Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 465, Rebels Without a Cause, Part 1.

I imagine that if you have any familiarity with the history of the U.S. in the 1960s,

you're at least a bit familiar with the history of student activism at that time.

The political student movement was very active during the 60s and a major feature of the era's political landscape.

From students for a democratic society to the anti-Vietnam war movement, the student movement was a major driver of,

and participant in the debates around what was happening in the United States in the 1960s.

And the interesting thing about the 60s is that this sense of chaos and opportunity

that the student movement was bound up in was not just an American phenomenon.

The student movement was something global and shaped the 60s around the world, not just

in the United States.

We've already talked about how Japan's 1960s radically reshaped the country, how the

anti-security treaty protests in 1960 led to the birth of the current incarnation of the Liberal

Democratic Party, as we know it today, and how the very success of the protests

also helped undermine the leftist movement in Japan, seemingly as it was poised for its greatest

success.

But one thing we have not spent that much time on specifically is Japan's student movement

in the 1960s, which was briefly also a major force in the social

and political arena before flaming out into its current substantially reduced form.

So today is going to be the start of a discussion about the student movement in Japan,

and especially about one of the most pivotal years of that movement,

1968, and how the rise and fall of the student movement reflected both tensions in Japan itself

and a sort of broader youth rebellion that, in a certain sense, helped to shape the uncertainties

...