1970s

The 1970s are the formative period behind the Pioneers and the Dawn: a decade in which radical student politics moved from university occupations into agricultural communities, then fractured into opposing paths. In Aomamé’s reading of the press coverage, this history is not simply over. The newspapers cast the later bloodshed as a relic of the past, while the information she has learned about the Pioneers exposes how much their polished public image leaves out.

From student revolt to rural community

More than half of the future members of the Pioneers had taken part in the occupation of the Yasuda Auditorium at the University of Tokyo or of Nihon University. Mobile police removed them from their strongholds; the students surrendered and were expelled. Some teachers and students concluded that making university campuses the center of an urban political movement had reached a dead end. Moving beyond factional divisions, they established an agricultural community in Yamanashi Prefecture and initially joined the Takashima Course, a grouping of farming communities.

Unsatisfied with that arrangement, they reorganized and regained their independence. They acquired an abandoned village deep in the mountains at little cost and began farming. The early years were difficult, but city consumers became enthusiastic about their organic produce, and vegetable deliveries developed into a substantial business. Hard work, effective organization, and strong leadership helped the community expand its farms. It took the name the Pioneers, giving a rural livelihood a new place in the political and social landscape left behind by the student movement.

The split and the divergent paths

As the farming business stabilized, disagreements divided the community into two broad currents. The radical armed faction, shaped by Marxism, continued to advocate revolutionary guerrilla warfare. The more moderate communal faction accepted that violent revolution was not a realistic option in modern Japan, yet still rejected capitalist values and sought a natural life sustained by the land. In 1976, the moderates, who had greater numbers, expelled the armed faction.

According to the newspapers, the separation was peaceful rather than a forcible expulsion: the Pioneers asked the radicals to leave and provided them with new land and the capital to establish themselves. The radicals accepted and founded their own community, the Dawn. At an unspecified later point, the Dawn acquired highly effective weapons; the investigation had not established how they were obtained or how they were financed. The two communities thus emerged from a shared break with campus politics but came to represent sharply different futures: one organized around spiritual and communal life, the other retaining its revolutionary armed orientation.

The Pioneers’ transformation and public account

The newspapers could not explain when or why the Pioneers changed from an agricultural community into a religious sect. They reported that the shift accelerated after the peaceful separation from the radicals. In 1979, the Pioneers were registered as a religious corporation, bought neighboring land parcel by parcel, enlarged their cultivated area, and expanded their economic activity. They built a high fence around their domain, barring outsiders on the stated grounds that visitors interfered with spiritual exercises. The origins of their funds and the speed of their registration remained unanswered questions in the press account.

When journalists visited, the Pioneers presented themselves as a community for people seeking spiritual awakening, not as an organization intent on imposing a religion. Reporters generally left with a favorable impression: members appeared courteous and deferential, and the visitors were served fresh, frugal food made from the community’s own produce. Aomamé recognizes the distance between this managed encounter and the history concealed behind it. The reporters had spent only half a day on the grounds, where they saw orderly exercise rooms and heard polished explanations; they had not seen the abuse alleged by the Dowager, who said the group’s leader sexually assaulted girls as young as ten while claiming religious justification.

The decade as a remembered political ending

The newspapers described the Dawn as the Pioneers’ diabolical offshoot and presented the latter as a spiritual alternative that had been forced to eliminate it. Their account also situated the conflict within a broader change in Japan during the 1980s: Marxist revolutionary politics seemed anachronistic, as many former radicals entered companies and fought within the market economy, while others turned away from public struggle toward individual self-realization. From this perspective, the violent incident was a tragic but irrelevant recurrence of an earlier political season, its final act rather than the beginning of a new one.

That framing makes the 1970s more than a chronological backdrop. It is the period whose failed political promises are used to make the Dawn appear to have no future and the Pioneers to embody one. Aomamé’s response unsettles that neat contrast: the Pioneers’ public serenity and the press’s story of spiritual progress cannot erase what is hidden behind their fence. The decade’s legacy therefore persists not only in the Dawn’s violence, but also in the unresolved history of the community that claims to have moved beyond it.