William Andrews is a writer and translator in Tokyo. He is the author of Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw: Adachi Masao and Japan’s Cinema of Revolution and Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima.
Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi spent nearly three decades in Lebanon alongside the Palestinian resistance. Today, stripped of his passport and largely ignored at home, he’s making the most politically alive cinema in Japan at 87 years old.
During the 1960s, the Japanese Communist Party faced a strong challenge from Japan’s New Left groups amid a wave of student radicalization. While the Communists’ staying power proved greater, neither old nor new lefts have succeeded in transforming Japan.
Efforts to suppress political expression in Japan are meeting an unlikely foe: the flash mob.