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Just go to indeed.com slash show right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash show. Terms and conditions apply. and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 567, The Revolutionary, Part 2. Take a moment and just imagine what a dislocating experience it would have been to be a young person in post-war Japan. Imagine, for example, that you were born in 1940.
You'd spend the first few years of your life being inculcated with propaganda of sacrifice and loyalty to the state in everything from children's books to what daycare was available. Then suddenly the war ends, and instead everything's all, look, democracy, freedom, rights, the Americans are here to help, and they're giving you all these wonderful reforms and freedoms.
But then a few years in, maybe a few of your elementary school teachers who are a bit too critical of the old regime or a bit too active in their union get dismissed or shuffled around.
Maybe the May Day protests you'd seen for a few years started to draw a bit more police attention. And as you get into the 1950s, you have an increasingly polarized society between the left and right, increasing tensions in the realm of politics, accusations that the conservative prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke, is trying to wind things back to the pre-war era with his new policing and anti-union laws, and of course...
you'll turn 20 just in time for the security treaty protests. Given those circumstances, it's probably not that surprising that a lot of young people were swept towards political radicalization. how could you not be miyazaki manabu was of course on the younger end of this generation he was not twenty but fourteen fresh into his high school years
when the security treaty protests of May and June 1960 broke out. But his tutelage under his friend and mentor Amagase meant that he was aware of what was happening, and interestingly... Despite his Yakuza background, his father was actually fairly supportive of his son showing an interest in the left-wing side of the political spectrum.
When he came home from attending an anti-security treaty demonstration in May, his father, Miyazaki Kiyochika, who, keep in mind, was an oyabun, a boss for a small Yakuza family, actually told the boy of his personal admiration for leftists. In particular, Kiyochika had once upon a time been friendly with one of the bigger figures of pre-war leftism in Kyoto prefecture.
Yamamoto Senji, a member of the Rô-nô-tô, or Farmer and Laborer Party, one of the pre-war left-wing parties that came together to try and push a socialist agenda while not... technically being a socialist party and thus avoiding the legal prohibition on socialist parties. Yamamoto in particular was a big campaigner for the rights of the Burakumin.
the former lowest caste of the feudal system, whose communities are still targets of discrimination today, and which tend to be poorer as a result and sometimes still heavily subjected to social discrimination. Particularly in the 20th century, budaku communities were as a result heavy targets for recruitment by the yakuza, since nothing incentivizes people to organized crime, like being unable to make a living via more traditional means.
And this was apparently how Miyazaki and Yamamoto met and struck up a friendship, at least until March of 1929. Yamamoto, you see, had won a seat in the pre-war Diet, the National Parliament, but in March of 29, he was assassinated in Tokyo by a rightist who accused him of defaming the government, for, among other things, his public objections to the sweeping policing laws that would later enable much of the wartime government's repression.
As Miyazaki later recalled, his father told him that, quote, those guys have got real guts. I'd cut a deal with the cops if they nabbed me and put the skirts on, but they just take it. On top of that, they don't hesitate to risk their lives for things that don't bring in any money. He smiled wryly. We can never be like them. Still, that's a pretty admiring stance for a Yakuza boss. Historically organized crime in Japan has tended towards pretty extreme political conservatism.
and has often involved physical attacks on the political left. Indeed, more than a few anti-security treaty protesters in 1960 were attacked by members of the Yakuza, particularly in Tokyo. Miyazaki Kiyochika's rather accepting stance was very much the exception. For most Yakuza families, left-wing egalitarianism was a threat to the hierarchical social structures their authority was based on.
But with his father's, if not blessing, at least permission, Miyazaki Manabu thus threw himself into a study of left-wing politics with the help of two people. The first, of course, was his tutor, Amagase, the former revolutionary whom his father had taken in to protect from police retaliation. The second was a teacher from his school, a member of the highly politically left-wing Japan Teachers Union.
It was from the two of them that he received his first communist texts, which were, as he later recalled, the Communist Manifesto, a militant and at the same time practical appeal for us to liberate ourselves by our own hands. and Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary pamphlet, What is to be Done, in which Lenin lays out his idea of a vanguard of political activists, the Bolsheviks, who would militarize the working class for revolution.
