전후 일본 ‘대중’과 ‘시민’의 교차와 길항－1960년 안보투쟁을 둘러싼 서사를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection and contention of “mass” and “citizen” along with its discursive effects in postwar Japan, focusing on narratives of Anpo Tousou, the struggle against the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty in 1960. Discourses on mass society, which originally emerged in the western countries at the beginning of the twentieth century, brought about acute controversy on how politics, economics, power and people are related with one another when they were actively introduced to Japan at a time of high-growth in the 50s. At that time, progressive intellectuals viewed discourses on mass society as a significant challenge to Marxism and postwar enlightenment thoughts and debated fiercely. Nevertheless, there was no consensus among them, the debates only resulted in intellectual conversion to the retreat. At the backdrop of these too early arrived debates lies a specificity of Japanese society that lacked the phase of civil society before the transition to mass society. Yet, a sort of reverse course from “mass” to “citizen” resulted from the aftershock of the struggles against the US-Japan treaty in the 1960s. Some intellectuals attempted to protest “citizens” instead of “mass” in the course of the struggles and viewed them as a distinctive subject. Those subjects who protested in defense of democracy were newly termed “citizens” not “bourgeoisie” in the Marxist sense. This new trend whose characteristic was to determine “citizen” as a coexistence of both “professional” and “living man” instead of as “laborer” was entitled “civicism”. Thereafter, the term of autonomous living man could gain significant meaning throughout the history of Japanese social movement. Nevertheless, the moderateness of the united front taken by civicism completely broke with the notion of rebellious laborers and thus could not practically stop the treaty revision in reality. What is paradoxical of the struggles in the 1960s against the US-Japan treaty is that the more mass society is extended, particularly combined with the backwardness of democracy, the less political its actual leverage becomes.