A Japanese Grandmother on the Student Movement She Joined 50 Years Ago: An Age of Idealism, Freedom, and Violence

This is the second piece in our Age of Utopia series.

“Of everyone, I was the true dregs — the most useless person of all.”

In 1970 that thought took hold of Makoto Toyama and would not let go. She decided to quit the student movement, stop marching, and withdraw from Sophia University of her own accord. She was 21.

Toyama cut off every tie to her comrades in the movement. As for why she left, she has rarely told anyone — not even the family she has lived with for decades.

Born in 1948, Toyama turned 70 this year. She belongs to the first generation of what Japan calls “the children who don't know war,” and to the postwar baby boom known as the Dankai Generation — the children born between 1947 and 1949, 8 million of them in all.

Japanese society at the time had rallied behind the slogan of a “decisive battle of reproduction,” and the women's magazines of the day filled up with lines like “contribute children to the nation.”

By the official count, the average Japanese woman of that period bore 5.0 children in her lifetime, the high point of population growth in Japan's history. Hokkaido, where Toyama was born, was once named the region with the most “children of honor” in Japan. Her own family had five children.

Born after the war, Toyama never went through the firebombings and the hunger her parents had lived through. But the memory of that fear stayed buried in every corner of society.

Eiji Oguma, a professor at Keio University's Faculty of Policy Management, once summed up the traits of postwar Japanese society in his book How to Change Society. One of them was a fierce commitment to absolute pacifism: “It rejects war in any form. Nowhere else in the world has absolute pacifism carried as much weight as it has in postwar Japan.”

Toyama loved to read, and she noticed social injustice early. She had no patience for people who took no interest in social questions — her own older sisters included.

At the start of the 1960s Toyama was still in elementary school, but the restlessness that antiwar feeling had stirred up travelled from Tokyo all the way to her small town on the eastern edge of Hokkaido. She says she can still remember exactly how shaken she was by the death of Michiko Kanba, a University of Tokyo student.

On June 15, 1960 — 15 years after the end of World War II — more than a hundred thousand university students surrounded Japan's National Diet, demanding that the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (the Anpo Treaty) be sent back. Under the treaty the two countries would form a military alliance. Japan's postwar rules barred it from raising an army or declaring war, but American troops could be stationed on Japanese soil.

Shintaro Ishihara, then still a novelist and not yet a politician, joined the group Young Japan Association and told the Asahi Shimbun: “Rallies and protests never much interested me, but this was about to cross a line inside me, so I stood up.”

Outside the Diet a huge crowd of students chanted “Down with Anpo!” Before long the police line broke, and students and police began to fight.

In the thick of that standoff of clubs and shields, a female student in a white top and dark blue trousers, Michiko Kanba, was carried out by her comrades with blood running from her head. She died in the protest. She was 22.

Kishi Nobusuke driving opposition lawmakers out of the Diet chamber, the images of students fighting police — all of it reached the whole country through the television set, one of the three sacred treasures every postwar Japanese household wanted. (Note: the three sacred treasures were the television, the refrigerator, and the washing machine.)

Two days later Japan's major newspapers ran a joint front-page statement condemning violence.

The death of the student Michiko Kanba set Japan's student movement alight at a stroke, and the whole society was carried away by the “anti-Anpo struggle.” By the organizers' count that year, 5.6 million people joined demonstrations across Japan.

The anti-Anpo struggle rose and fell over the years that followed. Students and ordinary residents also mounted protests against the expansion of Haneda Airport, the Sanrizuka Struggle over the building of Narita Airport, and marches against the Vietnam War.

Naoyuki Umemori, a professor of political science and economics at Waseda University, argues that Japan's postwar social movements began with the democratization drive of the “postwar reformist forces” — a movement built on the shared experience of war and poverty, and aimed at changing the country's political, economic, and social structures.

Industrialization, meanwhile, had visibly improved Japan's economy. Between 1955 and 1973, Japan's average growth rate reached 10%. In 1965, for the first time, manufacturing employed more people than farming, forestry, and fishing; from that year Japan formally entered its era as a “manufacturing power,” which lasted until 1993.

Industrialization brought mass consumption with it, and the “disciplining” of daily life.

