A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

29 | On the Shores of Japan’s Postwar Left: An Intimate History

For the past three decades, Tokumura Tokiko and Tokumura Akira have made their home in the interior woodlands of Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. They live among a community of family, friends, and assorted young people and children—some longtime residents and others temporary sojourners. Each summer, scores of children migrate up to “Children’s Village” for a rare summer camp experience that borders on creative anarchy. In the “Autumn Forest Schoolhouse,” a smaller group of adults gather to experience the forest along with the Tokumuras and share ideas on a range of subjects from organic farming, ecological systems, and planetary ethics to children’s initiatives, social movements, and prospects for peace. Twice a year, Akira and Tokiko travel widely through Japan’s main island to talk to small groups of old friends and new acquaintances about the knowledge they have gained over years of interacting with children and inhabiting the northern forests. On these trips, Akira often spends several weeks at a time walking the remaining beech forests of Akita and Iwate, occasionally joined by friends who hope to experience firsthand what Akira describes as the “wonder” of the forest and the myriad living beings that inhabit it.

The way of living that the Tokumuras have embraced over the past half century—an evolving experiment in fostering a child-centered and ecologically conscious community—might not appear to be political in the strict sense of the term. Even so, the threads of their own lives are intertwined with the history of the Japanese left in the second half of the twentieth century. The legacies of that larger history lend texture and direction to their convictions and engagements.

Tokumura Tokiko and Tokumura Akira, 2012. Leslie Pincus (personal photo)

In the past, scholarship on the Japanese left, both “old” and “new,” focused closely on organizational taxonomies, charting the vicissitudes and schisms that divided the histories of the established leftist parties and New Left “sects.” Recently, a new cohort of scholars has taken on these boundary issues, looking beyond organizational divisions to discover continuities and connections among a diversity of progressive and leftist movements. These scholars hope both to rescue the history of Japan’s New Left from opprobrium and to situate it within broader contexts. Their work brings to light the New Left inheritance from earlier progressive traditions as well as its legacy (some would say an ambiguous one) for newer forms of collective action in the late twentieth century and beyond.[2] Rather than retrace these new histories, I have borrowed their insights in my own exploration of the narrative itineraries of Tokiko and Akira as they traverse the war years, old and new lefts, local social movements, and more. Both are creative foragers of memory, culling what is relevant to their current engagements even as they continue to make meaning out of their pasts. Their documented lives—whether in print, conversation, correspondence, or, most recently, texted free verse—add up to a small but revealing archive of conviction and practice on the shores of what Howard Brick has called “the long left.”

For their generation, that narrative begins by necessity with a calamitous war—the history that “must never be repeated” and the ground zero of leftist and progressive politics in postwar Japan. Akira (b. 1928) first found his political voice in the student self-governing associations that sprang up in the wake of defeat; in 1948 these coalesced into Zengakuren, a nationwide federation of student movements identified closely with a revived Japanese Communist Party (JCP). Tokiko, five years his junior, traces her storylines through the cultural circles that flourished in the early 1950s—groups that encouraged participatory democracy, organizational autonomy, and utopian political aspirations. At the end of the decade, these circles and a dynamic student movement converged, in loose association with organized labor and the established parties of the left, to mount a massive, nationwide protest against the 1960 renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (commonly known in its abbreviated Japanese form as “Anpo”).

 
Until Japan’s surrender, Akira had been a young cadet in Imperial Japan’s elite military training institution, the Naval Officers’ Training School on Etajima (an island just off coastal Hiroshima Prefecture), where he suffered the routine brutality of Japan’s wartime military culture. Had the war continued beyond August 1945, he might have been inducted into the “special attack forces” only to meet his end in a kaiten, a manned underwater torpedo. As part of a distinctive generational cohort reprieved from death by Japan’s surrender, Akira must have returned to his provincial home in Kanazawa with a mixture of feelings: guilt toward his seniors who did die in the war, a sense of being betrayed by the wartime regime, and distrust for an older generation that hastily refashioned itself from fascist to democratic.[3] His activist career began in an elite preparatory higher school where he helped organize one of the many student self-governing associations that emerged with encouragement from a still-progressive Civil Affairs section of the Occupation administration in the wake of defeat. In 1949, newly admitted to Tokyo National University, Akira arrived in the midst of student demonstrations against rising tuitions and early signs of an Occupation-backed “red purge” as US Cold War policies sharpened political divisions in a Japan still wracked by scarcity and inflation. The student protests would have been organized by the Tokyo University branch of Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Governing Associations) in which all students on campus were automatically enrolled. But for a large part of the student body, allegiance to the JCP-allied Zengakuren was no mere formality: many of this postdefeat student generation were drawn to the Communist Party for its record of opposition to fascism and militarism before 1945 and its commitment to democracy after. And Akira was no exception. By his own account, he kept his distance from the more doctrinaire leadership of Zengakuren, devoting his energies instead to the Japan Memorial Society for Fallen Students, an antiwar organization inspired by the 1949 publication of Kike, wadatsumi no koe (Listen to the Voices from the Sea), a compilation of posthumous writings by seventy-five student-soldiers who died in the war, some in suicide missions.[4]

