Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan

Making Japanese Citizens

Making Japanese

Citizens

Civil Society and the Mythology of the

Shimin in Postwar Japan

Simon Andrew Avenell

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

Parts of chapter 1 appeared previously in From the ‘People’ to the ‘Citizen’: Tsurumi Shunsuke and the Roots of Civic Mythology in Postwar Japan, in positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 711–42. Copyright 2008, Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Parts of chapter 5 appeared previously in Civil Society and the New Civic Movements in Contemporary Japan: Convergence, Collaboration, and Transformation, Journal of Japanese Studies 35, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 247–83. Copyright 2009, Society for Japanese Studies. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Avenell, Simon Andrew.

Making Japanese citizens : civil society and the mythology of the shimin in postwar Japan / Simon Andrew Avenell.

    p.      cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26270-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-520-26271-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Citizenship—Japan.  2. Civil society—Japan.  3. Political activists—Japan.  4. Japan—Politics and government—1945–   I. Title.

JQ1681.A94    2010

323.60952—dc22                          2010008308

Manufactured in the United States of America

19    18    17    16    15    14    13    12    11    10

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Before the Shimin: The Dark Energy of the People

2. Mass Society, Anpo, and the Birth of the Shimin

3. Beheiren and the Asian Shimin: The Fate of Conscientious Civic Activism

4. Residents into Citizens: The Fate of Pragmatic Civic Activism

5. Shimin, New Civic Movements, and the Politics of Proposal

Conclusion: The Shimin Idea and Civil Society

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Banana Boat civic groups’ areas of activity

2. Program activities supported by the Toyota Foundation Citizens’ Activities Grant, 1984–2003

3. Frequency of civil society terms’ appearing in Asahi Shimbun, 1984–2007

TABLE

Phases of civic activism in postwar Japan

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I thank my wife and family for their patience and encouragement as I researched and wrote the book. I am particularly grateful to my wife for supporting my move from the financial world to academia.

Many individuals have facilitated and enriched this research. M. William Steele sparked my interest in Japanese history and directed my attention to grassroots thought and activism while I was at the International Christian University. He also offered generous institutional support as I made numerous research trips back to Japan. Andrew Barshay and Irwin Scheiner were constant pillars of support from the very outset of the project. They provided both intellectual and financial sustenance during my years at the University of California, Berkeley; they read numerous drafts at the dissertation stage; and they generously critiqued various versions of this book. My ideas about Japan have been deeply shaped by both of them. Thanks to Thomas Havens, whose door at the East Asian Library at Berkeley was always open, and who spent countless hours discussing my project and providing advice. I am equally grateful to Steven Vogel and Nobuhiro Hiwatari for introducing me to the political science literature on Japan and to Setsuo Miyazawa for his guidance on the study of Japanese law. Steven Vogel, in particular, provided invaluable feedback on my work, especially with respect to issues of causality and the tension between institutional and ideational approaches. He also offered a thoughtful and extremely valuable critique from a political science perspective. Thanks also to the late Reginald Zelnik, historian of Russia, and to Waldo Martin, historian of the African American experience. Elements of this book (especially chapters 2 and 3) would not have been possible without the knowledge I gained from them about Marxist thought and the civil rights movement, respectively. I am eternally grateful to Japanese sociologist Kurihara Akira, who spent countless Monday afternoons introducing me to theories and case studies on Japanese social movements and civic groups. Professor Kurihara also graciously facilitated meetings with many of the activists and intellectuals discussed in the book. Many thanks also to Fujibayashi Yasushi for guiding me through the wealth of movement newsletters at the Center for Education and Research in Cooperative Human Relations.

Thanks to Reed Malcolm at the University of California Press for his encouragement, support, and optimism from the outset and to Kalicia Pivirotto and Jacqueline Volin for patiently guiding me through the book production process. I am especially grateful to Robin Whitaker for her thoughtful, thorough, and wholly enlightening editing work on the book.

Robert Pekkanen provided unwavering encouragement and constructive critique as I researched and wrote the book. His openness to my approach and his faith in my potential intellectual contribution were constant sources of motivation. His meticulous comments on the penultimate draft, together with those of an anonymous reviewer for the UC Press, were nothing short of intellectual gold. Robert, more than any other, pushed me to clarify and articulate the central thesis of the book, which I hope I’ve done.

