After March 11, 2011, Japanese and foreign media lauded Japanese forbearance and restraint. During the postwar reconstruction period, too, a calm and orderly response was prescribed, idealized, and instrumentalized; emotions were (to be) sublimated and suppressed in the service of the economic miracle. Yet trauma was equally a factor in shaping postwar and now post-3/11 society. Opposition movements “emotionally mobilized” constituencies by capitalizing on anger at the failed wartime regime, the ravages of war, and postwar social injustices. When A-bomb survivor Yamaguchi Sasako addressed the first World Congress against Nuclear Weapons in Hiroshima in 1955, crying, “War is horrible!” the whole auditorium wept with her, galvanizing the antinuclear movement. Social movements of all types are grounded in emotional response, but emotions have rarely been subject to sustained historical inquiry. Recent work by historians of Europe like Barbara Rosenswein, William Reddy, etc., has championed the importance of emotion to history, challenging its equation with irrationality. Though emotions, and narratives of emotion, are critical in defining social imaginaries -- and therefore prescribing and proscribing action -- no body of work on emotion in Japanese history yet exists. This panel examines student, antinuclear, and regionalist movements in postwar Japan to address this lacuna. By examining the critical interaction of emotions and “rational” political decisions in the “emotional mobilization” of political groups, we demonstrate the importance of emotion to shaping history.