Fresh Eyes on 1960s Japan
Japanese politics in the 1960s have tended to be seen as a sharp turning point from the tensions of the tumultuous 1950s and the fractious debate over the revision of the Us-japan Security Treaty toward a focus on economic growth and consensus politics.
Nick Kapur offers us a fresh interpretation that highlights the continuing diversity of political, intellectual, social and cultural trends. He presents illuminating new insights: a portrait of Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato as a politically sophisticated, tactically astute leader who prevented the fragmentation of Japan’s governing
Liberal Democratic Party; evidence of the efforts by US President John Kennedy and Ambassador Edwin Reischauer to craft a more equal and constructive bilateral partnership with Japan; and detailed accounts of the tensions that split the protest movement that rallied against Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and the closer Us-japan
Cold War partnership. Innovatively, Kapur suggests 1960 should be seen as an “inflection point” that helped define a new political and social environment.
Kapur mines a wealth of Japanese sources to illuminate the contested nature of identity politics among different actors across Japan’s political and social spectrum, and in the process paints a new, vivid and illuminating picture of Japan’s modern post-1945 history.
Kapur paints a new, vivid and illuminating picture of Japan’s modern post1945 history.