Cold War historians have expanded the scope of research from the superpowers to their allies to the Third World, and we now know that local forces fought the Cold War on their own terms. Anti-communism has been widely studied in the context of the Americas, Europe, and Asia, too, but research relating to Japan is significantly limited as the historiography of Cold War Japan remains informed by the orthodox binary of the anti-U.S. progressives pitted against the pro-U.S. conservatives. What did the Cold War actually mean to the Japanese on the right and the left? How did they see the so-called free world and the communist camp, situate Japan in the bipolar world, and pursue Japan’s diplomacy? To what extent did clear dichotomies exist along ideological and political lines?

This panel attempts to answer these questions, focusing on the theme of anti-communism in postwar Japan. Masami Kimura reexamines the thought of Japanese socialist thinkers of the right and the left. She highlights the fact that in the early postwar years, both groups, including those who were the opponents of U.S.-Japan security alliance, looked to non-Russian modernity and shared anti-communist/ Soviet views. Yutaka Kanda shifts our attention to the diplomatic policy of the Japan Socialist Party. He investigates the often-overlooked foreign policy of the rightist socialists, particularly toward the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s, which shows their antipathy toward communism and difficulty of working out their own policy distinct from that of Japan’s conservative national government. Though the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the ruling party between 1955 and 1993, is known as an anti-communist, conservative party, Taro Tsuda raises an important question: precisely how did LDP members view communism, and how did anti-communism help form their party identity? Tsuda analyzes the LDP’s anti-communism in the Cold War which, taken as a given, has never been systematically studied.

Thus, all the papers identify anti-communist undercurrents and actions across the right and the left in postwar Japan. In doing so, the panel complicates and deepen our understanding of the nature of anti-communism and the role it played in postwar Japanese politics, society, and foreign relations. Ultimately, this is an attempt to explore possibilities for new research on Cold War Japan and to add new perspectives to global studies of the Cold War.