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(★)(´Drama dictates that this story begin near the end,´writes the author,´on January 18, 1969. Throughout that day, beginning shortly after dawn and lasting on into the next afternoon, thousand of Japanese riot police laid seige to several buildings on the campus of Tokyo University in an effort to evict the masked and helmeted student radicals who had occupied the university campus for over six months. This epic exchange of rocks, firebombs, and tear gas... proved the climax of the turbulent student movement of the late 1960s and occasioned much comment both in Japan and abroad.´ Henry DeWitt Smith II goes on to relate the coincidental event which was occurring a slight distance away from the raging battle --a gathering of some seventy men, most in their mid-sixties, in the alumni club to reminisce about their own days as left-wing student activists at Tokyo Imperial University in the 1920s. Meeting for the first time since their graduation, these men, most of whom were prominent in their professions, were commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Shinjinkai [New Man Society], the leading prewar left-wing student group. This reunion of the former Shinjinkai membership dramatically highlighted the long history of student radicalism in modern Japan. Although Mr. Smith traces the continuity of the prewar and postwar student movements, he believes that the Shinjinkai movement is vital to the understanding of Japan´s recent student movement. For this reason the major focus of the book is on the Shinjinkai, regarded by the author as´a phenomenon of great importance in itself, marking off a new era in the development both of the concerns of the young and of social protest in modern Japan.´ After providing the necessary background on the university system and the roots of student unrest, the study details the period from the founding of the Shinjinkai and a number of similar groups in late 1918 and early 1919 until the suppression of the student movement, with the rise of militarism, in the 1930s. Special attention is given to such problems as the relations between the student movement and the Japanese Communist Party, the disputes within the student movement, the student involvement in the labor movement, and the lifestyle of Japanese student radicals. Based on extensive documentary material and the author´s interviews with many members of the Shinjinkai,´Japan´s First Student Radicals´concludes with an analysis of the Shinjinkai members, both in terms of origins and later careers and with a look at the precedents set by the experiences of the 1920s and 1930s for the revived student movements after 1945. Mr. Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. ▼CONTENTS : 1.The Prewar Japanese University System, 2.The Roots of the Modern Student Movement, 3.The Early Shinjinkai, 1918-1921, 4.The Evolution of a National Student Movement, 1922-1925, 5.Shinjinkai Activity on the University Campus, 1923-1928, 6.Under the Spell of Fukumoto, 1926-1928, 7.Suppression, 8.The Student Movement Underground, 1928-1934, 9.The Shinjinkai Membership, Before and After, 10.The Shinjinkai in Historical Perspective) |
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