5 Secret Combat Unit

As the human life is dotted with the ups and downs, so are the times with their own exaltations and depressions. In the 50 years of my life, there have been two occasions where I felt such exaltations of the times as if the earth itself had benn rising. One was during the period of the bubble economy in the late 1980's, and the other was in 1968, the third year of my college life. In either case, it was the time when desires, violence and self-assertion were let loose from the constraints of the civil society, and the people and towns were lively in a loud way, perhaps infected with the contagion.

During the first season of exaltation, not only Japan but the whole world was in turmoil, a kind of political mania.

In France, a student resurgence termed the "May Revolution" triggered a general strike that involved the whole nation; in Checoslovachia, a movement calling for democratization of its political system, the "spring of Prague," was raging. The United States was being rocked by the anti-Vietnam war movement and the civil rights movement requiring to obliterate racial discrimination against black people. Amid that uproar, Reverend King, the leader of the civil rights movement, was assassinated and the incident precipitated riots staged by blacks across the nation. The red China had its own share of problems, too. Driven by the Red Guards, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was messing up the whole country to the critical extent that it paralyzed the nation's administrative functions. The central role of all these global upheavals was assumed by young generations.

In Japan, too, youths were ramping about at the forefront of the times. The anti-establishment movement led by "student power" became violently active. The campaigns erupted one after another; against the calling of the atomic aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise at Sasebo; against the construction of Narita Airport; and against the opening of the U.S. army field hospital in Oji.

It was 'Sanpa Zengakuren' (three sects--Chukaku, Bunto and Seikai--of the All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) that stood in the spotlight of the scoiety in these campaigns. Starting with the anti-U.S.S. Enterprise demonstrations, each of the three sects wore uniquely painted helmets in livery and carried long wooden staves in hands. They repeatedly clashed with the riot police for 5 days, and local citizens joined the student along the way, thereby making the demonstration a stage of great violence. Despite the continued press denunciation of the demonstrators as "extremely militant," the public often supported the students with great relish.

What might be called a culmination of the warmongering 'Gewalt' line was the Shinjuku riot incident on Octber 21, the International Anti-War Day. In an attempt to check the transportation of war supplies as part of the struggle against U.S. army bases in Japan, about 3,000 students of the anti-JCP sects gathered at Shinjuku station, a transit point in the transport route, after having swarmed over the Defense Agency and the American Embassy. The insurgents ran amuck, clashing with the riot police, pulling off signal posts, and in the end setting fire on trains and police vehicles. The peak of the riot happened to fall on the evening rush hours, so tens of thousands of communters were barred out of the station to fill the streets in the Kabuki-cho area next to the station. Some of the onlookers egged or denounced the students, and in many cases, the quarrel between students and bystanders came to hard blows. The whole town of Shinjuku was thrown into a great disturbance.

Shinjuku in those days was a vulgar, youthful and energetic town, in a sense different from what it it today. Every night, it was jammed with people till dawn, and gay and excited voices were fluttering about. American soldiers on a temporary release from the battle front of Viet Nam were roving around with bloodshot eyes in search of Japanese whores, while local kids being stoned out of their mind on drugs lay flat here and there on the streets.

On the other hand, the town was no short of guys who roamed with stern looks as if they had been personifying the heroes they had just seen in Yakuza movies like "Showa Zankyo Den" (Story of Old-Fashioned Yakuza in the Showa Era) or "Hibotan Bakuto" (Professional Gambler-Yakuza With A Tatto of Red Piony). At jazz-playing coffee shops and bars that remained open till early morning, people like student activists, actors/actresses of underground plays, and Yakuza henchmen were absorbed in battle royal, either by words or blows. It was a gathering place of ambitious youths of wild nature both from abroad and at home.

Because these youngsters plus boozers joined the pandemonium, the vicinity of Shinjuku station on the night of Octber 21 was relegated to a place of complete lawlessness. The government invoked the anti-riot law against insurgents a little after the midnight, and almost 2,000 students and citizens were arrested. The number of policemen injured seriously and slightly counted over 800, though the information on the casualties of the rioters unavailable.

The halls of learning were also being rocked. Originating from the student opposition to the school's proposition to institute a registered doctor system and a medical office system, the struggle at University of Tokyo (Todai, for short) precipitately grew intense when the riot police was called into the campus. In July of 1968, the Todai Zenkyoto (the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee) was formed, and ACJSC students seized the Yasuda Memorial Hall on the campus again. At Nihon University, where an unaccounted-for expenditure amounting to 2 billion yen was revealed, a movement to investigate the matter thoroughly and demand the democratization of the school administration arose at a single heat, resulting in the formation of the Nichidai (short for Nihon University) Zenkyoto. Most of the nation's universities were, more or less, afflicted with some sort of internal problems, like a campaign against the tuition hike at Chuo University.

Such were the general circumstances abroad and at home in 1968. It was certainly the time of "gala," and the whole world was in a state of extreme mania. Although it was undoubtedly a vulgar and confused era, I was feeling a spiritual uplift as if I had been carried on top of surging waves. What shaped the sense of the time was the Vietnam war.

At that time, the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front and North Vietnam were fighting a miraculous war against the indestructible, almighty America. It was more than an evenly matched war; the Asians had changed to the overwhelming offensive and cornered the Americans. In January, 1968, the resistance fighters finally charged into Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam. Forced into inferiority in strength, President Johnson expressed his decision not to run for the second term office and accepted to convene peace talks in Paris.

I am positive that no one could foresee the victory of the Vietnamese when America first came to seriously intervene in the Vietnam war. Everybody in the rest of the world thought the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front and North Vietnam would be in no time downed by the American armed forces. But the guerrillas of a small Asian country, who were equipped only with small fire arms, managed to fight a close war against the Americans. It should have been impossible. Furthermore, the Liberation Front and North Vietnam kept fighting, despite the merciless American bombing attack on their land and the mounds of corpses it left behind. They perseveringly conducted guerrilla warefare with the aid of labyrinthine trenches and tunnels dug in the jungles and underground, as if they had been making sport of the Americans approaching on the strength of their material superiority. And the Vietnamese finally started to stand at advantage over the outlanders. It was truly nothing but a miracle.

First, the world was just stunned by the miracle occurring in a corner of Asia, and then it began to express it plaudits. In Japan, too, many people sent up hearty cheers to their Asian brothers and sisters. At least, among the students, there was a common sentiment of "Show your nerve, Viet Nam!" When it came to the subject of the Vietnam war, even the most cynical person would turn red from strong emotions.

For the people of my generation, the Vietnam war was an event that gave a decisive influence upon us. At least, it was one of the events worthy of special mention in the 50 years of my life, and the war in Vietnam appeared to me to be a proof of the world's changing political structure. It seemed that the gloomy control of the world by the two super powers, the United States and Soviet Union, for the preceding 20 years had been subjected to the first ordeal, and that the long-oppressed Asian and African countries would be on their own way to independence and self-support.

The year of 1968 was a year like that. The people as well as the streets were tinged with the smell of violence, and we, young people, always sensed that something was going to happen. In a flutter of that sensation, youths were repeatedly rushing about to no purpose, while I was going to run pell-mell for 'Gewalt' with the intention of playing an ungracious role of the time.



It was on September 7, before the second term began, that we, student members of the Japan Communist Party at Waseda, got ourselves involved for the first time in the struggle of Tokyo University.

Around that time, I had a live-in, part-time job at a mahjong parlor near Kanda station. Although I had rented a spacious apartment in Kagurazaka, it had been turned into a dormitory for penurious activists of Waseda, so I had run away from it to find shelter elsewhere. I worked from the evening through midnight, and my main duties were to make the game by filling the fourth seat when there were only 3 players available and to act as a bouncer in the event of a trouble. Because the parlor, located in a flourishing quarter, was mostly frequented by chance customers and men were more aggressive than today, there were many occasions where customers blackmailed the parlor on a pretext or another, or where they had a quarrel between themselves. So I was supposed to kick out the troublemakers or, I had to chastise them in the back alley when their conduct was of really bad nature.

I was quite confident of winning the game because I had been playing mahjong long enough (since I was a grade school kid) and I used to play often with professional players like Takeo Kojima at parlors around Tsurumaki-cho after I became a college student. So my service at the mahjong parlor was more like an entertainment for me, rather than a part-time job. The pay was extremely good, and I could eat as much as I liked at the restaurant of the head shop of Niku-no-mansei (a restaurant chain specilizing in meat dishes). In addition, I was lucky enough to shack up with the mistress of a snack bar who got stuck on me. It was certainly a sinful part-time job.

As far as I remember, it was on the night of September 6 that an executive member of the student union at Waseda gave me a call at the mahjong parlor and asked me to get my Gewalt (commando) unit ready for action at the campus of Tokyo University in Hongo the following day. I could detect the excitement that the executive member betrayed at the other end of the telephone line. The reason for his excitement was that it was the first time for the commando unit to be mobilized since its inception about one month before.

It was at a general assembly of Zengakuren (All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) held two months before that the JCP had declared to counter the new-leftists' Gewalt with its own Gewalt, stressing its right to legitimate self-defense. The party formally realized that it was becoming increasingly difficult to consolidate the party at urban universities, where many sects were vying against each other, simply along the line of its "conventional policy against the use of violence" amid the inter-party Gewalt incidents taking place on the streets and campuses almost daily. However, the belated green light for Gewalt given by the party threw a wet blanket over us--the student members of the JCP at Waseda--who had always given tit for tat, and more often than not paid back too much in kind. But at the same time, we thought it would make our life much easier as we would not have to worry about the party headquarters' interrupting our activity.

After the Zengakuren assembly, a JCP combat unit was immediately formed with students from Waseda, Meiji, Chuo, Hosei and some other private universities in Tokyo--the schools in the second block of 'Togakuren' (the Metropolitan Students Federation)--being at the core. While the combat unit was organizationally a sub-unit under the direct control of 'Togakuren', it was virtually under the guidance of the party's 'Seigakutai' (Youth and Student Department) led by Shunji Hirotani, a central committee member, with a color of a clandestine organization whose responsible leaders and duties would not be disclosed. In short, it was an illicit unit. Within the JCP, the unit was referred to as "Togakuren Action Corps"; however, it would soon come to be known as "Akatsuki Kodotai" (Dawn Action Corps) both within the party and without.

The membership of the combat force numbered about 1,000 at the peak time. The unit was organized into companies by universities, with students from a same school forming one company. The company was divided into platoons, each of which consisted of 50 students. It was furhter divided into squads, each of which comprised 3 students. The three members of the squad were always supposed to act in concert under the squad leader. Above the level of squad leaders were platoon leaders and company commanders, the latter being responsible for the unit members at their respective universities. The line of command required close communications between the company/platoon leaders and the squad leaders, and the company at each university was required to call the headquarters of Zengakuren three times a day in case of emergencies.

At Waseda University, about 150 students joined the action corps, and I was appointed the field leader for the entire action corps. It so happened; because Waseda had traditionally assumed a leading role in the second block of 'Togakuren', because we had been used to inter-factional vying from the experience of the Sodai struggle, and further because Waseda had earned a big say in the action corps due to our famed skirmish of 1966.

The 1966 skirmish was a clash with anti-JCP-orientated students at an assembly of 'Zenryoren' (All-Japan Dormitory Self-Government Federation), which became the starting point of the action corps. Let me give you a brief description on how it came about.



On the sleepless summer night of July 4, 1966, I was busying myself with preparing materials in the sweltering small room of Student Union at a little past 8 o'clock when Komukai, a law faculty student of Waseda and chief secretary of the JCP-orientated Zengakuren, came rushing in and said in an unusually stiffened look, "The Zenryoren conference is in terrible confusion, and the tide is turning against us. Go to aid now."

The Zenryoren rally was an assembly of the highest deliberative organ which comprised 250 student dormitory councils located in various locations around Japan, and it had been convened for 3 days since July 2. The number of students living in dormitories at that time accounted for an insignificant percentage of the total number of students; however, they were of extreme significance for the student movement in general and for the sects in particular, since the Japanese student movement, unlike the more individualistic Western counterparts, traditionally leaned more towards collectivism and adherence to down-to-earth life, counting on the student dormitories and circles on campus as strategically important points for its development.