In 1973 NHK surveyed public feeling about the high growth rate. Of 1,500 respondents, 59% said they “opposed continued high growth,” far more than the 22% in favor. They listed what growth had brought with it: pollution, the destruction of the natural environment, rising prices, the loss of humanity.

In 1966, at 18, Toyama passed the entrance exam for Sophia University, against a backdrop of antiwar feeling and a student movement gathering force. Others of her Dankai Generation were becoming university students within a year or two either side.

So many students enrolled that Japan produced “mega-universities,” routinely with more than 100,000 students. Between 1960 and 1974 the rate of students going on to university (including junior colleges) rose from 10% to 37%.

Students were deeply unhappy with an outdated education system. They challenged the schools' strict controls, protested tuition increases, and demanded that universities govern themselves.

In 1968, student movement organizations at universities across the country came together in the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee (Zenkyoto for short). Before that, the student self-governing associations at many schools had formed the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations (Zengakuren for short).

Sophia University, where Toyama studied, fell under Zenkyoto's Liberation Faction. The moment she enrolled she joined the Sophia University Political Science Research Society, for the express purpose of taking part in the movement. Until she dropped out, what she knew of the world came not from the classroom but from the street.

Being a woman, Toyama was sometimes given a support role — making rice balls for everyone, or raising money on the street. She jokes that she has no idea how many rice balls she wrapped during those years. There were fiercer actions too, from time to time.

1968 was the year the world remembers as the year of the student movements, and Japan was no exception. The movement escalated that year, with the University of Tokyo's Yasuda Auditorium at its center. The University of Tokyo Zenkyoto, protesting the internship system for medical residents, launched a struggle, boycotted classes, and occupied Yasuda Auditorium. Rather than offer any concession, the administration asked riot police to enter the campus and clear the students out.

The following January, students occupied Yasuda Auditorium again. Two days of fighting ended with 819 students arrested, among them friends of Toyama's.

Japan's student movement differed from Western Europe's in one large way. Both were deeply marked by Marxism, but what carried the most weight in Japan was the “vanguard party” — the faction, built out of a small elite.

From the 1960s on, Japan's left split into a tangle of branches and lines. Zenkyoto belonged to the fast-rising “New Left movement.” But the fighting between factions was fierce, and in the movement's later years it produced a great deal of internal violence.

In 1972 the United Red Army, one branch of the New Left, purged and killed 12 of its own members at the Asama-Sanso lodge in the name of “summing up.” Violence brought Japan's student movement to a forced end, and “New Left” became a label with nothing but bad connotations attached to it.

Toyama says the United Red Army affair caused enormous pain to Japanese society and to her.

Today, any new Japanese civic movement takes pains to avoid actions that hit hard at the system, for fear of turning the public against it — never mind the young people, who are largely indifferent to politics. As Toyama puts it: “The education system has raised a crop of obedient students who don't know how to resist.”

After she left the movement, Toyama went on quietly following social causes where she lived, from women's rights to opposing nuclear power. In a way that is part of the good inheritance left by the so-called Zenkyoto Generation: a critical spirit, idealism, and the will to act.

Talking to QDaily, Toyama was still a little uneasy about setting out the details of the movement and her own part in it. That unease may have to do with how the movement ended in failure, or with how confused she was by it at the time.

In the end, Toyama chose to tell her story under a pseudonym:

Even as an elementary school student, I looked down on my sister for not caring about social problems

“Komatsu was in the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Letters during the 1960 Anpo struggle, and he had been an officer in a student movement organization. When Michiko Kanba joined a demonstration and was beaten to death by the riot police, he was right beside her, and was himself badly hurt.” — Haruki Murakami, 1Q84.

In Nemuro, a remote town in Hokkaido, even elementary school children remembered Kanba's death vividly.

In 1960 Tokyo was in the middle of the Anpo struggle, and a female student named Michiko Kanba was killed. I was only in sixth grade, but reading about it in the newspaper shook me badly. Even in high school I was still reading memorial volumes about Kanba and books by people who had been there.

My family home is in Nemuro, and my family was in the fishing business. I had two older sisters, an older brother, and a younger sister — five children in all.

During the Anpo struggle my eldest sister was at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. Kanba died on June 15, and my sister came home for the summer holiday in July. I asked her whether she had joined the Anpo demonstrations, and she said, “Go? I wasn't even following it.”

