Over the past three weeks I have looked back in this column at the decades leading up to the 21st century, which has to date seen a marked shift in Japanese domestic and international policy back toward a not-so-new form of nationalism. In this last article I discuss the 1970s, when critical decisions were made about the future direction of the nation.
It was obvious from the start of the decade that the radical student movement was self-destructing at a rapid rate. While the antiwar movements in the West were increasingly effective in focusing attention on the cruelties and injustices perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam, the Japanese protest movement was rent by factional strife, symbolized by the word uchigeba (violent in-fighting). While student activists in Europe and America were becoming conscious of threats to the environment and the needs of the underprivileged, their counterparts in Japan were hung up on ideological struggles among Marxist and neo-Marxist factions.
In May 1969, left-leaning students held a debate with the novelist and monarchist Yukio Mishima on the University of Tokyo's Komaba campus. This marked the peak of the 1960s polemic. Yet the debate, which went long over time, turned into a philosophical and aesthetic confrontation, culminating in Mishima's professed adoration for the Emperor as Japan's supreme national symbol -- a symbol the ideology-bent anti-imperial students were never going to accept.