Japan 1968: student protest movements in

Japan also had a 1968. Students occupied university campuses across the country - in the most dramatic cases storming lecture-halls, building barricades and wielding bamboo spears in clashes with the police, counter?protestors and each other. These protests coincided with a wave of other campus occupations around the world, including in the US, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and China. In Japan they marked the culmination of a decade of protest against a range of issues including (but not limited to) the Vietnam War, colonialism, nuclear weapons, pollution, inflation, consumerism, capitalism, corruption, labour abuses, police brutality, authoritarianism, censorship, patriarchy, conformity and boredom. This course explores why students protested and what methods they used. It asks what effect the protests had in terms of goals achieved, unintended consequences, and longer-lasting social and cultural legacies. How did protestors’ motivations change over time, and how did Japanese state and society accommodate, repress or subvert the movements? How did the protests and subsequent crackdown transform universities as spaces for learning, research and socialization? What alliances did students seek to forge with peers, activists, guerillas and governments overseas? Was there such a thing as a global 1968, and if so was Japan a part of it? And in what ways did their protests resemble or differ from other student protests around the world, then and now?