4 Waseda University and the Internationale

I was taken aback at the change the city of Tokyo had gone through for the past one year. When I had come here a year before for the entrance exam of Hitotsubashi University I was under the impression that the city was in a mess with construction works going on everywhere with the Tokyo Olympics just ahead. With the Olympics being over, the city was shining in a brand new mechanical order, too bright for a rubber-neck boy from the ancient city of Kyoto.

The views from the train of the elevated Yamate line on the way from Tokyo station to Waseda presented to my eyes a world completely different from Kyoto. I could hardly detect sediments of people's life that history would have otherwise precipitated. And the seemingly endless sprawls of the urban areas suggested to me the fundamental openness of the city, particularly because I had spent all my life in the ancient city surrounded by mountains on its three sides.

Suddenly it occurred to me that it was the city where the 1960 anti-Security Pact struggles had taken place. The very thought kindled me with a renewed determination to go on a rampage in my life awaiting me there.

The year I got enrolled into Waseda was also the year that the Vietnam War had for the first time attracted the worldwide protest against it. The war had gone on intensifying since the beginning of the year. On February 7, the United States Air Forces made a bombing raid in North Viet Nam where the then USSR's premier, コスイギン, had been visiting. In March, the U.S. ground forces began to advance into North Viet Nam, first led by the U.S. Marine Corps. In response to the initiation of a full-blown American intervention in the war, the Soviet's chief secretary, Brezhinev, suggested its volunteer corps to Viet Nam, which made the situation there extremely strained all at once.

As the war intensified, the anti-Vietnam War movements also increasingly gathered momentun around the world. Even within the concerned party, the United States itself, a number of protest rallies were organized against the American intervention in the war. The emergence of the anti-Vietnam War movements in the suzerain of the western world shocked the whole world. Inspired by this movement, the leftist camp and student movement factions in Japan, which had been inert for some time after the setback in the '60 anti-Secrutiy Pact struggles, were also readying themselves up for their versions of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The state of student movement at Waseda University around that time was somewhat comparable to the world of 三国志. That is, the three parties were opposed to one another: 'Kakumaru' (Marukusu shugi gakusei domei kakumaru-ha, "Kakumaru Faction of the Marxist Students Alliance") which followed the wake of the main stream faction of the Zengakuren at the time of '60 anti-Security Pact movement; 'Seikai' (Shakaishugi Seinen Domei Kaiho-ha, "Liberation Faction of the Socialist Youth Alliance") which was a splinter faction of the youth organization, Shaseido, under the Japan Socialist Party (currently called Social Democratic Party); and 'Minsei' (Minshu Seinen Domei, "Democratic Youth Confederation") which was under the control of the Japan Communist Party. To make their contesting situations worse, all three parties had the largest populations of their supporters at Waseda University and Tokyo University. In other words, my school was not only the main battle field for each group, but also their self-claimed territory that they would never give up. The existence of other minor groups, such as 'Chukaku-ha' and 'Bunto', added a fresh fuel to the already confused situation.

The three major groups were, therefore, always butting against each other in a triangular struggle. It was no exception at the general assembly of the law faculty's class secretaries which was held immediately after the entrance ceremony. At this assembly, during which the control of the executive committee changed hands from Kakumaru to Minsei, bitter words were passed between the two groups and ash trays flew around several times, although there were no inter-factional free-for-all as we would experience on later days. Minsei recaptured the three major posts of the executive committee at the assembly that had been held by the Kakumaru faction. I was appointed a standing member of the committee, and at the same time a member of the executive committee of the student union (Gakuyu-kai), too.

Taking part in the skirmished during the assembly, I felt that the actual scenes of student movement in Tokyo were much more violent than I had thought. But I also thought that the logic and physiology underlying the contests among these factions were the same as those of teenage delinquent scuffles I had been familiar with. That very conclusion made me feel relaxed. There I was ready to fight.

Thus, my life as an activist at the university started. Activists referred to the allied members of a party or its faction and positive sympathizers who ran around for the sake of the party or faction. Despite its grandiose tone to the naming, the activist's life was plain and modest.

First of all, the room allocated for the use of the student union, which was the base of our daily activities, was quite too dirty and unpleasant. At that time, the faculty of law was in No.2 building to the right of the school's front gate. The student union had a room in the basement. In the hallway, which was pretty dark even in the daytime, were agitation shingles and wooden staffs piled pell-mell. On the both sides of it were pigeonhole-like small rooms occupied by leftist circles, one of which was the student union's room. Inside the room was a continuation of the mess out in the hallway. There were mimeographs for printing hand-outs and stacks of blank paper also pile up pell-mell. The whole place was stained with ink, and there was no order whatsoever.

The activists hanging around there were also crummy. Their hair was hanging in wild locks, and they wore shabby sports shirts and cheap trousers with their crests having long gone. I guess there was not a single person in blue jeans which were considered an emerging fashion at that time. Such an untidy and frowzy crowd packed the small room from morning till late in the evening and earnestly devoted themselves to their individual assignments.

Activists were no short of things to do. Preparations of hand-outs to be given on the street and materials for rallies and study meetings were a very exhausting labor. We had to make a number of different kinds of hand-outs and materials in the unit of a few thousands, all of which had to be printed on mimeographs without the benefit of a copying machine of the present time. Those who wrote a good hand would engage in scribing characters on wax paper. Their steel-tipped pens kept scribing on wax paper placed upon a flat file, making scratching noises all day long every day.

I was charged to be an organizer. An organizer was to invite 'Nonpori', non-sect students (we activists used to call them "ordinary students"), to rallies and meetings as well as recruiting new members for Minsei or the JCP from promising students. I liked this organizer activity very much. I talked to so many students and urged them strongly. The duties of organizer seemed quite congenial to me. I succeeded in mobilizing a considerable number of ordinary students for demonstrations, and I ended up recruiting most of the JCP's student members at Waseda by myself.

The organizer's duties required no special tricks. I just tried to talk to as many students as possible and told them the meanings of participating in rallies and being a confederate. I spent my days meeting students one after another. It was a lot of fun as I could meet all kinds of personalities along the way.

The places of my choice for those meetings were classrooms not in use or benches on the campus. Many of the students in those days were poor and could not afford to talk over a cup of coffee at a fancy coffee shop. When my interviewee exhibited some interest, I would visit him at his apartment another day and subjected him to further pursuasion.

Most of the guys whom I visited at home lived in a small 3-mat or 4.5-mat room with no electric appliances like TV or refrigirator. The only modern conveniences they owned were an electric pot, cheap radio and electric foot warmer with a quilt over it, at most. In their darfty rooms I talked to them over a cup of low quality tea for many hours.

Every once in a while, the host treated me Suntory Red or Toris whisky which was a lower-scale liquor but certainly a treat fro poor students. We held the glass with both hands and drank it in driblets. Liquor was that much precious for us, and we would never imagine to drink alcholic beverages in a gulp as it was practiced in a fad among more affluent younger generations of today some time ago.

It was over a glass of Suntory Red whisky that I had for the first time succeeded in recruiting a classmate at his apartment. This guy was greatly depressed at the speech delivered by his professor of socioligical jurisprudence in his first class after the enrollment. The professor had said, "Dear students, do not be mistaken. The students of the faculty of law at Waseda will become laborers and remain laborers for the rest of your life. Do not equate yourselves with the students of Tokyo University who will most likely run the nation. So be prepared to study labor laws as they deal with things that will be your own issues shortly."

His depression was quite understandable because he was sentenced to a "life-laborer," so to speak, in his first class which he had attended with a future plan to become a lawyer or attain an even higher position in the establishment. His distressfulness was even more aggravated by the fact that the professor's remark had lots of truth in it.

"That professor has gone quite radical in his statement, hasn't he? But I admit that he was right. So I am now thinking to study seriously about laborers. And the man that you talked about, what was it, Marx, is the authority on laborer issues, right?"

The other people who I had approached were similar to this classmate in their lack of knowledge on Marxism, and they had never participated in demonstrations, of course. It was a troublesome thing for me to take such tenderfeet to the scenes of rallies. Usually we were to meet at a place like railway stations before we actually marched to the scene. I would wait for them with a big flag of the student union to help them locate me easily. If there was anybody who did no show up, I would run to a pay phone nearby to call him out. I was acting just like a tour conductor. It was certainly cumbersome to take care of such an inexperienced crowd, but I never felt like complaining about it as it was a way of life by my own free choice.

The duties of student movement activists were mostly insipid and earthy like what I have just described above. Throughout my college life, I continued my organizer activity at Waseda and also went down to other schools, including some local schools like Shizuoka University, Shinshu University and Kyoto University for canvassing and recruitment.

During the same period I frequently took part in labor movements, too. Since I was not a union member of any sort I participated in them as a helper. Unlike the ideology-oriented student movement, labor movements were more unidealistic and down-to-earth. There were more mingled feelings of joy and grief concerning life, which made it hard for the participant to get out once he was in the movement. One time I went all the way down to Kyoto to help organize a union at a driving school. The days I spent there at that time were full of thrills and excitements which were brought about particularly by the interference of Yakuza and police.

I busily ran around like this everyday until the student movement grew intensified and factional conflicts started raging around 1967. It was the beginning of what was called the "gebalt era"--the time of skirmishes. Keeping up with the times, my life, too, shifted its turn to brandishing a wooden sword and steel chain.

At the same time, police and agents of the Public Security Investigation Agency began approaching me in an attempt to find out what was going on within the JCP and its cells at Waseda University. I countered them by using tactics, like inviting them to drinking or mahjong, and I tried to wheedle them out of information they had. Because of my frequent contacts with these law enforcement people, one of the agents was suspected, many years later, as an accomplice in the Glico-Morinaga Confectionery Affair in which my involvement was also unjustly suspected. What a really strange pass things can come to!

My activist life continued for about 5 years, but it turned out to be completely different from what I had originally imagined as a high school boy green to the way of the world. Such a life was certainly fun, no doubt about it. But it was also filled with digressions, meanderings, flounderings and rompings. During the 5 year period, I had attended classes only several times and never managed to take a single unit. It was pretty much representative of the student life of most activists.

Hereafter, I would like to talk a little more about my college life by focusing on what we used to call "the Sodai (short for Waseda University in Japanese) struggle" and "the Todai (short for Tokyo University) struggle" because I believe that these two struggles were not only representative of the student movement in late '60s but also they exhibited a striking contrast to each other. And the ways I was involved in them were also in a sharp contrast to each other. In the former, I, as part of a direct party to it, looked at the school disturbance from the front, so to speak, while I sort of peeked at the back side of the student movement as a helper in the case of the latter.

Before going into these struggles themselves, however, let me briefly touch upon the struggle against the ratification of the Japan-South Korea Basic Peace Treaty, which came to the fore 6 months after my enrollment into the university. This was the first big political struggle that I had ever experienced in my college life, and it was in the course of this struggle that I went through an encouter with and a sudden parting from one person who has been ever in my mind to this date.

In 1952 Japan and South Korea entered into the negotiations with regard to the treatment of the Korean residents in Japan and the compensation for the damages incurred by Japan during the war. The talks, however, had long been suspended due to the conflict of views between the two parties since the initial stage. As the Sato Cabinet was organized in the fall of 1964, the negotiation was reopened, and in February of 1965 the Japan-South Korea Basic Peace Treaty was initialled. Behind the speedy progress of the negotiation was a strong pressure from the United States.

