Coed Revolution

The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
(Duke UP, 2021)

In the 1960s, a new generation of university-educated youth in Japan challenged forms of capitalism and the state. Coed Revolution recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women’s participation in these protest movements led by the New Left through the early 1970s. Women were involved in contentious politics to an unprecedented degree, but they and their concerns were often marginalized in the movement and the mass media, and the movement at large is often memorialized as male.

This book disentangles the gendered patterns that obscured radical women’s voices to construct a feminist genealogy of the Japanese New Left, demonstrating that student activism in 1960s Japan cannot be understood without considering the experiences and representations of women.

Read the introduction here.

ERRATA:

p. 31: Zengakuren activists broke into the Diet groups on November 27, 1959 — *not* 1969.

p. 118, FIGURE 4.2: The artist of the poster in the image is *not* Nakamura Hiroshi. It was created by Hashimoto Osamu (橋本治).

p. 155: My description makes the mistake of replicating rumors at the time that Shigenobu Fusako was actually involved in planning the 1972 attack on Lod Airport. She was ultimately cleared of responsibility in a court of law.