Each sect had attempted to secure a big strongpoint in dormitories; and in almost all cases, the boarding students made up the core of the sect. Take for example, the Komaba dorm was the largest strongpoint for Minsei, and 'Togakukan' (Tokyo Students Dormitory), a boarding house for students of different schools, was another strongpoint for the new-leftwingers. In fact, Waseda had quite a few activists, including Akihiko Oguchi, who lived in 'Togakukan'. Because of this uniquely Japanese background, the questions of which sect controlled which dormitory and which sect ruled the executive committee of Zenryoren affected not only the ups and downs of particular sects but were vital issues that would decide the consequence of the student movement in general.

The executive committee of Zenryoren had been under the control of Minsei-orientated groups since 1963. The 5th Zenryoren assembly in 1963 had appointed as its chairman Katsuhiko Shirakawa who was then the chairman of the self-government committee at the Komaba dormitory of Tokyo University. Shirakawa, now an LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) Diet member, was a Minsei activist at that time. Hideko Ito, who, representing the SDP (Social Democratic Party), drafted the bill of the Corruption Prevention Act jointly with Shirakawa in 1994 had also been a Minsei activist, and as I remember, I had seen her attending the 8th Zenryoren assembly in 1968.

The Zenryoren assembly of that year was a dire confusion. New-left sects, which, by then, had successfully guided mass struggles, including various campus struggles and the struggle against the Japan-Korea Peace Pact, were now attempting to take the initiatives of the assembly, thereby recapturing the control of the executive committee at a go. They had previously stepped up their canvassing activity at the Komaba dorm and rewarded with a drastic increase in the number of their confederates and sympathizers.

The assembly got entangled from the outset. Of the 250 delegates taking part in the assembly, about 100 were from new-left factions, and 150 were representatives of Minsei-oriented sects. Beside the formal representatives, another 400 sobservers from both sides stuffed the venue. Most of the delegates as well as the observers consisted of core activists of individual sects. Occasions like this, where facions bandied words with each other, were sort of the hidden side of the student movement; activits laid bare their rough aspect that they would never show in the presence of ordinary students. The 700 participants divided into two groups, Minsei and new-leftist, respectively, and started to exchange hard words over the opposition to the closure and destruction of the 'Togakukan' dormitory.

The heated argument escalated as a student of one group struck one of the other group with his fist, catching the latter in his own words. As if at the signal of this first blow, both sides got into scuffles here and there. The whole place was thrown into a commotion with roars and bellows flying around--not an unusual sight in those days. As the fistcuffs simmered down, another round of heated discussions resumed. Then the first day of assembly came to an end, and the second and third days elapsed similarly. July 4, when Komukai came rushing in, was the last day of the assembly. On that day, the new-leftists sent their Gewalt unit to the assembly hall, which resulted in an ever more riotous session than before. The Minsei students, who had hardly had an experience of scuffles, were being pushed into a tight corner by the podium--that was what Komukai reported.

At the news, I started to summon up our own soldiers. Unfortunately, however, I had a hard time finding any activist in any of the circle rooms, partly because it was at night, and particularly because it was a sort of vacuum period immediately after the end of the Sodai struggle. At the height of the struggle, tens of activists would have gathered at my call. This time, however, I only managed to summon about 30 students after having done everything possible for about an hour. My luck still held as the troop inlcuded two exceptionally tough and reliable guys--Tsutsui (no kin to Nobutaka Tsutsui mentioned earlier) and Hirayama.

Tsutsui, born to a family of a garden stone dealer, had been helping his family business since his childhood, carrying heavy stones. He was an extraordinarily strong man. Strong and tall (6'1"), he had been a star wrestler on his 'Sumo' wrestling club throughout his junior and senior high schools, the culmination being his winning the championship of a national high school tournament. At Waseda, he was always in knickers and looked like a construction laborer in every respect. On the other hand, having been a heavyweight boxer at high school, Hirayama was as tall as 6 feet 3 inches and weighed over 220 pounds.

It was a little past 10 o'clock at night that I and my 30 soldiers arrived at the assembly venue. On the approach to the hall, Takakazu Taguma, chairman of 'Togakuren', and a few executives of the Yoyogi group of Zengakuren had waited to see us in. Taguma--small, chubby and with a haughty bearing--was a typical bureaucrat type often found in the upper eschelon of the JCP. He, in a tense voice, solicited us to form a storming party to rescue the Minsei members out of the plight inside the hall.

According to Taguma, the Minsei comrades were holding out against the New Left, holding clubs in hand; and the podium had been seized by the New Leftists. He also said that the doors to the hall had been locked from inside since a vote was being taken on an urgent motion, thereby leaving us no hold for the rescue.

"Dash into the hall and deliver our comrades from captivity. Do you think you can do it?" Taguma worriedly asked me. I thought that a relief of Minsei from captivity was too mild a way to deal with the New Left, because I knew, on the front of a factional strife--be it an ideological dispute or an armed struggle, defeat would directly lead to that organization's decline. So I made up my mind to beat the enemy out of the hall, and told him, "Forget the relief business. If we are on the defensive now, we ought to hit back and kick them out."

First of all, I picked out a Waseda activist who was an old hand in troubles from his experience in the prolonged strike, and sent him to the hall to obtain information on the number of the opponents and the weapons they had. While he was away reconnoitering, I started procuring weapons. At that time, a quarter adjecnt to the Meiji Memorial Hall was under construction. Building lumber and foundation stones were piled up outdoors. We snuck some cedar square bars of convenient size to fill our arsenal. In the meantime, 60 to 70 Minsei activists from Hosei and Chuo Univesities' night schools came to the rescue of their comrades, which brought our force to count almost 100 soldiers.

As we were getting ourselve ready for a thrust by handing weapons also to the Hosei and Chuo students, the scout came back and reported that the New Leftists numbered 150 to 200, about a half of whom were armed with helmets, clubs and steel pipes and were in high spirits. He also confirmed that cooperation and communication between various factions of the New Left seemed to be working well, which made them an intractable enemy; that all doors to the hall were locked up from inside and were difficult to open from outside; and finally that it was possible to get in touch with the Minsei members inside.

Thinking that our cedar bars would be no match for steel pipes, we went back to the constrcution site searching for more operative weapons. There we found a tree of a huge diameter lying on the ground. It took three people to carry it. Although I was not so sure how effective the tree might be as a weapon, it would at least shock the opponents off their feet.

When we completed the preparation for the thrust, it was almost 11 o'clock. Before we could dash to battle, we needed to formulate some tactics. Firstly, I divided our personnel into two, one group of 50 students led by Hirayama and the other 50 by myself. My plan was to have these two groups break into the hall through separate doors with some time lag between the two raids. My group would go in first, and make a frontal attack on the opponents. Then, Hirayama's troop would come bursting in a few minutes later, attacking the enemy in the flanks. It was a pincer maneuver with a time lag incorporated.

Thanks to my fight-ridden militant career since childhood, I was quite confident of coming up with battle tactics. I had learned that, in a collective skirmish between two groups, the group which had divided its force into two sub-groups would always win the battle. The subunit which delivered a frontal attack would sustain a greater loss of fighting power; however, once it managed to withstand the loss, it would be blessed with a reinforcement of the other subunit . Further, the two groups would most likely lock eyes at a certain distance for some time at the outset of a collective battle. In that case, the one that made a first dash at the other would win. The one that was acted upon would tend to retreat, being pressed under the strong drive of the onrushing party, and it would be extremely difficult for them to recover the initial backdown.

Secondly, I equipped each of my soldiers with clubs as a thrust weapon. In the Gewalt skirmishes in those days, conflicting groups would beat each other with long wooden staves, but the problem was that they did it with their heart in their mouth, thus making their maneuver totally ineffective. So I directed my warriers to bring their opponents into a close combat and thrust them in the abdomen with the club, but not in the head, because I thought that hitting the enemy in the head was not permissible in student skirmishes. We were not Yakuza after all. At the close of my direction, I instructed each of them to carry three pebbles, and told them tersely,
"As soon as you break into the hall, throw your pebbles at the opponents. Then, rush headlong into them. As you get within point-blank range, thrust your club into their bellies. Never backdown. If you pull back, they'll get you."
On occasions like this, instructions ought to be simple, otherwise ineffectual.

A little past 11 o'clock, my troop surged into the hall as the doors flung open from inside. With that huge tree trunk clearing the way, all 50 of us dashed towards the podium seized by the New Left. They were taken aback by our surprise attack as well as by the tree trunk of mysterious character.

Taking advantage of their unguarded moment, all 50 of us simultaneously pitched our pebbles at the podium. The New Leftists turned their faces down and covered their heads with hands in the rain of pebbles. All of us, except for the 5 or 6 guys who carried the tree trunk, bolted into the crouching crowd. Bewildered by our attacks of pebbles and onrush, they pulled back in a single crowd; however, there were 4 or 5 guys who made a stand against us, brandishing their steel pipes. Several of my soldiers fell a victim of the pipes.

We eventually knocked them down and continued our march to further drive them out. Right at that time, Hirayama's troop came barging in through other doors. The New Leftists got walled to one of the corners of the hall.

The New Leftists, most of whom were experienced combatants, would not remain on the defensive, of course. They soon launched a furious counterattack, dragging us into a big fray. Our soldiers got pretty bad damages; and I myself was clubbed in the face and bleeding considerably. But the New Left was not able to recover the handicap imposed on them by our initial surprise attack. In the end, we managed to drive them all out of the hall. After that, the proceedings went quite smooth. A bill proposed by the executive committee was passed by a vote of 0 to 189, and 斉 Fujimoto from the Komaba dorm of Tokyo University was elected to become a new chairman.

Our use of force at the assembly naturally incurred censures. Being well aware that the use of force had been on both sides, the New Leftists at Waseda did not go much beyond talking personally against me as being "a son of a Kyoto gangster," but it did not leave a trail in the wake. A prickly question lay rather within my ally, Minsei, itself. I subsequently faced various internal criticisms. At the forefront of the criticism against our violence was Hideko Itoh. Currently an ex-Diet member from the Socialist Party, Itoh was once a Minsei activist. She was a quick-thinking person; however, she tended to get unsettled at critical moment of the movement due to lack of political sense. I suspect that she might have swayed toward the right at that time, judging from her tenacious criticisms levelled at us.

In the background of these criticisms and censures, there were some people in the party headquarters who secretly appreciated what we had done. The appreciation, however, only took note of our usefulness as a clandestine violent device. Of course those criticisms and appreciations were nothing to us, the Gewalt unit.

We, the boldly active student members of the JCP at Waseda, were smart enough to be cognizant that what we were fighting was a factional struggle, while it had been our common feeling, since the time of the Sodai strike, that we had been used as tool by the party headquarters and the upper eschelons of its Waseda cell. Our understanding was that those aspects were fundamentally an integrated part of any polical movement. And further, we thought quite opptimistically, and nonchalantly, that the tool would be in a position to use the theretofore "user" if the mass movement surged up. It was the thinking that was also shared by part of the Minsei members, including Tooru Kawakami, the chairman of Zengakuren.

It was an axiom that bright guys, once they got a hold of a militant device, would become dependent on it. Fortunately or unfortunately, the axiom proved itself in the formation of the "Akatsuki Kodotai" (Dawn Action Corps) emerged at the cross point of the party's appreciation of our utility and the nonchalant stance taken by some of the student members.



A little more about the Action Corps. Since it was meant to be a unit specilizing in Gewalt, each university had selected grade holders (or black belters) of martial arts or strong street fighters as candidates for members. Waseda's selection list included such men of valor as Tsutsui, Hirayama, Kawai (2nd grade in Shorinji Kenpo), Wada (2nd grade in Satsuma Jigen School swordsmanship), and Yoshida (2nd grade in Karate). Other school also sent in their own troops of similar composition. Among the memebers sent from Chuo, Meiji and Hosei Universities were some laborer-students who attended their schools at night while working during the day.

They stayed in a camp for training on Izu Oshima island, and underwent individual drills and disciplines at their respective schools. Thus the action corps gradually took shape as a viable fighting unit, though through cram trainings. It was in the middle of the final training phase that the order of dispatching the corps to the Hongo campus (of Tokyo University) was brought to me working at the mahjong parlor in Kanda.

Frankly, I was heavyhearted, thinking that the present dispatch of our unit would make us go deep into the Todai struggle. The feeling was backed by my following personal observations. Tokyo University had traditionally been the largest stronghold for the JCP, and a little prior to that time, the student councils in the Departments of Liberal Arts, Law, Education, Science, and Agriculture were under control of the JCP. Todai and the JCP had been on particularly close terms with each other, and a good many execitives of the party were Todai graduates, most of whom were bold in word with a clever tongue and an exceptionally strong instinct of self-defense. It was quite plain that JCP-oriented students at Todai with such dispositions would butt in on our Gewalt activity from time to time. Judging from the way the JCP headquarters had meddled in our Waseda strike, it was a good bet that they would place a strict and thorough control over our activity. The likelihood of my anticipations being realized was just depressing.

