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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2022
This article positions the early career of the Japanese activist and writer Tsumura Takashi as anticipating, from an intellectual and historical-media standpoint, the surge of interest in gendai shisō (“contemporary thought,” i.e. French theory) in 1980s Japan. Often understood as the devolution of theory into a mere commercial fad, the gendai shisō boom—in its reliance on a host of writers who worked at a distance from traditional academic publishing networks—promoted an ethos of interdisciplinary and transgressive knowledge production. Tracing Tsumura's interest in structuralism and post-structuralism as an outgrowth of his participation in the student movement, the article provides a prehistory of gendai shisō in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that Tsumura's creative appropriation of structuralism and post-structuralism took place at a crucial juncture when the academic print networks that had legitimated intellectuals in postwar Japan were being hollowed out from within and without.
1 Hamano, Yasuhiro, Fashon-ka shakai (Tokyo, 1970), 22Google Scholar. Hamano was particularly inspired by John Lennon's ability to constantly remake himself and his style. For an account of similar discourses in American advertising at the time that clearly impacted the Japanese context see Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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3 Ivy, Marilyn, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago, 1995), 40–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Discover Japan” was organized to encourage tourism after the downturn that followed the 1970 Osaka World Fair.
4 Such a coinciding of anti-intellectualism with “lifestyle culture” parallels observations made by sociologist Sam Binkley on the emergence of authenticity-based discourses on the US West Coast during the 1970s. These were marked by a rivalry between the elite publishing culture of the East Coast and the “upstart,” grassroots West Coast publishers and their embrace of anti-professionalism. Binkley, Sam, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham, NC, 2007), 108–15Google Scholar.
5 Nakajima, Azusa, Besutoserā no kōzō (Tokyo, 1983), 28Google Scholar. “Aesthetic populism” refers to the explicitly antimodernist tendencies, i.e. the rejection of all intellectual or cultural vanguards, in the cultural logic of postmodernism, as epitomized by the sardonic style of Tom Wolfe. Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991), 2, 61Google Scholar.
6 Nakajima Azusa, Besutoserā no kōzō, 104.
7 Tsumura, Takashi, Kakumei e no kenri: Gutaisei no hō e (Tokyo, 1971), 255Google Scholar.
8 Such a critique was an organic outgrowth of the late New Left's critique of technocracy and technological rationalism—clearly a quality shared with the global ’68 movement. See Nagasaki Hiroshi, “On the Japanese ’68,” in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (London and New York, 2020), 12–37, at 33–7.
9 Tsumura, Takashi, Media no seiji (Tokyo, 1974), 90Google Scholar.
10 For a discussion of contemporaneous critiques of the postwar Nishida Kitarō publishing craze, and its relation to prewar intellectualism, see Bronson, Adam, One Hundred Million Philosophers: Science of Thought and the Culture of Democracy in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, 2016), 31–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 By these networks, I refer primarily to intellectual magazines called sōgō-shi that often featured academic writers, most prominently Sekai and Chūō Kōron in the postwar period. For a helpful overview of the culture and practices of these magazines see Oku Takenori, Rondan no sengoshi (Tokyo, 2018).
12 Racketeer magazines were premised on a rather bizarre alliance between right-wing racketeer or mob groups, who extorted advertising revenue out of large corporations in the form of magazine advertisements (sanjo kōkoku), and the ex-New Left editors and writers to whom they delegated responsibility for content. For a useful overview of this publishing culture see Ōsawa Satoshi, “‘Ryūdō’: shinsayoku-kei sōkaiya zasshi to taikō-teki genron kūkan,” in Takeuchi Yō, Satō Takumi, and Inagaki Kyōko, eds., Nihon no rondan zasshi: Kyōyō media no seisui-shi (Osaka, 2014), 245–70.
13 For a snapshot of Tsumura's entire intellectual oeuvre—including its relationship with Henri Lefebvre, which I am less concerned with for the purposes of this article—see Kamakura Shōtarō, “Tsumura Takashi ni okeru ‘nichijō-sei’ hihan no shatei,” Bunka/Hihyō 2 (2010), 68–94.