The United States, which had already launched forth to intervene in the Vietnam War, was maneuvering to map out a new anti-Communism strategy for Asia to support their full-blown intervention in Indo-China. America had chose Japan and South Korea as strategically important bases and urged the two countries to go into strengthened political, economic and military mutual relations. But before they could do so, there was a precondition for them to meet, and that was to conclude a basic peace treaty, which had remained an impediment to any cooperative relationship between these two neighboring countries. Under such situations, the negotiations were carried out with dispatch almost to the point of being rough-and-ready, and in June of the same year the basic peace treaty was finally signed.

The Treaty required Japan to extend loans and grants amounting to US$500 million to South Korea to cover the latter's expenditures of disptaching its army to Viet Nam. The amount, US$500 million, was equal to 1.5 times of South Korea's annual budge at that time. In return, the Japanese monopolistic capital gained a foothold to make an economic inroad into the Korean peninsula. The contents of the Treaty thus concluded overemphasized the political and economic relations. The long-standing issues like the legal status of the Korean residents in Japan and the post-war compensation for the war damages were to be worked out with much of South Korea's compromise.

As soon as the contents of the Treaty were disclosed, there arose a chorus of dissenting voices. In Japan the leftist camp across the board cried against the treaty, and they organized the first meeting against its ratification in June. I was on the scene and saw thousands of laborers and students, mobilized by the Socialist Party, Communist Party and 'new-left' factions, packing Hibiya Park.

The campaign surged with increasing momentum as the Diet session to deliberate the ratification of the treaty was called in early October. 'Zengakuren' (short for All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) organized a few large-scale demonstrations; the JCP-affliated Zengakuren mobilized 12,000 students, and the anti-JCP Zengakuren (consisting of various anti-JCP factions like Chukaku, Kakumaru, Kaiho and Bunto) deployed 3,000 students. On October 12, there was a demonstration jointly organized by the JSP and JCP to petition the Diet, in which a total of 100,000 laborers and students participated--the largest rally that had taken place since the anti-Security Pact struggle in 1960. I mobilized a few hundreds of students from the faculty of law. I was in high spirits.

Korean residents in Japan, however, were desperately disappointed at the disclosed contents of the Treaty because the South Korean government had greatly yielded on the issue of the legal status of the Korean residents in Japan, bringing about little improvement on the status quo, as a result of the hasty ratification at the political request of America and the compromise lured by the enormous economic assistance promised. Not only that, in the course of the negotiations, Pak Chong-hui, the then president of South Korea, even ventured to say positively that the 600,000 Korean residents in Japan should make sacrifices for their 30 million brethren in South Korea. At the news of this remark by Pak, the Korean residents in Japan perceived that the people in South Korea had "sold" the human rights of the Korean residents in Japan to the Japanese government in exchange for the economic assistance given.

It is true that the economic assistance extended at that time did provide a great impetus for South Korea to achieve its miraculous economic growth in later years and helped South Korea lead its archrival, North Korea, by an ever more widening margin in their economic race. We can say so now, but only by using a hindsight. The extent to which the contents of the Treaty and the remarks by Pak shocked the Korean residents in Japan was just stupendous.

Some repercussions from that shock reached me, too. It was at the height of summer that a Korean friend of mine in Kyoto gave me a call. Contrary to his usual cheerfulness, he asked me in all seriousness,

"Manabu-chan, I have called you because I heard you are involved in the campaign against the Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty. Is the message of that treaty that South Korea has deserted us Koreans living in Japan?"

The tone of his voice demanded an explanation, rather than simply asking a question. I was completely at a loss for an answer. I personally perceived that Pak Chong-hui had abandoned his brethren in Japan. But considering my friend's torment, I scrupled to give it to him straightforward. So I equivocated in replying for a while and then gave him a little pep-talk, "Let's work to shatter that damn treaty. I'll do it over here, so you fight it out over there. OK?"

At about the same time I had an opportunity to talk over the phone with Haruyama Yoshio, lieutenant of the Teramura Gumi. As mentioned earlier, Haruyama was a Korean resident in Japan and Yakuza and also a zealous supporter of 朝鮮総連. Wrapping up the original business I had called him for, I asked him, "Are they making a row over the Treaty thing in Kyoto, too?"

"Yeah, they are. But it's only a great fuss that the people upstairs are making for nothing. This is our second time to be abondoned by our home country. Those guys up there don't understand what that means to us. It's a stir that has nothing to do with us, you know," he vented his mind to me. Then, in a much lowered tone, he added, "I am aware that we Yakuza have no voice in this Treaty thing, but it makes me sad to see all these fellow countrymen crying over the way the South Korean government treats them.........Oh, by the way, Bon, I've heard from your great lady that you are going pretty wild against the Treaty. Good. It's very much like you. Carry it right through to the hilt. I will have some money sent to you. Buy lots of meat and get some nourishment. OK?"

What Haruyama told me was quite shocking to me, because, though he was fearless and daring Yakuza by nature, he was extremely attentive to other people, and I knew he was not a kind of person who would usually make a blunt and detached comment like "only a great fuss upstairs" to someone who was involved in the movement. But the fact that he did say so represented the very depth of his sorrow, unvented ire and alienation, I thought.

As Haruyama pointed out, Japanese people involved in the campaign were almost devoid of solicitude about the Korean residents in Japan. Despite the express statement "solidarity with the Korean residents in Japan" in their slogans, there was no corresponding activity to substantiate it. In that respect, the anti-Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty campaign here handled it with gloves.

Driven by that realization, I gradually came to think that I should take charge of that mission of bridging between Japanese and Koreans in Japan toward a workable solidarity. As a first step, I set out to facilitate the interchange with Chosen University, a school specially established for Korean people living in Japan.

The contact of Chosen University was Mr. Kim with whom I managed to establish close relations. Mr. Kim was an outstanding figure among the elites at the school. He was from a family that ran a business in recycling old clothes in Nagoya. He was bright enough to have passed the entrance exam for Tokyo University, but he dared choose to study at Chosen University with the aspiration to take the helm of the Korean residents in Japan. He was a taciturn and scholarly person, yet a man of impressive fervor. He appeared almost like a living saint, particularly when compared to those delinquent Korean buddies I used to hang around with.

I soon got on calling terms with Mr. Kim. I still clearly remember the day when I visited his apartment in Nakano for the first time. It was a small room in a wooden frame apartment house, but inside the room everything was in perfect order. Against the walls on three sides were high piles of books in Japanese, Korean and English.

It was the first time for us to talk between ourselves, so we naturally told our respective backgrounds. When I told him that I had been from Kyoto, that my father was Yakuza, and also about my theretofore associations with discriminated-against Buraku people and Korean residents, which seemed to have interested him.

In turn, Mr. Kim bashfully told me about his background. I learned from his recounting that the discrimination against Korean residents in Nagoya was just as bad as in Kyoto. He also told me about his dream to teach the history of anti-Japanese partizans at a Chosen senior high school (senior high school specially established for Koreans in Japan). As I asked him one question after another about the anti-Japanese partizans, he answered them all with reserve, but I sensed from odds and ends of what he told me that he had read and studied an incredible volume of materials written in Japanese and other languages.

After having several reciprocal visits to each other's apartment, I ventured to throw questions which, I thought, he might have some difficulty answering.

"Let me ask you some questions. I know they are hard for you to answer. What do you think of Kim Il-song's Stalinistic regime? I don't intend to sound arrogant, but I believe I have some knowledge of what's going on in your country, based on the information fed by my Korean friends here in Japan. Judging from all that, I cannot help thinking that the present regime of North Korea is no different from the Soviet Union under the reign of Stalin's terror. Mr. Kim, what do you have to say?"

He listened to me with his head down. His face betrayed a mixture of emotions within. I slightly regretted that I should have not posed such a question at him. But I could and should not get around this issue if I were to stay on honest and sincere terms with him. After pondering for a while, Mr. Kim digested his ideas and said, carefully choosing words,

"Yes, I am well aware of that criticism. Still, to us North Koreans, Chairman Kim Il-song is a true hero who has fought through the struggle against Japanese as a partizan. His heroic career is almost like our identity as well as the pride of our race. And I think that his achievement in that regard can never be over-appreciated. But please don't get me wrong. I don't mean to say that the present regime is free from any problem. I admit there are problems with it. But I also believe that they are the kind of things that can be resolved on our own."

I knew that he himself knew more than anybody else that his remarks were no answer to my questions. But I understood that what he had told me was what he really believed and yearned over. I understood it so well that my heart ached like anything.

I invited him and his fellow students to come over to Waseda and speak out their thoughts frankly and freely at our meetings. They spoke falteringly but in their own words about the situations they were in, about the consequences that the Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty would bring to them, about the crises that might be created in the Korean peninsula and East Asis, and so forth. The speeches by Mr. Kim and his friends seemed to have given considerable impacts on the Waseda students at the meetings.

Contrary to the Japanese students' commitment towards the campaign which was ideological and little more than other people's business, the way the Korean students committed to the movement was almost bloodcurdling. When I visited the campus of Chosen University in Kodaira, I saw most of the students there walking in stern looks with a headband saying "Ready To Die In Fight Against The Treaty." In demonstrations, their eyes became bloodshot.

Partly kindled by their vim and enthusiasm, and partly driven by my own commitment to establishing solidarity with them, I busily ran around for canvassing and recruiting supporters. When we were short of participants in a demonstration, I even marched into the Jingu Stadium where an inter-collegiate baseball game, either Waseda vs. Meiji University or Waseda vs. Keio University, happened to take place. I appealed to the spectators in the cheering section, most of whom were students, waving the flag of the student union up and down. Of course, I knew it was uncouth.

Much surprised at the unexpected occurrence, some of the cheering squad ran up to me and pleaded, "Stop it, please. We've never seen anybody waving the student union's flag in the Jingu Stadium." In the end we arrived at a compromise in which they promised to let me wave the flag as I pleased, but only after the game. Still, I managed to take 40 or 50 students to the demonstration on that night anyway.

While I was having some fun doing things like this, the Liberal Democrtic Party forced a vote on the Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty at the House of Representatives' Extraordinary Committee held on November 6. It was around that time that the campaign gathered further momentum, and the number of demonstrators doubled each time a new rally was organized. The city of Tokyo was thrown into a frenzied uproar.

The fever of the movement, however, was short-lived. The campaign against the Treaty rapidly ran out of steam as the ratification of the Treaty was force-voted in the House of Councillors (or the Upper House) on December 11. Thus, we were completely defeated. The discouragement of each faction of the leftist camp was tremendous as their expectations had grown so much for the first time since their struggle against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1960. Particularly, I presumed that the Korean residents in Japan had a grave disappointment at the failure of the movement beyond my imagination.

Mr. Kim, however, was a fighter to the core, and he did not show even the scantiest trace of disappointment. When I said,

"Kim-san, too bad we couldn't make it."

"Yeah, it was a complete defeat. Well, what could we expect? It's a long way, anyway, so I'll take it easy and stick to it. But it was a lot of fun to get to know you and your friends at Waseda. I want you to stay in touch with us, and I look forward to an even deeper interchange between our two groups," he responded and bowed very politely. It was very impressive to see such an unswayed determination in the aftermath of the campaign failure.

My interchange with him continued after that, too, although to a little lesser degree because I became heavily involved in the Sodai (short for Waseda University) struggle which arose soon after. He came over to my school every once in a while to support and encourage us with a supply of exotic Korean provisions, saying, "Please take care of yourselves. Wish you good luck."

It was in September the following year that Mr. Kim suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.

At that time, I, as a member on the executive committee for the second consecutive year, was planning a symposium to discuss the issues on the Korean residents in Japan at the upcoming Waseda festival. So I visited his apartment in Nakano to ask for his participation in it as one of the lecturers. But he did not come home even after the promised time. He had never kept me waiting before. So I left there, assuming that there was probably some urgent business coming up for him to take care of.