Clearly, as Miyazaki saw it, the work of someone who was a genius when it came to revolutionary struggle. A big part of his revolutionary spirit, he later noted, didn't come from these texts, though. It came from his experiences with his father's Teramuragumi. Its membership...
as we've said, drew heavily from the budaku communities of Kyoto in particular, which were still extremely impoverished in the 50s and 60s and subject to a great deal of discrimination. Here's how Miyazaki described it in detail. Not only were they, the Burakumin, forced to live in wretched conditions, but in an extremely conservative city such as Kyoto, they were also subjected to severe discrimination.
When a person from this underclass visited an ordinary home, he had to use the back entrance or he would get a beating. Until the early post-war years, Buraku people were forcibly kept away from festivals, on the grounds that they would desecrate the portable shrines brought out on such occasions just by looking at them. Besides this overt discrimination there was also ingrained prejudice.
It was a common occurrence in a regular household for a mother to threaten a child that refused to study with the words, quote, If you don't do your homework, you'll end up a dog catcher your whole life just like those people. How would you like that? severe discrimination also restricted employment opportunities and marriage prospects hardly a company or shop none in fact would employ a buddhaku person but if there was a job to be had at best it would be as a laborer
most had no alternative but to stick to dog catching to survive. And by the way, when Miyazaki's talking about dog catching, that's not in the sense of taking them to the pound. That's dog catching in the sense that there aren't... many sources of protein available for cheap, if you understand what I mean.
Kyoto, like much of Japan, was still a place riven deeply by class divides, its wealthy families congregating in places like Gion and often the scions of politically powerful families, of the old aristocratic families, of great merchant houses operated in a fundamentally different world from much of the rest of the city on the other end the burakamen were still treated as subhuman this despite the fact that it had been by this point
Well over a decade since Article 14 of the post-war constitution had laid out that, quote, all of the people are equal under the law, and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic, or social relations. because of race, creed, sex, social status, or family origin. It was pretty clear that that was not what was happening, and growing up in post-war Kyoto made it very clear that it was not happening, given how central the whole dynamic was to how his family found its recruits.
it would be hard for Miyazaki Manabu to miss. And that, Miyazaki later recalled, was a big part of why, at the time, he found himself so sympathetic to left-wing arguments. and so he said thanks to my encounter with the books by marx and lenin i learned that there was a way apparently a quite practical one to liberate even the most oppressed members of society this way and it was the only one was revolution
revolution would write the incongruities that i had noticed in my unsophisticated way revolution would turn the world on its head and resolve society's contradictions at one go i decided to see what i could do to help foment one From then on, scuffles and Marxism dominated my time at junior high. I hunted down Marxist texts and read quite a few. I also read up on the Russian and Chinese revolutions and became passionately convinced that Japan needed something similar.
Of course, in the meantime, life went on, as it so often does for the passionate middle school revolutionary. In 1961, Miyazaki made it to high school, enrolling at a prestigious private school in Osaka. I do feel compelled to note that Miyazaki mentions in his autobiography that to celebrate, his father took him to Chushoujima, Fushimi's red-light district, because, quote, I think you're old enough now that you're in senior high.
Because a long time ago I marked this podcast feed as clean on the Apple podcast settings, I am not going to say anything more about this particular moment in the text, except that it concludes, quote, Of all the presents I received, including those from my mother and the Terramura henchmen, my father's was by far the best. I really do not want to interrogate that further, if I'm being honest.
Miyazaki's description of his time in high school is fascinating. It's mostly focused on the amount of fights he got into with bullies from neighboring schools, insisting, of course, that, quote, I never went looking for a fight, but if someone offered me one, I would always take him up.
Which might be true, but given that Miyazaki also says at this point he basically always carried around a baseball bat to defend himself. I don't know, maybe I'm being cynical here, but I have a hard time buying it personally.
But that's the image of Miyazaki we have, the self-described bully boy scrapping his way through high school against any and all comers, and at the same time... working through Das Kapital, which he had come to understand basically held the same role in Marxist thought as the New Testament does in Christianity, which... you know, thinking about it maybe is not too out there as a notion in terms of equating the two texts.
In 1963, Miyazaki Manabu, son of a Yakuza Oyabun, undertook to join Kyoto's branch of the Japanese Communist Party. Kyoto, you see, has always been a bit weird politically, home to this ancient group of families that are extremely politically conservative, but with a huge number of communist voters in its regular population. Kyoto has therefore long been a Communist Party bastion. At the time, the prefecture was actually governed by a Communist Party member, Ninagawa Torazo,
And up until the 1990s electoral reforms, the city was a constant bastion of Communist Party support. It still pretty consistently sends at least one Communist representative to the Diet every election. Why is that?
