‘시민의견광고운동’을 통해 본 일본의 진보적 시민운동

Abstract

There have been many sharp confronts in Japan between conservative and progressive groups along a lot of issues since 1990s. Once conservatives held a majority position in the Diet and so progressive forces declined, a series of legalizations were geared up to render execution of Japan's self-defensive right and constitutional amendment efforts were taking place markedly. In the meanwhile, Asian's request of compensation for wartime damages since the charges of wartime comfort women in 1991 forced Japanese to reconsider existing historical understanding of war-related matters and also intensified conflicts between the conservatives and the progressives. With the newly escalated conservative-progressive conflicts in mind, this article analyzed possibilities and limitations of Japan's progressive citizen movement in light of cases of ‘citizen opinion advertizement movement.’ This movement basically makes attempts to change public opinion by citizen's advertisements and there were so far six successful cases by united efforts in collaboration with major NGOs. Many citizens have participated in the movement to protest against Japan's conservative tendency toward a war-able country. And also there were many efforts to expand and diffuse successful results of this new citizen movement. In the very aspect can we argue that this movement entails some potentials and possibilities of Japan's progressive citizen movement. But this movement shows a limitation in that it is mainly provided by the mid-and-over aged who experienced war on person. So the task of Japan's progressive movement goes around on how to enable a sort of ‘succession of memory’ to be effectively transmitted to the young generation without the memory of war.