From the following day on, I phoned him at his apartment several times only to find that he was not at home. It was not very much like him at all. If he were to leave Tokyo for some reason, he would have let me know of it. Feeling awkward about the situation, I re-visited his place a few days later and asked the landlord to open the door to his room and let me in.

His room was in perfect order as usual, with no trace of him having gone on a trip. It gave me the impression that he had been there until just a while before. There was a book left open on his desk. His clothes were left there, too. From the state of the room, I gathered that his departure was of abrupt nature. The landlord, too, thought it was strange and called his parents' house in Nagoya. He had not gone home and his folks had not received a call from him, either.

His worried mother came up to Tokyo in a flurry. It looked like she had left Nagoya the minute she hung up the phone. She was in everyday clothes and her hair strayed loose. After scrutinizing the interior of Mr. Kim's apartment with a determination not to overlook the most insignificant abnormalities present, she seemed convinced of her son's vanishment.

All of a sudden, she dropped on her knees and started lamenting aloud. She cried, harshly banging the tatami mat with her hands. It was a wail as though she had been crying to pour out her intestines. She kept crying for a long time. I felt that it was just too overwhelming for me to enter into her feelings. Mr. Kim must have been her boast and pride and a prop of her life. When I thought of that, I just could not bear to look at her.

Mr. Kim has remained missing to this date. Was he given an assignment to become a North Korean mole operating within South Korea? Was he summoned back to North Korea for some other duties? Or was he killed? I thought of various possibilities, and I also asked some people well-versed in the current situations of the Korean peninsula for their opinions. Staying in touch with Mr. Kim's friends at Chosen University, I visited places where he used to make his appearance. But all those efforts did not produce a result. No clue to his whereabouts was found.

According to the students I talked to at the university, there had been several students in the past who suddenly disappeared. They suggested that each of the cases seemed to have something to do with the political situations on the Korean peninsula. There was no doubt that Mr. Kim's vanishment was of political nature, too.

If that was the case there should be no way of finding his whereabouts. A cold shiver ran down my spine. I suddenly felt that the Korean peninsule in geographical proximity to where I was had become a far more distant place in my mind. While I repented of my prematureness that I had optimistically believed in a ready solidarity with the Korean residents in Japan, I was also struck with the onerous weight of some undefinable thing called "race" which had been given only a superficial consideration in Marxism.

And I finally awakened to a conclusive self-analysis that I was still a verdant activist, compared to Mr. Kim and his fellows who were bitterly fighting under far more severe conditions.

Of all the JCP-oriented students of Waseda and Tokyo University whom I got to know in the course of my acitivity against the Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty, Satoshi Shinzaki was by far the most unique one. He is currently active in writing pungent critical essays under the pen name of Go Chi-ei.

Shinzaki was a student of the law faculty in the same year as I was and also the class scretary of our Russian class. He was an Adonis wearing his hair long--the in-fashion of the time, though a bit hard to imagine from his receded hairline today. From his freshman year, he stood out in that he had already been well exposed to the communist ideology at high school via one of his teachers who was a militant activist of Japan Teachers Union. It was characteristic of him to speak fast in a high-pitched voice. He used to level caustic criticisms at the executive members on occasions like the class secretaries assemblies.

The first time I had ever talked with him was at one of the rallies during the anti Japan-South Korea Treaty struggle. The demonstration was planned to throng to the government's official Reception Hall where the negotiation on the proposed Treaty was to take place between a secretary to Pak Chong-hui and the Japanese government. About 200 students, mainly from Waseda's law faculty joined in the demo. Sinzaki and I were part of them.

That day, the areas surrounding the Reception Hall were under particularly strict guard by the riot police. As we stepped out of Yotsuya Station, the closest station to the venue, the demonstrators were immediately sandwiched tight between rows of cops on both sides. We walked silently towards the Hall, and the riot police jostled and tussled us on the way. There were also many plain clothes around who took photos of every individual taking part in the demonstration.

It was a disgusting thing for students to be taken photos of for if they were identified as an activist due to the photo evidence it might negatively affect their prospects for employment in future. At least, that was what everybody believed. In fact anybody with a police record of arrest for unlawful conduct would have extremely difficult time landing a decent job. So except for really determined activists, most demonstrators would turn their face down as the law enforcement's photo shooting began. It put us all to shame. However, so long as anybody had to get a job to live, dropping their head down in a rally was just a small defensive measure.

Most of the demonstrators, being ordinary students, stooped this time, too. When I looked back at the demonstration parade behind me, I found a guy who stared ahead with his head up. It was Shinzaki. Afther the demonstration fell through, I went up to him and asked if he was not worried about his employment.

"Employment? I don't intend to get a job at all," Shinzaki brusquely said. I thought he was a unique person.

I thus made acquaintance of Shinzaki, and the closer our association became, the more I came to realize his uniqueness. He was remarkably well read and so learned that I thought there was nothing he did not know in this world. But the real uniqueness of Shinzaki was that he never leaned on his knowledge. Rather, he was trying hard to devise his original thoughts. His ways of thinking were creative, and his talks were in fact interesting.

What was most unique about him was that he was a loner activist with no association with any faction. To be more exact, he was one of very few who maintained an expressly critical posture towards factions and activists belonging to factions. Criticism against partyism and factionalism became more prevalent 4 or 5 years during the so-called "Zenkyoto (the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee) era" when the number of non-sect activists increased sharply. At the time I began associating with him, student movements were, in almost all cases, run by activists belonging to some kind of sect.

Despite his loner stance, Shinzaki was quite popular among the students with a new-leftist slant. Backed up by those students, he was elected several times to deliver the key-note speech at the students assembly for passing the resolution to strike in the first faculty of law. And the contents of his speeches were as singular as his later works under the pen name of Gochi-ei, which went as follows:

"Self-abnegation is same as self-affirmation. The more you pursue learning just for career purposes, the farther you will find yourself apart from the true meaning of learning. That is self-abnegation. It's not something you attain by striving for it. It is something that turns up as a result of self-affirmation. It could be compared to a fireman who devotes much labor to his task, while it will be inevitable for him to lose his job if he achieves a thorough fire prevention."

In similar tones, Shinzaki leveled unsparing criticisms at the theory of sectarian movements. Being in the new-left camp, though non-sectarian, Shinzaki severely criticized us, the JCP-oriented executive committee. On occasions like the class secretaries assemblies, Shinzaki and I often bandied words with each other.

At one of such assemblies the executive committtee announced its movement policy to the effect that it should grasp the requirements of the student masses, put them forth to the school authorities, and win their compliance with the requirements through persevering negotiations. The minute this simple policy statement was announced, Shinzaki flew out at us, saying that our policy was merely a mass-oriented opportunistic 政治主義. After having made all sorts of criticisms against the committee, he said,

"Then, are you saying that if a request 'we want to get laid' rose like a flood from among the student masses you members on the executive committee would approach the school authorities for it and get us all laid? Don't state a stupid thing like that devoid of principles."

I could agree with him on some points. There was in fact some tendency of mass-oriented opportunism in the committee's policy. But as one of the committee members, I was in no position to admit it. Also as a field leader of the movement, I could not let Shinzaki keep on critisizing the committee. So I told him,

"Shinzaki, what you have just said amounts to a shameless confession of your own problem with women. You need to self-criticize your own problem before making an utterance which does not pass even as a rhetoric. Period."

My close relations with Shinzaki allowed me to speak harshly with these words which would have brought in offense if spoken to other people. So the thrust and parry between Shinzaki and me took on a mixed tone of joke and seriousness, at least I perceieved that way. He reacted to my raillery with a curse in a particularly high-pitched voice, "Fuck you!"

At another time, we contended with each other for the post of vice-chairman of a class secretaries assembly during our sophomore year. Shinzaki, by that time, had earned his reputation as a new-left activist, and he ran for the election with an extensive backing from Kakumaru and 三派.

This was an awkward election. Had my opponent been somebody other than Shinzaki, I would have savagely criticized his sectarian tendency and thinking patterns. But I did not dare do that to Shinzaki. I finished my general-policy speech without any criticism against him at all. Shinzaki paid back in my coin, without any criticsm against me or the JCP. It must have been an awkward election for him, too.

I was returned for the vice-chairman by a large margin over Shinzaki. The victory was mostly due to our success in undermining the solidarity of the opposition's class secretaries belonging to Kakumaru and 三派. By the time of the polling, fixed votes for the new-left camp had diminished to an unthreatening level. In fact, I was confident that we had perfectly counted the oppositions' votes. When the results became known, Shinzaki's votes were less than our count, by one vote. It came home to me.

"Hey, Shinzaki, you have voted for me, haven't you?" I whispered about his ears after the class secretaries assembly. Then, in his usual openness, he vacantly said,

"Yeah, I have. I knew I had no hope for being elected. So, what's the point of voting for myself? I would never have voted for any JCP-affiliated candidate other than you, Miyazaki. But I thought you were OK." Then, he laughed in his familiar high-pitched voice, "Ha, ha, ha,..."

"Dear my fellow students who have come to this meeting. I would like to felicitate ourselves on seeing this memorable day. Let's make it clear that, by having joined the overwhelming power of all the faculties of Waseda, we have successfully gone into the strike at the 1st faculty of law and the faculty of education on the past 18th, and further at the faculty of engineering today, on the 21st, as a result of our discussions conducted in each class and circle. We must maitain with unshaken conviction that we will shatter the school's proposition for a tuition hike, and that we will win the right to control and manage the Students' Hall on ou own....."

A cold wave hit Tokyo on January 21, 1966, and it was so cold that we could not help treading to keep ourselves warm. Amidst the freezing cold, the above speech was delivered by Akihiko Oguchi, Chairman of the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee, to declare the strike before 2,000 students at the Indignation Meeting held in the square in front of the administration building.

I listened to his speech right by the podium. It was a spirited, good speech to commemorate the first all-campus strike ever taken place in the history of Waseda's student movement. Oguchi was the chairman of the student union of the 1st faculty of politics and economics and also was a tough fencer of the 3rd grade of the 'kendo' (Japanese fencing) club. As usual, he wore a black school uniform underneath which his muscles were bulging. His hair was close-cropped and his face rough-looking. His agitation wrung out of his whole body was rustic and plain, but certainly powerful and moving.

In less than a week after the struggle against the Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty came to an end all too soon, a campus dispute had arisen at Waseda in early December, 1965, followed by an unprecedented 150-day long campus-strike which came to create much sensation. Oguchi's speech was to mark the beginning of the strife, later to be known as "Sodai (short for Waseda Univ.) Struggle," which was fought under the two slogans: "Let's acquire the right to control and manage the Students' Hall on our own," and "Fight against the proposition for a tuition hike."

The origin of the disorders was a conflict between the students and the school administration over the issue of who should be entitled to the control and management of the yet-to-be-built Students' Hall. The students intended to take full control of the management of the Hall in hand so that they couldmake the Hall a headquarters for their student council and student movement activities, whereas the faculty and administration hated to see the new building to be turned into a hotbed of student movement. Naturally, the negotiation between the students and school went on a deadlock. Frustrated students undertook to confined one of the trustees in a room. Taking this opportunity, the riot police was imported into the campus at the request of 大浜信泉, the president of Waseda University. I was at the scene of the police introduction, and I cannot forget the pain they gave me when they trampled on my head with the studded soles of their combat boots.

Immediately following the incident, the shool disclosed their plan of tuition hikes; 57 percent for the faculties of law and literature, and 44 percent for the faculties of sciences. It was a complete surprise to us. Activists of each faction, most of whom had a bitter memory of being beaten by the riot police 3 weeks before, uniformly thought that Ohama was making light of the students. But at the same time, we declared to ourselves in a fury that we would change to the offensive and corner them, taking that very opportunity of the school's proposition for tuition hikes.