On the other hand, I had a hope that our involvement might bring about interesting developments, too. The struggle at the school sitting at the top of all Japanese universities would be a turmoil on a far larger scale than the Waseda struggle, I thought. Predictably, all the sects would devote themselves to the Todai campus as a decisive battle ground, thereby throwing the factional contest into an unrelenting confusion. Wouldn't it be fun? If we were to make a showdown with other sects sooner or later, Todai would be an ideal stage for us to carry on factional strifes dashingly.

In addition, it was my understanding that what we would have to face from then on would be basically no different from street fights of punks or strifes of Yakuza gangsters, no matter how elegant the rhetoric might be. If that was the case, I thought I should involve myself in it after my own fashion, that is, in a melee style that an ex-delinquent had acquired through his scuffle-laden teen years. I was settled in my loose resolution that if I could only kick and struggle in my own style, I would not mind being arrested or being thrashed within an inch of my life.



It may be in order to take a moment here to describe the development of the Todai struggle briefly. It started with a dispute between the university and its students over the medical office system of the Department of Medicine. In the course of the controversy, an act of minor violence on the part of the students resulted in the dismissal of a total of 17 students in March. The dismissal issue, however, became entangled when one of the dismissed students turned out to have been absent from the scene of violence. Having been vexed at the school's bureaucratic implacability, students of the Medical Department seized the clock turret on the campus on June 15. The school authorities took a countermeasure by calling in the riot police on June 17. The incident induced considerable indignation on the part of the students, and it made many of the students sit up and take notice of the issue. The dispute quickly became a matter of great concern and interest for every student.

In July, the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee at Tokyo University (Todai JSC or Todai Zenkyoto)) was formed, and it immediately indicated to the school 7 basic requests, including the withdrawal of the dismissal of the 17 medical school students, and a self-criticism of the introduction of the riot police into the campus. Yoshitaka Yamamoto, who was at the time in the doctor's course of the graduate school in science, was put in the chair. I heard that Yamamoto had once been an activist of a small faction called "Sect Number 6" affiliated with Shagakudo's National Secretariat Faction at the time of the schism of Anpo Bunto. One of my friends at the university also told me that Yamamoto was a genius-class brilliant researcher in theoretical physics. Aided also by Yamamoto's personal popularity, the Todai Zenkyoto garnered support from a majority of the students. Thus they carried on an ideology-oriented movement which ventilated the questions of their school as the nursery of national leaders as well as themselves who studied there.

One of the reasons why it took up such a slant was that some ex-activists of Shagakudo's National Secretariat Faction--now being assistants and graduate students at the university, like Yamamoto--had recently started to push the struggle forward as though they had awaken from a long sleep. They intended to put in practice their assertion that they ought to construct a self-reliant organization of the mass completely parting with a vanguard organization--a thesis derived from the 総括 of their anti-U.S.-Japan Security Treaty struggle (in 1960). Thus the Todai Zenkyoto took on an anti-vanguard, self-supporting stance which was relatively distinguished from that of the anti-JCP sects.

In September, when our action corps was mobilized, the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee (Zenkyoto) was about to launch forth into blocking the whole campus with barricades. This plan of campaign was met with the opposition of the JCP-Minsei camp. The latter, which had grasped the Todai struggle as an issue of university autonomy, proposed a 4-point request including the establishment of an all-campus council. They were in readiness to check the blockade, pointing out that the blockade:
"would rather keep off a possibility of having the school accept the students' basic requests,"
"is an irresponsible operation which merely represents Zenkyoto's stance 'to counter only when they are subjected to suppression,'" and
"is an arrogant measure to separate 先進 from 後進."
It wa in this context that our action corps was mobilized to head off Zenkyoto's attempt to blockade the Todai Hospital.



Around noon of the following day, July 7, about 50 Waseda students went to the Hongo campus either by car or train. Some of Waseda activists had their own cars, and I, too, was driving a Toyota Crown around that time. The reason for my owning a car laid emphasis on function, rather than on appearance.

By that time, I had long formed an offshoot group with some activists in the law faculty and studied on various aspects of things military with an underlying vision of creating a militant group that would find its singular 'raison d'etre' in challenging power, emulating "Ikazuchi-to" (the Thunder Herd) depicted in "Kamui Legend", a comic book by Sanpei Shirado.

It was not all imaginary; we studied various pertinent literature inlcuding Karl von Clausewitz's "戦争論" and other military data and information. We considered, through simulations from military points of view, how we should act in cases of laborer insurgencies, anticipated self-defense forces' coup d'etats, or in case of the Socialist Party and Communist Party sat on the fence. On the other hand, we procured several cars, high-fidelity tranceivers and light firearms, and also threw out a feeler in search of possible procurement channels for heavy firearms. Looking back, all these acitivities were like child's play; however, we ourselves were in dead earnest at that time.

So I owned a car and drove it around in my organizer and union support activity. It turned out to an extremely useful method of transportation. Main members of the Action Corps from Waseda got in 5 cars, and we drove up to the porch of the Todai Hospital. It appeared to have very much irritated the Todai Zenkyoto students who despised us, saying "How could you 'Minkoro' (a deregatory way of addressing Minsei) dare come to a rally by car! Don't be cheeky."

When we arrived at the Hospital, there were about 300 members of the main body of the action corps, who were students of private universities in Tokyo, and 200 members of a detached force formed solely for the struggle with students of private universities in the Osaka/Kyoto areas. After the preliminary meeting between the leaders of the main body and the detached force, a leader of 'Togakuren' (the Metropolitan Students Federation) called me into a side alley beside the Hospital building. A Coca Cola delivery van was parked there, and I found 4 or 5 'Togakuren' members who looke familiar to me, including Takakazu Taguma, ex-chairman of the Federation, who had just been elected to chair 'Zengakuren' (All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) .
"Here I have brought helmets and clubs for you to arm your soldiers with," he flung open a door of the van which was loaded with brand new helmets, 1-meter long oak clubs and cotton work gloves. But I winced involuntarily at the sight the helmets, because they were nothing but the ones typically worn by workers on construction sites. Painted in chrome yellow, style and elegance were idle words in this case.
"What a color! Do you want us to wear these?" I nagged at the guy.
"It's the color of warning, perfectly suitable for what we are going to do, a Gewalt for justifiable defense," he explained as if my question had been beyond his imagination, and he repeatedly nodded in self-applause.

The whole company of Waseda members, too, froze in shock at the sight of the helmets, and expressed their disgust and dissatisfaction, "What the hell is this? We woul look quite stupid in that helmet. We ain't navvies, man." The very few picked up one.

An open-air meeting of the JCP-related factions was held before the Hospital building a little past noon. Its objective was to check by force the blockade of the Hospital being planned by the Joint Struggle Committee. The students and school personnel who participated in the meeting numbered about 500. Everybody sat down on the ground. We, the action corps, followed suit at short distance from the ordinary Minsei members. Whether or not the Joint Struggle Committee really had the intention of a blockade of the Hospital remained to be confirmed. However, the JCP camp avowed to prevent the blockade on the ground that it would give the school another excuse to call in the riot police, while the JSC retorted with a contention that the talk of a blockade was an ill-willed rumor inspired by the JCP.

I knew well that the truth of such a case could not be ascertained. However, it was true that the JCP had been overwhelmed in the face of the JSC's hard-line policy which allowed the escalation from the seizure of the clock turret to the blockade of the Hospital. Further, the initiatives among students at each faculty were changing hands to the anti-JCP camp, and an increasing number of students had started to support the JSC lately. Sinking in its strength at their largest stronghold, the JCP, probably under the pressure of having to getting on the offensive, decided on the obstruction of the blockade as a demonstration of their across-the-board opposition to the general blockade tactics adopted by the JSC.

When two hours had passed since the start of the meeting, about 100 Zenkyoto guys armed with wooden staves and helmets came marching towards us and railed at us for a while. In the end, some of the chargers started striking at Minsei students in a defenseless state. One of the wooden staves directly hit the head of a Minsei member yelling in a chorus, "Go back! Go back!." The stave broke into two pieces. As our action corps set out en masse, they withdrew without any resistance. It was a kind of reaction that we had not expected.

The sight of their withdrawal pissed me off. The backs of the receding troop showed complete confidence, and appeared to be making light of us, as if they had never thought of being chased. Their backs apparently challenged us, "You've been raising your voice against the use of force. You've got no pluck to engage in Gawalt."

I looked at the faces of my Waseda colleagues around me. They uniformly looked a little puzzled since had it been a charge taking place on our own campus we would have never let them pull out like that without crossing swords. We would have come to blows and fought it out. It seemed that the factional contest here on the Todai campus was very refined, and that the physical power relationship among the sects was quite fixed, while ours was much more crude, simple and clear-cut.

"OK, guys. It's our turn to stage a demonstration on them. If they turn upon us, beat them up," I proposed.

So we, 200 members of the action corps, decided to wage a charge on the Yasuda Memorial Hall. On that day, it happened that an Igakuren (Medical Federation) conference was being held at the blockaded Yasuda Memorial Hall where about 200 New Left activists had gathered from all corners of the nation. Our plan was to provoke those activists and draw them into a skirmish, thereby paying them back in their own coin. But things turned out quite contrary to our expectations, probably because it was the first time for them to see that many uniform helmets and oak clubs in a JCP demonstration, a sight uncanny enough to make them wait and see.

After the dark, both sides began making conspicuous moves to get out of doldrums, and it was me who triggered them. As we continued our sit-in into the night, a group of Zenkyoto-related students came over and started protesting against us. Each of them had a glib tongue, and they enlarged eloquently about things like "The JCP ought to self-criticize its resort to a foreign Gewalt legion." On the other hand, they openly provoked us by kicking the squatters, "What the fuck are you jerks doing sitting there?" Under such circumstances, the JCP leader earnestly asked fellow demonstrators not to be lured to the provocation.

"Oh, they call us a foreign legion...Kasbah and ジャンギャバン...Not a bad naming, is it? But can't we do something about the color of our helmets?" The members of the Gewalt corps, initially amused at the Zenkyoto performance, became gradually irritated by them. The Jigen school swordsman, Wada, and Yoshida and some other guys started raising a clamor, "They are getting on our nerves. Let's go shut them up." They were justified in their irritation. They were being staged a demonstration on and kicked around, yet they were told to control themselves under great pressure. But they were there to fight in the first place. The disagreeable rain that had been ceaselessly pouring down aggravated their exasperation.

"Don't come butt in while I'm dealing with them," I told my soldiers from Waseda and headed for the Zenkyoto bunch, holding in my hand a wooden sword with a strip of lead inplanted in the core. On the way, I stopped over at the JCP leader and spoke rapidly to him, "You don't seem to know the old saying, 'Never fail to accept provocation', do you?" He looked foolish with his mouth wide open.

"Shut the fuck up!" I spoke right into the face of the Zenkyoto student who had been most noisily charging at the squatters. As he was about to talk back, I thrashed the wooden sword on top of his skull. I thought I had pulled my punch with a good margin; however, he tumbled down, and blood began gushing out between the fingers of his hands that he covered his head with. The other Zenkyoto activists closed in on me and cried severally, "What the fuck do you think you're doing? What are you gonna do if he dies?"
"If he dies, he will become a dead man. And he will be given a funeral. Do you guys wanna be dead men, too?" It was a threat that I used to bluster out in the rows during my delinquent days. I don't know why, but it came out of my mounth. Those boys were popeyed.

This thrashing incident enraged Zenkyoto. Those who had seized the Yasuda Memorial Hall took quick revenge by raiding one of Minsei's strongholds, Student Council's Central Committee Room, and wrecking the whole room with wooden staves. Their fury was also felt on the Komaba campus; they assaulted the circles that were under Minsei's control and injured some of the circle members.

I later learned that the activist I had knocked out put three stiches in the head. Zenkyoto lost no time in reporting in detail the assault by the foreign Gebalt legion (that is us) in an extra the following day. Further they launched an extensive denunciation campaign against us, which seemed to strike a sympathetic chord in love for their school. The campaign attracted an increasing number of supporters among the Todai students. There were some students in the Todai JCP cells who got agitated by it, and several of them personally criticized me, saying that I had gone too far.

