SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Mobilizing Japanese Youth examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who chose to engage in radical politics during the 1960s and 1970s. The book unpacks how intertwined notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the ‘Sixties Generation’. It argues in part that the intertwined political rhetoric of the far-left and far-right precipitated further levels of social alienation that enhanced the allure of violence well into the 1970s and helped to define the political consciousness of the ‘Sixties Generation’ well into the twenty-first century.