In 1968 and 1969, student protests at several Japanese universities ultimately forced the closure of campuses across Japan. Known as daigaku funsō (大学紛争, lit. ‘university troubles’) or daigaku tōsō (大学闘争, ‘university struggles’), the protests were part of the worldwide protest cycle in 1968 and the late-1960s Japanese protest cycle, including the Anpo protests of 1970 and the struggle against the construction of Narita Airport. Students demonstrated initially against practical issues in universities and eventually formed the Zenkyōtō in mid-1968 to organize themselves. The Act on Temporary Measures concerning University Management allowed for the dispersal of protesters in 1969.

Initially, demonstrations were organized to protest against unpaid internships at the University of Tokyo Medical School. Building on years of student organization and protest, New Left student organizations began occupying buildings around campus. The other main campus where the protests originated was Nihon University. They began with student discontent over alleged corruption in the university board of directors. At Nihon, protests were driven less by ideology and more by pragmatism because of the university’s traditional and conservative nature. The movement spread to other Japanese universities, escalating into violence both on campus and in the streets. In late 1968, at the zenith of the movement, thousands of students entered Tokyo’s busiest railway station, Shinjuku, and rioted. Factional infighting (uchi-geba, 内ゲバ) was rampant among these students. In January 1969, the police besieged the University of Tokyo and ended the protests there, leading to renewed fervor from students at other universities, where protests continued. However, as public support for the students fell, and the police increased their efforts to stop the protests, the movement waned. The passage of the 1969 Act on Temporary Measures concerning University Management gave police the legal basis to apply more forceful measures, although splinter groups of the New Left groups, such as the United Red Army, continued their violence into the 1970s.

The students drew ideological inspiration from the works of Marxist theorists like Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, French existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and the homegrown philosophy of the Japanese poet and critic Takaaki Yoshimoto. Yoshimoto’s interpretation of “autonomy” (jiritsusei) and “subjectivity” (shutaisei) were based on his critique of the progressive liberal interpretations of these ideas by other Japanese intellectuals such as Masao Maruyama, whom he denounced as hypocritical. The students’ devotion to shutaisei in particular would lead ultimately to the disintegration of their movement, as they focused increasingly on “self-negation” (jiko hitei) and “self-criticism” (hansei).

The university troubles helped in the emergence of Mitsu Tanaka’s Women’s Liberation (Ūman Ribu) movement. While most disputes had settled down by the 1970s and many of the students had reintegrated into Japanese society, the protests’ ideas entered the cultural sphere, inspiring writers like Haruki Murakami and Ryū Murakami. The students’ political demands made education reform a priority for the Japanese government, which it tried to address through organizations such as the Central Council for Education. The protests have been the subject of modern popular media, such as Kōji Wakamatsu’s 2007 film United Red Army.

Zenkyōtō

The All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees (Japanese: 全学共闘会議; Zengaku kyōtō kaigi), commonly known as the Zenkyōtō (Japanese: 全共闘), were Japanese student organizations consisting of anti-government leftists and non-sectarian radicals.

The movement began at the University of Tokyo and Nihon University, and expanded rapidly to the other major universities over the subsequent three years.

Across the country, 127 universities — 24 percent of the national four-year university system in total — experienced strikes or occupations in 1968. In 1969, this rose to 153 universities or 41 percent. There was also a Zenkyōtō movement in the Japanese high schools.

Up to this point, mobilizing in the student movement meant conforming to the rules of the student council and constituting a clear majority within it. The Zenkyōtō, however, was formed in a voluntarist manner — or through direct democracy, so to speak — as an extralegal organization that operated outside the rules and without recognition by the university administration, consciously opposing the existing type of conformism.

The Zenkyōtō had no rules that governed either its membership or its leadership. Political sects participated in the movement, along with a multitude of small nonpartisan groups, but these organizations fought under the banner of each specific university in the Zenkyōtō.

From the moment of its formation, the Zenkyōtō spread to universities across the whole of Japan, something that had never been seen before in the postwar Japanese student movement, marking the specific character of ’68. Yet, at the same time, the Zenkyōtō as an organization overburdened itself from the outset with political difficulties specific to the practice of direct democracy, difficulties that would emerge later as the movement developed.

Hexbear links

reminders:

  • 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
  • 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
  • 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
  • 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
  • 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

Theory:

  • SubstantialNothingness [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    15 小时前

    When people outside the region think of Japan, I don’t think they imagine student protests - or individuality, decentralization, MLs, traditional (pre-Meiji) culture and crafts, anarchists, etc.

