- Convenor:
-
Joel Matthews
(Tokyo Metropolitan University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Mark Pendleton
(The University of Sheffield)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
Short Abstract
This panel reconsiders 1960s Japan through marginalised voices and transnational entanglements, examining psychiatric resistance, Okinawan labour activism, Zainichi Korean struggles, and debates on collaboration to broaden dominant narratives of the decade.
Long Abstract
Standard narratives portray 1960s Japan as an era defined by rapid economic growth, cultural transformation, and mass protest. Yet these dominant frames often obscure the experiences and movements that unfolded outside metropolitan student activism and state-centred histories. This panel reinterprets the 1960s as a decade marked by structural contestation, postcolonial tension, and transnational entanglements by foregrounding four underexamined sites of struggle: psychiatric institutions, Okinawan labour movements, Zainichi Korean activism, and Korean debates on collaboration. Together, the papers reveal a more complex and deeply interconnected landscape of social and political change.
The first paper challenges the assumption that psychiatric ex/patient activism emerged only in the 1970s by uncovering forms of resistance within Japan’s booming psychiatric hospital system. By tracing early organising among those confined in rapidly expanding institutions, it shows how the 1960s generated the conditions for later movements while also revealing why such voices were long dismissed or rendered illegible in historical scholarship.
The second paper examines labour activism in Okinawa, focusing on the mobilisation of base workers who sustained, and simultaneously resisted, the expanding U.S. military presence. Through the formation of large-scale unions and coordinated actions, Okinawan workers shaped the operational realities of American power in the region and reframed the 1960s as a period of assertive labour struggle rather than passive accommodation.
The third paper reinterprets the 1968 Kin Kiro incident as a key moment in postcolonial Japanese–Korean relations. By analysing grassroots publications that documented discrimination and contested prevailing media narratives, it demonstrates how Zainichi Korean activists confronted the persistence of colonial hierarchies during a decade often celebrated as one of modernisation and democratic consolidation.
The final paper turns to South Korea, examining the development of scholarship on pro-Japanese collaboration during the 1960s. Produced under authoritarian constraints, these early studies illustrate how debates about colonial complicity unfolded within a tense political climate and how they shaped later intellectual and activist movements.
Collectively, the panel reframes 1960s Japan as a space of intersecting struggles, not a unified story of growth and protest, but a constellation of marginalised voices and transnational forces that demand a broader historical lens.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines the 1968 Kin Kiro Incident through Zainichi Korean activist writings, showing how the case exposed unresolved colonial legacies amid 1960s normalisation, labour migration, and emerging rights discourses, and highlighted competing visions of postwar justice and citizenship.
Paper long abstract
This presentation situates the 1968 Kin Kiro Incident within the broader landscape of postcolonial tension and political transformation shaping Japanese–Korean relations in the 1960s. The decade marked a critical juncture: the 1965 Normalisation Treaty redefined Japan’s diplomatic engagement with South Korea, labour migration patterns intensified, and new rights-based discourses began to emerge amid rapid economic growth. Yet these shifts coexisted with persistent racial hierarchies and social marginalisation experienced by Zainichi Koreans.
Drawing on the Kin Kiro Trial Countermeasure Committee News (1968–1975), a grassroots newsletter produced by Zainichi lawyers, activists, and intellectuals, this paper examines how contemporaries interpreted the Kin Kiro case as a symbolic confrontation with the unresolved legacies of empire. While mainstream media framed the incident largely as a sensational criminal event, the Committee News reframed it as evidence of structural discrimination, documenting the everyday injustices faced by Korean residents and positioning Kin as a victim of systemic exclusion. Through its reportage, appeals, and editorials, the newsletter served both as political communication and as a vernacular archive that captured minority perspectives largely absent from official narratives.
