Studying as Resistance: The Regular Study Sessions of the Academy of Mao Zedong Thought in Japan During the Cultural Revolution

This article examines the regular study sessions of the Academy of Mao Zedong Thought (AMZT) in Japan through a critical close reading of its institutional bulletin, Gakuin Nyūsu (Academy news). During China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Maoism attracted considerable interest among pro-China circles in Japan, leading Ōtsuka Yūshō (1897–1976) to establish the AMZT to instruct young learners. Recent scholarship has moved beyond a static, rigid, and dogmatic conception of ‘Mao Zedong Thought’, instead emphasizing ‘Maoism’ as a flexible concept that can be appropriated, adapted, and reconstituted across diverse contexts. Using the AMZT as a case study, this article probes how this flexibility makes visible the practical constraints encountered in the Japanese context. At the AMZT, participants adopted a highly bookish and inwardly oriented mode of teaching and learning. This approach paradoxically constrained a doctrine centered on practice, reducing it to classroom instruction and theory-driven study. In this sense, the act of ‘studying’ Maoism became a form of ‘resistance’ that diluted its radical ideology.