For Akira, the antiwar stance had a special salience: on August 6, 1945, he and fellow cadets at the Naval Academy on Etajima watched from five miles across the Inland Sea as Hiroshima and its inhabitants were annihilated in an atomic cataclysm. Less than two weeks later, he crossed over to Hiroshima to pick his way through the ruins in search of a train out of the city. A gifted conversationalist, Akira is uncharacteristically reticent on this topic. Only after the recent Fukushima nuclear disaster sixty-six years later did Akira describe the scene in writing: “What I saw before my eyes was a scene of cruel tragedy: People, near naked, their flesh burned away, wandered the city in search of relatives. It was too much to bear. Right then and there, the worldview of this ‘militarist youth’ was forever shattered.”[5] It was also after the Fukushima disaster, when the issue of naibu hibaku (internal radiation exposure) came to the fore, that Akira first realized that the chronic illness that plagued him throughout his adult life was likely the result of his exposure in Hiroshima.

In 1951, Akira returned once again to Hiroshima, this time as part of a production team for a documentary film with the same title as the epistolary anthology Listen to the Voices from the Sea. His promotional efforts—tacking up posters with the injunction “Never again repeat the tragedy of Hiroshima”—drew the ire of Occupation authorities who placed the atomic bombings at the top of their covert list of censored topics. In hopes of evading the American military police, Akira made a fateful decision to go underground.

Akira himself attaches little importance to his memories of these early postwar years: “I wasn’t acting out of my own conviction,” he says. “There was just this powerful tide, and the views of those above me in the organization [JCP].” From my perspective, Akira’s retrospective self-doubt seems to run parallel to Zengakuren criticism of the JCP in the late 1950s for its authoritarian organizational tactics, erratic policy shifts, and recent embrace of parliamentary politics. The conflict between the JCP and many of the leaders of the student movement would lead the mainstream of the Zengakuren to break from the Communist Party in 1958 and form an independent, radical left “Bund”—an event that coincides with the early beginning of the New Left in global history. For his part, Akira contrasts this early period of his political life to his more recent engagements with children and ecology, to which he brings endless reserves of initiative, imagination, and passion.

In 1952, still at risk of arrest, Akira was smuggled out of Japan by boat, a clandestine departure most likely arranged and funded by the JCP.[6] His own intention, he explains, was to attend the Vienna Congress of the Peoples for Peace in December 1952 and return to Japan. But once the Congress was over, reentry proved difficult for a Japanese national who had left the country illegally. Akira never clarifies exactly why he remained outside Japan for nearly a decade. He spent most of that period in the People’s Republic of China (a safe haven for Japanese Communists in the early 1950s), another subject on which he has little to say—only that he was treated as an “esteemed representative of the Japanese Student Movement.” He reveals this fact with some discomfort as if he now believes he was in China under false pretenses. Whatever admiration he may have had for revolutionary China has been blunted by his disillusionment with the orthodox left and the new hierarchies it installed, whether in China or Japan.

 
For Tokiko (b. 1933), news of Japan’s surrender came in Onomichi on the Inland Sea, the Nakai family hometown and refuge from Kyoto, where food had become scarce and bombing raids likely. During the 1930s, Tokiko’s father, Nakai Masakazu, had combined a brilliant academic career in philosophy with antifascist, Popular Front activism; for the latter, he was arrested and prosecuted for “dangerous thought” under a sweeping Peace Preservation Law, spending most of the war years in prison or under surveillance. In the wake of defeat, the Nakai household quickly became a center for cultural enlightenment and democratic activism. Tokiko’s accounts of those first few years in Onomichi after Japan’s defeat are filled with a sense of elation and liberation—a feeling not unique to her but nevertheless intense, colored as it was by a child’s experience of the war only understood after the fact. Of the war itself, she invokes a small number of memories with a clarity that suggests a photographic imprint, sharpened rather than dulled with each narrative iteration. These include the kinds of everyday privations shared by many families during the war but also the distinctive suffering visited upon the child of a “thought criminal.” Until the eve of defeat, the Nakai children knew little of their father’s oppositional views. On rare excursions, Tokiko and the other children, dressed in their finest, were told that the police prison where they were taken to visit their father was his university office.