A good majority of "ordinary students" (i.e., apolitical students) were indignant over the proposed hikes, airing their views, "It is too excessive a hike. Moreover, it would place a heavy burden upon our juniors," and "We cannot swallow the hike because they decided on it on their own without having consulted with us." Unlike today, most of the Waseda students were from not-so-affluent families. To them, the hikes must have appeared outrageous and the decision making process arbitrary.

Thus, the all-campus indefinite strike brought forward by the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee won the support by an overwhelming majority of the students. On the day Oguchi delivered the speech described above, January 21, 1966, the four faculties including politics and economics, commerce, literature, and science and engineering went on a strike, following the faculties of law and education which had already gone on strike on January 18.

Signboards claiming in large characters painted in red, "WE ARE ON STRIKE !" or "LET'S PARTICIPATE IN 同盟登校" were put up here and there on the campus. Depite the early hours of the morning, quite a few students were hurriedly passed in front of them with a curious look. Loudspeakers placed before the administration building incessantly rolled forth agitative speeches appealing to the students to join the strike.

It was not long before a demonstration was started on campus. Ranks consisting of about 5,000 students marched by zig and by zag. The heavy sounds of the demonstrators tramping by echoed against the walls of closely situated buildings and turned into a giant whirl of noises. It was one hell of an electrifyingly impressive scene.

Picket lines were set up at the entrances to each faculty building where endless disputes were going on between the picket and the nonstriking students. The picket would explain to them the justification and need of a strike, while the nonstriking students would insist, "I want to attend the classes. Let me in," or "I am against the tuition hikes, but it doesn't seem right for students to go on strike."

Then, the disputes would digress to issues like: whether or not students had the right to strike; the social responsiblity and financial foundations of private universities; and the propriety of the industry-university cooperation that was being championed by the school. Such quarrels would usually end up either with the picket, much experienced debators, talking the nonstriking students down, or with an untter confusion. Verbal controversies were not limited to the entrances to the faculty buildings, but debates took place in classrooms and coffee shops around the campus or in the general area of Takadanobaba.

The executive office (or secretariat) of the Joint Struggle Committe located in the basement of the faculty of politics and economics was an overturned anthill. One student after another came in to report the current situations of each faculty's strike and other miscellaneous incidents taking place on the campus. It was in a sheer turmoil.

Just prior to the decision to go on strike, I had been appointed to take charge of mass movement in the all-campus cell of the JCP. The all-campus cell was an steering function to oversee all the JCP cells organized on the campus, where basic policies and strategies were to be decided upon. It consisted of 10 student party members, and the mass movement section was led by Hajime Takano who is currently active as a journalist. The missions place upon Takano and me were to fan up the movement and to win the initiatives in it by crossing words and blows with the activits of the other parties and factions.

So I spent most of the time in the office of the Joint Struggle Committee around this time. It was fun because all kinds of informtion was brought in one piece after another. For example, some students of the Joint Struggle Committee were beat up by right-wing students; someone put out his cigarette on the face of a JSC student and what not. At such news, 4 or 5 students would get up and run out being black in the face, sayning "What? Where the hell is that guy?"

One time somebody brought in the information that an anti-striking student on the Karate club had broken one of our message boards by kicking it, that he had battered down the student who tried to stop him, that he had calmly given his name and place, and that he had finally talked eloquently about his justification of the act before leaving the scene in a grand manner. At the news, all of us there had just to smile a wry smile.

At Waseda, there were many students who belonged to the youth organization of the Liberal Democratic Party and right-wing organizations, since our school was also a stronghold for the right-wingers. Most of the students of the numerous sports clubs under the control of the department of athletics (DOA) were against the strike, partly because the school was clamping down on them with budgetary squeezes. We had heard a rumor, even before the strike, that the right-wing and DOA students had a plan to scab on the strike. In fact, we had had a bout of fistfights with them following a harsh crossing of words like "We'll come to beat you up and kick you out tonight" and "Anytime, man."

What we were most wary of was the riot police, more than the right-wingers. We thought that it was a matter of time before the school would call out the riot police for the second time following the 1st dispatch in December the previous year, since Ohama, the president of the school, himself had concluded that the strike was "the work of a mob" and used authoritarian language without compunction that he would never allow a strike on the campus.

Immediately after having gone on strike, many of the striking students stayed in each faculty building by way of precausion against the riot police and right-wingers. We were busy at night, too. At the initial stage of the strike, there were alarming rumors in circulation everyday that they would come raid us anytime. We stayed up all night several nights for protecting our picket, patrolling the campus and attending meetings to discuss countermeasures. Well over 1,000 students were on the night duty and their eyes were red from want of sleep.

In any case, the hearts of the activists and sympathizers of each party and faction were glowing. For one thing, it was because of their natural logic as leftists that they wanted to successfully fight the struggle, though an individual struggle at Waseda, and develop it into a struggle against the state power, which was their primary objective. For another, the students' passion was backed by the physiology and ambition of organizations themselves that each faction sought to take the initiative of the struggle as well as for self-aggrandizement of their own organization in the course of the struggle.

There were, in fact, there were some events to stir the heated activists. Thanks to the meetings and on-campus demonstrations held everyday, the number of students participating in the strike almost doubled from 3,000 to 5,000 and to 8,000 as the time passed, without much canvassing or recruitment efforts on the part of the JSC or student councils. Supporters for the strike welled up out of nowhere, it seemed.

At the meetings held in the square before the admin building, not only the leaders of the JSC but ordinary students went up on stage and delivered agitative speeched one after another, and the number of speakers kept on increasing. Hiroshi Kume, one of the most popular TV casters in Japan, used to be among those speakers. Unlike unaudible thick voices of the activists, his vocalism and elocution were remarkable perhaps due to sufficient trainings in the broadcasting circle and college theatrical company he belonged to. I remember that one of the JSC leaders said, "He is good at speaking to the mass. Let him keep on agitating," as we listened to the speech by Kume who was delivering it in an easy and stylish manner. Being stylish was something that was not part of the Waseda students in those days.

One day in end-January, the participants in the meeting numbered close to 20,000 which was beyond the capacity of the square before the admin building. Overflowing students were swarming the streets around the campus. They shited into a demonstration after the meeting. Though the demonstration was meant nothing more than go round the campus, the 20,000 people was such a huge number that I even wondered if the very last of the crowd would ever be able to leave in the line. The number accounted for a half of the total Waseda students, 40,000. All of us at the JSC and the law faculty student union were unusually excited about the fact that day, which made a majority of the activists start thinking that the chances of our winning a victory in the struggle were quite favorable for us.

The management of the school, on the other hand, kept pretending not to notice the emerging support for the strike. They just kept consistently expressing their anti-strike attitudes, saying "Strikes are not allowed," "It is out of question for the school to enter into a collective bargain with the students," and "The leaders of the strike shall be severely dealt with." On top of that, the school maintained to enforce the final exams from January 24 inspite of the on-going strike.

The JSC with a growing confidence naturally went into an upright confrontation with them, saying "Final exams? They don't know what they're talking about. We'll spoil them all." The JSC not only decided to boycott the exams but also took action to check the school's effort to enforce them. Except for the law faculty where its faculty meeting resolved a postponement of the exams, the other faculties attempted to conduct their final exams at places like Waseda Technical Senior High School (a school run by the same group as Waseda University). Every time such an attempt was made, the JSC in turn had the venue surrounded with 5,000 to 10,000 striking students and aborted them all.

About the first 10 days of the strike passed like this. During that period the JSC meetings were convened everyday and the participating sects vied for an initiative with each other. Everybody high-handedly asserted the position of their own sect, which were either severely criticized by other sects or greeted with catcalls. We got into captious arguments over trifle things. For example,
"Hey, the faculty of literature, we saw much fewer students than you'd been supposed to mobilize. You guys need to work harder," the Seikai sect of the faculty of politics and economics would denounce the Kakumaru of the literature faculty.
"Take back your Stalinistic remarks. What's important is the quality of the participants, not the number. You don't seem to understand that "the logic of the proletariats" who shoulder the movement......," the Kakumaru would retort and start harping on the same old string.
"Aha, all you guys have a bad tendency of squeezing the reality into the framework of logic, rather than starting from what goes on in reality. It's an ideological handstand in which you end up turning what should be established as a movement theory rather into an organizational theory or tactic. In short, you guys are devoid of a movement theory," yet another sect would attack the preceding speaker with yet another argumentattive criticism. Then, still another sect would yell emotionally,
"Shut up! I'm fed up with your voluble, I-know-it-all kinds of comments. You just bring your own share of students to rallies. Period!"
There were of course tough activists representing the Chukaku and Bunto factions; however, to their regret, none of them had control over the student councils, thereby making their presence relegated to a lesser position. On most occasions, the intra-JSC struggle over the initiative was fought in a three-cornered battle among the Kakumaru, Seikai and JCP sects. The arguments among them often culminated in turning over desks, throwing ashtrays and engaging in fistcuffs in a corner of the meeting place.

Meeting carried out like this, therefore, would hardly produce any specific business decisions. At the very most, we could only reach an agreement on the "opening of a meeting at such-and-such hour tomorrow." The rest of the time we were simply absorbed in arguments, day in day out.

That was how the Sodai Struggle was started. For the initial 10 days or so, we assumed the one-seided offensive. It was a period of a go-go optimism. The mass media reported the upsurge of the movement with heavy headlines everyday, inviting the general public's attention to this struggle as a big social issue. The press comments during the initial stage of the struggle was generally favorable for the students. One of the women's weeklies, "Josei Jishin" I think it was, even played up Chairman of the JSC, Oguchi Akihiko, as something like "a masculine and marvelous leader of the student movement."



In the fierce competition among vying factions for leadership in the movement, the faction that took the initiative was 'Seikai' (Liberation Faction of the Socialist Youth Alliance). It was my belief that their success was considerably due to the popularity of the key members like Oguchi. He utterly lacked sophistication or urban elegance, but he was a type of person who would fight through a struggle by leading the van in the movement. He was a trustworthy man free from claptrap of any sort.

As with most students of the athletic clubs, Oguchi was usually spare of speech and a shy person. He was also a very studious man who seemed to have read widely, not only on Marxism but on other subjects as well; but he bashfully shyed away from being argumentative. Obviously, he was ill fitted for canvassing and recruiting female students. When he did try to do so, he would usually wind up being unable to utter a single word of pitching after two hours of telling a general history of revolutionary movements in a whispering tone. He was, in a nutshell, a stickler for old-time ideas, or an old-fashioned lad.

Other members of 'Seikai' were of a hair, more or less, and they were quite popular among non-sect activists and ordinary students. In fact, there were quite a few interesting guys in 'Seikai,' one of whom was Takeshi Fukuda, one of my classmates.

I guess he was not a confederate of 'Seikai.' But in the course of the struggle, he was elected to act as secretary-general of the JSC, a singular appointment for a freshman student. Fukuda, together with Oguchi, was later designated a most wanted criminal, the first case in the history of Japanese student movement, which led to his expulsion from Waseda. He was thought to be a typical Waseda activist at the time.

After graduating from a senior high school in Ishikawa prefecture where he had been the president of the student body, Fukuda went on a rampage at the headquarters of 'Kakumaru' the minute he was admitted into the faculty of literature at Waseda. Disenchanted by the strong sectarian slant of the faction, he went to break through the barricades they had put up. He further distributed bills requesting them to appoint him Chairman of the faction. I assume that his act must have caused quite a bit of friction; but it did not develop into a serious trouble as he was a big and strong fellow. 'Kakumaru' probably considered him as a fresh activist in reserve and perhaps thought they would be able to assimilate him into their own faction in due course.