Others who have provided invaluable assistance or intellectual input along the way include Daniel Aldrich, Timothy Amos, Mary Elizabeth Berry, Steve Blom, Luke Franks, Fujita Kazuyoshi, Curtis Anderson Gayle, Mary Alice Haddad, Harima Yasuo, Laura Hein, J. Victor Koschmann, Marilyn Lund, Vera Mackie, Gavan McCormack, Stuart Picken, Sue Pryn, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Naoko Shimazu, Patricia Sippel, Patricia Steinhoff, Takami Yūichi, Terada Takashi, Thang Leng Leng, Timothy Tsu, Tsujinaka Yutaka, Paul Waley, Watanabe Gen, Brad Williams, and Yoshikawa Yūichi.

I am indebted to the following institutions for assistance and support: the Center for Japanese Studies and the Department of History at UC Berkeley; the Institute of Asian Cultural Studies at the International Christian University, Japan; the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo; the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology; the Toyota Foundation; the Hitachi Foundation; the Daiwa-Anglo Japanese Foundation; the Asian Research Institute (ARI) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at the National University of Singapore; and the National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan.

Introduction

Here citizen does not mean the resident of an administrative

unit such as prefecture, city, town, or village. Nor does it

refer to a specific stratum such as the petit bourgeoisie.

Citizen means a spontaneous type of human shaped by a

republican spirit of freedom and equality. . . . Of course,

citizenship is not a godlike existence. It is nothing more than

we ordinary people with all our joy and anger.

—Matsushita Keiichi, 1971

WHO IS A SHIMIN?

Who is a citizen and how is citizenship expressed? Is it all about qualification, 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—or, at least, incompleteness—explained for them much of what had gone wrong in Japanese history from the mid-nineteenth century onward. It was at once a commentary on failures of the past (both individual and national) and a prototype for a new national community to be fashioned by ordinary citizens in the present and beyond. In fact, so important was this concept of performative citizenship for reformers that they gave it a name: shimin (citizen)—a word that spoke to some of the central aspirations of the Japanese people as they refashioned their nation into a modern liberal democracy in the wake of war and national humiliation.

The historian Bronislaw Geremek, though he was speaking of citizenship in Poland and Czechoslovakia, succinctly captured the spirit of this shimin idea when he observed, the magic of the word ‘citizen’ . . . came from the widespread sense that it referred less to one’s subordination to the state and its laws than to one’s membership in an authentic community, a community whose essence was summed up in the term ‘civil society.’ ² This was very much the case for postwar Japanese activists and progressives: shimin encapsulated a vision of individual autonomy beyond the outright control of the state or the established left and within an idealized sphere of human activity they called civil society (shimin shakai). For them, as well as many others, shimin became one of the quintessential symbols of liberal democracy in postwar Japan, taking its place beside other powerful motifs such as peace (heiwa) and democracy (minshushugi).

This book is a history of the activists, intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats, and advocates who invoked and deployed the shimin idea and the civic movements and public programs in which it found form. I have two aims. First, by retracing key movements of the postwar era I want to show how ideas have affected civic activism and, more broadly, the development of civil society in the country. Leading activists and their ideas, I will argue, helped shape both the mechanics of civic activism and the meanings participants and others attributed to it. Second, I want to use the shimin idea and its manifestations in civic movements to scrutinize the motivations and aspirations fueling grassroots activism and progressive politics throughout the period. As I discuss below, a case can be made for understanding postwar civic movements as a Japanese variety of the new social movements (NSMs) prevalent in many advanced industrial nations. I will argue, however, that the NSM approach often obscures more than it explains and that, to truly comprehend the historical significance of postwar civic activism in Japan, we need to move beyond one-dimensional progressive master narratives and carefully unearth the multifaceted, complex, and sometimes troubling motivations underlying it. Put simply, I am interested in both how ideas have mattered and what those ideas have symbolized and meant for activists and others—especially the shimin idea.

Consider first the how of the shimin idea. Scholarship to date has given us many important insights into the shaping influence of political and economic institutions on these spheres of activity, and indeed, this work confirms such influence.³ Nevertheless, each of the case studies I present shows how activists used the shimin idea and its related concepts to legitimize, encourage, facilitate, or otherwise make action possible.⁴ A relatively obscure term for much of modern Japanese history, it was fashioned in the postwar era by activists, intellectuals, and others into a kind of master frame or paradigm for social action and was employed to mobilize, shape, and legitimize a stunning diversity of grassroots civic movements and public policy initiatives.⁵ Within civic movements the shimin idea informed patterns of decision making, membership, and participation by endorsing nonhierarchical, ideologically plural, small-scale, voluntary mobilizations. On an individual level, the shimin idea legitimized spontaneous political action, encouraged autonomy and self-reliance, and promoted active engagement in the public sphere. As an idea, shimin proposed a new relationship between individual and state; it made possible a progressive reimagination of the nation; it legitimized the defense of private interest against corporate and political interference; and, most important of all, it infused individual and social action with significance far beyond the specific issues at stake, linking them to an ideal—if protean—vision of a new civil society for a new Japan.

