This book examines the widespread protests which took place in Japan in 1960 against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and assesses their far-reaching impact. It emphasizes the scale of the protests, at the climax of which hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan's National Diet building on nearly a daily basis, and large protests took place in other cities and towns all across Japan. It considers the results of the protests, which included the cancellation of President Eisenhower's state visit and Prime Minister Kishi's removal from office, and argues that although the protests apparently failed in that the Security Treaty was renewed and the Liberal Democratic Party remained in power, nevertheless the protests brought about subtle lasting changes in Japan: they revealed many latent societal and political tensions, and they compelled the ruling establishment to reshape itself, having to take seriously non-militarization and the need to listen to the people. The events are analysed in terms of social movement dynamics, with comparative references to the Western European protests of 1968.

Writings on post-war Japanese politics have tended to take for granted the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as inevitable, without questioning how this came about. This book analyses the nature of Japanese party politics over the first four decades following the Second World War, assessing how the chief contenders - the conservative LDP and the socialists JSP (Japan Socialist Party) - competed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses relative to the other. Throughout, it addresses the questions: How effectively were the parties' strengths harnessed? How did they alter over time? To what extent was the winning formula challenged? Did the loser have access to strengths with a major potential, and, if so, why did these remain underdeveloped? It extends widely to include discussion of the political system, the social and economic environment in which parties operated, internal party matters, especially factions, personal support groups, special interest groups, and the role of government bureaucracy. It shows why the Liberal Democratic Party was dominant, why the Japan Socialist Party remained out of power, and how successive prime ministers conducted policymaking in ways which often resulted in the bureaucracy taking the lead. Overall, the book shows how precedents for the political system and for policymaking were set in this important period, precedents which continue, and which have contributed significantly to the present conservative stance on many key issues.

Writings on post-war Japanese politics have tended to take for granted the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as inevitable, without questioning how this came about. This book analyses the nature of Japanese party politics over the first four decades following the Second World War, assessing how the chief contenders - the conservative LDP and the socialists JSP (Japan Socialist Party) - competed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses relative to the other. Throughout, it addresses the questions: How effectively were the parties' strengths harnessed? How did they alter over time? To what extent was the winning formula challenged? Did the loser have access to strengths with a major potential, and, if so, why did these remain underdeveloped? It extends widely to include discussion of the political system, the social and economic environment in which parties operated, internal party matters, especially factions, personal support groups, special interest groups, and the role of government bureaucracy. It shows why the Liberal Democratic Party was dominant, why the Japan Socialist Party remained out of power, and how successive prime ministers conducted policymaking in ways which often resulted in the bureaucracy taking the lead. Overall, the book shows how precedents for the political system and for policymaking were set in this important period, precedents which continue, and which have contributed significantly to the present conservative stance on many key issues.

This groundbreaking study on the forging of Chinese communism in the furnace of the anti-Japanese war focuses on North China, where the CCP first took root and later expanded to conquer China. Whilst the explosive growth of the Chinese Communist movement during the war years is a fact, the nature of this expansion remains disputed. Here, the author examines a set of interrelated issues that have so far not received comprehensive treatment with regard to the main Communist base areas in North China - regions where the party secured most of its recruits and where its policy programmes were most severely tested by Japanese military campaigns. The analysis centres on how the Party strove to combine two objectives that it perceived as crucial to building up a sustained mass resistance movement to the Japanese: socio-economic and political restructuring in favour of the poor and the forging of a grassroots rural united front including all social strata.The author also stresses the host of severe constraints that the party's policy ambitions ran up against, such as destruction by the Japanese army, the economic burden of running the resistance, peasant attitudes, and the shortage of trained cadres. Ultimately, the movement spread too rapidly and too wide for the party centre to exert more than a very weak or mediated vanguard function outside scattered enclaves. This in turn allowed localities an autonomous dynamic that often conflicted with higher party echelons. Nevertheless, the movement had a broad, if highly uneven, redistributive impact on power resources in the various fields, lead; ing to a structural fluidity that raised the prospect of a future revolution. History accelerated.

This groundbreaking study on the forging of Chinese communism in the furnace of the anti-Japanese war focuses on North China, where the CCP first took root and later expanded to conquer China. Whilst the explosive growth of the Chinese Communist movement during the war years is a fact, the nature of this expansion remains disputed. Here the author examines a set of interrelated issues that have so far not received comprehensive treatment with regard to the main Communist base areas in North China - regions where the party secured most of its recruits and where its policy programmes were most severely tested by Japanese military campaigns. The analysis centres on how the Party strove to combine two objectives that it perceived as crucial to building up a sustained mass resistance movement to the Japanese: socio-economic and political restructuring in favour of the poor and the forging of a grassroots rural united front including all social strata. The author also stresses the host of severe constraints that the party's policy ambitions ran up against, such as destruction by the Japanese army, the economic burden of running the resistance, peasant attitudes, and the shortage of trained cadres. Ultimately, the movement spread too rapidly and too wide for the party centre to exert more than a very weak or mediated vanguard function outside scattered enclaves. This in turn allowed localities an autonomous dynamic that often conflicted with higher party echelons. Nevertheless, the movement had a broad, if highly uneven, redistributive impact on power resources in the various fields, leading to a structural fluidity that raised the prospect of a future revolution. History accelerated.

Forged in the furnace of the anti-Japanese war, Chinese communism first took root in the North, later expanding to conquer all of China. The nature of this explosive growth remains disputed. Dagfinn Gatu examines issues that have so far not received comprehensive treatment. In the North China regions, the CCP secured most of its recruits and its policy programmes were most severely tested by Japanese military campaigns. The CCP movement in these regions had a broad, if uneven, redistributive impact on power resources. These conditions lead to a structural fluidity that lowered the barriers to a future revolution.