ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two transnational aspects of Japan's armed New Left. First, it examines the diffusion of revolutionary ideas through published Japanese translations that were available in the 1960s and 1970s in left-oriented bookstores and widely read by students. Second, the chapter examines direct transnational contacts between the Japanese armed left and similar groups all over the world, based on long-term research on the Red Army Faction in Japan and its offshoots. In addition to print materials produced by Japanese authors, translations from Western languages into Japanese brought in Western ideas, including socialism, anarchism, and Marxism. As New Left student activism blossomed from the mid-1960s, it provided a ready market for international New Left books. The protest cycle of the late 1960s and early 1970s was far more complex and multilayered than the basically single-issue 1960 anti-security treaty campaign. The Japanese Left was transnational from its inception early in the twentieth century through sharing ideas that emanated from foreign sources.