More concretely, I intend to show how the shimin idea has fueled and invigorated key civic movements in Japan since the mid-1950s. In the struggle against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of 1959–60 (Anpo tōsō, the Anpo struggle), activists set the shimin idea in motion, using it to mobilize citizens into street protests and, thereafter, into a plethora of local initiatives. In the anti–Vietnam War movement from 1965, the shimin idea inspired a broad-based grassroots protest movement, supporting the movement leaders’ antistate, anti-U.S. ideology and their belief in Pan-Asian liberationism. In antipollution and antidevelopment protests of the same era, activists used the shimin idea to justify regional autonomy and a strategy of localism, while in progressive local governments it informed policies encouraging citizen participation. And, after a period of intense contention between the state and civic groups, beginning in the mid-1970s a new generation of activists and civil society advocates used the shimin idea to fashion a communitarian vision of civil society based on collaboration and so-called constructive activism.

In the hands of activists, intellectuals, and other advocates, I argue, the shimin idea was rendered into a mythology—what I call the mythology of the shimin—not because it was imaginary or somehow fictitious (although it was a plastic idea), but because of what it represented and the kind of action it made possible in the present. As Claude Lévi-Strauss has explained, mythmaking is very much like bricolage, because it takes to pieces and reconstruct[s] sets of events (on a psychical, socio-historical or technical plane) and use[s] them as so many indestructible pieces for structural patterns in which they serve alternatively as ends or means.⁶ The French syndicalist Georges Sorel similarly suggested that the value of myth is not so much whether it will actually form part of the history of the future but whether it has the capacity to move people now.⁷ For Sorel myth contained the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, and it gave an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action upon which the reform of the will is founded.⁸ The key here, it seems to me, is the way leading activists actively constructed the mythology of the shimin around ideas of spontaneous action, individual autonomy, and democracy, and, more important, how their use of this mythology inspired and mobilized participants in public actions with a stamp of authenticity. To borrow an idea from the philosopher-activist Tsurumi Shunsuke, the appellation shimin became a kind of talisman for activism of all kinds during the postwar era.⁹ Mobilizing this symbolism—invoking the mythology—gave groups legitimacy, because it connected them directly to everything that postwar Japan and its citizenry were supposed to, or could potentially, be. So powerful did the shimin idea become that simply invoking the term became, in the words of the shimin critic Saeki Keishi, a display of the magnitude of a person’s political consciousness, almost as though the shimin identity imparted a kind of magical power (majutsuteki na chikara) on those who adopted it.¹⁰

I begin, then, by showing how the shimin idea became important—so magical—for postwar activists and progressives and, more significantly, how it made civic action and social change possible. Following that, I use the shimin idea in a more broadly historiographical way to rethink the historical meanings of civic activism and thought in the postwar period; in other words, what has the shimin idea symbolized and meant? I suggest that in activist discourse and scholarship alike, the shimin idea, its politics, and its movements have been all too easily slotted into a master narrative of progressive civic movements versus a powerful bureaucracy, a reactionary conservative government, and a rapacious corporate sector.

As I mentioned above, some have explained shimin movements as a kind of Japanese permutation of the so-called new social movements prominent in many industrialized nations in the post-1960s decades.¹¹ According to the theorist Claus Offe, these NSMs are distinguished by their commitment to individual autonomy and identity, their organizational decentralization, self-government, and self-help, and their opposition to manipulation, control, dependence, bureaucratization, [and] regulation.¹² Alberto Melucci points to the NSMs’ critical perspective, which resists the intrusion of the state and market into social life, reclaiming the individual’s identity, and the right to determine his or her private and affective life, against the omnipresent and comprehensive manipulation of the system.¹³ I am quite sympathetic to the NSM characterization of shimin movements in Japan, especially the emphasis this perspective gives to identity and autonomous action as independent variables in contemporary social activism.