Miyazaki attributes it to the attitude of the locals, who, growing up in a city that was once the capital of the country and which had been the target of invading warlords hoping to seize control of the government for centuries, had developed a bit of a suspicious and hostile attitude towards political power he talks a great deal in fact about a local legend of one of kyoto's most famous battles the siege of fushimi castle in 1600
when followers of the future shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu fought a bitter battle to the last man to buy time for their master to muster his armies and defeat his rivals, and about how the locals of Kyoto came to watch the siege as entertainment taking bets on the side about who would win. Anecdotally, that definitely fits with what I've seen in Kyoto. When I've gone in the past during election seasons, I've seen more posters and rallies for left-wing parties than anything else.
It's also worth noting that Kyoto is very much a university city in a certain sense. Kyoto University, Rutsumeikan University, and Doshisha University... are all in the city and particularly in the 60s were infamous for extremely left-wing faculties. And so the party organization in the city was pretty strong in 1963. In fact, the man Miyazaki went to see, Taniguchi Zentaro, was an old friend of his father's pre-war acquaintance, Yamamoto Senji.
and he was also at the time one of the Communist Party leaders and a Communist representative in the House of Representatives. Now, this association with Taniguchi would be important for Miyazaki, and it's going to shape quite a bit of what we're going to be talking about the rest of this episode and the next one, because Taniguchi did not, in fact, end up letting Miyazaki into the Communist Party.
largely because he was still a little bit too young for membership. You have to be at least 18 to join. But he did meet with the boy, encourage him to keep studying, to read more books about Marxism and revolution, and ultimately to do something that I think otherwise Miyazaki would not have thought to do, go to college. After all, What need would the son of a Yakuza Oyabun have for college education? It wasn't like he had to go out and find a job on the job market.
But his time with Taniguchi, who encouraged him and built on the foundation of interest that Amagase had first stoked in the young boy, led him ultimately... to attempt an application to college, specifically to the Faculty of Economics at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. He was, of course, roundly rejected. Miyazaki was, by his own admission, a terrible student, and at the time, college admissions in Japan were
very competitive given the booming population of the country and the growing number of white-collar jobs where you needed a bachelor degree to even be considered. However, Miyazaki was undeterred by this first failure,
and set about aiming at admission to another Tokyo-based university, Wasuda. And after hard studying at a cram school, interspersed, of course, with the occasional protest against port visits by American nuclear submarines, he not only got his admission to Wasida's law program, but was admitted to the Japanese Communist Party as well.
Now, Waseda University in Tokyo was a very interesting school to pick, and in point of fact, that was why Miyazaki chose it. To understand why, we have to take a moment to talk about a big part of the era's politics. the student movement in post-war Japan. Back in 1960, during the anti-security treaty protests, student organizing had been a big part of supporting the protest movement.
That organizing, in turn, had largely been done by two groups. The first was Minsei, short for Nihon Minshu Senen Dolme, or the Democratic Youth League of Japan. The second was the Zengakuren.
or All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Organizations. Both these groups were heavily affiliated with the Communist Party. Minsei was literally the party's youth league and a path to membership in the party in the future, but one Miyazaki had dismissed as simple posturing, while Zengakuren had been set up in the post-war era, as a way to help the Communist Party influence student governments at universities and boost its own profile with young people as a result.
The Zengakuren was a centralized organization with a series of campus-based affiliates. You can think of it like the campus Democrats or Republicans on a college campus in the U.S. Run by students at the university. but affiliated with this bigger political entity. There was one big difference in the immediate post-war, though. In America, those college campus organizations are put together independently by the students.
In Japan, the Zengakuren could latch onto an existing organization, the Jichikai, the Student Self-Governing Associations, essentially a combination student government and student union. Individual Jichikai could, and often did, choose to affiliate with the Zangakuren, allowing the movement to grow very rapidly because it could piggyback on these existing campus student governments.
While it was initially very successful as a vehicle for communist influence on campus, by the mid-50s, the party started to lose control of the Zangakarin. Partially, this was for international reasons. The acknowledgement, for example, by Nikita Khrushchev of the crimes of Joseph Stalin during his secret speech turned many around the world against the Soviet Union and Marxism in general.