He was sort of a novelty hunter, too. Around the time of the struggle against the Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty, Fukuda brought a new form of discussion called "panel discussion" over to Waseda for the first time, to which he himself had been exposed at a student-interchage meeting sponsored by a newspaper company. He held a panel discussion of his own under the title of "Grand Panel Discussion on the Japan-South Korea Issue," chaired, of course, by Fukuda himself. With the help of some big-name controversialists in the student movement circles of the time as panelists, the event was a great success resulting in standees in a large lecture room. Heated discussions went on for a few hours, and it was going to end in complete success.

Towards the end of the discussion, one of the audience raised a question, "I would like to hear the Chairman's conclusive comment on today's discussions." Fukuda was personally in support of the promotion of the student interchange bewteen Japan and South Korea, so he honestly answered, "It's a good thing to be on good terms with Korea, our neighbors." Before he could finish his comment, the panelists and audience flung away and left in a huff. It was simply a natural consequence because the student movement community was across the board against the dictatorial government of Pak Chong-hui.

He was greatly depressed at his blunder. Later, I heard that he had wept the night away in his apartment, lamenting how miserable he was. Worring about his exceptional depression, some of his classmates took the trouble of going down to console him the following day. They told me that he had had his mind set on studying more lest he would disgrace himself again.

It seemed that he had studied hard since the incident. But he was extremely shy about raising an argument. When someone came to high words at a JSC meeting, he would vow, "I don't give a damn about complex reasons and arguments. When it comes to the issue of tuition hikes, I think only two simple reasons should be sufficient: 'stop ripping off the poor' and 'I was not consulted for the decision on the hikes.'" It was certainly impeccable reasoning. Mass movement should run in the grooves defined as simply as this. So, everytime the JSC meeting entered into a dispute, he would wham on the desk, crying, "Hold your jaw! Shut up! I don't wanna hear your babbles any more."

With the advent of the Sodai struggle, Fukuda participated in the JSC in the capacity of vice-chairman of the executive committe of the strike, through which he struck up friendship with Oguchi, assuming a sort of younger-brother role of the latter. He was made fun of by 'Kakumaru' as "Oguchi's favorite hanger-on," but he did not seem to mind such bantering. He even talked bombastically, "What's wrong with being a hanger-on. I'll make a great hanger-on out of me." There were quite a few occasions where Fukuda acted as the agent of Oguchi out in the field. The on-campus demonstration that mobilized 20,000 students was also commanded by Fukuda in behalf of Oguchi.

His appearance was also unique in that he always wore a pair of 'geta' wooden clogs and a woolen stomach band. He remained in that style even when he had to meet with directors of the university and diet members. When there was a melee on the campus, he would be the first one to rush to the scene, pattering his clogs.

It is fair to say that a breed of old-fashioned activists like Fukuda was not yet on the verge of extinction at the time, particularly at Waseda where there were a good number of activists who were into the student movement because they found amusement in its physical aspects like demonstrations and fistcuffs. Those were the kind who would openly boast, shaking their fist,
"I have never read a single book written by Marx. What's so big about Marx and Lenin. I don't give a shit. What it takes to bring about a revolution is this fist."
The backstage of the strike, where there was still some room for such old-fashined acitivists to run around, was quite different from the more ideology-oriented movement of later years.

Although, as mentioned earlier, numerous students stayed in the school buildings everyday, their daily life was, surprisingly enough, characterized by uprightness. The JSC and each student council took great care to prevent the literature, materials, equipment and furniture owned by the school from being scattered and lost. Some of the facilities stored extremely precious literature. During the period of the strike, students had free access to those facilities, so it took tremendous efforts on the part of the JSC to install highly disciplined morals among the students, some of whom might fall a victim to temptation.

The JSC and student councils sent out an official notice never to touch anything in possession of the university at the spots subject to strike. They would go so far as to physically punish those wrong-minded students from time to time. Thanks to their care and considerateness, the scatter and loss of the school's literature during the strike was kept almost nil, which was miraculous as compared with what happened to those school assets in the strikes carried out in later years. When Fukuda and other students stood their trial in relation to the Sodai struggle, some faculties and administration personnel testified, asking for reduced sentence, that the literature in the school's possession had been kept intact during the strike due to the enforcement of strict control by the JSC.

The striking students conducted well in their night life, too. They spent their night hours either debating, reading, listening to 北京放送 or モスクワ放送, or, in the case of hot-blooded students, boxing out in the ground. Despite the presence of female students, there was not even a hint of any romance going on.

I heard directly from Fukuda about the incident of the panel discussion he had held during the struggle against the Japan-South Korea Peace Treaty; however, I think his recounts must have been caricaturized to some extent, given his shy personality. He was a nice fellow with a good mixture of a rough and uncouth political youth and a man well versed in the niceties of the heart.

Presently, he is a businessman running a hotel in the Izu district, Shizuoka prefecture. His hot-bloodness, however, does not let him stay contented with just being a business owner. So he helps his bankrupt friends by dipping into his own pocket, or vies with notorious jobbers or sydicate mobsters in collecting debts--adventurous days as before. When asked about his days of student movement, he bluntly asserted,
"The setback of the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committe's struggle? It's no use of saying something or other about the setback experience of mushy kids."
He is one of my sound-minded comtemporaries who is completely free from excessively sentimental attachment to the student movement of the late 60s and early 70s, or for that matter, to that turmoil era in general. Still, he expressed his reminiscences about the sudden downturn of the struggle as follows,
"My memories are getting a little hazy. As I recall, the struggle had surged quickly, but it ran out of steam even more quickly. The heat of the struggle died down while I blinked. It was interesting to see that happening."



What triggered the quick decline in the movement fervor was the final exams. The school administration changed the exam system from their regular "question and answer" type to a term paper as the striking students had disrupted the exams initially scheduled to take place at Waseda Technical Senior High School.

The term paper was to be submitted directly and personally to the school by indivisual students. That meant that the decision as to whether or not to submit it was left up to each student. Without submitting the paper, the seniors would not be able to graduate, and the juniors, sophomores and freshmen would not be able to move up to the next grade. The labor market of that particular year was pretty tight. Many students had scraped through severe competition to get an informal notice of employment. The seniors faced decision. We had expected that this kind of eventuality would arise sooner or later; but when it actually happened, it dawned on us that it was an exceedingly serious affair.

In the faculty of law, nearly half of the senior students had refused to turn in their paper, although most of them of course wished to graduate in March that year. Each one of them was concerned that his personal decision to submit his paper might lead the struggle to suffer a defeat. Being charged with mass movement, I was visited by these concerned seniors for consultation. They would say,
"I'm so sorry to say this to you guys, but I'm going to submit my paper to the school. I cannot afford to stay in the same class for another year, and I do want to get a job. Of course, I am well aware that my act of submitting the paper would disrupt our solidarity, thereby leading to a defeat of the struggle. Still, I am going to graduate. I just did not want to submit my paper behind your back. You can call me a seceder, a traitor or whatever you want. I should deserve it."

The seniors at that time was a class that was admitted into the university immediately after the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1960. To me, they all appeared very matured, cynical and anarchistic, perhaps having been influenced by the mood of "the era of setabacks" that followed the Treaty's ratification. I was really impressed with the way they managed their own affairs like that.

To such senior students, I had nothing but to say, "Please, don't worry. We, lower-class students, are here to take over your struggle. So leave it up to us, and please go ahead to graduate. We'll take care of the rest of the struggle."

We had no right to hold the seniors harrassed by the question of graduation in the struggle any further. And I thought that it was wrong to ask them to refrain from submitting their term paper just for the struggle's sake. If we had done so it would have meant to ask them to fight against their would-be employers, which nobody was entitled to do. So the issue had to be left to the individuals' discretion. Some even shed tears in mortification. The seniors held several meetings of their own, and in the end, most of them bashfully took graduation for choice.

That was how the strike started to crumble from inside. It was, however, to their credit that none of the seniors at that time bid to call off the strike just for their jobs lined up.

Under such circumstances, we were routed out by a mass bargaining with the university's president held on February 4.

On that day, what was termed as an "explanation meeting" to be given by the president of the university was announced by the administrators who had, up until then, flatly refused to hold any negotiation whatsoever with the students. The students, on the other hand, took the liberty of calling the meeting a mass bargaining and were on the mettle with a full resolve to stande face to face with the president. The memorial hall assigned for the venue of the meeting was packed with 15,000 students. Despite the cold weather, the heat emitted by the audience made me slightly sweaty, and the hall bristled with numerous flags of the student union and class councils.

At 2:00 pm, Ohama President of the University went up on the platform amidst boos and hisses. But when he started speaking a dead silence fell over the hall for a good number of students were full of expectations that the obdurate president would have to yield this time. To their disappointment, however, the old man was provocative from the outset, saying,
"It is incredible and lamentable that the president and professors of the highest institution of learning are greeted with taunting and heckling. I should call for your grave reflection."
Just at that moment a thundering surge of boos and bellows arose from the house in the same breath.
"Damn reflecion! You, bastard!"
"What the fuck is this all about?"
Ohama countered, showing a will of adamant, "I no mind to change our prearranged plan, no matter how big your strike may grow."
Voices of disappointment with heavy sighs came from students of the law faculty around me, "Oh, my god, we have no chance. They'll never accept our requests even if we push them to the brink of collapse of the school," and "No way we'll get them to completely abandon their propositions."

Following this speech by Ohama, leaders of the JSC including Oguchi took the floor to agitate with frontal rebuttals. To which, Ohama responded with a defiant attitude, reiterating "No matter how intense your opposition may be, the school is going to carry through our prearranged program." Then, he was about to leave the hall, girded by school administrators and right-wing students. JSC members ran to call after him, "He's running away. After him!......"

Casting a contemptuous glance at the farce on the platform, a mojority of the audience gradually receded, despite frantic appeals by the JSC, "Let's go on a protest demonstration." But to no avail, the agitators were merely given a cold shoulder. The protest rally held ensuing the collective bargaining turned out to be a desolate event with less than 1,000 participants--a painfully miserable deterioration from the all-campus meeting that had attracted over 20,000 students only a few days before.



Looking back on the Waseda uproar, I realize that it was a strife resulting from the tangle of various elements. What drove so many students to take part in the strike was their disapproval concerning the way the tuition hikes had been decided upon, in addition to the sympathy for their juniors to follow. They suspected that the regents of the university might have made the decision on their own judgement without having put the question to full debate. Their distrust was also based on the fact that the students had not been informed of the issue until it was officially announced by the school.

The students' resistance against the undemocratic decision process meant that the "post-war democracy" had taken root, to a large degree, in their awareness and ways of thinking. But, unfortunately, there was a considerable gap between the ordinary students taking part in the strike and the activist students. The latter's primary objective was to take the opportunity of the issues of the tuition hikes and the control over the student union building to undermine various social institutions existing at that time, and at the bottom of their heart, they did not give a damn about the democratic decision-making process preached by the "post-war democracy."

Another aspect of the strike had a lot to do with a universal question which human beings have repeatedly faced--the generation gap bewteen youths and adults. Unlike today, the grownups back in those days were fully matured men and women with considerable authority. As was betrayed in the speech and action of President Ohama, they were not the kind of fellows who would be disturbed by a mere student strike. Once they were determined to do something, they would carry it through, no matter how much opposition they might invite, or no matter how much disdain they might be subjected to. That was exactly how Ohama was, an archetype of the people born in the Meiji era.

