authors were attempting to connect theshiminidea and its postwar history to the then-ascendant notion of civil society(shimin shakai)— a novel undertaking because, apart from a few important exceptions, the two concepts were essentially divorced in progressive discourse throughout most of the postwar period.Shimin,...