I said to those people in a sort of perfunctory manner, "Quite a few of your comrades got injured by Zenkyoto. Advocating humanism and pacifism is OK, but you've to realize that what we are now facing is an uncouth political struggle. If they found despicable foes in you, that would bring about a decline of your organization." But I was well aware that part of the Todai cells of the JCP was in great reaction against the foreign legion.

This was how my Gewalt force made a debut in the Todai struggle. From then on, we would cast ourselves in a role of an idle flowering--being held in contempt and hatred both from within and without--that undertook all the rough and dirty work in the background of this ideology-oriented struggle of the country's elite students.



What was the Todai struggle all about? And what were the points of conflicts between the sects over this struggle? Let me first give you an "official" profile or a told story of the Todai struggle seen through my own eyes, before I go into describing its "dark side."

The origin of the struggle was a campaign over the elites' status. The doctor registration system and medical office system mentioned earlier had focused on the question of how the would-be doctors were to be treated during the period between their graduation from the medical school and their approval by the state as a doctor upon the state exam. Even after the medical department's struggle had spread repercussions throughout the school upon the questionable dismissal of students and the introduction of the riot police into the campus, this issue on the medical students' status remained an undercurrent.

The issue, however, was not necessarily of the kind that intended to protect special interests of the elites. The Todai struggle had features quite its own, in that it developed into a struggle which re-questioned the way the school, its students and reseachers should be--one that tried to put the ideas of a university and the subjecthood of learnig in a new perspective. Its media were the criticisms against such established school systems as:
- the course system and medical system at national universities that had arbitrarily suppressed their elites in embryo;
- the self-regulation based on the rigid equation of "the university autonomy=the self-governance by faculty councils"; and
- the military-industrial-academic complex mediated by boss instructors who had direct links with power and monopolistic capital.

Zenkyoto further developed the issues of ideal universities and scholastic subjecthood in the directions of the "dismntling of an imperialistic university" and "self-negation." That is to say, the present Tokyo University existed as a "factory of education," and the faculty councils worked as the "lower reaches of power" that were charged with maintenance and control of the order. Under such circumstances, the "autonomy of university" was nothing but an illusion, and they thought it mandatory to dismantle the whole system of such suppressive control. The dismantling was to be carried out through the blockade of the whole campus, while their ideological questioning would be carried on through their internal "self-negation" of their "statuses as students and researchers." Therefore, the general blockade of the school was believed to carry a political siginificance of the demolition of an imperialistic university as well as an ideological siginificance of self-negation.

The JCP camp, on the other hand, opposed a democratic reform of the school as against Zenkyoto's stance of its total dismantling, and the establishment of the subject of self-governance as against the self-negation. The JCP asserted that the student dismissal and the introduction of riot police should be construed as reduction to a shell and/or destruction of demcracy and self-autonomy at Todai, rather than as mere epitomes of imperialistic rule. The struggle against it, therefore, should assume the form of a more general, democratic and reformative susbject, rather than a class-oriented, revolutionary subject as Zenkyoto adovocated. The JCP perceived a university as something that should be grasped in an antagonism of the globally social level between "state power/monopolistic capital VS laborer class/people," instead of something monotonous like "factory of education."

The JCP further contended that the "autonomy of university" would have a positive meaning in such an antagonistic relationship. A change from the distorted self-governance by the faculty council to a more democratic, all-participatory self-governance by representatives of the undergraduates, graduate students and administrative personnel was believed to lead the realization of reformative subjects, such as the withdrawal of the wrongful dismissal of the students and the self-criticism of the calling in of the riot police, to a really democratic reform of the university. The undergraduates, graduate students and school personnel were expected to self-reform themselves as the subjects of self-governance in this struggle, the JCP argued.

The conflicts in these basic lines between the two camps were naturally reflected in their strategic/tactical questions of whether or not to support a general campus blockade and the establishment of an all-campus council, as well as in the organizational issue of which the struggle should base itself on, Zenkyoto (the core element that fought subjectively) or all students=the student council.

I am afraid I have dwelled on complicated arguments a little too long. We had gone through arguments on "factory of education" or "military-industrial complex" or "autonomy of university" in the Waseda struggle, too. However, ours had been far less disputatious, and our struggle subjects had been commonly shared by all sects, though we did argue. Each of the sects supported the all-campus strike in the struggle. We from time to time faced tactical conflicts but they would never lead to a divisive strategic confrontation.

In addition, the Sodai struggle was a quite worldly struggle involving money, and it was basically a strife fought between the students and school within the framework of a private school, Waseda. The Todai struggle, on the other hand, was a contest between students and state power, as long as the students ranged themselves behind Zenkyoto's assertion of "dismantling the university." A fundamental difference in the stance of the two struggles.

An even more fundamental difference was that our struggle was one fought by "not-so-bright students" whereas the Today struggle was one carried out by "very bright students." Throughout the whole period of my involvement in "their" strife, I was sick and tired of the way the highly intelligent Todai elites carried on their ideology-oriented struggle.



It was natural that conflicts of such strategic lines, as they grew intense over time, transformed into confrontations by force. Let me briefly follow the course the developments.

A senior executive of one of the New Left sects, with whom I met recently, stated his impressions of the Todai struggle, "Of several epochs in that struggle, the most notable event, I think, was the offense and defense between Zenkyoto and the JCP over the blockade of the library. It was the occasion that completely changed the subsequent development of that struggle."

I quite agreed with him. Although the event was not known very much among the public, I believe that it had a profound significance in the history of the Todai struggle.

In November of1966, Zenkyoto decided on a line of policy to blcok the entrances to all the buildings of the school, and intended to act on the decision immediately. As a breakthrough, they had their eye on the general library which they had previously announced they would seal it off on Novembe 12. It appeared that it had been made their first target, partly because it was the center of the school's research function, and also because it had become a hangout for those grinders casting a contemptuous glance at the struggle.

November 12, 1966. It had been into the dusk when 500 action corps members arrived in front of the general library. Simultaneously, about 1500 Zenkyoto activists and supporters were showing fight in an indignation meeting held before the Yasuda Memorial Hall. Meanwhile, 500 to 600 started closing off the Engineering Department building. Driving on without a stop, they further came surging on us.

In that crowd, each of the Kakumaru, Fronto, Bunto, Seikai and other sects clung together to themselves respectively. The very front group put up bamboo poles as long as 10 feet, and the rest of the crowd was armed with wooden staves. As they closed in at a distance of about 10 meters, the Zenkyoto combatants suddenly dashed at us at the signal of a high-pitch whistle blown by their leader. Our action corps was subjected to a frontal attack by the dashing army, and crashing sounds of the bamboo poles and wooden staves hitting the helmets and bodies of my comrades arose in a loud report as if a huge building had collapsed.

Right at that moment, shrieks and bellows came from the school administrators and students surrounding the scene of the quarrels.
"Eek! Would you stop it."
"Stop using violence, you son of a gun!"
Furthermore, press photographers, who had waited for something to happen, all at once took photographs with blares of flashlights. The wooden staves being swung around by Zenkyoto were picked out in a white light every time a flashbulb was lit.

I was in the command of my action corps, standing on top of the stairs behind it. My plan was to make a counterattack after having drawn the other party into a close range. When their inrush appeared to have run out of fuel, I blew my whistle as a signal for our counterattack. Our force launched a concerted attack upon Zenkyoto. In the face of an unexpected counteroffensive from us, they showed a moment of flinch. My soldiers did not miss that opportunity to thrust further into their ranks. As we had pushed them back considerably, it was their time to rearrange the disposition of troops and launch a counterattack. Our frontal collisions thus continued for some time.

I had kept about 100 members of the action corps around me. They were the reserve corps which I was going to throw in wherever the situation was not in our favor. The view from the top of the stairs told me that our corps generally stood at advantage; however, the front that held out against Kakumaru was inferior in strength. Having ascertained our disadvantage on that front, I bolted out, shouting to the reserve corps, "Let's get moving. Our adversary is Kakumaru. We'll come upon their flanks." The 100 soldiers dashed at Kakumaru, flourishing the oak clubs. Being thrown off their guard, the Kakumaru troops backtracked with a rush. Watching the Kakumaru backing away, the rest of the Zenkyoto troops receded further into the distance, and in the end, they fled towards the clock turret, probably realizing that it was impossible to break through our line.

Subsequently, Zenkyoto executed repeated attacks on us. Probably because they had appraised us to be a formidable adversary in the first clash, from their second attack and on, they employed a variety of weapons, such as rocks obtained by crashing paving stones, milk bottles broken off at the neck, and liquid chemicals taken from fire extinguishers. However, the action corps, angry at their stone-throwing that injured quite a few people in the JCP camp, launched a full-blown counterattack against their onsets every time, which finally caused them to flee in utter confusion.

The following day, the Yomiuri Newspaper reported the skirmishes in the local news page under the banner headline of "Seat of Learning Seized By Hatred and Anarchy" as follows:

Yesterday, there were a number of students seen to be carrying wooden staves (rectangular timber) wrapped in kerchiefs and national flags here and there on the campus--a preparation for anticipated skirmishes.....The square bars prepared by the Zenkyoto camp included some gruesome "weapons" which had a thin iron point protruding from the tip of the bar covered with an iron plate. Some had nails hammered in and clinched. In front of the general library, a student, who was worried to death at the sight of such weapons, uneasily warned a masked and helmeted student, "Those weapons are just too much. You could kill people with them." The mask-man yelled back, "I don't give a damn about it." His reply was devoid of even a minimal rule to be observed by man--respect for the life of other members of its own species.
The students of the Yoyogi groups (note: so referred to because the JCP headquarters was located in a place of the same name) were armed similarly. They threw fire squibs to blind their antagonists and brandished wooden staves at the signal of a whistle blown by their leader. At 8:45 p.m., the whistle was blown in a noticeably long note. It was a signal for the start of their "full-scale offensive." They were extremely well officered, just like a well-disciplined combat unit. It was little different from Yakuza duels which we were familiar with in cheap movies. No matter what reasons and assertions of those scuffling students might be, it was a fact that an ugly scene took place right in front of the main entrance to the library--a symbol of learning--on the campus of Tokyo University, the highest seat of learning in Japan....

I had a good laugh over this article, particularly such hackneyed phrases as "Tokyo University, the highest seat of learning" and "symbol of learning." Press had an extremely poor stock of qualifiers for those who defied such an authority or refused to accept modern, democratic values. They would almost always qualify those people either as "just like Yakuza" or "like a mad man." But the press was right in that at least I had desired to stage a clash "like a Yakuza duel," which would clearly decide on the merits of a case. And I did it because it was to take place at "the highest seat of learning, Tokyo University."

But this scrimmage was, in fact, no match in intensity for the factional Gewalt wars taking place at some of the private universities in Tokyo or the JCP's internal strifes against its Mao-Tse-tung faction. For one thing the clash took place with all eyes of numerous students, school personnel and press fixed upon us. For another, Zenkyoto made light of us, the action corps. In terms of Gewalt scuffles, the Todai's Zenkyoto was nothing to be afraid of.

Another thing was that the New Left's Gewalt style had been rather demonstrative from the beginning. When they encountered with their antagonists, they would repeat tumbles for a while, but then as the trend of the quarrel became apparent they would fly in all directions. Theirs was ritualistic and somewhat indifferent about the outcome of a contest. The action corps, on the other hand, was too much about the issue of a battle. Accordingly, they fought in a mass formation and would never backdown, no matter how much they got penetrated at the outset. It was a scrap after all. In a scrap, once you back away that would be the end of it. I know that we fought in a crude way; however, I was sure that it was a way that would eventually lead us to a victory.