Young as I was, I felt a deep sympathy with the postwar democracy movement. My sisters showed not the slightest interest in social or political questions, and at the time I rather disliked them for it.

I loved reading from an early age. In fifth or sixth grade I read Kotan no Kuchibue (The Whistle of Kotan), and I still remember the story clearly — it centers on two Ainu brothers (Note: an indigenous people of northern Japan). That book taught me what the Ainu had suffered as a people. Looking back, that was probably what first made me aware of social injustice.

Education wasn't tightly controlled in those days, especially out in the country. My elementary school homeroom teacher talked a great deal about World War II. He often told us what war was, and how much suffering it inflicted on ordinary people.

In high school there was a course called Ethics and Society, and the school also had a Social Issues Research Society. My homeroom teacher raised political questions in class and served as the club's advisor. He told us the American planes that bombed Vietnam took off from Okinawa, so Japan was not unconnected to that war. (Note: The United States governed the Ryukyu Islands from 1945 to 1972. As much as 33% of the land taken up by U.S. bases in Okinawa was privately owned. In the early postwar years of the 1950s, the U.S. military expanded its bases by requisitioning private land cheaply.)

There were anti-Vietnam War movements all over Japan, but Hokkaido was too far out of the way for demonstrations. What we had were study sessions called “Japan Looks at the Vietnam Question.”

The high school library was a comfortable place for me. It didn't hold many books, but a group of us who loved reading would gather there and lend each other what we had. I read a lot of modern Japanese literature and Russian literature, including Kenzaburo Oe and Yumiko Kurahashi. That was probably where I first came to left-wing ideas like socialism.

For my first two years at university I barely went to class — it was all demonstrations

In 1965 and 1966, students at Keio University and Waseda University launched struggles — over tuition increases, heavy-handed administration, and the reach of corporate and political interests into the universities, respectively — which opened the second wave of the 1960s student movement. The first wave was the anti-Anpo struggle of the early 1960s.

Getting into university wasn't easy then, least of all for a woman, but my family still sent all five of us to universities in Tokyo.

I studied Russian in Sophia University's Faculty of Foreign Studies. I chose Sophia because I wanted to learn Russian and Sophia had the program. I had also passed the exam for Waseda, but Sophia ranked higher, and my father said, “Sophia, obviously,” so Sophia it was.

Japan had a fair number of mega-universities at the time. The largest was Nihon University, with 100,000 students; Waseda had 30,000. Sophia, a Catholic school, hadn't expanded excessively, and since its campus sat in the Yotsuya area of central Tokyo, it had comparatively roomy grounds. Most Sophia students came from well-off families.

After I got into Sophia I once saw, in television footage of the student movement, a blue flag that read “Sophia University Political Science Research Society.” That was how I learned Sophia had activists of its own, so I decided to join the society the moment I enrolled. I went into the club intending to join the movement.

Not long after I enrolled there was a demonstration on April 21 — a fairly big affair, as I recall, and the government sent riot police to put it down. Ever after, whenever I saw a patrolman, however kindly he was smiling, I still thought of him as a claw of the state machine.

The Sophia University Political Science Research Society wasn't only Sophia students. Outsiders took part too — students from Hosei University and Waseda, for instance. We even held a reading group on Lenin's The Communist Manifesto.

You could say that for my first two years at university I barely went to class at all. It was one dense run of demonstrations. We often raised money for the movement, at Shinjuku Station and Ochanomizu Station for instance, and the office workers passing by were willing to give us their change.

I remember once at Shinjuku Station, trying to hide, when a young white-collar man happened to walk toward me. I threw away my helmet, grabbed his hand, and asked, “Can we pretend to be a couple?” so I could slip past. He kindly played along. Another time at Ochanomizu Station a shopkeeper pulled his shutter down so we could hide from the riot police and get away afterward.

The truth is that even ordinary citizens who never joined the movement were supporting the students in their own way.

Every time, I went out expecting not to come back alive

Every time I took part I was frightened. I always went out expecting not to come back alive. But I went, because not going meant betraying my comrades.

There were cafés near the university that different student organizations used as meeting places. Classes didn't run from morning to night in those days, so students had plenty of time of their own. Our society printed a lot of flyers with meeting information on them, and people would turn up after seeing one. This is only my guess, but I think most of the people who joined the movement were brought in by a classmate or an acquaintance rather than being regular members of the society.

