Japan's First Student Radicals
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Japan’s First Student Radicals Harvard East Asian Series 70 The East Asian Research Center at Harvard University administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and adjacent areas. Japan’s First Student Radicals Henry DeWitt Smith, II Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1972 © Copyright 1972 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Preparation of this volume has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foun dation. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 72-81276 SBN 674-47185-7 Printed in the United States of America Contents Preface vii 1 The Prewar Japanese University System 1 2 The Roots of the Modem Student Movement 21 3 The Early Shinjinkai, 1918-1921 52 4 The Evolution of a National Student Movement, 1922- 1925 89 5 Shinjinkai Activity on the University Campus, 1923- 1928 131 6 Under the Spell of Fukumoto, 1926-1928 162 7 Suppression 186 8 The Student Movement Underground, 1928-1934 206 9 The Shinjinkai Membership, Before and After 231 10 The Shinjinkai in Historical Perspective 262 Appendix: Shinjinkai Membership List 291 Bibliography 300 Glossary 319 Index 327 v vi I CONTENTS Tables 1 Increase o£ students in higher education« 1914-1938 17 2 Departmental distribution of later Shinjinkai membership 234 3 Geographical distribution of Shinjinkai membership 236 Charts 1 Educational channels in prewar Japan 3 2 Radical groups at Waseda and Tokyo Imperial« 1918-1924 92 3 The Tokyo Imperial University Gakuyükai« 1926 153 4 Postwar educational reforms 273 Preface Drama dictates that this story begin near the end, on January 18, 1969. Throughout that day, beginning shortly after dawn and lasting on into the next afternoon, thousands 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, now commemorated on the Japanese left as the *‘1.18 Incident,” proved the climax of the turbulent student movement of the late 1960s and occasioned much comment both in Japan and abroad. On the same day and on the same campus, however, no more than three hundred yards from the center of the raging battle, occurred an event wholly neglected by journalists but of striking historical interest. Some sixty men, most in their mid-sixties, had gathered in the alumni club to reminisce about their own days as left-wing student activists in the 1920s. Coming together for the first time since their graduation from Tokyo Imperial University over three decades before, these men—now prominent politicians, journalists, writers, and businessmen—were commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding in December 1918 of the Shinjinkai (New Man Society), the leading prewar left-wing student group. Wholly coincidental to the more newsworthy activities nearby, this reunion of the former Shinjinkai membership was a dramatic indication of the long history of student radicalism in modem Japan. Striking as this coincidence may have been, it would be misleading vii viii I PREFACE to conclude that the historical significance of the Shinjinkai, the group which this book will treat in the greatest detail, lies purely in the newsworthiness of its postwar successors. While such continuity is certainly of interest, I would prefer to deal with it in the manner of a postscript and to see the student movement of the period between the world wars 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. The changes which the prewar stu dent movement effected in the structure of the entire left-wing move ment will be dealt with in the final chapter; some preliminary obser vations are in order, however, on die broad patterns of generational concern in Japan leading up to the beginnings of the student move ment in 1918. The unusually rapid pace of modernization in Japan since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 has naturally caused a continuing pattern of generational dislocation. The evolving crises of “youth” (by which term I refer to that small minority of the young at a given time who are educated, articulate, and concerned with broad national issues) in modern Japan can be understood only by reference to certain basic intellectual assumptions inherited from the Tokugawa period (1600- 1868). These assumptions were transmitted in the traditions of the elite warrior-official samurai class and began with the notion that all men have a determined place in society. While there is a certain ten sion between the Confucian ideal that a man’s “place” be determined by his abilities and the long-established Japanese tendency to ascribe rank by birth, it is nevertheless accepted that some men will naturally emerge to lead the rest: the youth with whom we are here concerned considered themselves, often unconsciously, part of this natural ruling elite. A further assumption of the Tokugawa Confucian heritage was that political behavior is basically a matter of ethics and that the right to govern thus falls to the ethically pure—again, a category to which the young are quick to assign themselves. A third assumption is that the ethical behavior of those who rule is closely related to the study of basic principles. This meant that students, those engaged in full-time study, were almost by definition concerned with politics. Upon these basic assumptions, broadly Confucian in origin, was imposed the historical situation of the systematic adoption of Western PREFACE I ix models to achieve rapid economic development and military prepared ness. The resultant tensions which were thrust upon all Japanese intellectuals, and the young in particular, may be broadly classed as two: those deriving from the “Westernn ess” of the process and those deriving from its “modernity/' The earliest strains were largely of the former sort, relating to the problem of cultural identity, and have been provocatively analyzed by Kenneth Pyle in The New Generation in Meiji Japan. This generation was “new” relative to the “old men of Meiji“ who had engineered the revolutionary reforms of the Restor ation; specifically, they were “the first generation of Japanese to attend the new Western-oriented schools of higher learning.“ 1 Reaching maturity in the decade before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, this generation struggled with the fundamental problem of national identity and of the proper use to be made of the Japanese heritage in the process of modernization. The two opposing sides of the “new generation“ of Meiji Japan, the Westemizers of the Min’yüsha and the traditionalists of the Seikyôsha, had in common a preoccupation with the integrity of Japan as a nation vis-à-vis other nations; “everywhere in Meiji Japan,“ one writer has observed, “one is struck by the stress on dedication and responsibility to what is described as the national interest.“ 2 Success for youth in late nineteenth century Japan was measured against potential contribution to the success of the nation in its struggle for international security and recognition. State service, thus, was the highest ideal for Meiji students, an ideal strongly reinforced by Con- fudan precedent This rather exdusive concern for national interest meant on the one hand a tendency to gloss over sodal and economic divisions within the nation and on the other a reluctance to indulge in self-centered philosophizing. The sights of Meiji students were set high and wide, giving their ambitions a certain heroic cast. A major shift from this Meiji pattern of the nation-centered youth began to occur around the turn of the century and was apparent by the death of the Emperor Mdji in 1912. Of the two major historical 1. Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan—Problems of Cultural identity, 1885-1895 (Stanford, 1969), p. 3. 2. Marius B. Jansen, “Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization," in Marius B. Jansen, ed.. Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (Prince ton, 1965), p. 67. x I PREFACE developments which effected this shift, perhaps the more important was a series of dramatic diplomatic successes which released Japan from the sense of foreign threat that had done much to mold the nationalism of the earlier “new generation.“ Revision of the unequal treaties, military victory first over China and then over tsarist Russia, alliance on equal terms with Great Britain, and entrance into the im perialist club of nations with the acquisition of Formosa and Korea: in the course of ten-odd years, the enduring Meiji goals of national independence, military might, and international respect had been achieved beyond all doubt. A second major determinant in attitudes among the young was a basic transition in the character of state education, from the varie gated, open, and largely Western emphases of the early decades of Meiji to a pattern of highly uniform indoctrination in the official myths of imperial Japan. At the same time, discipline and the enforcement of standard behavior (the requirement of uniforms for students in higher education was one example) became increasingly effective, and one finds a gradual shift away from the diversity and rowdiness of the early Meiji student population. For Japanese educated under the new uniform state system, which was in full operation by about 1905, national identity presented no immediate crisis, for it was built into the educational curriculum. The fact of nationalism by indoctrination meant that adolescent rebellion would most typically be in opposition to the state rather than in support of it. It meant at the same time that a reemergence of a perceived threat to national integrity, of the sort which was to occur in the 1930s, might trigger the deep national ist responses that had been conditioned in the period of compulsory education.