Nevertheless, in this study I purposely step away from both the "shimin versus establishment" master narrative and the NSM paradigm, not because I disagree, but because I want to explore historical aspects of the shimin idea not adequately captured by such approaches.¹⁴ As John Hoffman notes, though the new social movements [from the 1960s] can be presented as a way of developing citizenship capacity and responsibility, their focus on activism beyond the state as evident in the thought of Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci is curiously conservative,¹⁵ because it essentially forgoes the all-important task of making real inroads into the actual locus of power: the state.¹⁶ Derek Heater articulates a similar concern with the imagination of citizenship in a civil society rather than citizenship in a state. Reflecting on developments in the United Kingdom since the 1980s, he notes how paradoxically, both Right and Left, discarding and despairing of conventional citizenship respectively, turned to civil society. Thatcherites preached the virtues of ‘active citizenship,’ interpreted as membership of school governing bodies or neighborhood watch schemes, while the young leftists turned Green, forming and joining groups to challenge the immobility and insensitivity of politicians and bureaucrats. As Heater notes, supporters of civil society have even celebrated it as a means of beneficially depoliticizing citizenship.¹⁷

I am particularly interested in how the shimin idea has been utilized as a discursive tool for articulations of nationalism, parochial localism, consumerism, and communitarianism. I want to draw attention to the often-troubling connections between the shimin idea and deeply racialized notions of ethnic nationalism, as well as the ways both state and nonstate actors have mobilized the idea in recent years to propagate a communitarian, marketized, and largely apolitical vision of civil society. Thus, while acknowledging the significance of the shimin idea and postwar civic mobilizations within broader global trends since the 1960s, I also focus my attention on the more direct historical context in which they emerged: the aftermath of war, the manifestations of leftist nationalism, and the transformations wrought by economic growth and affluence. One of the central historical puzzles I explore is how the shimin idea and civic activism evolved from a stance of resolute antiestablishmentism in the late 1950s to symbols for self-responsible, noncontentious, participatory citizenship in the Japanese nation by the 1990s. As others have shown, generational changes, new social issues, and institutional pressures all played a role in pushing activism this way, but here I will show how activists and their ideas about the nation, community, and daily life deeply shaped this process.¹⁸

Put simply, to appreciate the impact of activists’ ideas we need to look at all the ideas they have used and not only those that fit into predetermined progressive or conservative master narratives. It is not that the "shimin versus establishment or NSM paradigms are wrong but, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, that they tend to smooth out the complexity of postwar civic thought and activism, affording them the simplicity of essences." The reality, of course, is an extremely complicated field of thought and action.¹⁹ Incorporating this complexity provides a new—if sometimes troubling—perspective on the way grassroots actors and their advocates have expressed agency in Japan’s postwar era.

THEORIZING IDEAS: MOVEMENT INTELLECTUALS AND THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE SHIMIN

I will use three concepts from social movement theory to guide my historical approach throughout the study: the theory of ideational framing processes, the related concept of collective action frames, and the notion of movement intellectuals. As Sheri Berman notes, How an idea rises to political prominence does not necessarily reveal anything about how it might entrench itself as a durable factor in political life. To understand this we need to study not only how ideas change but also how they persist: how they become embedded in organizations, patterns of discourse, and collective identities, outlasting the original conditions that gave rise to them.²⁰ Berman’s observation neatly encapsulates my approach herein. I am arguing that intellectuals, activists, and civil society advocates played a key role in articulating a civic mythology summed up in the shimin idea. This mythology not only expressed the innermost aspirations of those who propagated it but, more significantly, had the power to motivate participation as well as shape behavior within a wide range of civic initiatives throughout the postwar era.

I see the mythology of the shimin as akin to the collective action frames and cognitive framing processes conceptualized by social movement theorists such as David Snow and Robert Benford.²¹ Summarizing such approaches, McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald note that, while structural factors can tell us much about the conditions under which social movements mobilize and operate, they cannot adequately explain the decisions that social movement actors make. Political opportunities and material resources afford only a certain structural potential for action, and mediating between opportunity, organization, and action are the shared meanings people bring to their situation. At a minimum people need to feel both aggrieved about some aspect of their lives and optimistic that, acting collectively, they can redress the problem. Lacking either one or both of these perspectives, it is highly unlikely that people will mobilize.²² Crucial for scholars working in this theoretical perspective, then, is the core of ideas produced, debated, contested, and put into practice by movement participants—in other words, the collective action frames. Snow and Benford define such ideational framing processes as an active processual phenomenon that implies agency and contention at the level of reality construction. It is active in the sense that something is being done, and processual in the sense of a dynamic, evolving process. It entails agency in the sense that what is evolving is the work of social movement organizations and activists. And it is contentious in the sense that it involves the generation of interpretive frames that not only differ from existing ones but may also challenge them. The resultant products of this framing activity are referred to as ‘collective action frames.’ ²³ Snow and Benford see collective action frames as action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization (SMO). They render events or occurrences meaningful and thereby function to organize experience and guide action.²⁴ The mythology of the shimin, I argue, evolved and has functioned similarly in civic movements throughout the postwar period.