For big actions we organized in advance. Setting aside people who came on their own, those of us in the society would usually assign someone on-site as the “repo” (short for “report”) — someone who kept the record instead of marching, and who held everyone's student ID cards so the police wouldn't find them on us if we were arrested.

The repo was usually picked from among those with experience, people who could read a situation and react fast. After each demonstration the repo confirmed whether everyone had come back safely, who was hurt or arrested, and if someone had been arrested, organized the effort to get them out.

At any Japanese student demonstration you would see people in helmets of different colors, which usually stood for different factions: the Liberation Faction wore blue, the ML Faction red (Note: the Communist League Marxist-Leninist, ML Faction for short), the Kakumaru Faction — the Revolutionary Marxist Faction of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League — white. As for black, I can't quite remember.

In any case, once you arrived someone handed out helmets. Mine was blue, the color of the Sophia University Political Science Research Society. Each faction had its own strongholds in Tokyo; the Liberation Faction's were Sophia University and the University of Tokyo's College of Arts and Sciences.

Most people didn't really understand the differences between the factions. Which one you joined came down to whoever you happened to meet first. Had I chosen Waseda, I would have ended up in the Kakumaru Faction, simply because Waseda was Kakumaru's stronghold.

The leadership of each faction had a strong sense of factional identity, but the rank and file did not. A close friend of mine at Sophia fell in love with a Kakumaru boy from Waseda; that sort of thing was not unusual in the movement.

In 1968 the “New Left” forces mostly operated under the Zenkyoto name. At Sophia, the Zenkyoto was led mainly by the Liberation Faction of the Socialist party; the Hosei University Zenkyoto was controlled by the Chukaku Faction, and Waseda's by the Kakumaru Faction. It was a bit jumbled, but that is how the forces divided.

The Democratic Youth League and the Japanese Communist Party, meanwhile, worked under the Zengakuren banner.

At Sophia I would tell people I was a Zenkyoto activist, though I never had a clear grasp of the relations between the factions. Personally I disliked the way the Japanese Communist Party separated an elite leadership from the masses; their attitude talked down to people.

Sophia's Zenkyoto and Zengakuren were sharply divided, and small clashes broke out often, though nothing that ever became serious violence. So even without understanding it all deeply, I did think it over before joining the “New Left” side.

A woman in the movement

One crucial precondition for Japan's new social movements was the existence of “young people and women,” who were seen as a single coherent group.

In the 1960s Japan had only just entered industrial society. Factories and offices multiplied, changing how people worked, and the ranks of laborers and office workers steadily grew. Young people and women were both pushed to the margins of industrial society. Unlike laborers, they were not embedded in it. Young people hated the prospect of nine-to-five in a suit every day; women were dispirited by a life that offered nothing but housewifery. When they called for overturning the system, they did not necessarily mean seizing power, and their cry differed markedly from a labor movement flying the banners of socialized means of production, higher wages, and jobs. Theirs was a cry for “freedom” in a much broader sense.

I was the only one in my family who ever defied our parents, but because my grades were outstanding, my father never once said, “If only this one had been a boy.”

My high school social studies teacher told us once, “Before you are women, you are people,” and I remember thinking, “But I am a woman.” Back then I hardly noticed the inequalities between the sexes — enrollment rates, for instance. I only became aware of women's issues after I joined the student movement.

There were roles for women in the movement, of course: after the barricades went up, taking shifts at the university, standing watch, making rice balls. I have truly lost count of how many rice balls I made.

It was in the movement that I learned to smoke. Some people would tell me, “It's not good for a girl to smoke,” and that was what made me conscious of being a woman. Smoking is bad for anyone's health, man or woman — so why single out the girls? Why should a woman be looked at differently? I had always had a vague sense of the question of sex; it only came clear to me after I joined the movement.

I didn't hide my part in the movement from my family, but I didn't give them a detailed account either. My mother had no idea how dangerous it was, so she said little. My father, on the other hand, was very worried and very angry, though never to the point of forbidding it or making me come back to Hokkaido.

The media weren't much developed in Nemuro, and my mother paid little attention to newspapers or television news; nor did my sisters. So when I was in Nemuro I never expected them to understand. The student movement simply never came up between us. We went on with ordinary daily life.

