Protests and Democracy in Japan: The Development of Movement Fields and the 1960 Anpo Protests.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the historical processes leading up to the 1960 Anpo protests, the historic social movements that coalesced to oppose the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo in the Japanese acronym) in 1960. Specifically, the dissertation explores: How and why did movements developed as they did at the 1960 Anpo protests? How did democracy, the key watchword for rebuilding the Japanese nation-state in the post-World War II period, become the main slogan? And how did different movement groups put into practice various understandings of democracy during the protests? Contrary to studies that contend that social movements emerge from a foundation of common resources and frames, I argue that movements can also develop through conflicts and antagonism within and across movement groups. Building upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field, I argue that the groups involved in the 1960 Anpo protests developed movement fields and spaces of varying degrees of structuration, within which actors engaged in struggles and competition according to specific rules and practices. I examine three movement groups involved in the 1960 Anpo protests: intellectuals, students, and workers.Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in Japan between 2008 and 2010, including in-depth interviews and archival research, I first show that the 1960 Anpo protests did not constitute a coherent movement; rather, they were an aggregation of discrete social movements, each internally comprised of different movement groups demarcated by impermeable boundaries. I then argue that these movements surged in 1960 due to competition and conflicts within groups. Movement groups attempted to utilize the 1960 Anpo protests so as to achieve previously-developed goals, as well as to gain dominance within their respective fields and spaces. Lastly, I show that even as the understanding of the concept of democracy varied across groups, democratic practices—namely, discussion and voting—that were institutionalized under the U.S.-led occupation, provided a shared context to coordinate collective behaviors on the streets as movement groups fought over resources, goals, and power amongst themselves.