Tokiko calls up another wartime picture of her father, now released from detention but enduring the enforced idleness of house arrest. Occasionally, the family would pack lunch and head out to Lake Biwa, not far from Kyoto: “One day we rowed out and, as our boat floated in the middle of the lake, a naval training plane happened to fly overhead. My father looked up toward the sky and yelled ‘bakayarō’ (stupid fool). He was able to say it out loud only because we were out in the middle of the lake. At the time, we kids thought it was a game, so we imitated him.”[7] It was only years later, Tokiko explains, that she understood her father’s invective, aimed at a regime of violence that had rendered him powerless.

In 1947, when Nakai was appointed by the Diet, Japan’s legislative body, to help establish the new National Diet Library, the family relocated to Tokyo. By then a high school student, Tokiko aspired first to the study of Russian literature and then to a career in classical music—both foreclosed by her father’s untimely death in 1952 (a tragedy not unrelated, in Tokiko’s view, to the rise of a virulent anticommunism and its red-baiting tactics). Compelled to earn a living wage at age seventeen, she found employment at a major bank in Tokyo: “Not a place to spend a life,” she decided—and enrolled in an evening course at Tōhō Gakuen College of Music with the hope of redeeming her musical talents for a teaching credential.[8]

In between a day job and night school, Tokiko also found time to participate in several “circles”—small-scale, cultural gatherings devoted to literature, song, group study, or life writing that flourished in the 1950s, often with links to leftist politics. Many of these circles were initiated on the shop floor as part of a JCP effort to educate workers and build mass organization. However, as in the case of circle organizer and theorist Tanigawa Gan, some on the left chafed under the yoke of top-down direction from the party.[9] This more independent stream in the circle movement developed a different organizational philosophy from the established leftist parties. In place of the demand for unity, exclusivity, and compliance with directives issued from above, Tanigawa and other organizers encouraged free expression, internal diversity, participatory democracy, and exchange with other groups. While small in scale, these circles became a touchstone for both the New Left and the new social movements that emerged in 1960s.[10]

Tokiko was especially active in a flourishing utagoe (singing voice) movement—workplace choruses often linked to union politics. The choral connection proved to be her ticket out of the bank and into the labor movement. Not long before the 1960 Anpo protests, she took a job as secretary in Kurōkyō, a federation of labor unions established in the early postwar years to support working people in Tokyo’s twenty-three wards. Tokiko’s entry into labor politics came at a critical juncture: the late 1950s witnessed the last stage of a long struggle of militantly political unions against management efforts, backed by a powerful economic bureaucracy, to reassert control over labor and rationalize the workplace. During these same years, an ultraconservative government led by Kishi Nobusuke, an accused war criminal “de-purged” at the end of the US occupation, pushed a legislative agenda that included remilitarization, strengthening domestic police powers, and reasserting central control over school curricula. For new constituencies who had placed their hopes in Japan’s fledgling postwar democracy (unions, women, students, progressive intellectuals, and the leftist parties), Kishi’s administration raised the specter of a fascist revival. As the June 1960 deadline for renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty in the National Diet approached, these new constituencies came together in a coalition to oppose renewal and the binding of Japan to US strategic interests in East Asia. But what ultimately galvanized the millions of ordinary people who took to the streets in protest in May and June 1960 was less the long shadow of US imperialism than the antidemocratic tactics Kishi used to overpower the opposition and force renewal through the Diet.

In the offices of Kurōkyō, Tokiko found herself at the organizational hub of labor strikes and the massive protests against the Security Treaty. This is how she describes her days on the front lines:

For Tokiko, the Anpo protests exposed the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and coercive aspects of the orthodox left and raised doubts about the efficacy of its leadership. In search of alternatives, she turned to the most proximate and dramatic exemplar of social transformation: the Chinese Revolution, an event that loomed large in the progressive imagination during the years leading up to 1960 Anpo. “How could it be that the masses of people who brought about a transformation on that scale had acted simply on command from above?” she said. “I wanted to know how each individual actively took part in the movement.”[12] Tokiko was especially curious about a term that circulated widely among progressive intellectuals in the 1950s: taishū rosen (the mass line), a key concept in the early stages of PRC revolutionary policy. At the suggestion of a friend, she addressed her question to Akira, just back from China. His response, in the form of a letter, served a dual purpose: it offered clarification on the concept of the mass line and it ignited a romance. The letter no longer exists, but at my request, Akira attempted to recreate his explanation of the mass line, tempering memory with recent reflection: “Even then I had this sense that it meant drawing on the popular will from below, those freely formed sentiments and ideas, and then gathering them together into a single force.” He contrasted this approach with an entrenched tendency in Japanese leftist movements toward top-down organization. “Those above always try to control and manipulate those below, which is why the movement inevitably fragments.”[13]