14 Suga, Hidemi, Kakumei teki na, amarini kakumei teki na: “1968 nen no kakumei” shiron (Tokyo, 2018), 388Google Scholar.
15 For an analysis of the impact of the economic high-growth period on the social status of intellectuals and the various print communities and reading groups that supported them see Takeuchi, Yō, Kyōyōshugi no botsuraku (Tokyo, 2003), 206–46Google Scholar. Takeuchi argues that the corporate turn towards hiring students based on latent ability, correlated with the ranking (hensachi) of their universities, rather than with their departmental or disciplinary affiliations, obviated the traditional sociocultural need for holistic “refinement” (kyōyō). Such a transformation dovetailed the increased influence of US-style social sciences and the shift from an “oppositional” (teikō-gata) understanding of intellectuals to one that cast them as “designers” (sekkei-gata).
16 Cusset, François, French Theory: How Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis, 2008), 70Google Scholar.
17 Felsch, Philipp, The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990 (Cambridge, 2021), 90–95Google Scholar.
18 See Sasaki Motohiro, “‘Gendai shisō’: daigakuin-sei no kyōyōshugi zasshi,” in Satō Takumi, ed., Seinen to zasshi no ōgon jidai: Wakamono wa naze sore wo yon'deitanoka (Tokyo, 2015), 83–110.
19 Significantly, it was Miura Masahi who “discovered” Asada Akira as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s and asked him to serialize what would become the basis for Structure and Power.
20 Kitada, Akihiro, Kōkoku toshi tōkyō: Sono tanjō to shi (Tokyo, 2011), 72–88Google Scholar.
21 See Alexander Zahlten, “1980s Nyū Aka: (Non)Media Theory as Romantic Performance,” in Steinberg and Zahlten, Media Theory in Japan, 200–20.
22 Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” in Harry Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, eds., Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, NC, 1989), 21–46, at 30–31.
23 The “New Breed” generally refers to the demographic born between the late 1950s and 1970. For a discussion of the discourses surrounding this generation see Jordan Sand, “The Ambivalence of the New Breed: Nostalgic Consumerism in 1980s and 1990s Japan,” in Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan, eds., The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (Ithaca, 2006), 85–108. Sand characterizes it as demonstrating a paradoxical relationship between resistance and complacency: “[young] Japanese of the 1980s longed for something outside Japan's managed consumer society, yet they were captive to its fashions.” Ibid., 108.
24 Nakamasa, Masaki, Shūchū nihon no gendai shisō: Postudomodan to wa nan'dattanoka (Tokyo 2006), 16–17Google Scholar.
25 For a detailed analysis of the mechanics of the expansion of print capitalism in 1920s Japan and the emergence of a star system for writers and critics see Ōsawa, Satoshi, Hihyō media-ron: Senzenki nihon no rondan to bundan (Tokyo, 2015)Google Scholar.
26 Katō Hidetoshi, “Chūkan bunka ron,” Chūōkōron 72/3 (1957), 252–61.
27 Media scholar Ōsawa Satoshi regards this alternative print media milieu as serving as a training ground of sorts for the myriad writers who supported the contemporary thought boom in the 1980s. Azuma Hiroki et al., Gendai nihon no hihyō: 1975–2001 (Tokyo, 2017), 35–40.
28 Tsumura, Media no seiji, 90.
29 Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 60.
30 Sasaki Motohiro, for instance, has shown that it was not the more difficult, “highbrow” publications such as the journal Gendai shisō, let alone the texts of the French thinkers themselves, that were most popular with students in the 1980s, but “introduction” manuals meant to break down French theory in more accessible terms. These were often written by ex-members of the New Left, most prominently Kosaka Shūhei and Takeda Seiji Sasaki, “‘Gendai shisō’,” 100. For an account of the reception of these “easy-to-understand” (wakariyasui) texts by high-schoolers and university students in the 1980s see Toyama, Kōichi, Kaiseiban zenkyōtō igo (Tokyo, 2018), 291–5Google Scholar.