Ohama was a troublesome guy to us students, and he was a great hurdle for us to clear sooner or later, too. And I think that we probably had a latent desire to destroy the world of adults through a face-to-face showdown with them. Actually, many students in those days lived a sort of communal life in small groups just as the traditional 若衆宿. Particularly, more students of Waseda University lived in that style than other universities, I think.

In my own case, I was living in a modern apartment with a dining kitchen and two rooms. There were always several people staying in my apartment, and at worst times the number neared a dozen. They used to come and go freely as if it had been their own place. When I came home late at night after a long day of canvassing and recruiting activity, I would find someof them asleep sharing a limited amount of bedding. Two or three other guys would be engaged in wordy warfare over 'sake' rice wine, and still some other reading books and comics. So I often had to find a space either in the 'oshi-ire' closet or somewhere between those sleeping guys and cover myself with some newspaper to go to sleep.

Those who came over to my apartment were not limited to my close friends, but the parasites took their own friends and acquaintances with them, too. There was always a stranger or two sleeping there. I would ask somebody up in the room, "Who the hell is this guy?" Then he would say, "Oh, I thought he was one of your friends. I don't know who he is." It was not until the stranger got up the following morning that we all learned who he was.

Especially during the struggle, there was hardly anybody who would cloister himself in his apartment for reading books, and many students hung around in their friends' apartments located near the campus, getting themselves ready for action at anytime, so that they would be able to rush to the campus immediately if they got information that the riot police were going to be called in or that right-wingers might raid the picket lines.

There were always somebody around me, 24 hours a day, which deprived me of any private life. Such life would not allow me to sink into the narrow world of individualism, not to mention a possibility of making oneself a freak of some hobby as we see these days. Money was almost communized, too.
"You're broke again? Jeeze, then, I have to pay" was a familiar phrase whenever whoever had the money felt his pockets for his money that was in fact not really his. In a way, it was an incommodious and burdensome way of living, but it certainly produced thick relationships among the sharing students. Such a life style all the more made us feel that we were forming a youth group of our own, free from the constraints of the adults' world.

Our quasi-communal rooming was a fraternity house plus legacies of pre-modern 若衆宿, and the solidarity fermented there provided a driving force for the struggle, as well as a source for our bold self-assurance, "The adults' world? What about it? We'll destroy it one of these days."



After the collective bargaining with the school president, the striking students in turn went over to the defensive, leaving the Sodai struggle at a standstill. Nevertheless, the struggle itself continued for the subsequent 140 days. Let me briefly describe how it petered out over the period.

In the wake of the mass bargaining with Ohama, some New Left students from 'Seikai' and 'Kakumaru' factions on the JSC swarmed into the school's administration building and barricaded themselves in it, which in turn incited right-wing students to storm the admin headquarters and got into a big rough-and-tumble fight with the besieged students. After this incident, the discord between the JSC and the school, which was expecting to hold that year's entrance exams a few days away, grew strained at a heat.

During this period, several tens of Diet members, all Waseda-graduates under the plea of "saving their alma mater out of a crisis," launched out for mediation. But what they proposed was a humbug lacking any policy, and they said, "We will come up with a compromise without a loss of face for either side, so why don't you just pass the ball to us." The offer was naturally jeered off by the students who yelled at them, "You bastards. You came all the way just to tell us that bullshit? Go back." The arbitration bogged down.

Another compromise plan was suggested by the school, but it was also turned down by the the students, who insisted that there was no room for compromise other than the school's complete relinquishment of their propositions. The cornered school administration called in the riot police, and as a result, a total of 203 students were arrested--an unprecedented mass arrest in the history of the Japanese student movement.

The riot police were subsequently called in three more times. What was interesting was that everytime the riot police were brought in, students came back on the strike driven by their indignation with the school for having trampled the spirit of university autonom on its own. But then the spiritual uplift again dwindled after a while. Then again the riot police. The whole cycle repeated some more times.

On the other hand, internal rifts developed among the students. One was the confrontation between or among the sects participating in the JSC, especially over their tactics concerning the blockade and/or their reactions towards the Diet members who had butted in to arbitrate. Another fissure was widening between the pro-strike students and the anti-strike students. Towards the latter stage of the strike, the rollback of the right-wing and anti-strike groups gathered momentum, An organization called 'Yushi-kai' insisting on calling off the strike was formed in each faculty, and it came to attain support from students to a considerable extent. Makiko Tanaka, presently an incumbent LDP Diet member and a daughter of the former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, was one of the active key members of the 'Yushi-kai' in the commerce faculty.

Over the same period, the activists were scurrying about in an attempt to reorganize their strike. I too ran around from morning till night, seeking to recruit new supporters not only from the students already in school but also from the would-be freshmen. I was thinking that we should maintain the strike in some way or another until April when new freshmen would add their forces to ours. Oguchi and Fukuda, both of who had gone on the wanted list for the first time in the history of the nation's student movement, seemed to share my idea. They, in fact, had planned to turn themselves in if their arrest was inevitable, so that they could get back to campus by April.

Oguchi and his fugitive company called the police from a hideaway, offering, "We are showing up at the rally tobe held before the administration building tomorrow, so we'll let you nab us, but on one condition. You've got to let us speak on the stage for half an hour." They managed to have the police accept the condition. And the following day, Ohguchi and his bunch kept on giving burning speeches and agitations for four hours, defying investigators from the security police. The angry police finally brought in the riot police for the fouth time.

The enervated strike, however, did not regain its previous strength this time. But it was not quite that the university succeeded in bringing the students under control, either. In March when about 100 days had passed since the declaration of the strike, President Ohama and all the regents announced their intention to resign. And soon after that, it was announced that some 40 students were to be expelled, stripped of the student status and suspended from school. A majority of the penalized were the activists of 'Seikai' and 'Kakumaru' including Oguchi. After another two months, in June, a decision to call off the strike was made by vote in the faculties of commerce, politics and economics, law, and literature, in that order.

That was the end of the Sodai struggle. The end of the unexampled campus strike which had continued for 150 days, only in return for the resignation of Ohama and other meager fruit. When I considered the price we had to pay--the expelled fellow students, it was a futile and woeful end.



The strike for 150 days was a long struggle dotted with several unforgettable events. One of them was when the riot police was called in for the first time.

On February 15, just following the blockade of the administration building, President Ohama announced his decision to bring in the riot police on the grounds that the campaign led by some students was something to seek the popular management of the university, the school had tolerated the squatting by the students for long enough, and the administrators' patience had worn out. Students who had learned th bad news on TV or radio started showing up on the campus, and the number exceeded 3,000 by 10:00 pm.

Bonfires were made here and there on the campus, and each of them was surrounded by numerous students on guard. Other students were working hard all night to reinforce the barricades at each faculty building by way of precausion against the riot police. Although the students had been once depressed at Ohama's intimidation, the possibility of the introduction of the riot police altered the case. In an anticipation of another showdown with the riot police, the students looked extraordinarily tense with their red-shot eyes.

"The cops probably won't come in till dawn. Why don't we take turns standing watch, and the rest of us go to sleep?" I suggested. But they could not get to sleep, silently smoking cigarette butts for a long while. It was only natural because the guys they would have to deal with in the morning were a professional combat branch. It was beyond their imagination as to what the police might do to them in confrontation. If they were arrested, the door to descent jobs would be shut upon them. A mere thought that their life might take a completely unexpected turn from the following day on was just too much for them to sleep on. But on the other hand, they seemed to share a sense of special affinity in the nights of temporary communal life behind the barricades, just as those nights we all had been familiar with on our school excursions.

On the 19th of February, the school presented a compromise plan to us. It indicated that the university would reconsider to cut the tuition hikes by 20,000 yen in the event that a government subsidy came in sight. It was totally out of the question. The angry JSC strongly pressed for the complete withdrawal of their initial propositions, which led the negotiation to a breakdown. The failure of negotiation just before the scheduled entrance exams meant an inevitable introduction of the riot police.

It was often a human nature to turn his coat, or rather to unmask himself, in the last extremity. As I had seen in the strife with the Yamaguchi-gumi during my senior high school days, braggarts often hid themselves somewhere at a critical moment, while lam-like quiet-looking guys exhibited their grit to volunteer to sacrifice themselves for others. That was exactly what happened on February 20 when the riot police was called in.

There were 300 to 400 students staying in the law faculty building from around the 15th. On the night of February 19, when the police intervention appeared inevitable, many things happened. As a person responsible for commanding the strike at the law faculty, I asked many activists, most of whom were of JCP-related activists or supporters, to join the picket. But to my regret, I couldn't get hold of some of the guys who used to boast a lot, and they did not show up when the police actually came marching in. I knew that humans were weak after all, so I had no mind to blame the missing guys for fleeing. It just made me feel very sad.

On the other hand, it was another kind of surprise that some unexpected guys, who had been unobtrusive students at normal times, volunteered to join the picket to hold the riot police in check. Some of them were even senior students who had received a letter, though informal, of employment from their would-be employers. If they got arrested by the police in the picket lines, it would surely blow away their opportunity. I had to dissuade those seniors and other vulnerable students from joining us in the picket, though I was thankful to them for their offers. Still, there were a few left who would not accept my exhortation. Nakamura was one of such students.

He was my classmate and a serious and bright student. He belonged to 'Sekai Renpo Kenkyu-kai' (Research Association for the World Federation of Nations), a sort of right-wing research group, with critical ideas against leftists. His signing up to be a participant in the picket would have been welcomed as the birth of a new reserve activist, but there was a reason why we could not willingly accept his offer. His father was a policeman.

Back in those days, people--and for that matter, the society in general--were far more upright than today. If a son of a mandarin got arrested by the police for his activity in student movement, the father was most likely to submit his resignation to his agnecy. And if the father was in the police force, he would no doubt turn in his resignation. Therefore, when Nakamura came over to me to offer "Hey, Miyazaki. Let me join the picket line," I tried very hard to dissuade him by saying, "As I know, your dad is a cop. Right? He will surely turn in his resignation if you get busted." But it did not make him change his unrelenting mind.
"Yeah, I've thought about him a lot, and I'm sure he will resign from the police if I get nabbed, as you have said. But I don't think it's right or acceptable to shy away from the picket just because of my thought about him."
"Wait a minute. The only thing you have in mind seems to be part of the picket lines, but the contribution to the defense of the strike is not limited to checking the police's advance by standing before them. There are other important roles that you can play in it, such as liason between the students or duties behind the battle line. You can contribute that way, too. OK?"
"Well, I really appreciate your caring about me. Still, I wanna be part of the picket lines, which I think is the most convincing way for me to relate to the strike."
"If you were a leftist I wouldn't oppose to your wish, whether your dad was a cop or a judge. In that case, you might have to accept it if your dad disown you as a son, since you would have elected to take an anti-establishment path to begin with. But you are not a leftist. Rather you take the position to approve of this country's existing system. Right? Then, there is no reason for you to be apprehended by the police or deprive your own dad of his vocation as a policeman. Why don't give it a second thought?"
In response to my final push, he mumbled, "That sounds true, but...Well, I'll think about it again," and went home. His great worry over his father showed in an emaciated look on his back.

The riot police showed up at dawn the following day, February 20. It was drizzling. The group of students from the departments of law and education, 300 to 400 of them, had gathered at the front gate, while another group of 500 to 600 students from the oher faculties were hanging around before the administration building. When I looked hard at the town of Waseda in the early morning haze, numerous armored cars and squad cars came into my sight one after another. Led by the troop of those vehicles was a wide stream of blue helmets flooding the streets. I later learned that the riot police and plainclothesmen numbered 3,500, but the actual sight of those men swarming the place gave me the impression of a troop in size of several times larger than that number.