The year 1960 (when Tokiko and Akira’s paths converged) marks the culmination as well as the endpoint of the grand coalition of progressive forces in the early postwar era. The ultimate failure of the movement to prevent the renewal of the Security Treaty or to fundamentally transform governing structures led to the disintegration of the antitreaty coalition and widespread disillusionment with the established left (soon to be labeled “the loyal opposition”). Although this history of post-Anpo disaffection has lent itself to a narrative of “the decline of the left,” the 1960s actually witnessed a dynamic reconstellation of progressive organizations and movements. Moreover, as the Tokumuras’ stories from the 1970s suggest, there are other possibilities for imagining the historical trajectory of the left in late twentieth-century Japan. In the words of Fernando Coronil, the loss of a “monopoly on the future” by the established left “opened spaces for the imagination and experimentation” where a diversity of groups were free to pursue “alternative paths to alternative futures.”[14] In the Tokumuras’ case, these “alternative paths” have taken unassuming form—a children’s library, a collective child-centered community, and, most recently, visionary organizing in the field of deep ecology. These, too, represent one of the byways of Japan’s “long left.”

The Tokumuras were largely absent from Japan’s turbulent social politics of the sixties, no doubt because of Akira’s persistent maladies. In 1963, with hopes that his condition would improve with convalescence, the couple moved from Tokyo to Hiyoshi, a semirural suburb at the northernmost edge of Yokohama City. When they did reappear in the early 1970s, it was on ground that had been tilled by the New Left and small-scale citizens’ movements, both of which had come into their own in the 1960s. At the beginning of the 1960s, Japan was poised on the cusp of phenomenal economic growth driven by developmentalist and technocratic state policies. The more conciliatory politics of the Ikeda administration—with the promise of affluence captured in the slogan “Double your income”—were designed to subdue the widespread desire for radical change of the early postwar years. That desire was also restrained by the extraordinary degree of uniformity imposed on social life in the course of the 1960s. To facilitate Japan’s high-growth economy and contain the social energy manifested in the Anpo protests, government and industry coordinated efforts to rationalize the workplace, discipline the workforce, and standardize pathways from school to work.

It was this more affluent and intimately oppressive society that became an object of criticism for the New Left student groups that emerged from the organizational dispersion after 1960. Even as they sought an ideological foundation for a radical left independent of the Communist Party, these new student activists cultivated a critical awareness of how their own everyday lives were implicated in the systemic coercion that operated just below the surface of “Japan’s glamorous, consumer-driven society.”[15] Armed with the conviction that transforming “everydayness” would lead to social and political change, this generation introduced a new degree of reflexivity into the revolutionary struggle.

On the larger stage of geopolitics, the New Left students saw Japan’s rising economic power and wealth as inextricably linked to the Security Treaty system with the United States—a system under which Japan, now a junior party in America’s Pacific Asia strategy, had moved to rearm under a thin veil of pacifism. The outlines of that system became disturbingly clear in the mid-1960s as the United States stepped up its intervention in Vietnam and Japan became a staging ground, a manufacturer, and a morgue for the American war in Indochina. Criticism of Japan’s complicity in American Cold War policy extended beyond the student movement to engage the political passions of a wider public: between 1967 and 1970, an estimated eighteen million people took to the streets calling for the reversion of Okinawa to Japan and an end to the war in Vietnam—the latter under the banner of Beheiren (Citizens’ Federation for Peace in Vietnam), a nonpartisan alliance of hundreds of antiwar groups.[16] One of several large “people’s movements” in the later 1960s, Beheiren developed organizational principles that paid tribute to the earlier, independent circle movement—nonalignment, organizational pluralism, voluntary participation, and direct democracy. A similar organizational ethos defined the campus revolts at the end of the decade under the auspices of Zenkyōtō, a loose network of independent, nonaligned “joint struggle councils.”

The 1960s also saw the dramatic rise of small-scale, local movements, often in response to environmental depredations caused by intensive modernization policies and industrial recklessness. Scholars have tended to draw clear lines of demarcation between these new forms of collective action and the large-scale movements organized around powerful ideological programs that culminated in the 1960 Anpo protests. The “new social movements” of the sixties and seventies, they suggest, were distinct from the left (new and old) in both organization and objective—smaller in scale, more autonomous from established parties, more pragmatic in purpose, and less ideologically driven.[17]

The 1960s may indeed represent a watershed in movement culture, but that divide proves to be negotiable. Recent scholarship has highlighted continuities among these different movement genres, whether in the activist itineraries of specific individuals, in common aspirations for social justice, or even in movement styles. By the early 1970s, more than a few veterans from large-scale movements on the left had chosen to pursue social change on a smaller scale and in various forms—environmentalist and feminist movements, cooperatives and consumer movements, and alternative communities.[18] While these more local initiatives for social change might not present their ideological credentials in established form or directly confront the state, they often rose on radical ground.