31 It is worth keeping in mind that such a celebration of “amateurism” in itself was by no means a novel phenomenon. The cultural anthropologist Umesao Tadao, in his 1969 best-selling text Techniques for Intellectual Production (Chi-teki seisan no gijutsu), for example, advocated a “de-individualized” (botsu-kosei) method of collecting, storing, and using information that conspicuously resembled the operations of a computer. Such a democratic vision of production promised to free knowledge from the clutches of specialists. I argue, however, that while overlapping in their embrace of amateurism and disdain for academic credentials, the writers of the late New Left were equally suspicious of such a technical–pragmatic understanding of knowledge production given its parallels to the state's managerial techniques. I would like to thank an anonymous reader for directing me towards Umesao Tadao.
32 Tsumura, Takashi, “Jibun no jinsei wo kaeru: 80 nendai no kiki to kanōsei ni tsuite,” 80 nendai 1 (1980), 20–29, at 20Google Scholar. Such remarks echo the prevalent attitude of “self-negation” (jiko-hitei) at the time—of recognizing one's privileged status as an elite student in a powerful capitalist nation and actively trying to undermine that privilege—though it should be mentioned that Tsumura was generally opposed to this attitude for being a superficial form of moralism that doubled back on the individual subject, thus reinforcing it.
33 Takano Minoru led the union in the early 1950s and was instrumental in directing it to go beyond merely defending the interests of the working class to involve itself in activism to protect postwar democracy and peace. Watanabe Osamu, “Kōdō seichō to kigyō shakai,” in Watanabe Osamu, ed., Nihon jidai-shi 27: Kōdo seichō to kigyō shakai (Tokyo, 2004), 7–126, at 21. Tsumura's older brother Takano Hajime is also a well-known television commentator and journalist.
34 Then prime minister Kishi Nobusuke had negotiated the renewal of a revised treaty to rectify the vastly unequal original security treaty signed along with the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, which failed to include a firm commitment on the side of the US to defend Japan in the event of a military conflict. Kishi had planned to use the renewal as part of a program to revise the postwar constitution and remilitarize Japan, but significantly miscalculated mass opposition to it; he ended up resigning on 23 June 1960, amid massive protests after the Liberal Democratic Party steamrollered the renewal through the Diet a month before. For a detailed account of the US–Japan Security Treaty and fallout see Kapur, Nick, Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Cambridge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 4th edn (Oxford, 2020), 263.
36 Such a phenomenon, of course, was by no means specific to postwar Japan: the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, termed a similar dynamic in France “diploma inflation,” and observed that it was one of the principal drivers of student radicalism in the late 1960s. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London and New York, 2010), 139–40.
37 See Oguma Eiji, “Japan's 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil”, Asia-Pacific Journal 13/12 (2015), 1–27.
38 Tsumura Takashi, Kakumei e no kenri, 16. For a discussion of the term kanri shakai and its relation to the intellectual trends of the late 1960s see J. Victor Koschmann, “Intellectuals and Politics” in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley, 1993), 395–423, at 414–17.
39 Tsumura, Takashi, Ōgi ōkō ron (Tokyo, 2016), 215Google Scholar.
40 Oguma, “Japan's 1968,” 14.
41 Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture (Berkeley, 1995), 51Google Scholar.
42 Tanigawa Gan et al., Minshushugi no shinwa: Anpo tōsō no shisō-teki sōkatsu (Tokyo, 1960), 63.
43 Yoshimoto, Takaaki, Jiritsu no shisō-teki kyoten (Tokyo, 1966), 25Google Scholar.
44 Quoted in Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “Aikoku”: Sengo nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Tokyo, 2002), 581.
