Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode episode 568, The Revolutionary, Part 3.

I want to start us off today with a longer form quote from Miyazaki Manabu's biography,

describing his life right after becoming a political organizer at Waseda University for Minze,

the youth wing of the Japanese Communist Party.

I think it does a great job of evoking the feel, for lack of a better word, of the era,

and so I think it's best to offer it up as the man himself phrased things.

Students in those days were mostly poor and couldn't normally afford to go to coffee shops,

so we would talk in empty classrooms or on campus benches.

If someone showed an interest, I would pay a follow-up visit and subject him to further

persuasion.

Most of the guys I called on lived in small rooms of three or four and a half mats.

None of them owned a TV or a refrigerator. At most, they had an electric pot for boiling water, a cheap radio, and a half mats. None of them owned a TV or a refrigerator. At most, they had an

electric pot for boiling water, a cheap radio, and a Kotatsu, an electric leg warmer covered with a

quilt. I would sit for hours in such drafty quarters, talking over cups of tea. Every once in a while,

the host treated me to some cheap whiskey, like Suntory Red.

For students back then, this was as good as it got.

We would nurse our glasses with both hands and take tiny sips.

That's how precious the contents were.

Never did we imagine that in later years there would be a fad among students for downing their drinks in one gulp.

It was over a glass of Sunitory Red at his

apartment that I succeeded at signing up my first recruit. The student was in a funk because of a

speech his professor had delivered in the very first lecture after enrollment. I don't want you

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