The fact that our action corps won the battle before the library deprived the Todai Zenkyoto of a prospect for their all-campus blockade line. It seemed that there had been considerable unrest and confusion within the organization. I think that their restlessness was aggravated when a decision against the general blockade of the campus was made at the student meeting of the Department of Law and the Department of Science. A book compiled by Todai's Zenkyoto, "Toride no ueni warera no sekai wo" (Building Our World On Top Of The Fortress, published by Aki Shobo) describes how it was really like:

With its attempt to extend its blockade having been thwarted by the introduction of Minsei's foreign Gewalt legion, Zenkyoto came up with a draft resolution to call for support of students of all universities in the metroplitan area, and they set up an All-Tokyo Indignation Rally for November 18. To counter this, Minsei addressed an appeal on November 15, "To check the 'All-campus blockade' scheduled for the 18th stoutly." Taking alarm at these actions, the acting president of the university, Kato, immediately made a proposal to both Zenkyoto and Minsei around 7:00 p.m. on the 15th that he would like to hold an "all-campus meeting" "as soon as on 25th" "to avert an affair of bloodshed." With this as a start, a negotiation took place on the 16th between Kato and Zenkyoto, and they agreed to hold an "open preliminary negotiation" on the 18th. The reason why Zenkyoto, once having concluded that there was no room left for further negotiations with the school authorities, accorded with the the proposal for a negotiation was that Zenkyoto became aware of their lack of strength in relation to their archrival, Minsei. Further, Kato also negotiated with Minsei, and both of them agreed to hold an "open preliminary negotiation" on the 19th.

Thus the situation took a turn to enter on a negotiation phase. Zenkyoto, however, unremittingly kept groping for a way to put down Minsei's action corps by force. A leader of one of the New Left sects has recently told me what had been going on within Zenkyoto at that time. First of all, Zenkyoto's guidance division strived to build up their fighting strength. And a group of Todai Zenkyoto leaders led by its chairman, Yoshitaka Yamamoto, called on the chief secretary of the Chukaku faction, Honda, and asked him if Chukaku could loan 400 to 500 men of its Gewalt force to Todai to smash the JCP counterpart.

"I don't think a reinforcement of mere 500 or 1000 Gewalt soldiers will not enable you to beat the JCP. I am afraid that you may be underestimating their strength, particularly when they resort to Gewalt as a will of the party. You'd better keep in mind that the JCP is no easy adversary to be up against when they set themselves to take counterrevolutionary actions," the chief secretary advised the Zenkyoto leaders.

Honda was an ex-JCP member, and he himself had gone through dreadful internal strifes at the time of the party's split some time before. It's been told that the internal disturbance had taken a heavy loss of lives. I was told that Honda, from his own experience, had constantly expressed that it was the JCP's action pattern to emerge as a conterrevolutionary, inhibiting element in certain phase of a movement, exposing its hidden nature--Bolshevism.

I also suppose that behind Honda's advice to Zenkyoto was their bitter experience in which they had been defeated by our action corps in a Gewalt battle that took place, just a while before Zenkyoto's call on him, at Hosei University--a stronghold of the Chukaku faction.

Right after the disturbance over the blockade of the Todai Hospital, the JCP and Chukaku set themselves in direct opposition to each other over the control of a council members' assembly of the Economics Department at Hosei University. Scuffles were daily occurrences. As far as Chukaku was concerned, it was an attempt to recover by force the initiatives in the Student Council of the Economics Department--the largest stronghold of the Sanpa (three-faction) Zengakuren--that they had been losing to the JCP influence. After two days of repeated head-on collisions, Minsei members got eventually cornered into the Student Union Building. It was at that timing that an emergency mobilization order was delivered to us, the action corps, who had been staying on the Todai Hongo campus.

Two hundred members of the action corps promptly moved to Tokyo College of Science which was located near Hosei University and took up our lodgings there. Mosquitoes that had survived till that time flew around and bit us. All of us scratched our mosquito bites without a word lest security guards should discover our presence. Then, early in the morning, we went into a series of rough yet awkward encounters with Chukaku's Gewalt units before the eyes of a few thousand ordinary students. In the end, we managed to kick them all out of the Hosei campus.

We knew that the Gewalt force of Chukaku faction was believed to be the strongest of all militant student groups. They were a formidable rival for us. Before the actual clashes, we were not so sure whether or not we stood a fair chance of success in our battles. Every one in the action corps was unusally strung up. Fear overran the danger. Our victory came more easily than we had expected. Chukaku's war potential might have been tremendously eroded because of the numerous arrests of their militant members through a series of struggles they had been fighting, including the Sanrizuka struggle against the construction of an international airport in Narita, Chiba prefecture.

The sweeping victory over Chukaku made each member of the action corps , "Hey, we are great. We can hack anything that may get in our way." The battle with Todai's Zenkyoto in front of the library was a snap when compared with the scuffles we had gone through with Chukaku just prior to it. It was quite likely that Chief Secretary of Chukaku, Honda, had a fresh memory of this incident in his mind. After having lightly reproved Todai Zenkyoto's optimistic view towards the JCP, Honda proposed,
"If you are to mobilize Gewalt combatants, why don't you plan a mobilization of students on a national scale, say on the order of ten thousands. Then you would be able to wipe out the JCP."
All of the Zenkyoto leaders present there were pop-eyed, I heard. This daring proposal, however, was eventually crystalized via a meeting set up by Honda for Chairman of Todai Zenkyoto, Yamamoto, and Chairman of Nichidai (Nippon University) Zenkyoto, Meidai Akita. It took the form of "National Student Indignation Rally for the victory of Todai and Nichidai Struggles" held in front of the Yasuda Memorial Hall on Todai's Hongo campus on November 22, 10 days after the battle fought in front of the Todai library.



The JCP's commitment of its Gewalt force to the Todai struggle set off a surge in the intensity of violence. Before that incident, the JCP activists and their counterparts in the anti-JCP camp had not easily gotten into trouble as they ran into each other on the campus. But now they would jump at each other the minute they spotted their adversary.

Under the situations where insecure feelings were growing ever more, Zenkyoto scornfully referred to the JCP action corps as "cockroaches," alluding to its nocturnal behavior pattern and its annoying nature comparable to the household pests. In a sense, they were correct.

Since the September disturbance over the blockade of the Todai Hospital, the action corps had been staying on the Hongo campus. During the daytime, we, sort of an illegitimate unit, hid ourselves in unobtrusive corners or classrooms. We stealthily remained on constant alert under arms while our fellow membes of the JCP and its related factions at Todai were attending their meetings. Whenever there was an attack by Zenkyoto, it was our time to go out on stage. At night, we would go on patrol and perform combat exercises by way of killing time, sort of. I must admit that we deserved being branded as cockroaches.

In the case of the Todai struggle, however, the treatment granted to the action corps was exceptionally good; unlike during the Waseda struggle where we had to pay our own expenses. We were no short of money which was provided by the party in plenty. Meals were supplied in box lunches filled with such sumptuous contents as Sashimi and deep-fried chicken, and we might eat as much as we liked. They furnished us with more than enough 'futon' bedding to keep ourselves warm and comfortable. Helmets and oak staves were, of course, articles supplied by the party; we often incenerated them unsparingly after use in order to destroy evidence.

We located some plants in the vicinity of Koishikawa that had been placed under self-control of workers on strike, and we used those facilities as our arsenals and logistics bases. It appeared that the New Left factions had provided quite a bit of support, material and otherwise, for Zenkyoto, though not as much as the JCP provided for us. This shows that the Todai struggle was, in a way, one fought between the parties consisting of selected members.

The action corps members, usually 300 to 400 of them, had stayed in the building of the Education Department near Akamon (Red Gate). I myself sometimes lodged at Futaki Inn in Hongo, where the JCP's central committee members, the heads of the United Front Division and the Youth and Student Division, and executives of Zengakuren (All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) and Togakuren (Metropolitan Tokyo Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) had been stationed to provide political guidance for the struggle. And I had to meet them, almost every night, to arrange various matters. Command of the action corps itself was left up to the field leaders like myself; however, we were supposed to consult with the party top brass for political decisions as to whether or not the action corps was to be thrown in, or whether or not it was appropriate to get into a Gewalt battle with Zenkyoto under particular situations.

The action corps and the party executives were often confronted with each other at the meeting table. The corps insisted on assaults on Zenkyoto to a certain degree on the ground that "the offensive was the safest defense," whereas the execs pressed for the exercise of Gewalt force for defense purposes only, stressing that they ought to "avoid placing themselves under a barrage of public criticisms which could result from the action corps' assaults." Our debate often got so hot that the representatives of the action corps almost stood on the verge of flouncing out of the room indignantly.

As the old maxim goes, "When the going gets tough, rough gets going," those in control of military power would gradually gain more say in rough phases. In the meantime, the number of confrontations with the party execs tailed off, and at last, our meeting would be concluded with a very simple arrangement like, "I'm afraid that our comrades at Todai will not be able to maintain the upcoming assembly of Komaba Board of Representatives for themselves, since they are not trained for physical contacts. So we need to send in the action corps. I'll leave a plan of specific operations up to you, field leaders."

"Isn't the Gewalt apt to lead to any loss of life?" one of the execs asked at a meeting. The question bespoke their chief concern. It was obvious that causing a death in a student scuffle would invite a general condemnation, both from within and without the party, thereby putting the party in quarantine. It would have been totally out of the question for a party in quarantine to carry on the struggle, and the JCP, officially advocating a non-violent peaceful revolution, would have been struck a disastrous blow.

"A war is nothing but a continuation of politics to be carried out in another method," Karl von Clausewitz clearly defines in his book "戦争論." The JCP's affair of violence on the Todai campus was nothing but part of a contest for power among conflicting sects--a form of politics. Naturally, the JCP execs were politically concerned that a loss of life would directly lead to its political defeat.

"A loss of life is highly unlikely. If a death was to occur it would be our side that would fall a victim to it. At the moment, we are holding the edge over Zenkyoto. But they will most likely bring in reinforcements of "foreign legions." Then, I'm not so sure what may happen." It was my answer to the question raised by the party exec.

Our Gewalt wars in those days usually started out with stone-hurling. Then, taking advantage of the adversary's flinching, we would dash to drag them into scuffles. It was a relatively simple and idyllic pattern. And, much to our surprise, even the harshest of clashes had not produced a single death. Our understandings that a death could result only from an encounter between small groups, and that the employment of the service of our action corps was limited to the cases of battles between large groups were the sources of our optimism. Although it was grandly termed a "struggle," our perception was that it was no more than an internal trouble of a university. We were too mature to bring about a collision that would take a toll of lives.

The party execs were also concerned about how the police and the security authorities might react. Since the Gewalt confrontations at Todai were sort of "open scuffles" performed in the presence of the whole company of the public and press, political concerns for obscuring the existence of the action corps as much as possible were alway at work. It was a lesson that the JCP had learned from its past experiences with its own military agencies, such as 'Sanson Kosakutai' (Group of underground activists based in mountain villages) and 'Chukaku Jieitai' (Chukaku self-defense force). They had been subjected to various suppressions by power. So, in order to avoid committing the same error, the party now had to resort to wiles, such as refraining from employing the action corps as much as possible, and putting it to work for as short a period as possible where they were to employ it.

In fact, I looked out sharp for the movements of the police myself. "Look. Getting nabbed means a defeat for us. If they go after you, make your getaway, no matter what. Never get caught. OK?" I persistently aroused fellow members' attention. At the same time, whenever we expected a Gewalt war, I dispatched to the riot police deployed in the vicinity of the campus or to the Motofuji police station sentries a few times as many as the reconnoiterers spying upon Zenkyoto. I always tried to keep a constant flow of real-time information from my scouts by way of tranceivers. As far as I can remember, at least 30 of such scouts kept watch on the police at any moment. Monitoring the police radio was also part of our repertoire.

While entertaing these apprehensions, the party execs consistently stood by their policy of exercising Gewalt. They had also decided upon a plan to mobilize combat forces consisting of workers to be recruited from all the unions under the party's umbrella in the Tokyo area in case of the student action corps being shattered. In other words, the whole JCP buckled down to the issue of the Todai struggle; and at one time, the action corps even received a letter of encouragement from the party's chairman, Kenji Miyamoto. The soldiers of the action corps, however, took a somewhat cool view of the struggle and held the zeal of the execs at arm's length. We were optimistic, maybe too optimistic, thinking, "We need no encouragement from the top brass. Todai Zenkyoto is no match for us."

As November 22 drew on, however, alarming news began to reach the JCP's advanced headquarters from its subordinate organizations at universities across the nation. It indicated that armed students of the New Left groups from all parts of the country were coming up to Tokyo in their multitude to attend Zenkyoto's National Student Indignation Rally to be held on the Hongo campus on November 22. We also learned that some of the New Left-oriented labor unions like 'Kokutetsu Doro' (National Railway Motive Power Union) would be mobilized. Zenkyoto was saying boastfully, "We will gather as many as 30,000 comrades. With that overwhelming power, we will carry out the general blcokade of the campus as initially intended."