45 Tsuno, Kaitarō, Dokusho to nihonjin (Tokyo, 2016), 205Google Scholar.
46 Tsumura, Ōgi ōkō ron, 217.
47 Tsumura, Media no seiji, 249. In this article, Tsumura pokes fun at the responses of a variety of “anti-commercial” zines to interest from the popular magazine Asahi Jānaru in a 1971 issue: “If you get covered by Asahi Jānaru and you are curious about what got recognized by them, or across to them, then it'd be better to quit making zines [minikomi].” Ibid., 250.
48 Ibid., 247.
49 Ibid., 253.
50 See Suga Hidemi, “1968 and the Postwar Regime of Emperor-System Democracy,” in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (London and New York, 2020), 98–119, at 114–19. For an overview of the issues of sexism and misogyny in the student movement see Schieder, Chelsea Szendi, Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left (Durham, NC, 2021)Google Scholar.
51 The term kotobagari became prominent in 1993 following the science fiction writer Yasutaka Tsutsui's declaration that he would cease writing after being criticized for offensively depicting epilepsy in a 1965 story. See William O. Gardner, “Tsutsui Yasutaka and the Multimedia Performance of Authorship,” in Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds., Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams (Minneapolis, 2007), 83–97, at 91–5.
52 Tsumura Takashi, “‘Teidai kaitai’ to buraku, okinawa, chōsen no shiten,” in Suga Hidemi, ed., Tsumura Takashi seisen hyōronshū: “1968” nen igo (Tokyo, 2012), 23–35, at 26–7. In notes to the essay, Tsumura mentions that it was social anthropologist Suzuki Jirō who probably coined the term “rearguard labor army” (rōdō kōbigun) in Japanese.
53 Tsumura Takashi, “Inomata Tsunao = 1937 nen: ‘Rinpō shina no zento’ o megutte,” in Suga, Tsumura Takashi seisen hyōronshū, 48–60, at 53. Significantly, Takano Minoru, Tsumura's father, had been deeply influenced by Inomata while studying under him at Waseda University in the interwar period, and so there was a certain intimacy in Tsumura's studying Inomata during the early 1970s.
54 Ibid., 60. For a discussion of Inomata Tsunao's involvement in the interwar debates over the “feudal” character of Japanese capitalism, as well as his assessments of monopoly capitalism, see Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, 1987), 190–205. Inomata, as a member of the Rōnō-ha (Labor-Farm Faction), argued that there had been a significant transformation of Japanese capitalism after World War I and the “embourgeoisement” of landlords, and as such rejected the claim—advanced by the Comintern Theses—that Japanese capitalism was still plagued by feudal remnants.
55 See Ward, Max M., Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC, 2019)Google Scholar.
56 See Suga, Hidemi, Yoshimoto takaaki no jidai (Tokyo, 2008), 339–53Google Scholar, for an overview of their exchanges.
57 Tsumura Takashi, “‘Sabetsu-ken’ no tame no bokimei: Awasete yoshimoto takaki ni tō,” in Suga, Tsumura Takashi seisen hyōronshū, 101–6, at 102.
58 Ibid., 105.
59 Tsumura Takashi, “Fukusei gijutsu jidai no shisō,” in Suga, Tsumura Takashi seisen hyōronshū, 119–42, at 132–3.
60 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes tropiques (New York, 1972), 384–5Google Scholar.
61 Ibid., 391. Lévi-Strauss, here, lauds Rousseau's ability to first destroy the supposedly “natural” social order (Discourse on Inequality) and then rebuild it (The Social Contract).
62 Quoted in Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, 1980), 182Google Scholar. This was undoubtedly, in part, because Tsumura in the early 1970s was an ardent Maoist and the “people” (jinmin) had to serve as the collective subject for his project.
63 Here I refer to various attempts to find a “new” revolutionary agent after the supposed incorporation of the Japanese proletariat into capitalism, whether in activist Ōta Ryū's interest in Ainu culture, or the Marxist–Leninist sect Middle Core Faction's embrace of kessaishugi—a romantic ideology that stresses a “blood debt” to other Asian countries for the sin of Japanese imperialism. On Ōta's turn to Ainu culture see Till Knaudt, “A Farewell to Class: The Japanese New Left, the Colonial Landscape of Kamagasaki, and the Anti-Japanese Front (1970–75),” Journal of Japanese Studies 46/2 (2020), 395–422, at 414–16.
