Book Review

Asia

In this work, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura interprets the political and social significance of the AMPO demonstrations of 1960, a series of massive protests against the Japanese government's renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (AMPO). His aim is to explore AMPO's origins and trace the lasting changes domestic protest engendered. Taking a bottom-up perspective, he eschews any discussion of state-to-state international politics, party rivalries within Japan, or the organized student movement. He instead concentrates on loosely organized "citizens' movements" and what their involvement in AMPO can tell us about Japan's modern political culture.	1
Sasaki-Uemura succeeds admirably in providing informative case studies of four small antirenewal groups and in conveying the typically amorphous and fractured character of their activities. He also accurately describes a popular postwar concern for preserving new democratic institutions and practices. He makes a case for understanding the AMPO protests as a rejection of strongman politics, remilitarization, and a return to "fascism." This is a perfectly reasonable assessment, but in places one so narrowly focused on postwar developments that it ignores prewar antecedents for the "democratic" movements and popular organizations that emerged after 1945.	2
What Sasaki-Uemura does well is to depict how and why members of the Mountain Range, the Poets of i, the Grass Seeds, and the Voiceless Voices became engaged in the anti-security treaty movement. As the names suggest, the four did not make up a homogenous collection of permanently organized protest groups. In fact, they worked more apart than together and involved different constituents. They were also "spontaneous" in being voluntarily self-organized and not orbiting around a specific preexisting ideology (for example, Marxism).	. . .