 
The Tokumuras’ plans in the early 1970s for a small, community-based, cultural initiative coincided with this shift in the scale, locus, and affiliation of social movements. It is hard to say whether their choice was a consequence of practical limitations on their lives at the time, disaffection with the established left, or a fundamental rethinking of strategies for social transformation. What is clear is that the projects they and other veterans of organized opposition politics undertook in the 1970s sprang from a desire to begin anew—to return to the foundations of everyday life and create a radically democratic and egalitarian way of living, person by person. For Tokiko and Akira in particular, this meant returning to the early postwar moment when the passion for democratic revolution was at its height. As it turned out, it also meant beginning with the child.

The occasion for their renewed activism came in 1971 in the form of a bleak prognosis for Akira’s chronic maladies. Confronted with his own mortality, Akira was determined to leave no regrets, and so he and Tokiko considered how to live what remained of their life together. This is where the idea of a children’s circle first makes its appearance, and it does so through the mediation of Nakai Masakazu and the culture movement he helped organize in the wake of Japan’s defeat in World War II. As a young girl in Onomichi, Tokiko experienced her father’s experiment in grassroots democratic transformation firsthand. Akira discovered the movement in print—in Nakai’s accounts of how he had converted a small-town library into the headquarters for cultural organizing and a people’s university, all intended to nurture a revolutionary democratic subjectivity among farmers, workers, and demobilized soldiers in the towns and villages of Hiroshima prefecture. “I was especially drawn to these essays from the immediate post-defeat era,” Akira writes. “However small in scale, we wanted to create a library of our own—a place where we could engage with young people in the neighborhood.”[19]

While the couple traced their inspiration back to that postdefeat moment of radical democratization, they found practical advice in a recently published book by children’s author Ishii Momoko, an overview of Japan’s first wave of children’s libraries beginning in the late 1960s. These community-based, volunteer initiatives (typically organized by local parents concerned that the test-driven educational apparatus was diminishing the creative and imaginative worlds of children) aimed to reintroduce the rewards of reading.[20] Though far less conspicuous or contentious than the environmental protests that epitomized the grassroots citizens’ movements of this mid-postwar era, the “children’s library” initiative also takes its place in the new social movement culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Most of all, it was Ishii’s simple prescription for creating a children’s library that drew the Tokumuras’ attention: “When we thought of a library, we assumed that a building was necessary; and since we had no resources to build one, we were convinced that our plan was impossible. But Ishii Momoko’s book showed us that it was possible to create a ‘library’ right here and now. . . . All we had to do was open up our home.”[21] Here they use the Japanese word kaihō, which means both “to open” and “to liberate.” In the years that followed, the Tokumuras did liberate their home—along with their energies and aspirations—as part of a collective enterprise in social transformation. But to be more faithful to their story, I should say that the children liberated these sanctums for them. Akira and Tokiko maintain that they underwent a radical “reeducation” as they learned from the children who literally took over their home and their lives. Ultimately, this reeducation took them far beyond the modest ambitions of the children’s library movement. But what made them so receptive to this radical venture were the legacies they inherited from the left, both old and new.

In the first of their coauthored chronicles, Kodomo ga shujinkō (The child is the hero), Akira and Tokiko describe the first stage of that venture in the early 1970s as a dialogic process between adult and child that compels both to change; but it is the more socialized adults, steeped in everyday common sense, who must transform themselves to the core: “We started with the expectation that a manageable number of adorable little children would appear; that they would sit and read quietly to themselves or listen with their eyes aglow as we adults read to them. All we had to do was expose them to the gems of children’s literature and their minds would be enriched.”[22] As if in defiance of their intentions, “Sunflower Library” opened to a mob scene—from sixty children that first Sunday to more than five hundred bona fide participants six months later.[23] Not only did the children take over the house, but their play spilled out the doors into the side alley, on the roof, and out to the hill in back. They yelled at the top of their lungs and overstayed their welcome, and when they finally went home, they forgot to take the books they meant to borrow.

Despite repeated acts of sabotage, the children kept coming back to Sunflower Library, and the Tokumuras wanted to know why. The most likely explanation went something like this: children were constantly reprimanded and exhorted—not to make noise, not to run around, not to go outside, to study hard. In the unfettered environment of Sunflower Library, they raised a ruckus simply because they could. But Tokiko and Akira were also convinced that the children “found something here that they couldn’t find elsewhere, whether at home, at school, or in the community.” In the words of one articulate sixth-grader, “Sunflower Library is like a ‘zone of freedom’—that’s why I come here!”[24] The children’s testimony suggests that Sunflower Library was a rare exception to the rule.

