Political Ties of Visible and Invisible Social Movements in Contemporary Japan

"Political Ties of Visible and Invisible Social Movements in Contemporary Japan" by Dr. Patricia G. Steinhoff (Professor in Sociology)

Although the Japanese left is often declared to be dead, there is a lively collection of social movements active today in what Dr. Steinhoff calls Japan’s invisible civil society, whose roots can be traced to the New Left generation of the late 1960s. Unlike the centralized national New Left sects of the sixties that attracted heavy police surveillance, they exist as small issue organizations, linked through networks and clearinghouses, but lacking any official status because they fiercely guard their independence from the state. Consequently, they are invisible to national-level studies of civil society that rely on formal institutional indicators. They are active within an alternative civil society and public sphere, within which they are well-known. Because of their network ties, they can occasionally mobilize large numbers of participants to protest or promote particular issues, and thereby become momentarily visible to the public, but they appear to have little political impact.

By contrast, a number of fairly new, well-funded and highly visible conservative social movement organizations have had remarkable political impact on particular political issues, such as the North Korean kidnapping issue and the victim’s rights movement. This paper examines both the internal organizational structures and the political relations of these two types of social movements and finds that both cultivate political ties and participate actively in politics. The differences are in the levels (local or national) at which they concentrate their activity, and the political opportunities created by contemporary Japanese politics.

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