    They think of Cool Japan, or Meiji culture including the empire.

    Of course it’s important to be familiar with the empire and how horrible it was (and how it connects to circumstances today). Much more important than escaping into isekai fan service. But imo it’s a shame that so much history and culture is overlooked. I think it leads to major misunderstandings about the country, the issues facing it, and its options for the future.

    So anyway, I don’t think people associate Japan with student protests. Not even the tame protests like US schools experienced over Gaza, let alone protests like the US had in the 60s. And yet the Japanese university occupations were more intense and energetic than either of the US events, afaik.

    Some more photos I pulled up from a search:

    Communists, anarchists, and other left-aligned students seized around 70 universities iirc (in addition to many more smaller strikes and protests). This work was built on the back of many years of student organizing by campus socialist and communist groups. By the early 60s they were also working with trade unionists. As the student organizations grew larger, they also grew more diverse, and this gave rise to Japan’s New Left movement.

    Despite the successes in organizing and liberating, though, the protests suffered the same fate as we are familiar with: They were not in a position to achieve meaningful demands or hold revolution, and eventually the various groups drifted into disarray and conflict among themselves. On the other side of the field the state was militantly cracking down on them, university administrators were given the right to call in troops on students themselves (and did so), and school events such as entrance exams were heavily monitored by police forces. Some say leftist division was the downfall of the student protests, but I think that reverses causality. As time went on and progress could not be made, the timer ran out and the fire went cold. Collaboration only holds together so long as the iron is hot enough to strike.

    Sometimes I think of these protests as a last big hurrah, a final flareout of the organized left. By this point in time the organized left had already suffered fatal blows and I don’t think there’s anything the students could have done about it (short of provoking a chaotic and unbalanced revolution through sabotage of critical capital). Previously, the left had fought against and sabotaged the empire and its war machine in the World Wars. There had been camps training these rebels (ideologically and physically) and their graduates acted in Japan, Manchuria, Korea, etc. They become a significant enough menace that the empire crushed them with a fanatic obsession. VIPs were killed and imprisoned, organizations were spied on until they could be disbanded, and there became a significant social stigma with neighbors selling out neighbors.

    The persecution was enormously successful. The basically left had to be rebuilt ground-up after WWII. Which is where these student groups came from. While they did enjoy more freedom than previously, especially on university grounds, the cultural (and economic, productive, etc.) damage from the imperial era was lasting. And it was now coupled with a red-scare US administration, leading directly to the era of neoliberal oppression.

    While leftist organizations were crushed, the sentiment was not. The leftist spirit survived the Meiji restoration as a counterculture, it survived the world wars as a counterculture, and it has survived neoliberalism as a counterculture. Without powerful organizations to contribute to, many leftists turned to the arts post-WWII. Media and literature cannot do much about material conditions and productive forces, but the seeds these artists planted are continuously renewed and serve to keep the spirit alive. In a sense it is a cultural guerilla war.

    Or perhaps it would be more precise to say “was” a cultural guerilla war - I am not certain that the arts will remain a refuge for the left. At least not arts that become commercially popular. Just as during the Meiji restoration, the liberal government has pursued exploiting and controlling cultural value. The “Cool Japan” initiative selectively supports which artists are promoted through government funds and benefits. Of course government support for the arts is not fundamentally bad, but in this is case it provided a degree of control over which voices and viewpoints would be heard and which wouldn’t. This initiative helped open up anime for audiences all over the world, which massively inflated the industry. With so much money coming in from so many places and influencing studio decisions, popular anime went through a period of political sanitation and enshittification. Wish fulfillment, fan service, and “apolitical” storylines flooded the industry. These treats sell like candy to alienated consumers and so a positive feedback loop occurred, with money influencing decisions in order to lead to more money. This made the studios very powerful compared to the creators, and now it is much harder for leftist creators to make the productions that they want to make.

    However I’m confident that the leftist counterculture will continue to survive in some form or another. I don’t believe they will be calling the shots any time soon, but I do think they could become a force to be reckoned with if a power vacuum emerged. There is a strong presence just under the surface, biding its time for better weather. It may not be disciplined or organized or well-defined anymore, but it has the potential to become all of these things again under the right conditions.

    If you’ve never read much about Japanese leftists, it’s an interesting history. They were extremely committed and ideologically driven. And yet their story is ultimately a cautionary one.