Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo By Nick Kapur,. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. 325 pp. ISBN: 9780674984424 (cloth).

Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo By Nick Kapur. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. 325 pp. ISBN: 9780674984424 (cloth).

We are fortunate to be in an era of increasing, if long overdue, scholarly interest in the culture of activism of Japanese during the 1960s.¹ Nick Kapur's magnificent Japan at the Crossroads is, as the title would suggest, the place to start out. This is at once a political history and a cultural history. It begins with a simple claim—that the protests in the spring of 1960 against the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, commonly known (protests and treaty alike) as Anpo, marked a key moment that defined everything thereafter, not only in international relations and Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politics, but also for left-wing political organizations, unions, the arts, and mass media. Perhaps Kapur is too successful in his argumentation; by the end of the book, I wondered how it could ever have been thought otherwise. Remarkably, for a book that is chockablock with details of factions, intellectual and artistic schools, and splinter groups, Kapur manages never to get caught up in the weeds. The introduction is, simply put, the best short history of the Anpo protests that exists in English. It is only the prologue to Kapur's actual project, but I suspect it is already appearing on syllabi.

Chapter 1 rejects the too-easy truism that nothing of interest in US-Japan relations happened after Anpo. Kapur shows how US president John F. Kennedy and Japanese prime minister Ikeda Hayato hit the reset button to undo some of the bad blood of the Eisenhower/Kishi years. The Kennedy administration's appreciation of the fact that Japan felt it was not being heard by the United States led to reforms on several levels. Consultative committees that still exist today, including the US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange, were established during this period, and the appointment as ambassador of Edwin Reischauer—whose ability in the Japanese language, understanding of Japanese culture, and engagement with people across Japan was unparalleled among US ambassadors—is portrayed as a particularly wise move. In Kapur's telling, prime ministers Ikeda and Satō Eisaku made rather extraordinary gains in exchange for very little.

Chapter 2 turns inward to show how Ikeda...