64 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man,” in Timothy O'Hagan, ed., Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd edn (Burlington, 2016), 25–38, at 28.
65 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 158.
66 Tsumura Takashi, “1930 nendai: Kyokutō ni okeru teikokushugi,” in Suga, Tsumura Takashi seisen hyōronshū, 61–86, at 68.
67 Ibid., 71.
68 Bronson, One Hundred Million Philosophers, 66–7.
69 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 246.
70 Suga, Kakumei teki na, amarini kakumei teki na, 383–91.
71 Ibid., p. 385. Significantly, Miyakawa was invited by then student Kobayashi Yasuo, a friend of Tsumura's, to give a series of lectures on French thought at Tokyo University in 1971. Miyakawa, as such, proved an important portent of the subsequent 1980s turn to French theory.
72 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 162.
73 Tsumura, “Fukusei gijutsu jidai no shisō,” 128.
74 Tsumura, Ōgi ōkō ron, 224–5.
75 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 252.
76 In his search for new sources of “revolution” following the collapse of the working movement through the 1960s, Tsumura was not immune to the tendency to essentialize and instrumentalize feminist and minority movements. As Tomiko Yoda has documented, in the late 1970s he rather condescendingly lamented the inability of the New Left to harness women's desire for self-transformation in the late 1960s. Yoda, “Girlscape,” 191–2.
77 See Koschmann, “Intellectuals and Politics,” at 409–12, for an overview of the “left-wing nationalism” of Yoshimoto and Tanigawa.
78 Yoshimoto, Jiritsu no shisō-teki kyoten, 106.
79 For a discussion of Tsumura's interest in the medial dimensions of cities see Miryam Sas, “The Culture Industries and Media Theory in Japan” in Steinberg and Zahlten, Media Theory in Japan, 151–72.
80 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 88.
81 Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero (New York, 1970), 76Google Scholar.
82 Ibid., 77.
83 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 90.
84 Harootunian, Harry, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2000), 185Google Scholar.
85 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 94.
86 Ibid., 90.
87 Ibid., 94.
88 Ibid., 112.
89 Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text (London, 1977), 143Google Scholar, original emphasis.
90 Tsumura, Kakumei e no kenri, 13.
91 For an account of Tsumura's embrace of New Age culture, see Suga Hidemi, Hangenpatsu no shisōshi: Reisen kara fukushima e (Tokyo, 2012), 131–8; and Maekawa Michiko, “‘Nyū eiji’ ruiji undō no shutsugen o meggute: 1960–1970 nendai seinen no igi mōshidate undō to no kannren de,” Shūkyō to shakai 6/4 (1998), 79–105.
92 See Kurahashi, Kōhei, Rekishishugi to sabukaruchā: 90-nendai hoshu gensetsu no media bunka (Tokyo, 2018)Google Scholar; Itō, Masaaki, Netto uha no rekishi shakaigaku: Andāguraundo heisei-shi 1990–2000-nendai (Tokyo, 2019)Google Scholar. Significantly, several of the leaders of the ultranationalist group Nihon Kaigi, particularly secretary general Kabashima Yūzō, have roots in a right-wing, “anti-systemic,” late 1960s student movement at Nagasaki University, with close ties to the new religion Seichō no Ie. These students sought to repudiate what they saw as the complacency and subordination of the right in the postwar to the corrupt politics of the ruling LDP party. Yasuda, Kōichi, “Uyoku” no sengoshi (Tokyo, 2018), 157–200Google Scholar.
93 For a discussion of the inverted relationship between anti-technocratic, civilian movements in the 1960s and 1990s neoliberal populism in Japan see Noguchi, Masahiro, Sontaku to kanryō no seiji (Tokyo, 2018), 167–92Google Scholar.