But there were also domestic reasons. For example, when the Communist Party and its affiliates launched their abortive attempt at revolution in the early 50s, the same one that got Miyazaki's tutor Amagase in hot water with the police, That turned public opinion pretty staunchly against the Communist Party, and led to a lot of Zengakuren groups at different universities cutting ties with the Communist Party.
Thus, by the late 50s, an anti-Stalinist, anti-Communist Party branch of the Zengakuren came to dominate the student movement. That group was called the Bund or Bunto in Japanese, derived from the name of the Bund der Kommunisten or Communists League, founded by Karl Marx back in 1847. As the name might clue you in on, the faction was not anti-communist, just anti-Japanese Communist Party, and especially anti-Stalinist.
Min Se, however, remained staunchly in the corner of the Communist Party, which, I mean, of course it did. It was literally the Communist Party Youth League. The two groups were thus emblematic of this growing split. within both the left in general and the student movement between the so-called old left which was affiliated with traditional revolutionary parties the communists or traditional sources of left-wing protest labor unions
and the New Left, which is very hard to define. Okay, basically, New Left groups like the Bundleds and Gakuren were united by their belief that the Old Left was in some way compromised. Perhaps because of the taint of Stalinism, as the crimes of Joseph Stalin's regime were coming into the public light after his death. Or perhaps by the failure in stupidity in the case of the Japanese Communist Party.
and its abortive revolutionary attempt in the 50s. This was about the only thing the new left agreed on, though. As for what should replace the old left, let's just say there was a wide array of positions. Now, the Bund-led incarnation of the Zengaku-ren was in particular very successful at developing a following among Japanese students. It took a prominent role in the 1960 Security Treaty protests,
mobilizing thousands of students to protest against the treaty and against Prime Minister Kishi. In the aftermath of the protests, arguably the single biggest success for Japanese leftism since the 40s, the last time the Socialist Party had won an election, The Zengakuren seemed to be on the cutting edge of the Japanese New Left, the groups independent of old-left organizations like the Communist Party, which got a lot of credit for leading the protests.
But success also destroyed the Boond, because its members didn't really see what happened as a success. After all, the security treaty was not stopped by the 1960 protests. It cost Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke his political career, but he did successfully force the treaty through. Kishi, of course, had resigned, but the conservative Liberal Democratic Party was still in power, and in fact, as the 60s went on, the LDP seemed to get even more politically entrenched.
roundly defeating the left-wing opposition with its popular message of a focus on economic growth and prosperity, instead of revolution. So in short order, the Boond basically imploded, fragmenting into a series of competing zengakurens spread over the entire country. From university to university, different factions of students would choose different zengakurens to affiliate themselves with.
There were breakaway movements that were explicitly revolutionary, very often anti-Soviet but pro-Maoist, explicitly identifying with the hardcore revolutionary stance of Chairman Mao. There were more moderate factions that supported rebuilding the Zengakuren's old relationship with the Communist Party but on a more equal footing. All these different factions ranged from a few hundred members on a given campus to a few thousand.
This was the collegiate world Miyazaki Manabu was entering, and he'd deliberately chosen one of its biggest epicenters. Waseda University in particular was famous for being home to a huge variety of competing Zengakuren factions, For that reason, it was jokingly nicknamed the Department Store of Factions. In particular, Waseda was divided between three major leftist factions. First, of course, was the Minse, the Youth League of the Communist Party.
Second was a faction of the Japan Socialist Youth League, which played a similar role as Minsei, but for the politically larger and more influential Japanese Socialist Party. And then finally, there was a faction of something called the Marxist Student Alliance, one of the mini fragments of the old Zengakuren, and these were just the biggest three. There were others too.
Miyazaki picked Waseda specifically for that reason, to be at the center of what was looking like the future of the Japanese left as it figured out what the hell the future of the Japanese left was going to be. After getting into school, Miyazaki made his way to Tokyo to take up residency at Wasuda in March of 1965, because the Japanese academic calendar runs annually from April to March instead of September to June like we do in the US.
He was 19, setting off into the world on his own for the first time. Indeed, he recalled he didn't even tell his parents about applying to Wasida until he got in, and his meeting with his father to tell him and ask for money, actually ended up being one of their last meetings ever because his father died of liver cancer about a year and a half later while Miyazaki was still studying in Tokyo.
But concerns like that were not, of course, at the fore of young Miyazaki's mind. The revolution was, and especially his chance to be at its forefront.
