Chelsea Szendi Schieder – författare

1968 was a year of mass protest: it was a pivotal moment in which students worldwide built barricades and launched radical critiques of war and capitalism, and decried universities for their role in perpetuating both. Tokyo 1968 introduces how this global moment played out in Japan, through the unique story of two young women, Hiromi and Kazuko, studying at the overwhelmingly male University of Tokyo during a turbulent period in history. Grounded in extensive research, this is the first literary work (in any language) to foreground women’s experiences and relationships in Japan’s late-1960s student movement.Through a fictionalized graphic rendering based on archival and interview sources, Tokyo 1968 offers a sense of the textured everyday life in which personal relationships intersected with political commitments. Hiromi and Kazuko become involved in the student movement and bring readers with them as they explore urban and activist spaces. The book depicts how they encounter systemic and casual misogyny, and grapple with differing visions of how one realizes social and political change while participating in dramatic events that captured the attention of the nation and the world. The characters’ debates on how to engage in the larger wave of youth activism speaks to dynamics common in social movements, particularly regarding what prompts people to come together collectively and what threatens the unity of a movement. Far from orientalist clichés about an essentially harmonious and apolitical Japan, Tokyo 1968 introduces a critical but often overlooked movement in global youth protest history. It highlights how these efforts set the stage for subsequent women’s liberation, ecological, and radical activism, and introduces readers to the gendered and political context in which young women participated.

In the 1960s, a new generation of university-educated youth in Japan challenged forms of capitalism and the state. In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women's participation in these protest movements led by the New Left through the early 1970s. Women were involved in contentious politics to an unprecedented degree, but they and their concerns were frequently marginalized by men in the movement and the mass media, and the movement at large is often memorialized as male and masculine. Drawing on stories of individual women, Schieder outlines how the media and other activists portrayed these women as icons of vulnerability and victims of violence, making women central to discourses about legitimate forms of postwar political expression. Schieder disentangles the gendered patterns that obscured radical women's voices to construct a feminist genealogy of the Japanese New Left, demonstrating that student activism in 1960s Japan cannot be understood without considering the experiences and representations of these women.