This dissertation explores the link between art and activism in early postwar Japan, in order to show how creative and expressive engagement became part of the project of building a participatory, democratic culture. Contrary to the retrospective tendency to approach Japan's postwar democracy as a failure, I argue that democracy thrived as both aspiration and everyday practice in the many grassroots social and cultural movements that flourished in the period from 1945 to around 1960. I take up three case studies: reportage painting (ruporutaju kaiga), the Society for Creative Aesthetic Education (Sōzō Biiku Kyōkai; Sōbi) and filmmaker Hani Susumu, and the Kyushu School (Kyushu-ha), to show how creative participation and personal expression were linked to a variety of social movements which included both elite and ordinary participants. My approach to art and politics emphasizes the need to speak concretely about their relationship: while showing how expression was taken to be part of democratic participation and the aesthetic itself promised a model for both uncoerced organization and full human engagement, I also trace how these ideas were combined with concrete efforts to extend the franchise of authorship, so that the fruits of anybody's creativity could be shared.

The reportage movement used their art to create a community of visibility, bringing to light the economic injustices and moral failings of the early postwar, in an attempt to realize a future outside both the remnants of the wartime state and the developing cold war. In addition to creating artworks, they joined the social movements they were depicting, and visited workers' art circles to assist amateurs in their own attempts at representation. Reportage became more than a style: it was a social practice which aimed to realize alternative communities through research and art. The filmmaker Hani Susumu and educators in the Sobi movement worked in parallel to realize the nascent creative potential within each human being. Sobi pursued a radically liberal form of child-centered education with the idea that fully liberating the individual's creative energies would counteract the tendency towards rationalization and authoritarianism that characterized wartime education, while Hani's filmmaking sought to use film to represent social reality in such a way that the potential for change always seemed present and the future never closed. Kyushu-ha is slightly later than these two groups, and straddles two eras. It was born out of the communal, enlightened spirit of mass participation that is so characteristic of the early postwar, but it was also subject to the emergent field of contemporary art which would structure the art world of the 1960s and later. I use their experience to show how the practices of professional-amateur interaction and attention to local audiences were sidelined by the emergent professionalization and internationalization of contemporary art in the 1960s.