Japanese student movements in the global 1960s: Encounter of the local context and the transnational context

In the late 60s, the United States, West Germany, France, Mexico, Poland, and several other countries experienced the student movements. The 1960s is called the decade of world upheaval partly because of large-scale student movements occurring simultaneously in various regions and countries. As to its background, recent scholarships focus on transnational context: the legacy of the Second World War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, decolonization in Africa, students’ interaction across the seas, and diffusion of counterculture thanks to improvements in transportation and communication technologies. Due to these, many of the student movements in the 1960s shared issues, strategies and ideas in common, but they also appeared only in specific regions and countries, not evenly around the globe.

  Japan also witnessed campus uprisings led by the radical or New Left students in the late 1960s. Out of all the universities in Japan, 127 (33.7%) experienced student strikes and building occupations in 1968, and 153 (40.6%) experienced the same in 1969 (Ono 1990: 28). The students protested against their authoritarian university faculty and administration, the government’s cooperation with the American Vietnam War, and the capitalistic Japanese society. Their movements had four characteristics that distinguished them from the movements in other countries: much stronger influence of communism and Marxism, the proliferation of the New Left sects, violent tendency in the protests, and the students’ existential inclination, as the most popular slogan “Self Negation” indicates.

  This presentation examines a case study of the University of Tokyo Struggle from 1968 to 1968 to show that these four distinct characteristics resulted from the interaction of the transnational context and the local context of Japan in the 1960s. In addition, this presentation demonstrates how the 1960s can provide sociological research on today’s transnational social movement with some insights on connections between localism and globalism.