As I looked around in a scrummage, everybody had a cramped look on their face.
"They are coming. Form your scrummage tight."
Despite my loud scream, some kids were too keyed up to be attentive to my suggestion. Soon they regained their senses to join their fellows yelling "Go back, pigs" in chorus. Up against our angry and excited voices was a encroaching quiet, black overwhelming muster of the riot police in regular ranks.

To that black wall, we in the picket started singing 国際学連の歌 and "The Internationale." It was right at that moment that one of my classmates behind me in the scrummage said, "Hey, Miyzaki. Look to your left. Nakamura is in the picket. That's no good."
I turned my head in that direction and found him beside the picket in a group of those students whom we had excluded from the picket. They were either bright students capable going on to a graduate school or those who wished to become officials at government agencies in future, so we had shielded them from the possiblity of arrest. He was staring at us so fiercely that I thought the pupils of his eyes might be fully dilated. His eyes were turned up in his gourd-like face in an extreme tension.
"Nakamura. Don't come in here. Stay away from this."
At my scream, he noticed me and threaded through the scrummage to me. Staying in my own ranks, I kicked him several times to drive him away, which turned out to be an invain attempt.
"No worry about my dad anymore. I've put my shit together," he said with set eyes.
"Are you really OK?" the guy behind me asked with a care-worn look.
"Yeah, I'm OK now. Sorry to have worried you guys. But it's OK now."
In hindsight, it sounds like a funny story, but back at that very moment Nakamura was seriously thinking about repudiating his father. All of us, his friends there, could sense it, and the feral looking Nakamura was most welcome to us all who had been feeling forlorn in the face of the mighty riot police.

In consideration of Nakamura's unfamiliarity with leftists' songs, we decided to sing our school song, 'Miyako No Seihoku' (lieterally meaning "To The Northwest of The Capital City"), which later invited a criticism from other leftists as opportunism fawning on the taste of the mass. But it was far from a grand thing like opportunism or Waseda nationalism as they liked to phrase it, but we sang the song because it was the only song among all the songs we knew that the tormented Nakamura consumed with the thought of joining the picket knew.

To the northwest of the capital city
In the grove of Waseda
The towering edifice of academy
Is our old school, Waseda.......

While we were singing the alma mater song, the police came surging upon us. We tried to hold out against them by tightly packing our scrummages, only to find ourselves overpowered. The group which was doing a zigzagging snake dance in front of the admin building was also driven away in a few minutes. While the ousted students were holding a meeting before the memorial hall or going into a huddle to discuss the possibility of inrush into the campus, all the barricades we had erected were removed, and counter-barricades wrapped with barbed wires were installed a new around the main campus by the riot police.

As the riot police pulled out in the afternoon, students who had heard the news of the confrontation started to gather around the campus. Driven to frenzy at the sight of the counter-barricades, some of the students took them down and rushed into the campus. The rest of the students followed suit, yelling severally "Fuck, this is our school. Come in. Come in." The scene of so many students swarming into the campus singing the alma mater song was moving as well as somewhat comical.

The number of students coming back kept on growing, and it finally reached 5,000. After a rally, barricades were put up again at each faculty building, and nearly 2,000 students stayed in those buildings overnight.

The following day, the riot police showed up again. But unlike the day before, this time they assaulted the students with a club in their hand and arrested whoever resisted their evacuation work. About 1,000 students who had been kicked out of the main campus wandered from a place to another around the town of Waseda. When they finally came back to the memorial hall, the riot police came marching in and started arresting those students, one by one, who ventured to break through the police line.

The day's confrontation left behind 203 arrests, an all-time high figure in the history of Japan's student movement. I myself was on the spot. It was really a miserable experience. I was in the vicinity of the literature faculty where students were desperately running criss-cross from the riot police with a thick club in their hand. It was one hell of a huge chasing game with 1,000 students running away from 1,500 cops in roaring cries. In the end, the police cornered us. As we exhausted our energy, they kicked us in the face with the studded soles of their combat boots and cracked our heads with the sturdy club, before we were finally taken into their custody. It was just a plain, miserable arrest devoid of any tragic message or heroic performance. A big difference from the offensive and defensive battle fought at the Yasuda Memorial Hall towards the end of the Todai (Tokyo University) struggle.



There was another incident of equally exciting nature when the students of athletic clubs at the universities across the metropolitan area rushed to our campus in an attempt to scab on our strike.

It was on the night of April 16. We had obtained the information that students of the physical education department were planning to raid into our fortresses to forcibly remove the barricades, which the school administration thought was necessary to hold the exam scheduled for April 18. We at once called on our activists to join the defensive, but there were only 150 of them who actually showed up. Among them were: Nobutaka Tsutsui, a lawyer and former lawmaker; Takeshi Fukuda; Taisuke Ara, the current leader of the Hinata faction of 'Bunto'; Norio Hanazono, a former Red Army member and presently activist in the campaign for the return of the northern islands to Japan; and Satoshi Shinzaki who is now active in writing critical essays under the pen name of Go Chi-ei.

When we were putting out pickets at the gates of the Politics/Economics and Education faculties, a group of about 300 people came slowly walking through the main gate of the university, led by the head of the Education faculty and security guards. At the sight of the bunch, the striking activists uttered yells of horror. It was a horde of monster-like gigantic fellows in outsize school uniforms. I learned later that the group consisted of students of the Sumo clubs of Waseda, Takushoku and Kokushikan universities and the baseball club of Waseda, plus the old boys of Waseda's various sports clubs. They had been treated with lots of 'sake' by Ei-ko-den, a rightist and Waseda graduate, the previous night, and had come directly from that banquet to raid us.

The troop came right up to us, about 80 students, picketing at the Education faculty and showed signs of removing the barricades. To check their advance, we formed a scrummage. The monsters and the striking students locked eyes for a while before they started storming and eliminating us one by one. We would have had no chance of overwhelming those monsters in a hand-to-hand struggle. So we countered them by brandishing the thick sticks that we had prepared.

In those days, we did not usually resort to any weapons even in our inter-factional skirmishes; rather, we tended to consider it unmanly to use weapons of any sort. But when it came to fighting against scabbing, it was another story.

We set out en masse towards the guards leading the scabbs and hit at them. Several of them fell rolling down the stairs, holding the head with their hands. Then there came a wave of Sumo wrestlers whom we also struck one and all. But to our horror, those guys were real Goliaths. Undaunted by the hard blows we rained on them, they tackled at us, taking a crouching posture. Suffering from the direct, heavy hits by the wrestlers, some of our fellow students were knocked off the top of the stairs and fell into a ditch of a depth of about 3 meters.

Determined to launch a counterattack, a troop of Sumo wrestlers came back en masse on us. One of them closed in to grab at my shoulder. I swayed away from his thrust and landed a weighty punch right in the middle of his fierce-looking face. But that only threw his head back just a little. He looked as if nothing had happened. When I was about to throw another punch, two other wrestlers grasped me by the shoulders and waist with their vise-like hands and flung away my body. A few meters away I landed on other than my feet.

After we had skirmished with the gorillas for about 10 minutes, the picket found itself completely ousted from the campus. But we could not afford to beat a retreat then, so we rearranged the disposition of our troops. We re-armed ourselves, this time, with the stone blocks in open-air storage for construction work and the milk bottles that we stole from the coop store. Under the humiliation of having been kicked outjust like that, we were driven to distraction.
"We can't let them break our strike. Let's go get them."
We turned ourselves into pitching machines, incessantly throwing the stone blocks and milk bottles, which were cracked at the neck to get sharp edges.

Under the attack of projectiles, the strikebreakers fell to the ground one after another. The sounds of shattering windows served like enlivening background music. Some of the scabs hid themselves behind trees and placards, but as our attack directed at them became more than they could bear, they started to run away towards the Okuma Memorial Hall. Receiving reinforcements of the picket from the politics/economics faculty, we set out in pursuit of the fleeing troop, severally yelling "Go, go after them, and get them." I and equally ferocious few other guys joined in the mopping-up operation, holding in our hand a specially prepared club studded with a dozen of long nails like porcupine spines.

What was most pitiable were those Sumo wrestlers. They were intractable and impregnable fighters, but their lexicon did not seem to carry the verb "run away." On top of anything, they were unable to run. They soon got caught up by the picket and fell victims to their clubs. Certainly it wasn't their day.

The hired scabs finally ran into the Okuma Memorial Hall and the Student Union Hall for safety. There we went into another round of skirmishes, this time both side brandishing clubs or sticks. Meanwhile, at an urgent report or news broadcast, reinforcement troops of each faction and ordinary students came rushing in. Faced with the ordinary students drawing up in hissing and booing, the scab troop went back with a heavy heart.

In the skirmishes, scores of students on both sides were either severely or slightly wounded. A few days later arrest warrants were out against seven activists, including Shinzaki Satoshi, all of whom were arrested later. Otherwise, the strike was defended, at least for the time being.

The April 18, 1966 issue of the Asahi Shimbun reported the skirmishes the day before: "The incident gave the ordinary students, who had begun to fall away from the striking students, a convinient excuse for returning to support the strike. In that sense, the school's attempt to smash the strike turned out to defeat its own end." It further went on to descibe our behavior and the ordinary students' reaction to it,
"The violence betrayed by the striking students that morning bordered upon madness. We may well wonder if they should really deserve their status as 'men of letters'. The ordinary students, on the other hand, expressed their dissatisfaction at the school, saying "None of the issues have been resolved yet" and "It's our duty to take the final exam, but we are also concerned that if we take the exam the school might think they could obscure the points at issue."

Eventually, the finals were boycotted across the board, except for the Commerce faculty and Science/Engineering faculty.

With regard to the violent encounter that the Asahi Shimbun criticized as "conduct bordering upon madness," those of us involved in it were subjected to harsh criticisms by the J.C.P. A person in charge of the party's youth and student division personally came to see us right after the incident and pressed, "Did you guys really do what was reported in the news? Isn't it exactly what the party denounces as 'the extreme-leftist adventurism'? Self-criticize yourselves."

He was particularly unyielding to those who brandished the nail-studded clubs. "Self-criticize ourselves? Bullshit. Then, you are saying we should have let the scabs smash the strike?" we retorted to him, and it created a conflict between the party representative and us. Nobutaka Tsutsui, who did not resort to the spiny club, took sides with us.

It was not the first time for us to get into a conflict with the party's headquarters. Shortly after we had gone into the struggle, I, as the person responsible for the mass movement, opposed to the Zengakuren's (All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) central committee which pressed us to stage a petition demonstration around the Diet, saying "What if the school calls the riot police into the campus catching the unguarded moment while we are out demonstrating at the Diet? We can never afford to give up our struggle just like that?" My opposition led the central committee to oust me from the position of mass movement in the JCP's general cell at Waseda. Tsutsui was one of those who opposed stubbornly to staging a petition demonstration around the Diet.

During my college days, I got to know numerous activists of various universities and factions. Of all those activists, Tsutsui was by far the most excellent activist. Born to the family of a poor itinerant vendor in Niigata prefecture, he got admitted into Waseda University after having graduated from a technical high school. He was a so-called "kugakusei" (self-supporting, needy student). At the time of the school strike, he was a junior student of the faculty of law and a student member of the JCP. Although his financial condition required him to work to pay his school expenses and prevented him from getting entirely devoted to political activity, he was, for his acute intellect, charged with the task of formulating tactics for the activists of the law faculty. Tall and slender, and with his forelock nonchalantly falling on his forehead and always in his grey duster, Tsutsui radiated a charismatic, astute aura befitting his role as a campaign planner.

