Paper short abstract:

One of the most famous works by Katō Shūichi, a postwar enlightenment intellectual was on his experience of the Prague Spring. I will analyze Katō's "Words and Tanks" as a text in which Japanese liberal intellectual elite of the time was trying to come to terms with new and emerging global reality.

Paper long abstract:

Katō Shūichi was an influential intellectual of postwar enlightenment (sengo keimō) in Japan. He was a prolific writer and critic who published a number of works during his seven-decade-long writing career. Through his work, it is possible to learn about postwar transformation of Japan, and the world. One of his most famous works is essay Kotoba to sensha (Words and tanks), published in 1969, upon his experience of living in Europe and travelling to Czechoslovakia in 1968, during the Prague Spring. This presentation will discuss the way Katō described the events in Prague in 1968. I will also argue that this essay, although written almost fifty years ago, can today be read as a contribution and source for an emerging subfield of global history. It can be read as a way in which Japanese liberal intellectual elite of the time was trying to come to terms with new and emerging global reality. I will also juxtapose his views of the Prague Spring and that of the 1968 protests in Japan. My main question is how did a democratic enlightenment thinker make sense of a wider world in the era of 1968, and what were possible implications of his views for understanding the world and Japan? In line with Sebastian Conrad's argument in What is Global History?, I will emphasize the importance of going beyond the study of connections, and thinking in terms of integration within a dynamics that connects many pieces of what we call the past.