SpringerLink - Journal Article

Special Issue: Political Ethnography I

Radical Outcasts versus Three Kinds of Police: Constructing Limits in Japanese Anti-Emperor Protests

Patricia G. Steinhoff¹

(1)	Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii, 240 Saunders Hall, 2424 Maile Way, Honolulu, 96822, HI, USA

Published online: 28 June 2006

Abstract Field observation of anti-emperor protests in Japan reveals two key processes through which the interaction of police and demonstrators gradually narrows the limits of permitted dissent through soft repression. The first process stigmatizes demonstration participants and sharply separates them from the mainstream of Japanese public life, discouraging public attention to or participation in their causes. The second process divides protest movements internally, decreasing support for groups that operate at the prevailing limit of tolerated dissent, and gradually constricting the limit itself. Great variability in police-demonstrator interactions within demonstrations suggests the limitations of newspaper content analysis methods for such research.

Keywords Japan - Anti-emperor movement - Protest - Demonstrations - Police - Police-demonstrator interaction

Patricia Steinhoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. A Japan specialist who studies Japanese radical left groups, she is the author or editor of twelve books, including three in Japanese, and eighty articles and book chapters. Recent publications include Doing fieldwork in Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), which she co-edited with Theodore Bestor and Victoria Lyon Bestor, and “Kidnapped Japanese in North Korea: The New Left connection” Journal of Japanese Studies 30:1, Winter, 2004, pp. 123–142.

Patricia G. Steinhoff
Email: steinhof@hawaii.edu

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