- Convenor:
-
Orion Klautau
(Tohoku University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Till Knaudt
(Leipzig University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
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.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper considers Hashimoto Ken's (1924–2007) ideas on psychic phenomena in the long 60s. It argues that through Seichō-no-Ie, he articulated a form of “alternative science” that circulated outside academic institutions and helped lay the epistemic groundwork for the 1970s psychic powers “boom.”
Paper long abstract
One of the most visible elements of Japan’s 1970s “occult boom” was the widespread popularity of psychic powers, often explained in earlier scholarship through the highly publicized 1974 visit of the Israeli psychic Uri Geller. While this narrative captures a significant moment in the popularization of “occulture” in Japan, it tends to obscure the longer and more complex processes through which discourses on psychic powers acquired social credibility. This paper argues that the psychic powers “boom” did not emerge abruptly in the early to mid-1970s, but was grounded in alternative epistemic infrastructures that had already taken shape in the postwar decades.
To illuminate this prehistory, the paper focuses on Hashimoto Ken (1924–2007), an electrical engineer and prolific writer on psychic phenomena whose intellectual activities were rooted in his commitment to the Japanese new religious movement Seichō-no-Ie. Strongly influenced by Anglo-American New Thought, Seichō-no-Ie developed a religious philosophy that emphasized the primacy of mind over matter. According to its doctrine, reality was fundamentally mental or spiritual in nature, and human thought exerted direct causal influence on physical conditions. Illness and misfortune were understood not as fixed material facts but as expressions of erroneous mental states. On this basis, the movement criticized modern science for restricting itself to the material world and argued for a broader understanding of laws that encompassed the realms of mind and spirit.
Hashimoto played a key role in advancing this project. During the 1950s and 1960s, he contributed numerous articles to Seichō-no-Ie’s monthly journal Mental Science, where he investigated parapsychological phenomena and offered “scientific” explanations of their underlying principles. From the 1960s onward, driven by a religious sense of mission, he extended this work by publishing popular books aimed at a wider readership. Through these activities, Hashimoto circulated alternative forms of "scientific" knowledge that challenged the limits of mainstream academia. His case demonstrates how religious ideas contributed to the formation and circulation of alternative scientific discourses, shaping the epistemic conditions that later made possible the psychic powers “boom” of the 1970s.
Paper short abstract
This paper reexamines Japanese literary engagements with Vietnam during the 1955–75 war through Kaikō Takeshi (1930–1989) and Hino Keizō (1929–2002). It analyzes their portrayals of war and society, highlighting literature’s critical role within Japan’s long 1960s intellectual climate.
Paper long abstract
This paper reexamines Japanese literary engagements with Vietnam during the country’s 1955–1975 war against the United States, focusing on the works of Kaikō Takeshi (1930–1989) and Hino Keizō (1929–2002). Both writers first engaged with Vietnam through writings based on firsthand wartime coverage and later produced a substantial body of fictional works that transformed these experiences into literary narratives. By examining these texts, this paper investigates how they represented Vietnamese local society and what role literature played in articulating contemporary political and cultural realities.
Postwar Japanese society is often characterized as having strong antiwar sentiments, yet conflicts occurring elsewhere in Asia—such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars—were frequently perceived as remote and largely detached from everyday concerns. Even among Japanese intellectuals of the period, cases such as that of Oda Makoto (1932–2007), who co-founded the Citizens’ League for Peace in Vietnam (Beheiren) and actively participated in the anti–Vietnam War movement, were historically exceptional.
Writers who sustained an interest in the Vietnam War through literary practice, rather than primarily through participation in social movements, were likewise relatively few. Kaikō and Hino, while not intellectuals positioned at the center of social movements, consistently pursued literary practices grounded in wartime observation and, through achievements such as receiving the Akutagawa Prize, occupied secure positions within Japan’s postwar literary establishment. It is in this sense that they merit particular attention.
Through close readings of their texts, this presentation places their literary practices within Japan's “long 1960s” intellectual climate. It explores how these practices were intertwined with images of the United States and perceptions of Asia under Cold War conditions, with Vietnam functioning as a key site for negotiating broader geopolitical and ideological concerns. At the same time, the paper situates these literary texts within the contemporary mass media environment—newspapers and weekly magazines—in which they circulated. By doing so, it reassesses the historical configuration of literary discourse on the Vietnam War in Japan and clarifies how literature functioned across, and in relation to, the boundaries of journalism, political activism, and cultural critique.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines two left thinkers, Ōta Ryū and Roger Garaudy, retrospectively positioned at the margins of the Long 1960s. It argues that their trajectories reveal blind spots in cultural turn–centered accounts while also reflecting divergent Japanese and French postwar experiences.
Paper long abstract
Ōta Ryū (1930-2009) and Roger Garaudy (1913-2012) have come to be positioned against the mainstream in retrospective accounts of the Long 1960s. Rather than viewing their later engagements with civilizational critique, anti-Zionism, and controversial representations of Judaism as ideological deviations, this paper argues that their trajectories expose blind spots in cultural turn–centered interpretations of social movements.
Both Ōta and Garaudy emerged as non-economistic Marxist thinkers who sought to overcome orthodox materialism through an emphasis on culture, subjectivity, and universal human emancipation. In postwar scholarship, however, figures whose thought moved beyond canonized cultural left frameworks—particularly academic forms of cultural critique—toward civilizational or religious perspectives have often been excluded from dominant narratives of the Long 1960s. Such exclusions are not self-evident, but are themselves products of the intellectual hegemony established by cultural-left-oriented frameworks such as cultural studies.
At the same time, these parallel trajectories unfolded within the divergent postwar contexts of Japan and France. Japan’s defeat and the critique of postwar democracy intensified by the New Left and student movements around 1968 provided fertile ground for radical reengagements with prewar thought, as seen in Ōta’s later reassessment of interwar intellectual traditions. France, by contrast, experienced the postwar period under the ambivalent legacy of occupied France, Vichy France, and de Gaulle’s reassertion of France as a victorious Allied power. In this context, political and intellectual movements largely directed their critique toward colonialism, looked to the Third World, and helped produce a configuration within which Garaudy’s turn to Islam took shape as a foundation for his critique of modernity and Western civilization.
By comparing these cases, the paper highlights how similar departures from the cultural left took form under distinct historical conditions. More broadly, it argues that the Long 1960s cannot be fully understood if confined to historically specific cultural-left-oriented frameworks alone. The cases of Ōta and Garaudy suggest that what has been labeled “against the mainstream” may instead reveal the internal limits of the cultural turn itself, and the unresolved tensions within cultural left humanism.