Of course, ideas do not spontaneously materialize; they must be articulated by people or collectivities. Snow and Benford, for example, point to movement actors who are actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers. The productive work of these actors, they explain, may involve the amplification and extension of extant meanings, the transformation of old meanings, and the generation of new meanings.²⁵ Modifying Antonio Gramsci’s notion of organic intellectuals, sociologists Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison identify a group they call movement intellectuals. As they explain, Many, if not all, social movements initially emerge on the basis of some kind of intellectual activity, usually, but not always, carried out by ‘established’ intellectuals. Intellectuals as social critics often play a crucial role in articulating the concerns of emergent forms of protest, putting them into broader frameworks, giving specific protest actions a deeper meaning or significance.²⁶ For Eyerman and Jamison movement intellectuals provide a larger framework of meaning in which individual and collective actions can be understood.²⁷ Such individuals assist in the construction of the Other, the opposition, against which the movement is protesting and struggling.²⁸ Michiel Baud and Rosanne Rutten concretize this definition by suggesting three central characteristics of movement intellectuals. First, they must be acknowledged as producers of meaning and as representatives of collective interests by a popular group or local society. Second, they must possess the explicit ambition to transform society and to put into practice their recipes for change. In other words, they combine reflexive activity with cultural and political activism. And third, they involve a motley crew, including traditional intellectuals educated in formal institutions as well as members of the popular classes and persons who gained their knowledge outside the realm of formal education.²⁹

Movement intellectuals are a crucial element in this study. They support my argument that human agency and personality (i.e., the personal history and identity of distinct individuals) have been important in the development of collective action and civil society in postwar Japan. As I show throughout the study, movement intellectuals—university professors, writers, journalists, former socialist or communist party members, former student radicals, local government reformers, environmental activists, grassroots entrepreneurs, and corporate philanthropists—actively used ideas to mobilize participants. Though they by no means had a monopoly on the imagination of the shimin idea, their pronouncements were the most audible, consistent, coherent, and influential of all these proponents. Movement intellectuals’ conceptualization and presentation of the shimin idea motivated others to act and gave that action meaning.

Focusing on movement intellectuals and their ideas allows me to tackle the thorny question of agency and structure in postwar civic activism. Though I adopt a social constructivist approach, I do not (indeed cannot) divorce ideas and action from the institutional structure in which they emerged. As I show throughout the study, civic movements mobilized in the name of the shimin were often thwarted by a conservative establishment with remarkably different priorities. The colossal defeat of the Anpo struggle in 1960 is the most obvious example, but we can also see state impact in the new civic movements since the late 1970s. In both phases the state played a role in shaping civic activism: driving activists from the streets into local mobilizations in the first case and encouraging noncontentious activism in the second. The temptation, of course, is to narrate subsequent shifts in civic activism in absolute terms: a strong state co-opting or destroying a burgeoning realm of contentious activism and, simultaneously, fashioning a sphere of apolitical, socially useful movements. I think such portrayals are only partly correct, because they discount or ignore altogether the role civic activists played in these processes. Faced with institutional roadblocks, movement intellectuals did not retreat. They took action, modifying the shimin idea and reconstituting or redirecting civic activism, which, in turn, encouraged new forms of mobilization, stimulated new tactics, and promoted new relationships.

