Problematic participation

Watanabe, then in her 20s, had been following Yamamoto since around autumn that year, filming the daily protests and meetings taking place inside the University of Tokyo. However, being a young, female photographer with no visible affiliation to the various sects involved in the dispute proved problematic.

“I was viewed with suspicion. Some thought I was a spy, others thought I was a newspaper reporter,” Watanabe says. “Then one day, I was given an armband that read ‘Zenkyoto,’ essentially making me a part of them, and that gave me access inside.”

Many of Watanabe’s photographs from those months are compiled in a collection titled “Todai Zenkyoto 1968-1969.” The images depict Yamamoto as a slim, handsome man with a beard. The lens would capture him orating at rallies, or wearing a helmet and speaking to fellow protesters.

However, an arrest warrant would soon be issued for Yamamoto, forcing him to go underground. Watanabe wasn’t deterred — at that point she was already transfixed by the heat of the movement and flitted between the University of Tokyo’s Hongo and Komaba campuses, documenting scenes that would become the definitive images chronicling the historic struggle in Japan’s most elite university.

The fervor reached its boiling point in January 1969 in what would later be called the “fall of Yasuda Auditorium.”

“Radical students holed up in Tokyo University’s Yasuda Auditorium Saturday withstood a 10-hour siege by riot police who seized control of 16 other buildings held by the students on the university’s Hongo campus,” The Japan Times reported in its Jan. 19 issue about the previous day’s clash that involved 8,500 riot police sealing the campus. “The students hurled blazing Molotov cocktails, acid bottles and huge chunks of concrete slabs and rocks at the policemen from the roof of the auditorium.”

In its Jan. 20 issue, the paper said the auditorium “lay devastated Sunday evening after riot police completed their sweep, arresting more than 370 students who had holed up there.”

It described the day as the “end of more than six months of occupation of the auditorium by the students who seized it on July 2,” adding, “radicals spearheaded by medical students first occupied it on June 15 but were evicted by riot police two days later,” an event that “ignited the anti-establishment feeling of all Todai students.”

Yamamoto, who pursued a career in academia following his days as a student activist, typically declines all interview requests regarding his time as the University of Tokyo’s head of Zenkyoto. He did, however, contribute an essay for Watanabe’s photobook, looking back at the tumultuous period and describing her stills as depicting both the “sense of liberation and, strangely, calmness” inside the barricades.

Student activity soon began to wane as the government drafted new legislation that granted police more authority to crack down on campus disturbances and, by the end of 1969, much of the barricades at universities had been taken down. By 1970, student activism had been almost entirely suppressed by police, while the economy continued to grow at a fast pace — as the nation became wealthy, people were no longer sympathetic to radical student movements.

In June, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was renewed and, apart from some extremists who formed the Japanese Red Army that went on to launch terrorist attacks both at home and abroad in the name of world revolution, most students returned to a state of political apathy.

Watanabe’s zeal also began to fade as the movement subsided.

“How should I describe my feeling … it was as if there was nothing left, and I didn’t want to remain in that depressing state,” she says. “There were others who went through much harder times. Some became sick, some committed suicide.”

It was an end of an era, and the sense of emptiness that nagged at Watanabe prompted her to leave the country.

“I decided to embark on a journey,” she says. This was 1972, and for the next quarter of a century she would travel for extended periods in Southeast Asia and South Asia, particularly India and Nepal. Her work no longer reflected the impassioned ideals of youth but assumed a tone of spiritualism and deep meditation.

Student activism

Kyoko Tominaga, an associate professor of sociology at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto and an expert on social activism, says the student movement of the period dispersed and evolved into local grass-roots movements often led by activists who were vocal in the 1960s.

Environmentalism became a focus, as national awareness heightened following protests over Minamata Disease, a 1950s industrial disaster that left tens of thousands of people poisoned after toxic wastewater containing methyl mercury from a Chisso Corp. chemical plant leaked into Minamata Bay in Kumamoto Prefecture.

