Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen Heft 32

Volker Fuhrt: Pacifism in Japan – a discontinued model?



The paper starts with the observation that Japan, since 1945 usually considered as a country
with a strong pacifist inclination, showed, at least in international comparison, only a minor
degree of protest against the support of US military intervention and occupation in Iraq by
the Japanese government in 2003. A first attempt to explain this phenomenon goes back the
heyday of Japanese peace movements in the decade after the withdrawal of the US occupation
troops in Japan in 1952. During this decade the protests of Japanese peace movements
were highly influenced by left wing organizations both in organizational and ideological
terms. Among these groups there was a growing anxiety to be drawn into another war by the
Japanese government, which cooperated very closely with the USA. The one-sided ideological
orientation of these “traditional” peace movements was a severe obstacle for a lasting resonance
of their efforts in the public sphere of Japan. The second important feature of Japanese
peace movements was a highly biased invocation of the historical role of Japan as a victim of
the Second World War (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) together with the displacement of those cases
were Japanese troops had acted as perpetrators. On the one hand, this bias resonated with the
Japanese way of coming to terms with their own past, but on the other hand it contributed to
a growing isolation of Japanese peace movements in the Far East.