Consider the two examples mentioned above. After the defeat of the Anpo protests one group of intellectuals began to foster local civic activism in the belief that it was the best way to overcome conservative domination. This effort ultimately bore fruit in reformist local governments of the late 1960s and new progressive consumer cooperatives. Shimin advocates made a similar intervention starting in the late 1970s. Reacting to the supposedly failed radicalism in the student movement and the accusation of consumer movements, activists began to embed the shimin idea in a praxis of proposal, symbiosis, and constructive activism. In the late 1980s their interventions opened a space for dialogue among activists, corporate officials, and state bureaucrats, feeding into a successful movement for nonprofit legislation that allowed many civic groups to incorporate and gain social legitimacy. Faced with institutional hurdles, movement intellectuals in both cases used the shimin idea to propel civic activism in new directions. Though to do so is somewhat counterintuitive, stepping away from theories such as the NSM paradigm, which privileges specific actors and predetermined modes of action, is the only way we can uncover these complex ways Japanese movement intellectuals have exercised their agency, responding to structural conditions and fostering new forms of social action. This more nuanced comprehension of human agency is what informs this study.

THE CASE STUDIES: THE SHIMIN IDEA IN ACTION

Given this theoretical framework, what did the shimin idea connote in practice, and how did movement intellectuals use it in concrete mobilizations? To begin with the idea itself, we might best conceptualize the mythology of the shimin as a patchwork of ideas that drew on some of the most potent aspirations and symbolism in postwar Japan. Since its creation in the mid-nineteenth century, the term shimin has been used variously as the Japanese translation for the French citoyen, burgher, citizen, and—for Marxists—bourgeois. It is also the translation for civil, as in civil society (shimin shakai) and civil rights (shiminken), and for civic, as in civic center (shimin kaikan).³⁰ From the mid-1950s, however, intellectuals began to reformulate the idea beyond its neutral meaning as the inhabitant of a town or city and in distinction to its negative petit bourgeois connotations in Marxist thought. They presented the shimin identity as a new and progressive agent of social change, keeping in check the state and the forces of reaction and valiantly defending the now-legitimate realm of private daily life. Over time, the shimin idea came to be associated with a form of democratic subjectivity and activism based on spontaneity, autonomy, everydayness, cosmopolitanism, and (for a time) antiestablishmentism. Movement intellectuals’ persistent and obsessive desire to distinguish their paradigm from the established left and its arguably hierarchical, rigid, ideological style of activism produced an idealized image of shimin-style activism as the exact opposite of the left’s: democratically organized, small-scale, voluntary, and nonideological.

Movement intellectuals also gravitated toward the shimin idea as much because of what it was not or had not previously been. Until the country’s defeat in the Second World War, there were no citizens in Japan, since all Japanese were legally subjects (shinmin) of the emperor.³¹ With the promulgation of the postwar constitution in late 1946, almost everyone on the archipelago legally became a citizen of the nation, or—to use the Japanese term—part of the kokumin. The rights and duties of the people (also referred to as kokumin in the constitution) were set out for the first time in Article 3 of this legal instrument, which went a long way toward establishing, though by no means inventing, the idea of a civic nation as the most desirable configuration for the postwar reconstruction of the country (both materially and psychologically). From 1947, then, most people in Japan became citizens of a legitimate sovereign nation, just like those in other liberal democracies. Kokumin remains the sole official signifier of Japanese citizenship, and the decision as to who can be part of the kokumin or, more prosaically, who can hold a passport endorsing the holder as a Japanese national (Nihon kokumin) is entirely in the hands of the state.³² Being part of the kokumin, in other words, is to proclaim one’s citizenship in the Japanese nation and, hence, involvement or complicity in the policies of the Japanese state—passive though this might be. Recognizing the association between the Japanese state and kokumin citizenship is crucial if we are to fully understand the appeal of the shimin idea for many civic activists. In the 1960s, for example, the anti–Vietnam War protester Tsurumi Yoshiyuki made the symbolic gesture of relinquishing his citizenship (kokumin o dannen suru), turning instead to the shimin identity, which represented for him a vision of citizenship independent of the state and based in a nonclass community of rights and mutual responsibility. The appeal of the shimin idea for Tsurumi and others was that, unlike kokumin, it never had to be reclaimed from the state, since it emanated from, subsided in, and, indeed, drew its life force from civil society.

