The Land od the Rising Yen

science. Some of the big firms — to single
out one group — pick up promising young men and girls of peasant and
working-class origin, employ them on a part-time basis and send them to universities,
at the firm’s expense. They would never have reached a university without this
help and their main concern is to get on with their studies. They, among many
others, are furious with the instigators of the riots. It has been stated that
of the 40,000 students at Tokyo University there are only three hundred and
fifty activists, and some of these are not students at all. On occasions,
so-called students of thirty-eight or forty have been apprehended by the
police. I was also told many times that right-wing groups fight left-wing
groups. Maoists fight pro-Soviet groups, various socialist factions fight other
socialist factions and that, indeed, there are so many shades and cliques,
internecine tussles and scuffles, that it is impossible to speak of a ‘student
movement’. Only love of violence unites them.
    It is quite true that there are many
shades of political opinion among them: pro-Soviet, pro-Mao Communists (Chinese
influence is, of course, very strong and the Chinese example of
anti-Americanism has made a great impression); there are many shades of
nationalists and most of them, as well as the Communists, Maoists and
anti-Maoists, regard the return of Okinawa as their primary aim. There are some
Freudist-Marxist-Leninist groups and other even odder combinations. Some want
to end the Vietnam war; others rebel against the older generation, though not
in the German manner. Their reproach is not ‘Oh, how could you do it?’,
the stricture of German youth; they feel that because the older generation
bailed, it is useless and has therefore nothing to teach them. The older
generation, in turn, refuses to listen to immature youth. It has never been the
forte of the elders of Japanese society to listen to their juniors. Today they
would not understand them even if they listened. ‘They never had it so good’ —
as a well-known Japanese saying has it — so what do they want? Many students
want to get rid of the present government; of the Americans; of the
establishment. A considerable number want university reform, and indeed the
system is not only silly and outmoded but also corrupt. Too many factions want
too many, often contradictory, things and these, in the view of many
professors, cancel one another out and turn student demands into nonsense.
Others point out in despair that many of these demands have nothing to do with
them. University authorities could, possibly, reform the system of entries; but
how could they end the Vietnam war?
    ‘They only want to destroy and
they have no idea what to put in the place of the destroyed institutions.’ I
have heard those words from professors scores of times.
    Sometimes I replied: ‘But don’t you
agree, Professor, that if someone is genuinely convinced that something is evil
he will try to destroy it? He will regard the destruction of evil as a positive
step forward. Don’t you see that in such circumstances he will regard
destruction as constructive?’
    Constructive destruction? They looked
at me as if I were either a dangerous anarchist agitator or an equally
dangerous madman.
     
    Japanese students — or a small but
important section of them — are in revolt against a system, against society,
and above all, against a future which they regard as bleak and distasteful.
    Their aim ? They aim at
themselves. They want to release themselves from the tyranny of the established
order; they seek humanity in a changing, electronic society travelling, as it
were, in space and eager to reach the repulsive barrenness of the moon. They
seek beauty and goodness in a world where people are not evil, perhaps not even
indifferent to these notions, but too busy to care about them. They seek
freedom: not necessarily political freedom of any specific kind, just simple,
human freedom. Freedom from the organizations which are already sharpening
their claws, ready to catch them for life; freedom from eternal discipline;
freedom from the rat-race; freedom from the oppression of the old ones. Japan is even more of a gerontocracy than most societies. Old men assume that there is
special merit in age — which is a general fallacy; the reaction of much-tried
youth is the belief that there is special merit in youth — which is equally
mistaken.

    It is the riot-police who personify
the