My older brother was studying in Tokyo too, at Aoyama Gakuin University. He was out for a good time and didn't study much. He knew something about the student movement, but he had nothing but contempt for the people in it: he thought it absurd that students would sponge off their parents and join a movement at the same time.

My brother also said it was contradictory of me to be in the movement while spending money on fashionable high heels to dress myself up. Honestly, I didn't know which of the two mattered more. But being with my comrades gave me a powerful sense of belonging — we would talk together about what we were really doing and what it was for.

Zenkyoto occupies the University of Tokyo's Yasuda Auditorium

University of Tokyo students, unhappy with the internship system for medical residents, formed the “University of Tokyo Zenkyoto.” The university became the main battlefield of the student movement. In June 1968 the University of Tokyo Zenkyoto briefly occupied Yasuda Auditorium, and the president at the time, Kazuo Okochi, asked riot police to enter the campus. That set off the students' fury and an open-ended class boycott. At the end of the year, the Ministry of Education announced that the following year's University of Tokyo entrance exam would be cancelled.

On January 18 of the next year, Zenkyoto occupied Yasuda Auditorium again. Riot police stormed in once more to arrest students, who fought back with stones and Molotov cocktails. Over two full days of clashes, police arrested 819 students and prosecutors indicted more than 600 activists; 15 of them were sentenced to two years in prison.

In September 1969 the magazine Sekai published a survey asking, “What do you think the University of Tokyo struggle was for?” Respondents could pick more than one answer. Establishing their own subjectivity: 41.7%. Remaking themselves: 31.7%. Dismantling the existing university system: 27.2%. Getting to the roots of their own thinking: 25.6%. Expressing an anti-establishment conviction: 25.0%. Liberating the senses: 5.5%.

Before the Yasuda Auditorium affair, students would usually barricade campus buildings so no one could get in, and go on strike and boycott classes. At Sophia, riot police came in to empty the school and clear out everyone who had barricaded the buildings.

In December 1968, with Sophia barricaded and no classes to attend, my father grew so worried that he wanted to bring me back from Tokyo to Hokkaido, and sent my mother to fetch me.

I couldn't bear the thought of my mother, who didn't even know how to take a train, making the trip alone, so I went back to Nemuro with her. As it happened, Zenkyoto's occupation of Yasuda Auditorium took place while I was home in Nemuro.

My mother was a housewife, more or less the ordinary mother who turns up in an elementary or middle school social studies textbook. She was a lovely person and very obedient to my father, but she never once scolded me for what I was doing at school, because she didn't grasp how serious it was and wasn't especially worried. With a mother like that — how should I put it — I always felt that anything I did would be accepted. Sometimes I would think that even if I couldn't make it in Tokyo and slunk back to Nemuro in defeat, my mother would still welcome me home cheerfully.

My mother knew things were hard for me and it never crossed her mind that I might refuse to come home; she had already bought the express train tickets. By then our base of operations was gone, and the New Year was right behind it, so I went home without putting up much of a fight.

Before I went home I truly hadn't expected the movement to escalate to something as serious as the occupation of Yasuda Auditorium. Once in Nemuro I was frantic, thinking of nothing but getting back to Tokyo and rejoining the movement, however angry my father was and however much he objected.

After it all broke out, some of my friends had already been arrested. There were no mobile phones then, and the only way to reach friends in Tokyo was an expensive long-distance call, so I didn't get much news. But I did learn that close friends of mine had been arrested, and I worried constantly about what had become of them and what they were doing. So in February, using the New Year's money I'd been given, I went back to Tokyo without telling my parents. Only when I reached my Tokyo apartment did they realize I had run away from home.

Sophia didn't reopen until April; before that students couldn't get onto campus. I joined small protests with students from Meiji University, Waseda, and Hosei, and met my comrades in cafés to keep the movement going.

One of the largest aims of the Zenkyoto movement then was to oppose the University Control Bill and guarantee the freedom and independence of universities. The Japanese government had set up a university management council and begun interfering in university teaching and administration. Alongside that, we also raised demands against Anpo and similar issues in these protests.

