1970 Articles
The Origins of Student Radicalism in Japan [1970]
This article is a compact summary of the contents of my PhD dissertation for Harvard University, “Student Radicals in Prewar Japan” (1970), which traces the history of the left-wing student movement from 1918 until its demise in the early 1930s, with a postscript on the Japanese student movement in the 1960s. The dissertation was revised and published as Japan’s First Student Radicals (Harvard University Press, 1972) and in Japanese translation as Shinjinkai no kenkyū: Nihon gakusei undō no genryū 『新人会の研究：日本学生運動の源流』(trans. Matsuo Takayoshi and Mori Fumiko). Tokyo University Press, 1978.
Citation: “The Origins of Student Radicalism in Japan,” Journal of Contemporary History 5:1 (1970), pp 87-103.
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- Journal of Contemporary History
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947000500106
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- East Asian Languages and Cultures
- Published Here
- May 28, 2026
Notes
When I entered Harvard graduate school in Fall 1970, I was interested in pursuing themes that I had studied as a history major at Yale (A.B. 1962), focusing on French history from the 1930s into the postwar period involving political movements that exhibited what in French was referred to as “the extremes touch one another”) (les extrêmes se touchent), and is now referred popularly referred to as the “Horseshoe Theory” (see Wikipedia article of that title). This reflected a detailed study I did for a research paper on Jacques Doriot (1898-1945), often cited as a prime example of the phenomenon in his shift from communism to collaboration with the invading Germans.
In my senior year at Yale, I was provoked by one of my roommates, David Arkush, who while spending his junior year in France took a course in Chinese history, reporting on how interesting he found it. Provoked, I signed up for two-semester courses at Yale in Chinese history (taught by Arthur and Mary Wright, fresh from, and in Japanese history by John Whitney Hall, who had just come from the University of Michigan where he had founded the still-active Center for Japanese Studies. I was more intrigued by Japanese history than Chinese (perhaps because of the assignment as a textbook of George Sansom’s as engaging Japan; A Short Cultural History (1932). Faced on deciding what to do after graduation, I rejected the option of law school that attracted most of my roommates, and decided that I wanted to study the Japanese language. Encouraged by Professor Hall, I entered the second year of the newly-founded Stanford University Center for Japanese Studies (today the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies on Yokohama), after an intensive summer course in beginning Japanese at the Stanford summer school in Palo Alto the following year.
I entered the Department of Far Eastern Language at Harvard as a graduate student in fall 1963, and on my first meeting with Albert Craig, the historian of modern Japan at the time, I mentioned my interest in right-wing nationalist movements, whereupon he suggested that the left-wing student group called the Shinjinkai (“New Man Society”), which he had encountered in his own teaching, might be more interesting. This certainly proved to be the case, and after writing a seminar paper on the history of the early Shinjinkai, I settled on its broader history as my dissertation topic, which I completed in summer 1969 after three years of research in Tokyo.