At the news, the JCP's advanced headquarters immediately issued orders for the mobilization of its forces of about 10,000 students on a national scale. I had no idea of what would result from a head-on collision of a total of 40,000 sanguine people. Neither was I able to imagine that the indignation rally would be the starting point of the subsequent Zenkyoto movement at numerous universities around the country, nor that the rally itself would turn out to mark a brilliant culmination in the history of the whole movement.





Yoshida, one of my Waseda colleagues in the action corps, was a born scrapper. His favorite weapon at that time was a baseball bat with scores of nails hammered in. When we barged in on Zenkyoto at the Yasuda Memorial Hall, he flourished it to provoke them persistently, saying with a grin, "Hey, Zenkyoto. I'll take you up on your challenge with this, anytime. Come on." As I mentioned earlier, Yoshida, a 'Karate' blackbelter (2nd grade), was really a combative guy. Although he hardly stayed overnight on the Hongo campus since he was living with his girlfriend, he phoned me every night,
"Is any trouble expected tomorrow? Should I be there?"
"Nah, not much is gonna happen. Don't bother to come over. Stay with your girlfriend."
Such a conversation was a daily routine between us. When occasion demanded, however, he was always the one to rush to the scene first and to be most actively engaged in scuffles at full blast. He had matriculated at the Department of Politics and Economics of Waseda University after spending a brief period as a laborer. Because of his experience in the real world, he shared no part of optimistic and naive ways of thinking usually characteristic of other students. Whatever he did, he did it with unwavering confidence--a qualification that best served the purpose of the action corps.

As described earlier, some of the members of the action corps were night school students who worked as laborers at places like manufacturing plants during the day. These guys also stayed on the Hongo campus at night in case of emergency. As might have been expected from their disciplines at work, all of them were stalwart, both physically and mentally. I had them armed with baseball bats and often sent them out to provoke Zenkyoto.

Pradoxically, as our armaments race escalated, the number of occurrences of large-scale confrontations had certainly diminished, which was comparable to a nuclear deterrent. Thus 5 or 6 days elapsed with both sides limiting themselves to no more than provocation. It was sort of a lull before a storm.

On the eve of the Nov. 11 National Indignaion Rally, students of the anti-JCP camp mobilized from all parts of the country swarmed the Hongo campus one group after another. Some came in groups of about 10 students most of whom were in a windbreaker with a daypack on their back. Large groups of about 400 to 500 students were much showier in display; some of such groups staged a brisk snakedance. The whole campus got flooded with Zenkyoto-related students in less than no time.

By that time, the JCP had already set out an internal policy regarding the November 22 event that they would by all means stop the blockade of at least two of their strongholds, the Department of Education and Department of Science, while they might give up the rest of the forts they held, depending on the situation. Their policy presupposed that it should by no means occasion death in any of its expected battles against Zenkyoto. In that regard, precautions were taken to minimize the employment of the Gewalt (action) corps' main body. I shared that view; it was not because I was afraid of an incident of loss of life, but because of my political concern and judgement.

At this particular point in time, the Todai struggle was entering into a terminal phase, and the school authorities, shaken up by public condemnation against its excessive leniency to recurring violent acts on the campus, were groping for measures to unsnarl the disturbance. The key under such situations was "Who would win the ordinary students to its side, the school, Zenkyoto, or the JCP?" Comforming too much to the accepted norm, those ordinary students of Tokyo University were quite allergic to violence, and their antipathy against us, the action corps, was extraordinarily strong. In view of winning their support, it would obviously be a bad policy to keep the action corps in an ostensible position. But in actuality, it was quite a knotty question to check the blockade while averting direct confrontations between the Gewalt forces of the two adversary student camps. After all, we had to leave our action to chance.

November 22 arrived at last. There was a constant stream of Zenkyoto-related students rushing to Hongo. I slipped among the ordinary students in disguise and went to the square before the Yasuda Memorial Hall. I wanted to see for myself what was actually going on in our adversary's camp.

It was around 10 o'clock on the morning of November 22, if I remember right. The area around the Hall was in turmoil. Nearly 3,000 armed Zenkyoto students had already started demonstrations in formation by the sects. There were many Zenkyoto students from Waseda, too. Masses of people briskly ran in orderly procession over and over again, yelling in chorus "Carry out blockade!" and "Smash Minsei!" The seemingly endless stream of the marching students reminded me of dying contortions of a snake. Surrrounding the flurry of demonstrators were equally numerous ordinary Todai students and school administrators watching them calmly. Most of the faces of those spectators showed a look of denunciation or contempt as if it had been telling "How come are you outsiders sticking your nose into our own business?" But some of the faces were clearly marked by expectation, though I had no idea of what it was that they were expecting.

Speaking of expectant faces, one of the JCP members at Todai told me that their scouts had reported that quite a few familiar faces of "progressive intellectuals" and "left-wing highbrows" were hanging around on the streets and at coffee shops in the vicinity of the campus, busying themselves in a task of passionately palavering as to what might happen. Those guys were nothing but a colossal joke, because they had kept prattling totally inapposite comments on the Todai struggle through its whole period. They were just a hopeless bunch of people.

Meanwhile, there arose a row in the direction of the general library. So I headed for it, getting myself mixed with ordinary Todai students. It turned out that a group of several people in the Chukaku helmets were setting out to block the entrance to the library. At that time, a good majority of the JCP camp had gone on a protest rally to the Ministry of Education, and they would not be back until1 o'clock in the afternoon which was the time they had scheduled to start blocking Zenkyoto's blockade. I realized that we had been outsmarted by Kakumaru, obviously.

The number of Zenkyoto supporters doubled in a matter of less than an hour. The Todai campus that day looked as though a site for a mobilization contest entered by the sects. Each sect displayed their originality in equipment, parading in their unique Gewalt fashion. A group in blue helmets in a forest of unusually long bamboo poles was Seikai. Every Kakumaru soldier wore a white helmet, carrying an iron pipe in his hand and an oak stick on the back. The red-helmetted unit of Bunto took a huge log of about 10 meters in length on their shoulder. They subsequently used it to force the Red Gate open before they came dashing into the Department of Education, the stronghold of our stubborn defense.

Each of these units in its own uniform style purposely put their ranks in perfect order and loudly yelled a slogan in chorus as they came to TV cameras. It was also a demonstration of their imposing figures on a gala occasion, being well conscious of the existence of cameras--a behavior more suitable for a festival than a struggle. For those demonstrators, weary and dreary days were over, and it was the time of festivity now.

In the JCP camp, on the other hand, the ranks began swelling in the afternoon. The students who had gone on the protest rally, and those who had been mobilized from all parts of Japan came rushing to Hongo. The number soon reached nearly 10,000. The action corps, too, had mobilized about 500 students for the occasion, plus a few hundred laborers who were under the umbrella of college co-ops, National Railway Workers' Union, 全自交, and other national labor unions. The latter was sort of a "relief" unit which was to be committed in the event that the student forces were overwhelmed by Zenkyoto. Until that time, they were supposed to lie concealed in the basement of the Education Department. When I went down to the basement to make arrangements with their leaders, I found the helmetted laborer corps holding a club tight in their hand with their faces down in stony silence.

In the meantime, I had had about a half of our action corps slip into the crowds of ordinary Todai students. Since around the time of the battle before the library, criticisms against the violent confrontations between the the JCP and Zenkyoto had quickly arisen. On that day, approximately 2,000 "non-sect" students (ordinary students belonging to no particular sect) had gathered to arrest another showdown between the two camps. So my plan was to give an extra thrust to their denunciation against Zenkyoto by having my soldiers in disguise join in their declaiming chorus, thereby trying to make the antagonism between Zenkyoto and the ordinary students more prominent that it actually was.

At that time, the "forces-of-conscience" consisting of non-sect students were on the rise as a third group, which assumed the form of "Class Alliance" and "Volunteer Alliance" on the Komaba and Hongo campus, respectively. I was informed later that the JCP had also succeeded in inplanting in this group some of its brightest Todai student members whom it had long kept to itself, particularly away from the front of the struggle, with a view to having them slip in the nation's ruling mechanism after their graduation. And I was told that in many cases those JCP members played leading roles under the disguis of non-sect students. No wonder that those sit-in groups positioned on the path connecting between the Yasuda Memorial Hall and the Education Department always made moves in directions which would make for our advantage!

With a majority of the action corps out joining the non-sect group, there were only 200 or so soldiers remaining at the Education Department when a group of several hundred guys, all in the Bunto helmets, descended upon us, having broken the Red Gate with the huge log I had seen earlier. Then, they started provoking us to anger, "Hey, you Minsei chaps. Come out here." We tried to be deaf to their challenge, for one thing we were outnumbered, and for another we saw no need to get ourselves involved in unnecessary scuffles. Their provocation grew impudent.
"You say you're taking part in a Gewalt war? Don't make me laugh. You're just good enough to go up to Lake Tama and dance around there."
"Oh, you're scared? Hey, you've got no balls to come out and face us."
They spoke without reserve. The storm cloud began to appear on the brows of the action corps, and their breathing through the nose became harder.
"All right. That's enough. We'll give'em a clout. Those of you from Waseda, come with me," I called out to my Waseda colleagues and started to map out a plan. The enemy were several hundreds in number, and we were 50 at most. We needed to come up with something outrageous to put them to rout. My answer was the use of rocks.
"Stuff all your pockets with as many rocks and pebbles as possible. Pick ones of fair sizes. I'm sure they will come upon us overbearingly, so hold yourself until they come into close range. Then, start hurling your stones all together at them. Aim at their faces, OK? I'm sure that will put them to flight."
"OK, let's go!"
A band of 50 commandoes made a sortie at once. But some of them were faltering with the weight of the pebbles in their pockets. As we advanced with a dash, though pantingly, towards the Bunto unit, they backed away also with a rush, being caught in an unguarded moment, or perhaps being knocked over by our bizarre way of running. We, the two parties, watched each other for a while, each looking for a chance before the Red Gate. Then, ascertaining our numerical inferiority, the Bunto forces rushed on us, sounding war cries, "Put the Minsei down" and "Waw."

The view of several hundred people dashing with wooden staves held up was no doubt impressive--so impressive as to make us feel goose-pimply. I thought that they would certainly get us this time, but it was too late to regret. There was no other way for us but to stand our ground and wait until they closed in on us as originally planned.

"Not yet. Hold until they come within point-blank range," I had to keep my Waseda colleagues from jumping the gun several times. I finally let them catapult their stones when the enemy closed in at a distance of about 5 meters from us. Everybody in the action corps must be scared like hell. The first round of simultaneous discharge did stop the enemy's advance. 3 or 4 men in the front row tumbled down, being hit directly in the face by rocks in size of an adult's fist. People behind tripped over their comrades and fell into a pile on the ground. Some more stones were thrown at them. We could never miss our mark within that close range. Rocks hitting flesh and helmets produced thick and dull sounds in procession. They scampered away.

We managed to repulse the enemy's second advance. But that was where our luck was exhausted. On their third advance, they dashed at us with their faces down. With our stone-throwing tactics debilitated, we had no chance of contending against such heavy odds. The action corps were driven to a corner by the Gate, and fell an easy prey to the enemy's collective beating and kicking. We tried to strike back with our oak clubs; but the 3-foot long clubs were of no use against their much longer staves and bamboo poles.
"Keep close to each other. Huddle up. Keep your face down." But these defensive measures were of little help. Some of the action corps started getting on their knees. It was a matter of time before they would send all of us sprawling.
"We're running into the Education Department! Brandish your club as hard as you can!" At my suggestion, everybody in the action corps got revivified and roared, "Wow!" We brandished our clubs vehemently.

Taking advantage of their unguarded moment, we barely managed to fly back into our stronghold at last. After a pause I was startled when I looked at the faces of the corps. Most of them were either bleeding at the nose and the head or bruised all over their face. Not a single person was unhurt. I myself had been beaten up in the face, shoulders, and arms with wooden staves; blood was streaming down from the tail of one of the eyes. We all crumpled to the floor like dead men.



The fervor expressed at the Indignation Rally in the evening was simply amazing as Zenkyoto had boasted to deploy 30,000 people. Search-lights threw bright light over the square before the Yasuda Memorial Hall. The whole place was covered with carpets of helmets shining in the light in white, blue, red and green; and sticking out above the tens of thousands helmets were forests of flags of various sects and universities. The scouts who had actually been on the scene told me later that it was truly a grand spectacle.

