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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the emergence in late 1960s Japan of Future Studies as an anti-Marxist intellectual strategy that developed a new science of the future, competing with New Left politics by reframing Japan’s crisis as one demanding technocratic expertise.

Paper long abstract

In 1967, social scientist Katō Hidetoshi and bureaucrat Hayashi Yūjirō casually suggested that Japan host the next Committee for Mankind 2000 conference. This offhand remark, taken seriously by international futurologists, catalysed the establishment of the Japan Association for Future Studies in 1968 and positioned Japan within a global movement concerned with managing rapid technological and social transformation. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Japanese futurists, this paper examines how Japanese Future Studies emerged from informal networks of conservative intellectuals to become an institutional force in shaping Japan's ideological and technological trajectory. The founding figures – which also included anthropologist Umesao Tadao, critic Kawazoe Noboru, and science fiction writer Komatsu Sakyō – envisioned Japan’s transition from what Hayashi termed a ‘hard to soft society’, imagining post-industrial futures centred on information-based economic structures and social harmony. To realise this vision, they set about developing a new science of the future itself.

But crucially, Future Studies must also be understood as a strategic intellectual response to Marxist hegemony in postwar academia. During the late 1960s, New Left movements convulsed Japan's universities and streets, challenging both Cold War structures and the alienating forces of advanced capitalism. New Left thinkers argued for the rupture of linear temporality and programmatic thinking altogether. In response, the futurists constructed an alternative crisis narrative: Japan's transformation represented not a crisis of capitalism requiring revolutionary politics, but a crisis of imagination demanding new forms of technocratic expertise. By appropriating claims to scientific authority, Future Studies therefore provided anti-Marxist academics with frameworks for envisioning ‘desirable futures’ that could compete with both the utopian appeal of socialism and the radical temporal politics of the New Left.

Yet this anti-Marxist intellectual positioning did not emerge in a vacuum. This paper situates Future Studies within longer genealogies of technocratic governance stretching from the utopian imaginaries of prewar Manchuria through Cold War institutions like the Policy Science Research Group. By analysing how these futurists mobilised sociotechnical imaginaries in service of particular political visions, this research illuminates the complex relationship between scientific expertise, future-oriented planning, and anti-communist intellectual strategy in postwar Asia.