Other Trans-Pacific Alliances: 1960s Protest Movements Crossing Borders in the US and Japan

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

The close US-Japan Cold War alliance stimulated the growth of “other” alliances -- trans-Pacific alliances of protest movements in the United States and Japan. In this panel, papers will examine the links between protest movements in the US and Japan during the 1960s, thereby breaking down nation-centric narratives about that decade and providing concrete cases in which people and ideas traveled among various communities. Such transpacific transfers did not guarantee perfect communications, and these histories also illustrate the various interpretations, local conditions, and slippages of meaning that constitute what recent scholarship has dubbed the “global 1960s.”

Manuel Yang will retrace some of the critical trans-Pacific political and intellectual exchanges among Japanese and US New Left activists and thinkers in the mid-1960s and thereafter, examining the complex tensions and continuities with previous cycles of global protest. Naoko Koda will examine areas in Japan that hosted US military bases as sites in which various local struggles against US policy converged for local residents, activists, and stationed US GIs and informed larger critiques of American “imperialism.” Go Oyagi will interrogate the ways in which Asian American activists linked resistance to US power in East Asia to challenging traditional structures of power in their communities in the late 1960s. Chelsea Szendi Schieder will examine the circumstances surrounding a protest by a small group of American exchange students in Tokyo in 1969, which was a limited event that nevertheless tapped into several international frames of protest at university campuses in both countries.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Meiji University

Chair

• Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Meiji University

Individual Presentations

• War, Language, and the Working Class: Toward a Trans-Pacific Genealogy of the New Left - Manuel Yang, Waseda University

• Protesting beyond the Borders: the Vietnam War and Trans-Pacific protests - Naoko Koda, Kindai University

• Fighting US Imperialism Everywhere: Asian American Movement Activists’ Struggles across the Pacific - Go Oyagi, University of Tokyo

• “Not like a Congo Line”: Studying Abroad, Striking Abroad in Tokyo 1969 - Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Meiji University

Discussant

• Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, University of California, Irvine