After all the star of the day was the Nichidai (Nippon University) Zenkyoto. In the center of the square was a wide vacant space set aside for them for whom a crowd of 10,000 helmets was waiting in excitement.

"Ladies and gentlemen, fellows of the fighting Nichidai Zenkyoto have just arrived here." In response to the ejaculative voice from the speakers, a roaring chorus of "Wawoo!" arouse, and all the helmets turned in the direction of the main gate. In the middle of that spotlight of attention the 3,000 Nichidai Zenkyoto corps paraded in a close formation. All of them wore brilliantly shining helmets painted in silver. The receiving students watched them in great awe.

Nichidai Zenkyoto had earned a reputation for their unmatched strength in Gewalt wars through a series of battles against militant right-wing groups which dared to attack the students with drawn swords. Their confrontation against the riot police two months before had even claimed a life of a policeman. I had never seen the Gewalt corps personally, but our scouts reported that the Nichidai forces were far more menacing than their Todai counterparts.

On their way from the Nichidai campus in Kanda Misaki-cho to Todai's Hongo campus, they had staged a demonstration without previous notice to the authorities concerned and broken through the walls of the riot police who stood in the way to check them. The injured and bleeding students in the outermost rows of the formation told of hard clashes they had gone through--a sinewy corps in silver helmets besmeared with blood. It was quite symbolic of the struggle of Nichidai students who might be described as "proletariat students" as against "elite students" of Tokyo University.

At that time, the JCP was its own rally near the Red Gate with the number of participants swelling to almost 10,000. As I remember, about 500 of our action corps were standing by in the building of the Education Department. And our scouts kept coming in with a report one after another. According to their reports, leaders of various sects, like Yoshitaka Yamamot (Todai Zenkyoto), Meidai Akita (Nichidai Zenkyoto) and Yoji Naruoka (Kakumaru), were taking turns in delivering their agitative speeches.

Around 8 o'clock in the evening, a scout rushed in to report, "Their meeting is winding up in a few minutes. It looks like they are going on to an armed demonstration."
"Here's a go. Let's get out of here," I urged my corps, and I gave them brief explainations; that it was of deep signigicance to check the blockade of the Education and Science Departments, thereby eventually ruining the all-campus blockade line of Zenkyoto; that, tactically, we would initially take a close formation with more emphasis upon defense, and catching them offguard at some point in time, we would at once change to the offensive, and in case of a defeat, we would run into the Education and Science Departments to recover combat readiness; and I finally pepped them up,
"Listen. Never think of backing down. The enemy are nothing but a rabble. Their attack may seem fair at first, but it won't last long. I'm sure they will soon be off their guard. Then we'll press upon them in a single spell." At the time, my face was swollen like anything from the drubbing with wooden staves by the Bunto assailants earlier in the day. My otherwise small, slit-like eyes were now almost non-existent, being hidden underneath the swollen eye lids. The members of the corps must have been amused at the tumid face giving instructions.

As far as I was concerned, however, I did not think that Zenkyoto would actually set themselves to enforce a general blockade of the campus. The JCP leaders at Todai seemed to share that prospect, too. If Zenkyoto had dared to do so, they would have been forced into a full-scale Gewalt war with the JCP who would lose its face without defending at least the Education and Science Departments. So we simply thought that Zenkyoto would not resort to such a foolish act under the situation of a large force of the riot police enveloping the campus and waiting for an opportunity of intervention, as it would only benefit the school and the police. In fact the police had exterted all kinds of pressures both upon the school and the students. As one of such measures, they had asked the Metropolitan government to strip off the paving stones from the sidewalks in the vicinity of Hongo.

I later heard from a leader of a New Left group that the New Left sects, too, had reached a previous agreement to stick to a 武装カンパニア that day. Still, there were always some groups of people who were rash and reckless or would run to excess in such a huge number of participants. It seemed that leaders of the Zenkyoto camp strained to keep a firm rein on such madcaps. We, in the action corps, tried hard not to provoke Zenkyoto uselessly, while we made our preparations to counter in case of some harum-scarums jumping the gun.

As our scouts had reported, Zenkyoto went into a demonstration, hoisting their wooden staves, steel pipes, logs and bamboo poles. Part of the rally diverted its course towards the library where the JCP supporters were sitting in. The action corps, guarding behind the supporters, went on a full alert. Right at the moment, non-sect Todai students and personnel sat in between the approaching Zenkyoto and the JCP. It was a totally unexpected thing.

Over 2,000 non-sect students and school personnel severally censured Zenkyoto, "Do without wooden staves," "Against the used of violence," and "Foreign legions, go back where you are from," finally followed by their chorus, "Go back. Go back." Zenkyoto in their anger tried to put them to rout, but the non-sect group fought to hold out, though slightly fazed. It was an expression of school nationalism to refuse to let students from other schools have their own way on the campus of Todai, perhaps partly assisted with behind-the-scene operations by the clandestine JCP members inplanted in the group. They managed to stick to their position even after over a dozen of tussles with Zenkyoto.

After all, Zenkyoto did not enforce the general blockade they had announced. They either left the Hongo campus around 11:00 p.m. or started getting ready for a stay for the night.

There were, however, some parties who would not beat a hasty retreat. When I was patrolling with 4 or 5 fellows of the action corps on the campus around midnight, we encountered with a queer group of 3 or 4 young people. I could not tell if they were students or laborers, and all of them wore combat clothes and workboots. Each of us had a club, baseball bat, or wooden sword in hand, but they seemed unarmed, even without helmets. Apparently knowing who we were, they plainly displayed a hostile feeling against us.

As they came within a distance of 4 or 5 meters from us, one of the strangers pulled out a dagger and took a fighting stance. The guy seemed very experienced in this kind of situation, and maintained composure. Two or three took to their heels at the sight of the dagger, though all of them were usually quite plucky. Still they were scared of an edged tool. I myself had been scared like anything at the time I was threatened with a knife for the first time in my life when I was a junior high student. So I had no intention of blaming my colleagues for their flight.

I stepped forward to accept the challenge. In my hand was my favorite weapon, a wooden sword with a stick of lead embedded in the core. I was absolutely confident that a long weapon would eventually be more advantageous over a short one, be it edged or otherwise. That conviction was backed by my own experience in which I had overpowered my opponents with a jackknife several times.

The dagger man crouched low, shifting all his weight on his toes and turning up the eyes. It was displeasing to have an opponent watch for a chance from a lower position than mine. I closed in on him quickly to bring down my wooden sword on his wrist. However, he stepped forward even more quickly to parry my blow. A dodge to the forward was something that would be very difficult for an unexperienced fighter. He was quite a combatant. I felt that I had to be resigned to be slashed in my arm or somewhere by his dagger.

Both of us moved in dead silence. The foeman dodged, ducked and sidestepped my swings several times. His gang sidelined our duel. After several more parries, my sword finally hit the opponent's forearm and knocked the dagger out of his hand. Then, the gang edged back, while keeping their eyes fixed upon me, before they vanished into darkness of the night. I racked my brains as to who on earth those guys might be.

The following day, I inquired into their identity and it looked like they were anarchists in association with a group called San-ya Kyoto (San-ya Joint Struggle) which was pushing the liberation movement of day-laborers in San-ya, one of Tokyo's slum areas. No wonder that the guy was good at handling his balde, since those activists had daily encounters with such rowdies like day-laborers' bosses and Yakuza by the nature of the movement. I gathered that some of such anarchists were also part of the Zenkyoto camp that day, because I caught sight of suspicious guys several times on the campus throughout the night.

It was towards the end of November that one of the party execs at the advanced headquarters told me, "We are planning to convene a Councils' meeting at Komaba around mid-December; but Zenkyoto will most likely attempt to thwart it. If that happens, I don't think our comrades here at Todai will be able to defend it as they are not used to skirmishes at all. So can you move part of your action corps down to Komaba for a while?"

Just around that time, the struggle for leadership between the JCP and Zenkyoto was growing ever more intense. Zenkyoto, which had led the struggle up until then, was being gradually quarantined. The ordinary students' alergic reaction to Zenkyoto's proposition for a general campus blockade led to resolving against blockade at the students meetings of the Departments of Law, Economics, Science, Engineering, Agriculture, and Education at the end of November. And they had also elected representatives of a unified negotiation body to be sent to a collective bargaining with the school authorities, which the JCP had proposed. In order to grasp the initiative more firmly, the JCP had come up with a plan that would enable the students at the Komaba campus to hold a meeting of representatives of the Department of Liberal Arts on its own.

More than hald of all the Todai students belonged to the Komaba campus. If the JCP could bring the students here under its thumb, it would decisively change the current of the struggle in favor of the party. The executive committee of Komaba's student council was under the rein of Zenkyoto-related sects. Anti- or non-Zenkyoto students had petitioned requests for opening a representatives' meeting several times, but their request had been turned down by the executive committee every time. So they schemed out a self-initiated representatives' assembly as a last resort.

Zenkyoto, on the other hand, criticized a succession of recent JCP lines as an act of treachery to the struggle and an illicit union with the school authorities. They also clamored against the unified negotiation body and the representatives' assembly as JCP's "got-up affairs" which Zenkyoto vowed to stymie, forcefully. As I remember, there were cries for "dismantling of Todai" arising within Zenkyoto at that time. When I heard that contention, I made fun of anti-JCP students of Waseda who had come to aid the Todai Zenkyoto, saying "Dismantling Todai? That sounds great, because it's just what I call a revolution." But that was my honest feeling, too.

In the beginning of December, I took about 300 action corps members with me to Komaba. About one week after we moved to Komaba, there occurred an assault incident in which three students got severely wounded. NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) initially reported that JCP-related students had swooped down on anti-JCP students. But in actuality it was an internal strife of Zenkyoto in which 50 members of Kakumaru faction had fallen upon Seikai. It was sort of an extra-inning game of the strife that had originally been fought between the two factions at Waseda University. Each faction deployed their supporters mobilized from throughout the Metropolitan area. The factional strife continued for a week, and every time there was a clash between the two the riot police was called in.

Dreariness was the word to describe what took place behind the scene of this "Seikai-Kakumaru War." The most dismal episode was that each faction not only lynched their prisoners of war, both male and female, in a building they had seized and barricaded, but also broadcasted the cries of pain uttered by the POWs over loudspeakers. A seed of the endless strife subsequently fought between Chukaku-Seikai and Kakumaru in the 1970's had already originated behind the ideology-oriented Todai struggle. Feeling misgivings about the developments, the Todai Zenkyoto finally came to order both factions to leave the campus.

I happened to be involved in this war myself, and wound up being disdained by Kakumaru. A account of how it all happened may be of some help in explaining internal dissension among the contending factions around that time.

The Seikai vs Kakumaru confrontation had originated at Waseda. The control of its Departments was shared among Kakumaru, Seikai and the JCP; however, the existence of the outstandingly powerful faction, Kakumaru, had skewed the triangle somewhat. In some cases, Seikai and JCP had teamed up to go against Kakumaru. The movement against the school's presidential election in 1968 resulted from one of such alliances. Battles initially took place on two fronts, Seikai vs Kakumaru and JCP vs Kakumaru. Each party repeated storms on its adversary's strongholds and skirmishes with each other as they met on the campus of Waseda. The flames of antagonism between Seikai and Kakumaru leapt to the Komaba campus of Todai this time.

"The fuck'n Kakumaru bastards are capturing the students' society room of the Second Law Department."
"The Second Division of the Law Department? Who is the mastermind? Is it a man called "I" by any chance?"

It was amid the Seikai-Kakumaru War at Komaba that I had the above conversation with one of the Seikai members from Waseda. When I went back to the Waseda campus for the first time in a long time I bumped into another Seikai activist with a shockingly swollen face.
"What's happened to you?" I asked.

The guy told me that he got beat up by Kakumaru, and also that Kakumaru had taken advantage of the weakness of Seikai's defense due to the strife at Todai to seize the student council room of the Second Division of the Law Department which had been their stronghold thitherto. It turned out, as I expected, that the ringleader of the raid was "I," head of Kakumaru faction at the Law Department. A zealous activist as he was, the man had long watched for a chance to wrest the initiative at the First Division of the Law Department, too. I was also told that JCP's Minsei at the Literature Department was being subjected to Kakumaru's raids, while most of the Minsei members had gone away to support the struggle at Todai. In any case, I could not leave these matters alone.

