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Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan. By WESLEY SASAKI-UEMURA. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. xiv, 293 pp. $56.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Teachers and scholars of modern Japan have waited long for a book that will take us inside the tumultuous events of 1960, in a way that puts the major public actors-Liberal Democrats, Socialists, Communists, intellectuals, unions, and students-in context and that illuminates how various groups in Japanese society participated in and understood those events. Wesley Sasaki-Uemura has produced such a work in a wide-ranging study that connects political and social with intellectual and cultural history and which adds in-depth consideration of important issues to broad coverage of the political unrest of the period. The combination of breadth and depth in this book is impressive.
After a theoretical introduction in chapter 1, which draws from studies based on a wide variety...