And what was that rule? Kodomo ga shujinkō offers a glimpse of some of the new arrangements impinging on children’s lives at the culmination of Japan’s high-growth era. By the 1970s, towns like Hiyoshi had become bedroom communities for nearby metropolitan centers, their neighborhoods and fields replaced by high-rise apartment complexes where families lived in confined proximity. With this reconfiguration of social topography came the loss of spaces where children could play. At school and at home, children were increasingly subject to hyperregulation: “In a society that keeps its children under constant surveillance,” the Tokumuras observed, “where there is no escape from the eyes of parents, teachers, and adults, what drew these kids [to Sunflower Library] was the freedom from supervision.”[25]

This trend toward regulation was particularly striking in the field of education: over the course of the 1960s, the Ministry of Education, in league with the powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, exerted increasing control over the national education system in the interests of “making it more responsive to the manpower requirements of Japan’s economy and industry.” In the view of education scholar Horio Teruhisa, the litany of reforms imposed by the central government—from universal scholastic testing and standardized student ranking to a reconstituted course of study (including the return of pre-1945 “moral education”)—was designed to control the content of education and produce a compliantly segmented workforce for the diversifying needs of Japan’s high-growth capitalist economy.[26] Increasingly, children were measured according to a single education-based standard, one that overwhelmingly determined the officially sanctioned path to their future. In turn, the aspirations of children and parents for educational success became a primary mechanism for discipline.

While these larger forces formed the backdrop to Sunflower Library, Akira and Tokiko seem to have been engaged in a struggle against more subtle and intimate forms of coercion. Here is Akira writing in a self-critical mode: “There was a part of me that was dead set on ‘doing good,’ on performing a service for these children. But my ‘good intentions’ didn’t necessarily correspond to what the children wanted. I told them to come to Sunflower Library, but only on my terms, in a structure of my making. The kids were trying to go beyond the structure.”[27] Significantly, this personal process of critical self-reflection retraced the arc of more public debates of the early postwar decades over the role of progressive intellectuals in relation to the masses—whether to lead the masses as an elite vanguard or to learn from them in pursuit of a mass line. The Tokumuras pursued their own version of the mass line in their early engagement with the children who came to Sunflower Library. But their struggle to dislodge the authoritarian disposition that had taken up residence in their own minds also evokes the more introspective quality of the New Left conviction that self-transformation in the everyday would lead to social change.

In essence, the Tokumuras conducted a sustained experiment in the redistribution of power, in relinquishing the authority that adults normally claim over the lives of children. That experiment would lead to the collective creation of a community where children could make a place for themselves, learn on their own terms, and create things of their own making.[28] In a letter addressed to “Ojiji” and “Obaba” (referring to Akira and Tokiko as grandpa and grandma), Yamada Yūko, a middle-school student at the time, got to the heart of the matter: “What is Sunflower Library, really? In a word, it’s sort of like a wide-open field. Since there are no boundaries, no walls or chain-link fences, anybody can walk right in, from anywhere. And as soon as you step inside, that’s where you belong; you join a large circle of friends and play to your heart’s content.”[29]

 
As Tokiko and Akira tell it, the Sunflower Library community developed spontaneously and incrementally—from games and hand-crafted toys to a “children’s bazaar” and a summer camp—all typical activities for any children’s circle. Yet there was something unusual about the qualities the Tokumuras brought to this enterprise: first, a rare degree of tolerance for unruly behavior and a willingness to withhold judgment; second, a readiness to listen attentively to those whose voices were often dismissed or discounted; and third, a capacity to resist appeals to social convention and common sense—this last is remarkable in a society where the pressures to conform to the social “common sense” can be both subtle and formidable. I once asked them how they saw their own role in this evolving enterprise. By way of an answer, Akira drew a pyramid on a piece of paper and explained: Power usually works like this; the few at the top rule over the many below. We’ve tried turning the pyramid upside down, but see how difficult it is to balance. Whenever the pyramid shows signs of tipping over, from our position at the bottom, we give it a little nudge, just enough to keep it from falling.

