Miyazaki Manabu heads to college this week to experience the life of the late 1960s student communist organizer. What does that work look like, how did it intersect with the politics of the period, and what was Miyazaki’s part in one of the first big student-administration battles of the era, the so-called “Sodai Struggle” at Waseda?
Sources
Andrews, William. Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima.
Miyazaki, Manabu. Toppamono: Outlaw,, Radical, Suspect. My Life in Japan’s Underworld. Trans. Robert Whiting.
Images
Protests against the Japan-Korea normalization treaty outside the National Diet. Miyazaki and his fellow Waseda communists would have participated in protests like these.Another Tokyo-based protest, this one from November, 1965.The halls of the student union building during the Waseda student strike (known as the Sodai strike, the “So” being the same character as the “wa” in Waseda.)Waseda’s campus during the strike. The left says “revolution”; the right “existentialism.”Newspaper coverage of the strike from the Nishi Nihon Shinbun, Feb 22, 1966. The headline says “Police officers will be stationed until Entrance exams- Fighting has already broken out – Uprooting the “Activists.” The banner above says “203 Students arrested.”
