Book Review: Naoko Koda. The United States and the Japanese Student Movement, 1948–1973: Managing a Free World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020)

The United States and the Japanese Student Movement, 1948–1973: Managing a Free World. By Naoko Koda. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2020. xiii, 259 pp. ISBN: 9781498583411 (cloth; also available in paper and as e-book).

Simon Avenell
Journal of Asian Studies (2022) 81 (3): 596–597.

In this fascinating study spanning the critical years of the postwar Japanese student movement from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Naoko Koda provides a vivid and compelling account of the ways that student activists helped shape Japan's budding postwar democracy, along the way influencing US elites’ approaches to their East Asian Cold War protégé as well as public attitudes toward peace and social protest within Japan. An innovative aspect of the book is the dual-track approach that Koda adopts. On the one hand, the narrative succinctly traces the development of student activism from its emergence in the early years after the war to its explosive conclusion in the violence of the early 1970s, while on the other hand, it provides an innovative insight into the ways American political elites became concerned about Japanese student radicalism and subsequently took action to bring it under control. The narrative of the...