By reading the Committee News against the shifting political landscape of the 1960s, the presentation argues that the Kin Kiro incident illuminates competing visions of postwar justice and citizenship. It reveals how Zainichi Korean activists challenged the state’s self-presentation as having moved beyond its colonial past, insisting instead on a reckoning with ongoing inequalities. This analysis positions the Kin Kiro case not as an isolated episode but as a window into a decade defined by contested diplomatic, legal, and social transitions, through which the terms of Japanese–Korean relations were actively being renegotiated.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes Im Chongkuk’s Ch’inil Munhangnon, published in 1966, as a key study of pro-Japanese collaboration. Written under Park Chunghee, it links literary collaboration to colonial systems, weighs its insight and moral limits, and shows its influence on later debates and activism.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines Im Chongkuk’s Ch’inil Munhangnon (Pro-Japanese Literature) as a foundational work in the post-liberation study of pro-Japanese collaboration in South Korea. Im first emerged as a literary critic and gradually became known for exposing the collaborative activities of major colonial-period writers. The publication of Ch’inil Munhangnon in the 1960s is historically significant, as it appeared under the authoritarian regime of Park Chunghee—a leader widely criticized for his own pro-Japanese background—when open discussion of collaboration was politically constrained. Rather than merely compiling lists of collaborators, Im situates collaboration within broader political and institutional frameworks by analyzing colonial policies, legal structures, and pro-Japanese organizations that developed alongside Japan’s assimilationist agenda in Korea.
This paper evaluates the scholarly significance and limitations of Im’s work through comparison with earlier studies from the 1940s, focusing on what changed, what remained consistent, and what continues to pose theoretical problems in the discourse on collaboration. While Im’s research was innovative in its scope and documentation, it also adopts a strongly moralistic framework. He sharply condemns collaborators as betrayers of the nation and assumes that Koreans could and should have maintained a fixed national identity under colonial rule. Such moral absolutism risks obscuring the fluid, coercive, and complex conditions under which colonial subjects negotiated identity and survival. Although Im’s approach presents clear limitations, his work offers crucial insight into grassroots intellectual movements surrounding pro-Japanese collaboration and helps trace how these early debates shaped the resurgence of public activism and historical reckoning in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the involvement of ex/patients in Japanese psychiatry during the 1960s. While the decade is known as the darkest era of Japanese psychiatry, it was also a crucial time for the rise of ex/patient activism, simultaneously revealing how ex/patients' perspectives have been dismissed.
Paper long abstract
The 1960s are known as the darkest era in the Japanese mental health system: with systemic support, Japan entered a “psychiatric hospital boom,” rapidly expanding its number of hospital beds. While the invention of psychotropic drugs prompted many developed nations to pursue further deinstitutionalization, Japanese psychiatrists instead used these medications to manage inpatients. At the same time, the mass media criminalized people with mental illness, encouraging the public to demand greater surveillance. Existing scholarship has highlighted the resistance formed by families of patients, young psychiatrists, and psychiatric social workers—a profession then on the rise—but activism by ex/patients themselves is often dismissed, with the assumption that such movements emerged only in the 1970s. This paper challenges that view by examining recent studies produced by contemporary mental health activists, which reveal the radical involvement of ex/patients during this darkest era. These studies show that the 1960s were, in fact, crucial for ex/patients to form connections and raise awareness, laying the groundwork for the expanded movements of the 1970s. Moreover, the historical dismissal of activism in this period suggests that ex/patients’ movements became legible to researchers only after the failure of segregation-and-confinement-based psychiatry had become apparent, making patients’ perspectives newly relevant.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the social construction of US military power through the labor movement of Okinawan base workers. While US officials portrayed them as cooperative supporters, workers formed strong unions, especially Zengunrō, to assert labor rights and expose tensions within the US empire.
Paper long abstract
Charles A. Willoughby, who had accompanied Douglas MacArthur to Tokyo for the occupation of Japan and served as the chief intelligence officer (G2) of GHQ, once recognized the contributions of Japanese civilian workers. He remarked, “The Japanese workers cooperated willingly and cheerfully with us,” supporting the U.S. war effort in Korea. These civilian workers employed at the U.S. military bases and facilities, ranging from dock workers and engineers to housemaids and those employed at clubs and other recreational facilities for American soldiers, have been collectively known as “base workers (Kichirodosha).” In Okinawa, workers employed at the U.S. military bases grew from 6,519 in 1946 to 37,771 in 1948. During the Korean War, the number of base workers reached 300,000 in mainland Japan and 63,000 in Okinawa. In contrast to Willoughby’s idealized image of Japanese civilian workers, they organized powerful unions, actively demanded improvements in working conditions, and defended workers’ rights.
My paper explores the social construction of US military power by focusing on the labor movement of base workers in Okinawa, especially the activism of the All-Okinawa Military Workers’ Union (Zengunrō), which represented base workers Okinawa. Founded in 1963, Zengunrō became the largest labor union in Okinawa, reaching a peak membership of 22,000 in 1968. A close examination of base workers in Okinawa, along with their experiences both within and in opposition to the U.S. empire, contributes to our understanding of the “inner workings” of the U.S. empire. (298 words)