Cosmopolitan Publics and Unintended Consequences for Alternative Future: The Case of Japanese Global Sixties

Social movements can often be the agency in revealing an alternative future that has yet to be widely recognized by society. However, this new idea has often remained unknown even among the movements themselves in their initial phase of activism. Instead, movements generate new ideas unintendedly through the contingent development of activism. While the “culture moves” (T. Rochon) so do the social movements. Based on such premise this paper explores the Japanese social movements during the 1960s and 1970s that had generated new ideas for alternative futures. It particularly focuses on the transnational networks and communication between Japanese and foreign activists as primary variables for change. I will call this space of transnational communication as cosmopolitan publics, where stateless collective identity is formed and preexisting identities are contested and transformed. I argue that cosmopolitan publics was critical space for generating new ideas for alternative futures. This will be explained through the cases of Japanese movements that became transnational in the later half of the long Sixties, including Beheiren the civic anti-Vietnam War movement and the Japanese Red Army, a partisan revolutionary movement. Beheiren, for example, developed transnational networks primarily with the Western New Lefts and the transnational communication within the anti-Vietnam War movement that urged members to shift their political issues to Asia by critically reflecting upon their hitherto Eurocentric mindset. The Japanese Red Army, on the other hand, in their interaction with Arab revolutionaries had challenged their grandeur and obstinate revolutionary ideology that led them in developing the idea that enhancing egalitarian relationships among different ethnicities (ethnic cosmopolitanism) should be the movement’s new goal. These new ideas became crucial values in the Japanese civil society from the late 20^th century, yet were unintendedly generated within cosmopolitan publics.