"The Era of University Unrest": Our Struggle of 1965

Publish: December 23, 2019

I studied at the Juku from the Elementary School (Yochisha) onwards, but I became interested in politics and literature around the time I was in Senior High School. Near the end of high school, I joined the Communist Youth League (Kyosei), one of the organizations of the so-called Structural Reform faction, and remained a member throughout my university years.

When I entered the university in 1962, I mainly worked on controlling the student self-government associations. There was an association for each faculty, as well as campus-wide associations, and an all-Juku self-government association that brought them together. Since the 1950s, the left wing had been strong in the Faculties of Economics and Letters at Keio, but the right wing generally controlled the others. From the time I was at Hiyoshi, I worked steadily on a movement to overturn that. We flipped the Hiyoshi self-government association from the right wing, which became the foundation for the later tuition struggle.

The activities of the self-government associations were basically service activities for students, such as organizing the Waseda-Keio rivalry events, demanding the expansion of scholarships, improving the cafeteria, and opposing price hikes. In addition, there were "anti-war and peace" activities that had been promoted since the end of the war. Demands within the university were made directly to the faculty executive committees or the Board of Trustees. The most concentrated form of this was the struggle against tuition increases.

On January 20, 1965, the Juku's Board of Councilors announced a tuition increase for the following academic year and the issuance of Juku bonds. In addition to the increase in admission and tuition fees, a new facility expansion fee was established for first-year payments, and the purchase of 100,000 yen in Juku bonds was made mandatory for the first year. As a result, first-year payments excluding the admission fee increased approximately threefold. This margin of increase was incredible. At the time, Suntory was running a sweepstakes called "Drink Torys and Go to Hawaii," and someone even created an opposition slogan: "Quit Keio and Go to Hawaii."

Immediately after the Board of Councilors meeting, we held a protest rally at Mita. At the time, I was the chairman of the Faculty of Letters self-government association at Mita. The chairman of the all-Juku self-government committee was Masataka Terao, who later became a professor at Hosei University. Each association distributed flyers to mobilize students, held student general meetings, and moved toward a "strike resolution." We demanded that the President come out, but President Shohei Takamura was admitted to Keio University Hospital due to illness.

On January 27, a boycott of classes began at Hiyoshi, and on the 28th, the university entered its first all-school strike since the founding of the Gijuku. Initially, it was planned as a one-day limited strike, but because no resolution was reached, it became indefinite.

We set up barricades at Hiyoshi and Mita. The idea was that if we were going to strike, we should at least prevent faculty and staff from entering.

The tactic of the "barricade strike" is said to have started around this time, but it had been done at various other universities before. We learned how to stack desks from organizations at Meiji and Waseda. Both Hiyoshi and Mita were easy to block. At Hiyoshi, you just had to block the entrance to the tree-lined avenue, and at Mita, the South Gate. A simple barricade was enough for the Maboroshi no Mon.

At that time, we weren't really worried about right-wing students attacking or the police coming in, so the barricades were symbolic; we would set them up in the morning and remove them all by evening.

Our demands were to temporarily withdraw and suspend the price hike. Another was to create a consultative body between the university and student representatives. Furthermore, instead of responding with price hikes, we proposed that the university and students work together to address the issue through national treasury subsidies, and negotiations continued over these points.

However, the university side only said things like they would create a reading space for students under the South Building. They probably thought they could get by with piecemeal measures.

In fact, graduation exams were coming up in February, and the issue of graduation for seniors was our weak point. Another thing was that the entrance exam for the Chutobu Junior High School was scheduled for early February at the Mita Campus, and the university threatened us, saying, "That is not a university matter, so if you interfere, it will become a criminal case."

Late on the night of February 4, the university side presented compromise terms through an alumnus of the Mita-kai. The struggle headquarters was told to come to Keio University Hospital in Yotsuya, where President Takamura was hospitalized. The conditions were: "The mandatory purchase of Juku bonds will be withdrawn and made voluntary; the tuition increase itself will proceed as planned; and a forum for consultation between the President and student representatives will be established in the future." This didn't even reach half of the final demands compiled by the students.

However, in the end, the struggle headquarters alone decided to use this draft of conditions as a basis for discussion at the student general meeting. In doing so, the struggle headquarters itself destroyed the principle of the "mass issue from below" that this student struggle possessed. This was our biggest failure. Ultimately, it means we were unaccustomed to political struggle.

The all-Juku student general meeting on February 5 was held in the plaza in front of the South Building at Mita. I was the person in charge of setting up the meeting, and in any case, since people were coming from Hiyoshi and Koganei as well, a huge number of Keio students gathered. I even became scared partway through. When we counted the final number of votes, it was about 12,000. At the peak, I think 15,000 or 16,000 people might have gathered.

Acting President Kotaro Imaizumi read the President's proposal to "withdraw the mandatory Juku bonds," and the compromise terms offered by the university the previous night were narrowly approved after more than an hour of debate, with many opposing opinions coming particularly from the Hiyoshi self-government association. Our struggle effectively ended. It was said that the campus struggle at Keio was a force of direct democracy, but at this stage, it vanished all at once.

I believe the 1965 struggle was supported by a self-governing democracy primarily led by general Keio students, before the "sects" seen later came to the forefront. Although we built barricades, we didn't break anything; we even went around diligently cleaning the campus. We shouldn't have caused any fundamental damage to the university side.

In '68 and '69, university unrest continued to become more sectarian and radical. As for sects, the Chukaku-ha and the Marusen-ha (Marxist Front) of the reconstructed Bund (Communist League) were quite strong. I did not participate in such struggles of force and quietly carried out self-government activities in the graduate school.

During the struggle against university legislation in '69, I went to give an agitational public speaking with a hand mic to disrupt the Hiyoshi rugby field rally held by President Saku Sato, but there was no surge of involvement from the entire student body like there had been in '65.

The 1965 struggle was an all-encompassing struggle that included groups like the Bunren (Federation of Cultural Organizations). When I think about why so many Keio students gathered for the 1965 struggle, I believe the background was the rapid expansion of the student population at universities from the 1950s to the 1960s. Until the first half of the 50s, the total number of students had not reached 10,000, but by our time, it exceeded 20,000. All sorts of contradictions accumulated in that rapid change, and student dissatisfaction built up.

(This article was composed by the editorial department based on an interview with Professor Emeritus Kenkichiro Iwamatsu conducted on July 18, 2019. Associate Professor Takeyuki Tokura of the Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies assisted with the editing. Professor Iwamatsu passed away on August 24. We pray for the repose of his soul.)