In effect, Sunflower Library summer camp was the “testing ground” for Children’s Village in Hokkaido—a term-limited experiment in collective living without hierarchy or bureaucracy. As the Tokumuras describe it, “The process by which the camp, through the children’s own initiative, became a site of independence and freedom rarely seen elsewhere, was, at the same time, a process in which we grownups struggled to overcome our ‘adult common sense’—the ‘management mentality’ that is part and parcel of summer camp—and all the old ways of thinking that we still harbored.”[30]

Early in their Sunflower venture, Akira and Tokiko began to make claims that went against the grain of the children’s library movement: “Children will grow up even without books”; “no book can substitute for play.”[31] These claims—based on the recognition of the significance of play and an appreciation of different ways of learning—brought the censure of the movement down upon the Tokumuras. Perhaps their most serious offence against the conventional wisdom about raising and educating children was a steadfast refusal of the “management mentality” so pervasive in late twentieth-century Japan. Criticism of the Tokumuras for their failure to provide “sufficient guidance” was a recurrent refrain throughout the history of Sunflower Library. Tokiko and Akira used the opportunity to articulate their own principles of “genuine guidance”: (1) Adults need to recognize that each child is an “individual human being with his or her own world”; (2) they must “release their hold”; (3) they should allow children the freedom to make mistakes because this is when they learn the most; and (4) adults must learn in tandem with children.[32]

No doubt it was ideas such as these that provoked critics to describe Sunflower Library and its founders as “extreme”—a word that has easily lent itself to red-baiting, particularly at critical turning points in the history of this unusual children’s community. The Tokumuras willingly accept the label, but on their own terms: As they define it, “extremity” is the moment when the self is shaken to its core, creating the possibility for profound change—a turn of phrase that evokes a history of the postwar left, from Nakai Masakazu’s call for a “revolution of consciousness” in occupied Japan to the New Left call for self-transformation.

The accumulated experience at Sunflower Library encouraged both children and adults to seek alternatives to conventional education, beginning with a series of “Science Symposia” initiated by the children and culminating in the involvement of the Sunflower community in the creation of a “free school” (among the earliest of such educational experiments in Japan). The initial appeal of this alternative school lay in its founding commitment to “freedom and autonomy.” Rather than “suppress the individuality of each child in the name of test preparation and supervision,” teachers would “value the children as human beings.” The plan called for an “open school” with no divisions among grade levels and no classes or exams. Students would learn through hands-on experience and fieldwork in a self-sufficient, cooperative community located in the mountains north of Tokyo.[33] But once the school opened, conflicting expectations among students, teachers, administrators, and parents were ultimately settled in favor of a model too conventional (and too remedial) for the Sunflower Library community, especially the handful of middle-schoolers who had taken the gamble and enrolled. Nevertheless, the “visionary organizing” for this revolutionary educational endeavor helped crystalize the themes that would animate Children’s Village, the next chapter of the Tokumuras’ story: the idea that “place” is integral to everyday life and that learning is best done in close connection to a specific site and its local inhabitants; the notion that children learn from necessity; the preference for inclusivity across open borders; and the conviction that common sense is something to be overcome.

The new school experiment marks a crucial point in the process that eventually led Tokiko and Akira, along with a number of children and young people, to leave the metropolitan center in 1983 and head north. They describe that process as “protean”—the term itself harks back to the early postwar understanding of the circle movement as an autonomous, spontaneous, bottom-up form of participatory democracy.[34] The decision to move to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, was partly an economic one: housing in the depopulated villages of rural Hokkaido was cheap by most standards, and the town of Takinoue offered Children’s Village a swathe of forestland along Bear Creek for use as a summer camp. Nevertheless, the Tokumuras’ chronicle suggests other, less quantifiable factors that stirred the collective imagination of the Sunflower Library circle: an extreme environment demanding renewed attention to the foundations of everyday life; a remote location offering the freedom of the periphery; and a land now populated by recent Japanese émigrés, thus easing the burden of settled custom.

In the prose from the time of the relocation, the lure of the “frontier” is palpable. (Hokkaido was, in fact, Japan’s first modern settler colony, its nineteenth-century development modeled closely on the settlement of the American West and at a similar cost to the indigenous inhabitants.) It colors both praise for new friends in Hokkaido and an emergent vision for Children’s Village. In an exuberant vision of their new location, the Tokumuras imagined a generous landscape of “wide open fields and forest, river and mountains,” invoking nature’s bounty and man-made development, an egalitarian community of children and adults in a self-sufficient outpost of civilization.[35]

That ebullient frontier spirit has been greatly tempered by time and experience, yielding to a way of life that is less enterprising and more attuned to the contours of the place they have made their home. What has remained constant, however, is a vision of Hokkaido as a space where revolutionary transformation is possible—in the words of Akira and Tokiko, a space “where we can fundamentally rethink human values and ways of living, a place where we can live intensely and mindfully, and, in so doing, go beyond our old selves.”[36] But rather than building an outpost of modern civilization, the community has chosen to radically rethink the fundamental principles of civilization on new ground. Over the years, the resettlement in Hokkaido has given rise to a new ecological awareness extending the reach of Children’s Village in unanticipated directions.