Many Zenkyoto student leaders and members had been expelled, and students demanded the schools rescind the expulsions. Zenkyoto had put these demands forward, and yet the administration reopened and carried on as though nothing had happened, which the students could not stand. They mounted a run of protests, including small-scale “class-smashing” and “exam-smashing” actions, and left campus to join antiwar demonstrations.

In the year after I got back to Tokyo I took part on and off in actions large and small. Mostly that meant “rescue work,” helping the activists arrested at Yasuda Auditorium and in other big incidents. We had to bring them food and water, and when the fundraising fell short, we all took part-time jobs.

Ordinarily, if I had work I got up early; if not, I slept until noon and then went to a café for a meeting. Looking back now, it was an aimless life, and a shameful one.

“Of everyone, I was the true dregs, the most useless person”

Japan's student movement mobilized enormous numbers of people in the 1960s. Young people like Toyama poured in a great deal of time and effort. They joined in order to change the depoliticized, disciplined selves they had been made into.

But as the movement dragged on, the people in it wore down. Shuhei Kosaka, once a member of the University of Tokyo Zenkyoto, said in looking back on it that a movement built on “making your own way of life the problem” ended up causing its members pain. “You stopped knowing what the right way to live was,” and what was left was “nothing but an empty self-consciousness and anxiety.”

As for why I dropped out, I have never told anyone, to this day.

Late in the movement I gradually learned that violence inside the organizations was on the rise, and my own doubts and exhaustion kept growing. One day, riding the Yamanote Line, I saw two boys younger than me who looked by every sign like ordinary laborers, and for some reason I suddenly burst into tears. Part of it was realizing that in the end I was still living off my parents; part of it was that at university I had neither studied properly nor done any real work.

Wasn't I talking about carrying out a social movement while living an ignorant, aimless life?

“Of everyone, I was the true dregs, the most useless person.” Caught in these thoughts, I cried my way around one entire loop of the Yamanote Line. From that day on I quickly settled on leaving university, taking a job as a worker, and changing society by working hard and creating value.

That year, 1970, the movement was no longer so intense. Some students went back to class instead of joining actions, to get the credits they needed to move up a year and go on with their studies.

When I decided to leave, my mother still didn't understand and didn't interfere. My father only said: “You're a child who does what she says she will do. If I threw you out of the house now for disobeying me, and you really left, we'd end up worrying about whether you were alive or dead. So do as you like.”

In Japan, when you enroll at university you need a guarantor besides your parents. If you simply stopped attending without a word, the tuition bills would go to the guarantor and cause them trouble. My father felt that if I was going to leave, I should go through the proper procedures and not make trouble for anyone else.

After that I never again saw the comrades I'd worked with in the movement at university. Asked why I stopped, I still can't say clearly, and I have no reasoning to offer. The only answer I can give is that I couldn't go back to university, so I had no choice but to give it up.

I was near the top of my class right through high school. It may sound distasteful to say so, but I had never once imagined I could be less than other people.

The other thing is that everyone in the movement then was a young man or woman, and there were plenty of romantic entanglements. I heard, for instance, that a classmate who had been imprisoned had passed word to me of his feelings. Too much emotional residue had mixed into the whole movement — we were no longer simply comrades in action — so I wanted to cut all those ties cleanly.

Ever since that day on the train when I felt like scum, and after starting work, I saw that a job was not such a simple thing either. So I dropped my earlier naivety and decided to try my hand at whatever came along. I worked very hard. At first I edited a trade association bulletin, which felt difficult at the beginning, but gradually I earned people's recognition and the work grew interesting. At the same time I gradually lost touch with my friends from university.

Before I left Tokyo I met my husband. He grew up in Tokyo's shitamachi, and a high school classmate of mine from Nemuro introduced us. We first met at a large gathering, and then kept running into each other around Tokyo by chance — three times, at Yoyogi, at Kinokuniya, and at Hibiya. It felt like too much of a coincidence, so we went out, got to know each other better, and eventually started dating.

In high school my husband had joined the Japanese Communist Party, but he didn't accept its top-down elite style of leadership, so he broke away and turned toward the “New Left.” Our thinking matched on that. Because of his family's finances he could only consider national or public medical schools, so he spent an extra year studying and got into Fukushima Prefectural Medical University. We never took part in protests together, but our views were very close, and we saw each other often when he came back to Tokyo.