He recalled that when he first got to Tokyo and hopped onto the train headed to Waseda's campus, which is in Shinjuku on the west end of the central part of the city, He was struck by this feeling of power being so close to the locations of the biggest protests that had happened in 1960, and he vowed to redouble his efforts to be a part of the revolutionary future.
He was, however, somewhat on the outs with that resolve. By 1965, Japan's student movement, divided and factionalized, had started to weaken. It wasn't just division, though, that was weakening the movement. A loss of interest among the youth was hurting it badly, too. A 1965 survey of Japanese college students asking what they enjoyed the most about college life
found that only 1% put student activism first. And when, in 1964, several Zangakuren factions managed to agree on a joint action, protesting the arrival of a U.S. nuclear submarine at the port of Yokosuka, they still only managed to scrounge up a few thousand protesters. Not bad, but not exactly the Titanic showing of 1960.
Why was there so much less youth interest in the Zangakuren or protest in general in 1965 compared to 1960? Well, it's hard to be sure, but one of the biggest factors was probably the growth of the economy. Economic success, after all, tends to politically de-radicalize people. For another thing, in Asia, the Cold War's tensions had started to drain away a bit by the early 60s. The Korean War was receding into memory,
and after the failures of the Great Leap Forward in mainland China, the militant chairman Mao Zedong was politically sidelined by more moderate members of the Chinese Communist Party. But as Miyazaki was going off to college, things were about to heat back up thanks to a little old place called Vietnam. And here's where I have to briefly try and recount the causes of the American War in Vietnam, so let's see how fast I can get through this.
So, Vietnam at the start of the 20th century was a colonial holding of France. In particular, it was one of three components of the territory called French Indochina, alongside what's now Laos and Cambodia. Notably not consulted in this new status, of course, were the actual people living in those places, and so, unsurprisingly, there were quite a few anti-French insurrections coming by the time of the Second World War.
In Vietnam, the most successful of these insurrections was led by Ho Chi Minh, who'd aligned himself with the Soviet Union in the 1920s simply because literally nobody else was willing to give him the time of day. I'm not exaggerating about that either, by the way. Ho first tried to get backing from the American president Woodrow Wilson after World War I for Vietnam's independence, inspired by Wilson's rhetoric on the importance of self-determination.
He even sent Wilson a letter while the president was at Versailles negotiating the end of World War I and the treaty that would conclude it, full of references to the Declaration of Independence. Wilson, however, was not willing to hear it, and it's very much an open question of how much Ho Chi Minh actually became a believer in communism as a philosophy after this point, or if he just kind of went along with the Soviet Union.
because they were at least willing to back him against the French. Anyway, the Second World War, of course, bit of a rough ride for France given the whole homeland being occupied by the Nazis thing. In Asia, Imperial Japan seized that opening to grab Indochina for itself. The Imperial Japanese Army at first attempted to suppress Ho Chi Minh's revolutionaries, called the Viet Minh,
But once it became clear the war was over and Japan had lost, some members of the Imperial Army, armed, trained, and even fought with the Viet Minh, we covered that in a bit more depth in episode 278. Anyway. When the Second World War ended in 1945, the French tried to re-establish control over Vietnam, but Ho was able to beat them in a bloody nine-year struggle. In 1954...
France signed a peace deal and gave up Vietnam, but by now, of course, we're deep in the Cold War and just a year after the end of the Korean War, so here's where the United States steps in. To prevent Ho Chi Minh's communists from taking over all of Vietnam, the United States intervened in the peace talks to force a partition deal.
Vietnam would be split in two, a northern half that would be governed by Ho Chi Minh and his followers, and a southern half governed by a more conservative, generally Western and French-aligned element in Vietnamese society. Ostensibly, there would eventually be an election which would determine which of these governments would rule all of united Vietnam, but of course, before long, both South and North Vietnam made it very clear that was not going to happen.
And of course, both South and North Vietnam claimed to be the only real legitimate government of the Vietnamese people and began planning to liberate the other side. Things steadily escalated, with tensions growing between the two sides, and the North in particular organizing a very effective communist insurgency known as the Viet Cong in the South.
By the mid-1960s, you have what is in effect an undeclared war between the South and the North, with the South generally being a much more poorly run government and thus losing the war very quickly.