But the shimin idea’s appeal to activists also lay in its receptivity to more visceral attachments to the ethnic nation, the locale, or an affluent private life. So long as movement intellectuals avoided overt class rhetoric and directed their message to ordinary people (futsū no hitobito), they could count on the mythology of the shimin as a legitimizing armor. As the American researchers Ellis Krauss and Bradford Simcock noted in a landmark 1981 essay, "The shimin undō ideal legitimized protest action on behalf of one’s actual or potential interests as actions for the collective good, and it legitimized political activities through noninstitutionalized channels and by direct action methods as being consonant with the best democratic ideals. . . . The ‘citizens’ movement idea’ [what I am calling the mythology of the shimin] helped to decrease the potential ‘costs’ of participating in a protest movement and being branded as a deviant or a rebel working for selfish ends."³³ So the mythology of the shimin had appeal as much for how it could be used as for the ideals it represented; in fact, the one fed off the other: ideas affected action, which affected ideas, and so on. In the chapters that follow I trace this ongoing dialectical process through six phases of civic thought and activism. I stress two aspects of the shimin idea: first, its modularity or adaptability over time and in the context of different movements, and, second, its historicality as a marker of a novel and quintessentially postwar mentality in Japan informed by defeat, democratization, national consciousness, and the institutional realities faced by activists.

Chapter 1 begins in the period before the shimin idea became prominent in progressive discourse, roughly from war’s end to the mid-1950s. I see this period as a nascent moment for both nonaligned activism (i.e., activism not instigated or directed by political parties or organs of the left) and the imagination of the shimin idea, even though the term was hardly used at the time. For individuals such as philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, the experience of war, defeat, and occupation brought with it a complex set of messages and challenges for the intellectual and for the Japanese people more generally. Like many of his generation, Tsurumi felt an almost-ceaseless sense of remorse for not lifting a single finger in resistance to Japan’s war in Asia. Tsurumi and others certainly blamed the Japanese state for what had happened, but they also blamed themselves as progressive intellectuals for not having led or even attempted to lead a proactive resistance. Notably, this remorse unfolded not only in an interrogation of the intellectual but also, more critically, in an intensive search for more authentic sources of identity and possible resistance to the state. This search led Tsurumi and his colleagues away from the intellectual toward the people, a collective imaginary rooted in the ethnic nation (minzoku) and the authentic space of daily life (seikatsu). It is in these early imaginations of the people, I argue, that the mythology of the shimin began to take form. In other words, one source of the shimin idea can be found in intellectuals’ war remorse and their commitment—as Japanese patriots—to rebuild Japan as a democratic nation controlled by the people, not the state. Many intellectuals involved in this project (the first postwar generation of movement intellectuals) also began to foster various grassroots initiatives in the early 1950s. These cultural circle groups, which I explore in the second half of chapter 1, became testing grounds for later shimin activism, setting some important precedents for movement organization and modes of individual expression.

While such developments can be considered the positive sources of later shimin thought and activism, I also use chapter 1 to explore more troubling antecedents. Tsurumi and others’ attempt to imagine democratic subjectivity through the lens of ethnicity, while understandable, always ran the risk of replicating earlier essentialisms it was supposed to overcome. Intellectuals’ progressive reimagination of the ethnic nation paved the way for its close and often deeply troubling association with the shimin idea and numerous civic mobilizations in the years to come. In terms of activism as well, the absolute rejection of Marxist ideas by many cultural circles in favor of a philosophy of self-help and inclusivity, while liberating, also tended to impede the critical faculties of these groups, making them all the more susceptible to the numbing impact of mass society. As I show in chapter 1, the prehistory of the shimin idea, then, is a story of intellectual remorse, designs for a new democratic praxis, and a complex set of legacies for later civic thought and activism.

In chapter 2, I turn to the anti–U.S.-Japan Security Treaty struggle of 1959–60 (Anpo tōsō), a moment remembered by academics and activists alike as the birth of independent citizen protest in postwar Japan. Rather than rehearse the erstwhile narrative of the progressive democratic movement versus the reactionary government, however, I search for the roots of shimin thought and activism during the Anpo struggle in two sources: first, the impact and intellectual implications of mass society, and, second, the role of intellectuals in Anpo struggle citizens’ movements in delineating and shaping models of civic activism. I am particularly interested in the subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle—intermingling of materialist values and democratic purpose in the civic mobilizations of the Anpo struggle, or, put in crudely schematic terms, the mixing of the conservative and the progressive. As Ueno Chizuko’s identification of daily life conservatism and Takabatake Michitoshi’s description of conservative sentiment in the Anpo protest indicate, the desire to defend an affluent daily life from external intrusion adhered quite seamlessly to higher aspirations for democracy and democratic process.³⁴

