Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 466. Rebels Without a Cause, Part 2.

I think that had you been running some sort of gambling parlor in 1968 and taking odds on the likely location of a college campus rebellion,

Nihon University would have been one of the worst bets you could offer.

For those of you not familiar with it,

Nihon University is a private school in Tokyo,

founded back in 1889 by one of the former leaders of the early Meiji government, Yamada Akioshi.

Like most of Tokyo's other major schools, the university is split between several different

campuses across the sprawling Tokyo metro area. And none of that inert it to student radicalism,

of course. Wasida University was also a private school in Tokyo,

founded in the Meiji period, and was so dominated by student radicalism and split between

different sects of politically active students, that the school was jokingly referred to as a

factional department store. No, Nihon University had other things going for it that made the place an

unlikely site of student rebellion. For one thing, the school was massive, over 90,000 students in

1968, meaning that one out of every 10 college students in all of Japan went to Nihon University. And within that gigantic

student body, the various radical student factions, like the Zengakuren, or the Communist Party-affiliated

Mince Youth League, had barely made a dent, a fact that the university administration touted

as a hallmark of their success.

Indeed, even the small number of radical left-wing students on campus

were generally more likely to sing the school fight song

rather than socialist or communist songs like the Internationale during their rallies.

However, the Nihon University Administration was, in the time-honored tradition of a certain

type of university administrator, known to university types all around the world, taking credit

...