I took 4 of my corps members with me and made a raid on the Kakumaru base at the Law Department without any more ado. The January 16 issue of the Waseda University Gazette cites "I" as describing our storm as below. Although the Gazette was a historic newspaper, it had a strong coloring of Kakumaru organ.

".....I was in the middle of a discussion with my mate, T, in the Student Council room when a bunch of guys burst in. They were a group led by Fukaya, chairman of the students' society of the First Division of the Law Department, Yamada, chairman of the liason conference of Minsei Zengakuren, and Miyazaki who is rumored to be an ex-Yakuza. The minute they came in, some of them struck at me peremptorily. Then, I was taken to a "lynching hut" which was located somewhere around Oume on the western outskirts of Tokyo. There, a gang led by Miyazaki beat me to a jelly and knocked me unconscious. Although I had previously heard about the JCP's conventional lynching style, I realize true anger at their malicious and wily methods for dealing their victims blows without causing visible injuries, or physically depriving them of their thinking faculty, or driving a nail in their chests...."

The passage "rumored to be an ex-Yakuza" set me to laughing. I was aware that it was plausibly rumored that I had been a Yakuza in Kyoto before being admitted to Waseda University. It may have had something to do with an incident during my freshman year in which I had a big quarrel with the police over their ungrounded accusation that I was a quasi-member of a Kyoto Yakuza family, when I was questioned at Totsuka Police Station in relation to some election irregularities.

Speaking of Yakuza, it may be in order to add that there were several ex-Yakuza in Minsei regional groups of the JCP. The lower branches of the party in those days appear to have been so broad-minded as to be tolerant of all sorts of men including near-outlaws. Unlike its bureaucratic upper echelon, the JCP's lower strata were full of more interesting personalities.

I admit that what we had done to "I" was nothing decent, and I might be open to his denunciation of me as Yakuza. But what "I" described about his abduction was not necessarily in line with our actual conduct. So, for the sake of records, let me disclose the truth of what he had gone through at that time. It is true that we lifted "I" up on our shoulders and banged him against the wall of the Student Council room to quiet him before we took him to the hut in Oume, and that we belabored him unconscious. But after that, we forced Suntory Red whisky down his throat and stripped him of all his clothes and threw out the tottering man. That's all.

Rowdy conduct of this degree was frequently observed in the background of the student movement at the time. We were all activists representing the interests of our respective factions on the forefront of the movement. We sort of accepted the situation in which we would sometimes steamroller activists of other factions; and they would thrash us at some other times. But I'm positive our conduct was different from lynching. We would batter the person down with our bared hands or a thick chain, and would give him a warning, "Don't mess with us any more. You won't get away with it next time. Understood?" That was about as far as we would go. Activists would never think of killing their adversary as in the factional strifes of later years. It was my thinking that killing a student would be of no help in our struggle since ours was not one against state power. In this connection, I may remark that Kakumaru disengaged itself from the Second Division of the Law Department after this incident.



The near-lynch internal strifes between Seikai and Kakumaru and the dispatch of the riot police aggravated the antipahty of Todai students of the Komaba campus to Zenkyoto. Taking the advantage of this occasion, the JCP succeeded in recovering the initiative of the struggle, and would lead its developments from then on.

As of December when a part of our action corps moved to Komaba, there precipitately arose increasing prospects of the cancellation of the entrance exam for the class of 1969 and the postponement or cancellation of graduation and promotion of the existing students. Some Cabinet members openly insisted on the cancellation of the entrance exam, and it was obvious that graduation and promotion would be the last thing if the strike continued as it was. There were even some people in the government who ventured to make a bluff at suggesting a possible abolishment or temporary closure of the school. Under these circumstances, the Todai students at Komaba grew restless. Some of the JCP-related students proposed to hold a representative conference with a view to bringing about a mass bargaining session with the university administrators as soon as possible, while maintaining an objection to any settlement plan lacking principles. "So let's elect representatives to send to the mass bargaining," they made assurance doubly sure. Many Todai students expressed their approval for the proposal.

The consent to the JCP proposal also meant the debarment of Zenkyoto from the bargaining table, which Zenkyoto would never let go, of course. They rebuffed the movement to hold the representative meeting as a "plot trumped up by the JCP" and decided to mar the meeting by force. The action corps was assigned the role of a defense force to guard the representative assembly against the expected attack of Zenkyoto. In fact, the meeting was held quite a few times between December and January the following year. Each time it was held we clashed with Zenkyoto, resulting in numerous people who got injured heavily and otherwise.

Under these circumstances, we saw the representative meeting of December 13 come round. It was a very cold day with a cloudless sky. From early in the morning, students started gathering in front of the dining hall of the Komaba Dormitory, where the meeting was to be held, as well as in the square before the North Dormitory. They were absorbed in discussions in many groups. By the time the meeting was declared open at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, a total of more than 2,500 students, faculty members and administrators had assembled before the North Dormitory. The unarmed action corps stayed behind the crowd, and watched the movements of Zenkyoto. According to the reports of our scouts, about 700 Zenkyoto students, including some from Waseda, were holding a rally of their own with wooden staves and steel pipes in hand. It was also reported that the riot police were building up their troops near the main gate to the campus.

The dining hall of the Komaba Dormitory stood solitarily in a clump of trees, and three paths connected it to the surrounding facilities. About an hour after the opening of the representative meeting, the 700-strong Zenkyoto men in helmets of various colors stormed in the meeting venue, passing the three pathways. A lot of them were empty-handed, perhaps entertaining apprehensions about possible intervention of the riot police. When I looked the guys in the face who were heading the procession, I recognized some familiar faces of Waseda' Kakumaru and Seikai members. Although it was only natural because Komaba and Waseda were two largest strongholds for both factions, that encounter made me smile a wry smile.

At the leader's word of command, "Charge!," the Zenkyoto troop pounced upon the students and school personnel sitting in before the dormitory for defense of the meeting hall. The sit-downers ran this way and that to make their escape, and fell down one upon another. Screams and bellows flew about, and clouds of dust rose into the air. It was a familiar skirmish scene; however, the students supporting the meeting that day held out unusually well, I supposed that it was perhaps because the number of steel pipes and wooden staves was much less than usual. The unarmed ordinary students blocked the way of the armed Zenkyoto corps, and kept pushing and shoving earnestly. Having failed to break through the human barricade, Zenkyoto finally gave up on their attempt to force through and withdrew their army.

The meetng, however, was interrupted temporarily when a group consisting of about 200 Kakumaru, Seikai and Front members barged into the hall through its back entrance. The intruders rampaged for a while by striking and throwing chairs at the representatives. Here again, the representatives offered a stout resistance, and finally managed to drive back the interlopers. Since Zenkyoto, having once withdrawn, showed a sign of making another assault, the action corps picked up weapons and positioned itself in between the ordinary students and Zenkyoto to protect the former. We, the action corps and Zenkyoto, faced with each other for a long time without coming to a fight. For some reason or other, they did not after all make another attack against us. Zenkyoto's assaults that day resulted in a total of 50 seriously and lightly injured people. We felt damped to find that their offensive itself was not tenacious at all.

The motion to elect a delegate of representatives for the mass bargaining with the school administrators was carried by a landslide at the representative meeting that day. The near-unanimous vote was a natural outcome for the Zenkyoto-related students all had boycotted the meeting. The movement to elect a delegate for the mass bargaining was to propagated to the Hongo campus thereafter. In this sense, the representative meeting on December 13 marked a decisive turning point in the final stage of the Todai struggle.



Frays persisted thereafter, too. Factional Gewalt strifes were fought more intensively on the Komaba campus than Hongo which mostly attracted public attention. In Komaba, wheneve Zenkyoto were apoise to open an indignation meeting with the assistance of "foreign legions" or to make an assault on a JCP stronghold, the action corps immediately turned out to stave it off. Naturally Zenkyoto took up the gauntlet. Battles were fought all over the vast campus with both side taking wooden staves and bamboo poles in their hands.

As both sides repeated encounters of similar patterns so many times, they conditioned themselves to run-ins, which made each battle all the more difficult to bring to a conclusive end.

The equilibrium in strength naturally called for an escalation of weapons. Towards the last stage of the struggle, the both sides wound up brandishing steel pipes and throwing Molotov cocktails, fragible bottle grenades. With the advent of Molotov cocktails, we were compelled to protect ourselves from the quenchless flames. Our solution was to wear a heavy raincoat, and if the coat caught fire we would shed it. Even with that protection, we frequently got burnt in the face and the hand.

Scuffles between the Gewalt forces of the conflicting camps were fought by night, too. Despite its proximity to Shibuya--one of the busiest centers in Tokyo, the Komaba campus was covered with the stillness and darkness of night after the sun down. There was nobody prowling about in the darkness but the Gewalt forces. It was really an insecure place. Fist-sized rocks were hurled at us during our night patrols. "Bom. Bom." Just a moment after I heard the heavy sounds, a few of my colleagues around me got on their knees with a groan. We had been made a target of stone-hurling from which the action corps suffered considerable damage.

We were also ambushed by Zenkyoto's "foreign Gewalt legion" armed with steel pipes while walking in a patrol squad. Following a thick voice of the leader, "Kill Minsei!," I heard the heavy sound of footsteps come surging upon us. We bandied blows with the assault troop in darkness; but we had a hard time telling the enemy from the ally in the dark. The only clue was the helmet colors that were only vaguely visible.

All I could hear were sounds only: the sound of something hitting human bodies and helmets; the cries of the leaders of both parties, "Don't draw back" and "Don' spread out! Huddle up!"; and the sound of disorderly footsteps. It was a truly eerie sensation that the enemy were audible but invisible. Such was almost a daily, and nightly, routine of my life during that period.



The Todai struggle drew to a denouement just as the year 1969 opened. On January 10, a mass bargaining was held at Chichibunomiya Rugby Stadium between the acting president of Todai, Kato, and the delegates representing 7 Departments excluding Medical and Literature Departments. The parties exchanged written confirmations on 10 items which greatly recognized what the JCP-Minsei had been contending. In the course of arriving at that stage, we fought Gewalt battles almost everyday agaisnt Zenkyoto which had attempted to defeat the two parties of an agreement. There were also some really interesting incidents during that time; but I will skip them all as I suppose the reader is, by now, fed up with the descriptions of Gewalt, scuffles and what not.

On the day subsequent to the ratification of the confirmation, January 11, a resolution to call off the strike was passed at the assembly of the student representatives of the Komaba campus, which made the struggle's termination definite. On the morning of the same day, Zenkyoto and the JCP went through formalities of exchanging "prisoners of war" with some faculty members acting as mediators. Each side had had about 6 to 7 people taken prisoners from the scuffles the previous day. The ceremony was a ridiculously pompous event in which about 60 faculty members and administrators, all with a sad look, stood in a row halfway between the respective strongholds of the two parties; they even held up a flag of the Red Cross. The POW's were taken to that point for exchange. All of them were wounded, but had received medical treatment, and some had to be carried on a strecher. It was the first and probably the last that prisoners of war were exchanged through the mediation of faclty members at a school in the zenith of its academic fame.

From then on, the Todai struggle was to go downhill to a dramatic close upon the fall of the fortified Yasuda Memorial Hall. Prior to the fall, Zenkyoto and the JCP each staged a huge demonstration on the Hongo campus on January 15, each deploying even laborer corps. A subsequent report indicated that the Zenkyoto demonstrators numbered 4,000 and the JCP 3,000, all armed one way or another. Every time the antagonistic parties passed each other in procession, thousands of steel pipes and oak staves were thrust out all together from both sides. I later heard that the sound of all those steel pipes and oak sticks rubbing and hitting against each other had been just deafening.

On January 18, a troop of 8,500 riot police began attacking on the Yasuda Memorial Hall, in which Zenkyoto had held a castle. It marked the beginning of an offensive and defensive battle that was to continue for 72 hours thereafter. Meanwhile, in the vicinity of Kanda near Hongo, thousands of students in support of the Todai struggle rampaged in their battles with the riot police, declaring "神田カルチェラタン解放区". Those who were stubbornly defending the barricades at the Yasuda Memorial Hall, standing prepared to suffere an honorable death, were nearly all "foreign legions." The leaders of Todai Zenkyoto and New-Left sects at that time went underground outside the campus. It was no other than not-so-smart non-elite foreign Gewalt legions who carried out the most troublesome phase of the struggle in defense of the elite students of Todai.

In this offensive and defensive battle over the Yasuda fortress, Kakumaru withdrew most of its forces, leaving only nominal garrisons at a few locations assigned to them. Altho