Japan actually has one of East Asia's longest socialist histories, from early 1900s anarchists and feminists, through the Japanese Communist Party's secret founding, to the explosive 1960s student uprisings and the Japanese Red Army's alliance with Palestinian liberation movements in Beirut. It's a messy, factional story of splits, repression, and internal contradictions that's been largely erased from mainstream narratives. This video covers some of the key figures and moments that defined it.
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Sources:
1. Aaron L. "The Japanese Student Movement in the Cold War Crucible, 1945-1972." Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 15, 2022. https://apjjf.org/2022/14/kapur.
2. "A Change of Course for the Proletarian Movement by Yamakawa Hitoshi 1922." https://www.marxists.org/subject/japa....
3. Gavin, Masako, and Ben Middleton, eds. Japan and the High Treason Incident. Routledge Contemporary Japan Series 47. London: Routledge, 2013.
4. "Lenin: What Is To Be Done?" https://www.marxists.org/archive/leni....
5. Linkhoeva, Tatiana Leonidovna. "Japan's Response to the Russian Revolution: Anarchism, Socialism, and Pan-Asianism in the Early 1920s." PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 2014. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1dt3....
6. Linkhoeva, Tatiana. "New Revolutionary Agenda: The Interwar Japanese Left on the 'Chinese Revolution.'" Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 6, no. 2 (2017): 84–105. https://doi.org/10.1353/ach.2017.0020.
7. Linkhoeva, Tatiana. Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.
8. Marsland, Stephen E. The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement: Takano Fusatarō and the Rōdō Kumiai Kiseikai. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989.
9. Michielsen, Edwin. "Fighting Fascism with 'Verbal Bullets': Kaji Wataru and the Antifascist Struggle in Wartime East Asia." Fascism 9, Global Cultures of Antifascism, 1921–2020 (2020): 9–33. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-0901....
10. Raddeker, Helene Bowen. Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies. London: Routledge, 1997.
11. Randall, Jeremy. "Global Revolution Starts with Palestine: The Japanese Red Army's Alliance with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 43, no. 3 (2023): 358–369. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-1089....
12. Schieder, Chelsea Szendi. Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012979.
13. Steinhoff, Patricia G. Whatever Happened to Japan's Radical New Left? N.d.
14. Taylor, Blaine. "Douglas MacArthur: Atomic Bombs Will Win the Korean War." Warfare History Network, September 10, 2017. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/dou....
15. Walker, Gavin, ed. The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68. London: Verso, 2020.

00:00 intro
01:04 early roots
14:45 resistance during the war
18:49 post war activism