First of all, he excelled all the others in analytical power for circumstantial judgement. Let me say in passing that Tsutsui backed out of political activity immediately following the dispute with the JCP and started studying for a state law examination--one of the most difficult exams to pass in Japan. A year later, he passed it for his first try. At the news of his success, his fellow students at the law faculty reacted with a cool, it-serves-him-perfectly-right attitude. Any way, he was preeminently bright, and his circumstancial judgement was unrivalled in sharpness.

Further his ways of thinking were extremely flexible; therefore, he was capable of presenting a new set of tactics in a short period of time, when we faced a difficulty or had to deal with a deadlock in our movement. Moreover, his fundamental perspective was never swayed in such situations, and he never got psychologically restless, of course. The cool Tsutsui stood out among the activists most of whom were excessively emotional and easily worked themselves up.

A former member of the House of Representatives, Tsutsui is now well-known, together with Yoshito Sengoku, as a theoretician of the Social Democratic Party; however, when he was a student activist he assumed a far more independent posture towards the JCP policies. Tsutsui and I, both non-conformists, used to frequently get into trouble with the party's bureaucrats.

To return to the subject, we had been mad at the party executives who used to level bureaucratic criticisms at us, so we were burning with our determination to confront with them. Up against the party administration who called only our skirmishes into question, we decided to counter them by sticking to principles and rehashed the issue of the party's self-criticism over a general strike two years before.

Korokyo's (short for the Council of the Public Corporations and Government Enterprises Workers Unions) general strike scheduled for April 17, 1964 was aborted as a result of a decision made by the JCP on the eve that it should steer clear of involvement in "a strike provoked by the American imperialism." Under the barrage of criticisms from within and without, the party had been compelled to criticize itself on July 19 of the same year, "...the right attitude that the party should have taken, in principle, was to make every effort to develop the situation at that time into a full-scale struggle."

Burning with fighting spirits, Tsuitsui with a bitter tongue arraigned the party executives, "Then, what was that self-criticism for? Was it that the party had ciriticized itself for having giving up a struggle? Our skirmishes that you are accusing us of this time are basically the same as what the general strike had meant to achieve at that time. Yet you are ordering us to self-criticize our use of violence. It is an unquestionable proof that the party has not learned a lesson from the self-crticism made in 1964. I think that it is the issue to be questioned rather than our resort to force."

The party executives were fed up with being unable to reasonably retort Tsutsui's sweeping condemnation against them, but they strenuously insisted on our self-criticism. Tsutsui, in turn, kept turning it down, and in the end the confrontation made him decide to part from the party. I think that Tsutsui, a man of sagacity, had already given up on the party by that time, and that he took the conflict with party as a good opportunity to bid a farewell to it. It was a very much Tsutsui-like way of deciding on his course of action by planning ahead.

As was shown in this demand of self-criticism, the party executives were "peti-mandarins." They merely leaned on "the central committee's policies" rather than what they had arrived at through serious thinking on how they should develop their struggle. And it was nothing but a self-protection from losing their positions. How could we expect the peti-bureaucrats to "guide" the rest of the party members?

In that respect, Yakuza gangsters appeared much more conscientious and efficient to me. For the Yakuza executive, instructions and directions were of great significance as what policies he should formulate was a matter of life and death that would simply dictate the fate of the members of his organization, not to mention his own. So the guidance the Yakuza would give his followers was a decision that was always to be made at the risk of his life. With his desperate eyes, he would try to discern the situations that they were in and their enemies were in, respectively, and he would have to make a sound judgement on the general situations, too. It was also true for the pre-war communists like Zentaro Taniguchi and others about whom my father used to tell me.

I had thought, therefore, that the communists ought to undertake the situations at the cost of their own lives more than Yakuza would, since the party was an organization striving to achieve, on a far more grand scale, a more death-defying enterprise called revolution. As far as the party had the safety of human lives in their keeping, it should be responsible for giving proper guidance to their members.

I don't mean to say that the party should have guided the members blindly or recklessly. But even if they came up with an extremely moderate action policy I would be pleased to follow it at the price of my own life, as long as there was somehting fundamentally worth risking my life about the policy. So it was to my great disappointment that the party's policies were completely devoid of that "something" I could risk my neck for.

Yet, I submitted a paper of my self-criticism to the party, although I was fed up with the vacillating attitudes of the party execs who swayed easily under slight criticisms by the mass media. But I did not care how such peti-mandarins would evaluate me. What was more important to me was the actual field of the movement. In view of the overwhelming number of my fellow students in the Waseda cell who earnestly supported us--activists, the submission of my self-criticism statement did not mean a thing to me.

A week after the skirmishes, the school president, Ohama, and all the board members expressed their intention to resign. Further, two months later, a decision to call off the strike was voted at all the faculties one after another.

The termination of the strike, however, was not determined easily. At every faculty there were a few tens of percentage of the students who had insisted that the strike should be carried on until the school took back their original propositions. At the French literature division of the faculty of literature, all of the students supported to maintain the strike. They did not mind if they had to remain in the same year or if they would not be able to graduate that year.

I think that their assertions also contained some indirect criticism levelled at the sects. Their frontal point was that "the strike should not be called or cancelled at the whim of the logic of the sects." But their real message was that "the assertions made by the sects sound sensible; but that's not the right way of approaching us. Our sentiments cannot be scooped up with the logic of political sects."

Keeping pace with the diversifying social patterns in the rapid economic growth, the awareness of students was also assuming various shapes. Some students had started showing an anarchistic lean. In discussing with such students I felt that the sects might be overcome by them in the near future. But I wouldn't mind it. It was my belief that something of the society would be turned over only when mass movement could transcend the party organizational constraints.

Still, inside me, there remained a guilty feeling, or "accountability for war," as a member of a sect who had agitated the strike. That question preyed on my mind, which was rather unusual in my life. I knew that there would be no firm conclusion for the issue, no matter how much I let it eat on me. A vague thought that my responsibility for it would stay with me for a long time to come occupied my mind at that time.

Looking back on those days, it was an idyllic struggle in an idyllic era. A struggle in which "the Internationale" and "Miyako No Seihoku" (the title of Waseda's alma mater song, literally meaning 'To the west of the capital city') were sung in a curious mixture of the various sects' orientation towards revolutions and the 'Waseda nationalism'. The relationships between sects were far less antagonistic compared with those in the "Zenkyoto (the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee) era." Though we often flung mud at other sects, there was even a feeling of affinities which could only be shared among activists.

And many of the activists themselves were the type who followed the old ways; for example, it was their manner to fight with bare hands, and they abhorred resorting to weapons of any sort as unmanly. As far as I could remember, the first time we picked up clubs was when the guys from the physical education department came to break our strike. Even then, we and the other side held clubs, just like swords, aimed at each other, crying shame at each other as if in old-fashioned Samurai duels.

The relationship between the activists and the faculty and administration members was still tinged with a family-like intimacy. As a matter of fact, a number of faculty and administration members sent in a petition for reduced sentences when the arrested members of the Joint Struggle Committee stood their trial. There were even some faculty and administration people who went so far as to commit perjury to save the defendants.



The Waseda struggle against the tuition hikes and for the student union building managment was one in which such fellows colored with somewhat "pre-war" traits ran around. In that sense, the struggle we fought during that time was quite different in nature from the later struggles led by the baby-boomer generation in the 'Zenkyoto' era. The 'Sodai' struggle was the last one to mark the end of the idyllic student movement.

But there was a non-idyllic aspect to the struggle, too. The turmoil on the campus produced the expulsion of about 40 students from school. Of them, very few are currently known of their whereabouts. First of all, quite a few of them subsequently committed suicide by plunging from buildings and jumping in front of on-rushing trains. Some others were killed in violence with a sect. And the rest of them have been missing without leaving a cue to determine if they are still alive or not.

Those whose whereabouts are known include: Akihiko Oguchi, now a lawyer busy defending union members and poor people; Takeshi Fukuda, now a hotel owner and real estate broker, who still seems to maintain a wild lifestyle in his businesses; and Sei-ichi Hasumi, now president of Takarajima Publishing Co., Ltd. But their paths to what they are now were not free from obstacles. The dismissal from school ruined Oguchi completely, and he was spending bedridden days for some time.

Before I finish this chapter on the Waseda struggle, I think it appropriate to touch briefly upon what happened to our leader, Oguchi, after the 'Sodai' strike.

Around the time a year had elapsed after the end of the strike, conflicts between the political sects on the campus were growing ever more intense. Particularly, Kakumaru and Seikai had gone into a hot rivalry. At that time, Kakumaru was on the ebb on the main campus, where most of the faculties were situated, after the struggle a year before, and they had been watching for a favorable opportunity to re-penetrate. Tensions were running high between Kakumaru and Seikai, which was trying to keep the former from re-entering into the race for campus hegemony. It seemed that there had been a number of harsh crashes between the two sects behind the scenes. Because of abomination of such sickening situations, the activists who dropped out of school counted more than a single digit number.

In the fall of 1967, Kakumaru shifted its turn and set out to crack down on Seikai at a go. The armed-Kakumaru made a raid on about 200 Seikai members and sympathizers who were rallying in front of the administration building.

Though taken unawares, Oguchi and his fellow members and sympathizers fought back hand to hand. A master swordsman as though he was, Oguchi was unable to counter the armed-troop with bare hands, and he got seriously wounded in the back of his head. So they decided to evacute the scene and retreated to a nearby park. The comrades who made it to the park numbered about 100, and most of them were injured.

What Oguchi did at the reunion was very much like Oguchi. He delivered a burning agitative speech in front of his disheartened fellow activists. The towel wrapped around his head was smeared with blood. Every time he strained his words, blood bubbled out of the towel. I heard that it had literally been a bloody agitative speech with berserk rage. In spite of his efforts and passion, Seikai eventually lost the battle to Kakumaru, and they headed for downfall in the contest for power on the main campus to the extent that they were not able to hold a rally under their own sponsorship--a sad situation.

That was how 'gebaruto' (a loan word from German meaning violence or force) between the political sects was fought. If you lost in 'gebalt' with another sect you would lose not only the initiative in the movement but also your territory. It was no different from a strife between feudal warlords or more modern Yakuza gangs. The tripartite regime of the student movement--consisting of Kakumaru, Seikai and Minsei--failed with Seikai's downfall, and the remaining two would clash with each other on increasing occasions.

Ensuing the encounter with Kakumaru, Oguchi dropped from view on the campus. After a while, rumor had it that Oguchi had ruined himself beyondrecovery. I was distressed to hear the news, because, though belonging to another sect, he was a very trustworthy man. He was such a tough guy that I could not even imagine he would get injured. A mere thought of him having become a vegetable got me to find no solace in anything.

By that time, many of the activists who had been actively engaged in the Sodai struggle had vanished. Some had killed themselves, and some others had been missing. Hardly any bright rumors were heard. It was in the middle of such bleak days that I heard the dreary rumor, which made me feel all the more sorrowful.

A few years later, however, glad news that Oguchi had been enrolled into Kyoto University was brought to me. First I could not believe it. But it was true. Much later, Fukuda told me that, immediately after the humiliating gebalt with Kakumaru, Oguchi was vegeted out to the degree that he was even unable to go out by himself. But fortunately, he did not get injured in the brain. So he pulled himself together once again and attended to his studies with diligence in preparation for the entrance exam of Kyoto University where he wanted to study Marxian economics over again. This news was one of the very few heartwarming topics at a time when the student movement was increasigly taking up bleakness. I remember that all of the activists at Waseda, regardless of the difference of the sects they belonged to, congratulated upon his fresh start.

But Oguchi's case was almost an exception for the subsequent life of activists mostly took a turn for the worse, although the student movement still retained an idyllic tone to it.

From then on, the movement made a complete change, and, accordingly, I myself was going to be increasingly involved in a strong-arm line.