Short Abstract

This panel examines how political, economic, social, and cultural changes in 1970s Japan can be understood. Focusing on feminism, civic education, and grassroots international exchange, it explores Japanese perceptions of state-society relations and revisits the meaning of the postwar and modernity.

Long Abstract

The 1970s marked a period in which Japan's post-1945 political, diplomatic, social, cultural, and economic structures began to undergo quiet yet unmistakable transformation. The disruption of the postwar international order triggered by the two “Nixon Shocks,” the near completion of postwar Japan’s settlement through the reversion of Okinawa and normalization of relations with China, and the end of high economic growth profoundly altered the fundamental conditions underpinning Japan's trajectory. For these reasons, the 1970s have come to be understood as an “era of crisis” in the history of Japanese diplomacy, as they are in the history of international relations, in which détente, multipolarization, and deepening interdependence are understood to have transformed the postwar international order.

Yet what may be even more significant than these visible and institutional changes is the contemporaneous transformation in popular consciousness. This perspective resonates with the argument advanced by the playwright and critic Yamasaki Masakazu, who suggested that the most fundamental shift of this era lay in the fact that, for the first time since the Meiji period, the state ceased to function as a compelling object of public interest. No longer did it provide daily stimulation or operate as a dramatic force shaping individual lives (Yamasaki, Yawarakana Kojinshugi no Tanjo, 1984). How, they, should we understand these simultaneous, multi-pronged changes in Japan's political, economic, social, and cultural spheres?

This panel explores how Japan in the 1970s—or more precisely, the Japanese people—reflected upon the meaning of the state and reconsidered the relationships between the individual and the state, as well as between society and the state. Focusing on the feminist movement, civic education, and grassroots international cultural exchange, the panel examines the ways in which Japanese society, a quarter-century after defeat, re-evaluated the “postwar” and more fundamentally, reinterpreted the meaning of “modernity” itself.