The shimin idea, as its most perceptive adherents recognized, was a product of mass society, emerging partly out of a mid-1950s debate about the impact of this social formation on popular political consciousness. Matsushita Keiichi, the leading theorist in the debate, originally focused on the pathological consequences of mass society: the stifling impact on political participation and the supposedly delusional influence of mass nationalism. Unlike other critics of mass society, such as William Kornhauser, Hannah Arendt, and, in Japan, Shimizu Ikutarō, however, Matsushita traced these pathologies more to institutions than to any irreparable degeneration in popular political consciousness. He was thus able to see positive potentialities in mass society, especially within the affluent and urbanized new middle stratum (shinchūkansō). The Anpo struggle experience only confirmed the potential of this group for Matsushita, causing him to abandon altogether the socialist project and the proletariat as historical subject in favor of a new civic vision constructed around public-spirited and self-responsible individuals embodying the qualities of the civic type of human (shiminteki ningengata).

During the Anpo struggle, progressive scholars further developed this discourse on an emergent, urbanized political citizenry, trumpeting the birth of a civic consciousness and a new form of civic resistance. More significant, some of them joined with activists to mobilize the earliest citizen protest movements. Tapping into the rhetoric of public intellectuals and scholars, leaders of groups such as the Voices of the Voiceless Association called on unaffiliated individuals to join their marches as shimin in the heat of the protests. These movement intellectuals played a key role in transforming theoretical discussions about the shimin into a collective-action frame capable of attracting citizens into their movements and, later, of shaping the nature of participation, membership, and activism. Their efforts proved quite successful: during and after the struggle, movement intellectuals used the shimin idea to fashion two streams of civic activism: one conscientious, the other pragmatic. The former stream engaged in protest and forms of symbolic dissent, pursuing questions of rights, democracy, and pacifism. Its participants focused on defending Japan’s peace constitution, opposing the American military presence in the country, and advocating the rights of peripheral groups. The latter, pragmatic stream of activism connected the Anpo issue to more prosaic questions of daily life, such as sewage, education, and garbage disposal. These movements took activism to the localities where they pursued the project of local democracy and the reform of local government. Of course, the breakthrough of movement intellectuals in both streams during the Anpo struggle was their successful deployment of the shimin idea to mobilize unaffiliated people who otherwise might have passively viewed events from the sidelines. The Anpo struggle may have been a grand defeat for some critical observers, but in the sphere of citizen politics it heralded the rise of a new and potent symbol for collective action born from the very heart of mass society.

In chapter 3 I trace the conscientious stream of activism into Beheiren, the anti–Vietnam War movement, looking at the ways movement intellectuals such as Oda Makoto and Tsurumi Yoshiyuki attached the shimin idea to notions of race, ethnicity, and nation. Leaders blended their war memories with nationalism, anti-Americanism, and Pan-Asianism to produce a vision of the Asian shimin actively struggling for the liberation of fellow Asian peoples from Western (read: American) imperialism. Oda, Kaiko Takeshi, and other Beheiren leaders connected their wartime experience as victims of the Japanese state and the United States to the plight of the Vietnamese by tracing a direct line from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Allied firebombing of Osaka to U.S. bombing in Vietnam. As Oda explained in 1965, when he saw images of Vietnam on the television he was transported back to the carnage of 1945 and the meaningless deaths of ordinary Japanese citizens. In the faces of the Vietnamese he saw his own face, and this motivated him to act. Identifying a victim-aggressor mechanism at work in Japan, Oda suggested that, to the extent Japanese people did not resist their state—a captive of the United States—they would remain not only victims of that state but also victimizers of the Vietnamese, with whom they shared a common ethnic bond as Asians. The task that movement intellectuals set Beheiren members was thus twofold: first, recognizing the shared historical experience of victim-hood with the Vietnamese and, second, exorcising the Western imperialism and pseudouniversalism supposedly driving Japan’s postwar national consciousness. Although Beheiren is usually presented as the quintessential postwar peace movement, such ideas clearly propelled it beyond simple humanism and pacifism, connecting it to struggles for third-world revolution and Pan-Asianist liberation. Drawing on his experiences with black activists in the United States and revolutionaries in Cuba, Oda imagined Beheiren as the source of a new open-minded nationalism (hirakareta nashonarizumu) that would transcend the state, combining with other progressive nationalisms into a form of global pluralism.³⁵ Oda, Tsurumi Shunsuke, and the latter’s cousin Yoshiyuki presented the movement as an opportunity for the Japanese people to remake their nation as a progressive vehicle for peace in the world—what I call Beheiren’s peace constitution nationalism. And, as I mentioned above, the shimin idea proved extremely useful for Beheiren’s leadership in