Challenging the Empires from Within: Black Power and the Japanese Anti-Vietnam War Movement

This presentation examines transnational alliances links between American and Japanese antiwar activists by focusing on international conferences organized by the Japanese group Beheiren (Peace for Vietnam! Committee) in 1968 and protests staged in areas that hosted US military bases in Japan. I understand these two sites as points of encounter for US and Japanese activists, and thus spaces at which ideas about anti-imperialism that had developed in different contexts could converge and mutually influence each other and develop in a transpacific anti-Vietnam War movement. In Japan, ideas about imperialism and imperial domination brought to such sites in Japan by American activists, particularly those from the Black Power movement, encouraged Japanese anti-war activists to articulate broader concepts of liberation.

Third World liberation movements had a tremendous influence on the imagination of young radicals, and the anti-imperialism of the sixties had been dominantly narrated in relation to oppression and neo-colonial violence in the Third World. However, Black Power was an anti-imperial movement that emerged from within the US “empire” and as such it appealed to activists in Japan who also hoped to cultivate a home-grown anti-imperial movement. This paper traces how the black liberation movement, and Black Power in particular, became a powerful source of inspiration for young radicals in Japan.