Student Activism in Japan

It still is a bit surprising how Japanese students, grown-up college students in particular, could get so apolitical and apathetic to what has been going on in their society. Historically students, along with a number of other sectors, are among the first to react to, if not mobilize against, socio-political encroachments. But in the case of Japan, things have become so, to say the least, peculiar. Vital issues have come and gone and most of the Japanese colegialas seem to be content enough to just go on with the daily routine of study-home-and-study-some-more. Some do become working students and eventually experience a somewhat proletariat lifestyle. As working students, they earn around 800 yen an hour which can buy one full meal. Although the corporate capitalist system clearly exploits them, what they experience is never close to what, for example, a labor reproductive wage-earning full-time EPZ assembly worker in Cavite undergoes. During the world-wide anti-war movements especially before and right after the 2nd Gulf War broke out, Japan was among the countries where students were paricularly silent. I went to a rally in Hibiya where around 150 gathered, a generous estimate, and found a handful of students, most of whom were members of a notorious Trotskyite group. But what more could I expect from a country whose Prime Minister's controversial Yasukuni Shrine visits never become a classroom topic?

According to a self-proclaimed Maoist Japanese friend of mine, student movements became generelly extinct after their last salvo during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Those generation of Japanese activists are now well-off professionals who annually assemble to talk about significant social issues. I've been to some of them and the talks, which were really just talks not even agit-props, end-up in a nomikai or a drinking party. They then go back to their daily routine the next day, maybe with a slight hang-over.

In Pacific War (1968), Ienaga Saburo, a famous Japanese historian, mentions of student activism before the 15-year war (1931-1945):

"I entered high school in April 1931 and was astounded by my classmates' knowledge of Marxist dialectics...About 1943, when I had been teaching in a higher school for two years, the students asked me to stop using the Christian-era for dates. In a little more than a decade there was incredible change in student politics and interests...By the time I began college in 1934, the student movement and political activities had completely disappeared." (p108)


Ienaga Saburo (1913-2002) was a Japanese historian and professor who was nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize by Noam Chomsky. He wrote a textbook on Japanese history (New Japanese History) which was rejected by the Ministry of Education in 1952. He would then sue the government in a series of court trials for putting him through the stresses of having been forced to revise his academic work. Finally in 1997, the Supreme Court ordered the state to compensate Ienaga 400,000 yen.