Short Abstract

Focusing on religious thought, literature, and political philosophy, this panel examines intellectuals at the margins of dominant narratives of Japan’s long 1960s. It highlights how engagements with science, war, and universalism challenged mainstream frameworks of postwar thought.

Long Abstract

The “long 1960s”—the extended period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s in which political, cultural, and intellectual challenges to established authority intensified—have often been narrated through the rise of mass social movements, cultural radicalism, and the consolidation of leftist and liberal frameworks that came to define postwar intellectual life. While these perspectives have yielded important insights, they have also tended to marginalize figures and discourses that did not align neatly with dominant models of political activism, academic legitimacy, or cultural critique. This panel reconsiders the period by focusing on intellectuals situated “against the mainstream,” whose work unfolded at the intersections of religion, science, literature, and political philosophy.

Bringing together three case studies, the panel highlights how heterodox forms of knowledge production and critique took shape within, alongside, and in tension with more visible intellectual currents. The first presentation examines the prehistory of the 1970s “occult boom” by focusing on Hashimoto Ken (1924–2007), an engineer and religious intellectual affiliated with Seichō-no-Ie, whose attempts to frame psychic phenomena in scientific terms reveal how new religious movements functioned as sites for alternative epistemologies. Rather than treating the occult as a sudden fad, this paper situates it within longer debates on science, mind, and religion. The second presentation analyzes how writers such as Kaikō Takeshi (1930–1989) and Hino Keizō (1929–2002) responded to the Vietnam War through sustained literary practice that functioned as political and cultural critique. By situating their works within the media ecology of newspapers and magazines, this paper shows how literature operated across the boundaries of journalism, activism, and geopolitical imagination. The third and final presentation examines Ōta Ryū (1930–2009) and Roger Garaudy (1913–2012), figures retrospectively understood as having departed from the cultural left in both Japan and France. Rather than treating their later trajectories as aberrations, this paper argues that these cases expose the internal limits of cultural-left humanism and the exclusions produced by its historiographical dominance.

Taken together, these presentations propose a rethinking of the long 1960s that brings into focus intellectual plurality, unresolved tensions, and the persistence of alternative modes of critique beyond mainstream narratives.