That's when the United States steps in, via increasingly direct means, to support the teetering southern government. The North, in turn, got aid, of course, from China and the Soviet Union. 1965 in particular saw a major escalation in the conflict because that's when the American president, Lyndon Johnson, started to intervene more directly to push back the momentum of the Viet Cong.
In a year, the American troop presence in South Vietnam grew from about 23,000 soldiers to 184,000, so about an 800% increase. And for the first time, American warplanes began bombing North Vietnam, trying to slow the flow of supplies headed south to support the communist insurgency. And this really galvanized the Japanese student movement for a simple reason.
The US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty allowed American forces to make use of Japanese military bases, and the final peace deal had ceded the entirety of Okinawa Prefecture to American control. It wouldn't be returned until 1972. and only then with the assurance that bases in Okinawa could still be used by the U.S. And this meant that a lot of the forces involved in either fighting or supporting the American war in Vietnam were based in Japan.
For leftists, this was obviously an issue given that their sympathies naturally lied with the North, and more generally, it was also a concern because it meant Japan was directly involved in a Cold War conflict that was growing hotter by the day. If things got out of hand, which of course they didn't, but you can't know that in 1965, who is to say that Japan wouldn't end up being attacked by the Chinese or the Soviets in retaliation for its role as an American base in the Pacific?
Miyazaki was thus arriving in university right as the radicalization of the student movement, galvanized by the Vietnam War, was starting to grow again. He saw that almost immediately. right after the ceremony welcoming him to the College of Law at Waseda, was another important moment for new arrivals, the election of a class committee to serve as their representatives to the Jichkai, the student self-governing association.
which again is like a combination student government and student union. For his year, this election was particularly combative because the makeup of his class enabled his preferred faction, Minse, the communist faction, to gain some ground on the executive committee of the Jichikai, which traditionally had been dominated by the more neutral Marxist student alliance. Miyazaki recalled that while things did not get as violent as they would in the future,
something to look forward to for next week, I guess, quote, bitter accusations were exchanged and ashtrays flew through the air. It is unclear, based on the phrasing, whether those ashtrays hit anybody. but one assumes that if not, there was at least a solid effort to try. Miyazaki, of course, was not a bystander in this. Quote,
I discovered the student movement in Tokyo was more violent than I had thought. But aside from the ideological hair-splitting, in essence, the nature of the confrontation was no different from the scuffles I had known as a young hoodlum. When I realized this, I felt much more relaxed and confident. For him, after all, getting into fistfights with his schoolmates was familiar turf.
And apparently his fellow students recognized this because he was one of the people elected to represent his year on the student council, on behalf, of course, of Minse, with its affiliation to the Communist Party. I'm going to wrap up this week with a longer-form quotation from Miyazaki's biography, Toppa Mono, describing the new environment of student activism Miyazaki found himself in, because I think it's great for setting a tone for next week. Quote,
Thus began my life as an activist at Wasida. Activists were faction members or committed supporters who ran around on a faction's behalf. The term might sound impressive. The reality was anything but. To start with, the room allocated to the student union was cramped and dingy. It was in the basement of the law school building, just to the right of the university's main entrance. The corridor, which was pretty dark even in the daytime,
was cluttered with protest boards and wooden staves. Leading off to either side were rooms occupied by those in leftist circles, one of which belonged to the student union. The scene inside was a continuation of the mess out in the hallway. There were mimeographs for printing handouts and untidy stacks of blank paper. Ink stains were everywhere and there was no discernible order to anything. The activists who gathered there were a scruffy lot.
Hair unkempt, they wore sports shirts and cheap trousers with the creases long gone. I don't recall a single person in blue jeans, which were fashionable at the time. This mangy-looking bunch packed the student union room from morning to late at night. Miyazaki was at first one of the organizers for this group, responsible for recruiting what they called ordinary students, in other words, ones that were not ideologically committed, either to Minse or directly to the Communist Party.
He'd keep to this role for the first two years of college, but things would slowly start to shift, starting really in 1966 and 67, because that was the start of what activists would retroactively term the Gewalt or Age of Gewalt. And by the way, I apologize for my terrible German pronunciation. But if you know German, you might have an inkling of what comes next, because give alt, my friends, it means violence. We'll get to that next week.
But for now, that's all for this week. Thank you very much for listening. This show is a part of the Facing Backward podcast network. You can find out more about this show and our other shows at facingbackward.com, and you can support this show on Patreon. Thanks very much to new patron Michael for donating to support the show. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you next week for part three.