 
In the early years, the community put in days of hard labor cutting the ubiquitous bamboo grass and clearing tent sites along Bear Creek. Even so, this continues to be a much wilder affair than the typical summer camp in Japan (or elsewhere, for that matter). Initially, the “facilities” consisted of a bare minimum: a makeshift outhouse, a well for drinking water, a rustic shed for provisions, and, scattered here and there in the woods, tents and tarps for shelter from the rain and mist. In the summers, the kids make themselves at home in the forest, scampering down the foot-worn paths that connect tent sites, supply station, creek-side and campfire circle. Over time, as Akira and Tokiko began to live year-round in the forest (no easy feat in the severe winters of Hokkaido), they have, with collective help, built several improvised structures: a couple of outdoor bathtubs in the form of huge cauldrons heated by wood fires and a few small wooden structures that do service as dwelling, study, studio, guest house, and firewood shelter. In recent years, the community has done less “clearing,” allowing trees, plants, and grasses to grow in relative profusion. While people inhabit this small woodland, they live in it lightly: no gas or electricity and no tap water or sewage system. The forest is left largely to its own devices, with human intervention at a minimum. Nevertheless, the site, affectionately referred to by regulars simply as mori (forest), has the familiar feel of home rather than a provisional campsite.

Gradually, over the past two decades, Akira and Tokiko have extended themselves beyond the perimeter of the children’s circle to embrace a wider community that includes all beings, human and nonhuman. This expansion of conviction and affinity has unfolded within overlapping contexts: on the one hand, a half century of environmentalist activism against an entrenched political economy fueled by development and “public works” and, on the other, an accumulation of personal experience that has illuminated the ubiquity, the interconnectedness, and the precariousness of life.

In a series of essays collected in two volumes, both published in 2003, the Tokumuras document continuing commitments and new directions. Here, Akira emerges as an advocate for the forest and a deeply ecological vision of the world. “Over the past several centuries,” he writes, “we have come to see trees either as extractable lumber or as aesthetic form; and, from this limited perspective, we assess the value of a forest for its ‘health’ or its beauty to the human eye. Presuming to understand the forest, human beings thin it or cut it down at their own convenience.”[37] But as he reminds his readers, even in the relatively young forest at Bear Creek, many of the trees are longer lived than the oldest surviving human beings. How can we be so presumptuous, he wonders, to believe that we understand the lives of these trees? How can we know which saplings will thrive, which will become ancient trees? Who decides which trees are undesirable? Which grasses, which weeds? The rotting trees that the forestry agency insists on clearing make good habitat for insects and the woodpeckers that feed on them. The wild mushrooms growing at their base rise from vast mycelial networks beneath the ground that connect soil and trees in mutually nourishing, wild systems.[38] From this more ecocentered position, the value of a forest rests not in its appeal as economic or aesthetic resource but rather in the sheer diversity and interrelatedness of the living beings it embraces. Pressing the point, Akira asks, “What is the meaning of ‘wealth and abundance’”? The word at issue here is yutakasa, commonly used to describe the affluence of Japan’s postwar consumerist society, but Akira offers a different answer to his rhetorical question: “The real meaning of yutakasa is diversity (tayōsei).”[39]

Based on an intimate and relational knowledge of the forest, Akira has distilled a set of ecological principles, radical in their simplicity: (1) All living beings are equal; there is no living being that doesn’t matter. (2) All living beings are connected to one another. (3) What we call an ecosystem is precisely this concatenation of living beings, each playing a role that cannot be filled by any other. (4) If just one of those living beings is missing, the ecosystem begins to unravel from that place. This ecological ethos has its origin in “a more concentrated empiricism” made possible by years of living on the banks of Bear Creek.[40] But, as Akira insists, it only gains cogency when one has “fallen head over heels in love with the forest.”[41]

In recent years, the Tokumuras have taken this ecological ethos on the road. With the support of a network of acquaintances spread throughout the Japanese archipelago, they have held hundreds of “gatherings to talk about the forest.” I wonder if these intimate gatherings are a form of organizing—or if it is even fitting to call the Children’s Village a movement. There is no membership roster, only a few cell phones and a carefully maintained, handwritten address book; no initiation fees or treasury, but a running invitation to contribute (in any form whatsoever); no official leadership or fixed agenda, just a core community of people who cooperate together and occasionally make things happen; and a hand-produced newsletter (mini-komi) that comes out when it is ready. This is not the conventional repertoire of organizing but rather a movement ecology of a different kind—one that operates on the conviction that encounters among people and between people and the natural world can change hearts and minds and ultimately transform the way people live in a world reconfigured in a less human-centered mode. “It’s not that I reject petition drives, demonstrations or strikes that mobilize large numbers of people,” writes Akira. “I think they are important. But now, what I most want to do is bring people together in small circles, one by one.”[42]