My father pressed us to marry quickly and settle down, and my husband's mother also thought it was better to marry early. So in something of a rush, just before I turned 24, we held our wedding in Tokyo.

My husband still had two years left of his six-year medical course, so I went with him to Fukushima and lived there two and a half years. After he graduated and passed the national licensing exam we moved to Sapporo. We had a daughter and a son in Fukushima, and our third child after the move to Hokkaido.

Japan's student movement reaches its end, and the New Left is stigmatized

By the end of 1969 Japan's student movement was in decline, yet a radical leftist group, the United Red Army, was born. It had split off from the Communist League. Its methods were extreme enough that the authorities later designated it a terrorist organization.

In February 1972 the United Red Army put its members through harsh military training at the Asama-Sanso lodge and, in the name of “summing up,” subjected 12 of them to struggle sessions and abuse until they died — what is known as the Asama-Sanso Incident. Once word got out, “New Left” and “student movement” were branded with an infamous label that cast a shadow over them ever after, and it obscured what was positive in the movement: its idealism, its critical spirit, its political and social analysis, and its cultural creation.

According to a survey by Japan's Metropolitan Police Department, 1,776 internal clashes occurred within the movement between 1968 and 1975, leaving 4,848 people injured, 44 killed, and 3,438 arrested. The Zenkyoto White Paper also surveyed people who had taken part: of 563 activists, 24% said they left the movement because of internal violence, and 16.9% because of the United Red Army.

The Asama-Sanso Incident of 1972 caused enormous pain to Japanese society, and to me.

As I said, we always wore helmets and carried wooden staves when we protested, but I never liked using violence to reach our goals, so that conflict was always inside me.

The Asama-Sanso Incident showed me what violence looks like carried to its limit. So many people died in the infighting that I began to wonder where the student movement was actually going. Back at Sophia, people used to talk about drifting off to South America, or working on a farm. It seemed everyone wanted to let themselves go, as a way of escaping reality.

I truly hope more people come to know how much pain the United Red Army caused, to individuals and to society as a whole. I resolved to hold on to the peaceful life I had.

I raised my children and worked in Fukushima, a city in the Tohoku region, and took that as the basis of my life. In those days it was all but impossible for a woman to work and raise children at once; even the women who managed to keep working after marriage had to give it up once they had a child. After marrying I quit my job in Tokyo, and once in Fukushima I had children quickly and never worked again. After we moved to Hokkaido I only took the odd part-time job.

Japan's economic growth over this period was astonishing, faster even than America's, so the living standards of workers at the bottom rose considerably. That comfortable life seemed to reclaim the student movement's rebellious energy, and left people settling for a lukewarm contentment.

While raising three children in Hokkaido, I began paying attention to social movements again after I turned 30. It happened to coincide with the government pushing through the Equal Employment Opportunity Law, and there was a lot of news on television promoting equality between men and women, so I joined campaigns in Sapporo to advance the law, and the women's movement in Fukushima as well. And because I love to read, and because Sapporo, a city of 1.5 million, had only one library, I also joined the “community library movement.”

Working in local social movements, I met quite a few people who had also been in the student movement. We hadn't known each other back then, but these people of my generation, in their 30s and 40s and with lives of their own, were still taking part in social causes and still had the energy to change society. Everyone was living their own life in their own field while keeping an eye on the society around them.

The people in Hokkaido today who actively oppose the security bills and nuclear power, for instance, are mostly what you'd call the Zenkyoto Generation. I believe people who were in the student movement end up more sensitive to social problems in the end. They don't take all the blame onto themselves; they look at things from society's side and notice its contradictions.

Times have changed, but social and political problems are still severe — poverty, the security bills, and so on. It's only that society isn't inclined to connect problems like these back to 1968.

After 1968 Japan carried out its system of controlled education very thoroughly, and it raised a crop of highly obedient students who don't know how to resist. The result is that today's Japanese have grown estranged from society, and fewer of them are conscious of being members of it.

Still, I did notice that in 2015 a new student organization appeared in Japanese society, SEALDs (Note: a group formed for a limited period, since disbanded). They were quite different, and I have high hopes that what this new generation does can gradually help the Japanese recover a sense of being one with society.

*With thanks to interpreter Zhan Muru and translator Hu Yue for their help with this article.

The next story about 1968 will be about young people in America.