“Anti-pollution campaigns, Minamata Disease and opposing construction of shinkansen lines and dams, as well as regional feminist movements, discrimination against those with disabilities and resident Koreans — these were some of the issues being tackled,” she says.

Such movements gradually took the form of nonprofit organizations, she says, spawning numerous groups dedicated to these and other causes.

After Japan’s asset-price bubble popped in the early 1990s and the nation entered the so-called lost 10 or 20 years of economic malaise, issues such as poverty and the plight of temporary workers gained traction. Demonstrations against the Iraq War gathered steam in the 2000s, while this decade saw several major social uprisings, including the 2012 anti-nuclear demonstrations held weekly outside the prime minister’s residence in reaction to the restart of two nuclear reactors following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and the emergence of the Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALDs) protest group.

Instead of helmets and Molotov cocktails, these youths donned designer jeans and played hip-hop in their campaign against security legislation bulldozed through the Diet by Abe’s ruling coalition that reinterprets Article 9 of the Constitution to allow Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense. The group, comprised of loosely knit members across the nation connected via social media, was credited with mainstreaming political activism, the likes of which have rarely surfaced in a nation where voter turnout among the young is doggedly low.

The movement was short-lived, however, with SEALDs announcing its disbandment 15 months after its formation, evolving into a successor organization and other splinter groups.

Tominaga, 32, hosts weekly classes at Keio University’s Hiyoshi campus, where she lectures on social activism.

“The impact of social media is immense, providing logistics and a means to rally crowds with relative ease,” she says, one reason why organizations such as SEALDs were able to morph into a considerable movement. “However, there’s a negative aspect in how this may have made such movements transient.”

And compared to the student activists of the 1960s, youths today are prone to consider themselves socially vulnerable and may lack the competitive urge of previous generations, she says.

“They face pressure against openly conveying political views in classrooms and seminars, especially if it’s anti-establishment,” she says. “Some even seek solace in the anonymity of demonstrations, in how people standing next to them won’t know who they are.”

A first-year Keio University student at Tominaga’s lecture who asked to remain anonymous says he occasionally attends Diet demonstrations but hides his face so he won’t be identified. “I’m scared of how it could impact my chances in finding a job,” he says. “I know my parents will be concerned, so I’ve never told them about it and don’t plan to.”

Others such as Shunsuke Tanaka, a second-year Keio student, are open about their political leanings. On his part, Tanaka expresses an interest in a variety of issues, including the contentious plan to relocate operations at U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from a crowded residential area in Ginowan to the coastal district of Henoko, known for its beautiful coral reefs. 

But the 21-year-old, who says he attends seminars and hosts events to discuss these and other topics, admits he thinks he’s an anomaly among fellow students. “I don’t really talk about these things with my classmates,” Tanaka says.

Atsushi Nozawa, a researcher at the University of Tokyo who has been working with victims of Minamata Disease, echoes Tominaga’s observation. “I harbor a sense of crisis toward students who learn what they are taught but are reluctant to take a step further,” Nozawa says.

Historical relevance

Sifting through her pile of black-and-white stills, Watanabe fondly explains who some of the people caught on camera are, recollecting the wild days that kick-started her career as a professional photographer.

“My, how we have grown old. We used to be heavy drinkers but we can’t tolerate much now,” she says.

Watanabe is old-school and prefers phone calls and letters to email as her primary means of correspondence.

“I’ve lost the addresses of some of the folks from that time,” she says. However, she occasionally sees Yamamoto and his wife when they visit her photo exhibitions.

The 50th anniversary of the 1968-69 student uprisings has renewed interest in her photographs, leading to a paperback reissue of her photo collection by publisher Kadokawa Corp. last year.

Watanabe welcomes the attention — for the longest time she had donated her images of the University of Tokyo and the student activists upon request.

“It was only after it made it into book form that I made some money,” she says.

And the rare photographs’ historical relevance only increases over time.

“The images are irreplaceable,” she says, “since I was the only one there to take them.”