Political Activism and the Everyday in Cold War Japan

‘On the evening of February 28, 1972’, Yoshikuni Igarashi tells us in Japan, 1972, ‘89.2 percent of Japanese television sets were tuned in to coverage of the end of a hostage situation...carried out by a militant leftist organization, the United Red Army’ (p. 228). Approximately sixty million viewers out of a population of slightly more than 100 million Japanese watched over ten hours as the final stages of the so-called Asama sansō incident unfolded. After heavy fighting at the mountain lodge in which the hostage was being held, which involved use of a crane and wrecking ball to pierce exterior walls and the fatal shootings of two members of the police and a bystander, the hostage was freed and five members of the URA arrested. Initially, Igarashi writes, public sympathy remained with the URA members, who in the spirit of the times were seen to be, like the New...

Bystander effect · Cold war · Evening · Left-wing politics · Media studies · Militant · Pentagon · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Sympathy · Demography · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology