EastAsian Anthropologist MLへのDavid Slater氏のメッセージ；
The Graduate Fieldwork Workshop at Sophia University invites you to hear Saruya Hiroe speak on Ampo Movements
February 28th, 2009
Sophia University,
Yotsuya Campus, bldg. 10, room 301
10am start
All are welcome; talk in English
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Title: Democracy and Protests in Japan: The 1960 Ampo Movements
Hiroe Saruya
(Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan; affiliated with the Institute for Social Science at University of Tokyo)My dissertation focuses on the protests against the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 (the Ampo 1960 movements). Despite the fact that the treaty concerned foreign affairs that did not directly affects on everyday lives of most people in Japan, millions of people protested. Despite the facts that protesters acknowledged the high probability of the ratification of the bill and that the bill, in fact, was ratified at the House of Representatives in May 19, 1960 (and this ratification meant automatic enactment of the bill at the House of Councilors 30 days after ), millions of people took to the streets, and dozens of companies, stores, and transportation services went on strike. On June 15, 1960 alone, approximately 5.8 million people demonstrated.
My dissertation seeks to examine (1) the conditions under which ideas of democracy came to the front in protesting against the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty; (2) the processes of movement collisions and conflicts among protests groups; and (3) the structure of movement organizations, the manners and behavior of people's participation, and the ways of making their decisions for their participation. My focus groups are intellectuals, student groups, labor unions, and citizens' movement groups.
The presentation is an interim report of my fieldwork and will mainly discuss university student groups. In a nutshell, it was intellectuals who were the main advocator of democracy, and students were not the group who actually called for it. However, the ways in which students made their decisions and took actions were conveyed in democratic manners. In the presentation, I will also touch on convergence and divergence between student groups and intellectuals in making their discourses and taking actions during the movements.
