Ebisuno—Tamotsu Fukada

Professor Ebisuno and Tamotsu Fukada share an unusually close friendship that persists across political rupture, institutional failure, and very different ways of inhabiting the world. Ebisuno’s account makes their relationship more than a biographical connection: Fukada’s trust in him gives Fukaéri a place to flee, while Ebisuno’s knowledge of Fukada’s choices lets him interpret the history behind the young woman’s story.

Friendship at the University

Ebisuno recalls that he and Fukada had been intimate friends since the 1960s, when both taught in the same university department. Ebisuno was about ten years older, and the two men differed in temperament and their understanding of the world; their friendship was not founded on ideological sameness. They had each married late and, soon afterward, each had a daughter. Living in the same university housing, their families spent time together, while their professional standing brought them public attention: the media repeatedly published their photographs, presenting them as leading intellectuals of their period.

That shared success forms the bright background against which their later divergence is measured. By the late 1960s, the political climate was turning volatile. Student protests against the Japan–United States security treaty grew, universities were blockaded, clashes with riot police and bloody factional struggles followed, and people died. Ebisuno concluded that the conflict between the established order and its opponents had become a contest between organizations. He resigned from the university, already alienated from its system and unwilling to place faith in organizations of any size.

Different Political Paths

Fukada took the opposite route into political action. He embraced Mao Zedong’s revolutionary thought and supported China’s Cultural Revolution, which intellectuals in Japan then understood only imperfectly. Carrying the Little Red Book had become an ideological fashion among some of them. Fukada organized students into a radical group modeled on the Red Guards, joined a university strike, and drew in activists from other faculties. The group grew until university authorities called in riot police. Fukada and his students barricaded themselves inside the campus, were arrested and sent before a criminal court, and Fukada was dismissed from his post. Fukaéri was still very young; Ebisuno assumes she remembers none of it.

Their divergent responses did not end the friendship. Ebisuno had already left the university; Fukada was expelled from it two years later. The surviving core of Fukada’s student group—about ten people, most also excluded from the university—followed him into the Takashima Course. Ebisuno describes the course as a refuge for people with nowhere else to go, but not as the utopia Fukada sought. In his judgment, Takashima trained people to obey rather than think independently, offering the comfort of a life in which decisions came from above. Fukada, by contrast, lived for science and insisted on thinking with his own intelligence. Ebisuno believes Fukada knew the course could not satisfy him from the start; it was a temporary shelter and an opportunity to understand how the system worked.

From Refuge to Community

Fukada and his students learned agriculture by doing it, beginning with the basics because they were city dwellers with no farming experience. They also studied distribution, self-sufficiency and its limits, and the practical rules of communal life. Ebisuno says that two years of close observation and rapid learning enabled them to judge Takashima’s strengths and failures. Fukada then reclaimed his independence with a group of young people. The relationship between the friends thus spans not just an ideological disagreement but a consequential difference in method: Fukada entered a system he did not fully accept, learned its operation, and left to build another form of collective life.

Ebisuno’s description of Fukada makes the contrast between them almost physical. Fukada was imposing, eloquent, politically gifted, and naturally suited to leadership; Ebisuno calls himself a solitary, apolitical scholar, small in stature and unprepossessing. Fukada’s ability to judge and persuade helped a heterogeneous group of people rally around him, while Ebisuno’s account stresses that he did not share his friend’s public, organizing temperament. Yet he calls Fukada the only friend he had ever had. The intimacy rests on mutual respect and trust across difference, not on an imagined similarity.

In 1974, Fukada’s group established a community called the Pioneers in a depopulated mountain village in Yamanashi Prefecture. The settlement acquired land and houses cheaply, including plastic greenhouses; the local government supplied a subsidy on the condition that existing cultivated land continue to be farmed, and the group initially received favorable tax treatment. Fukada also had a substantial private source of funds. Ebisuno says he never learned where the money came from or what its nature was, and Fukada disclosed the secret to no one. That capital enabled the members to buy agricultural equipment and building materials, set aside reserves, repair existing houses, and construct facilities for a community of about thirty people. Ebisuno’s account preserves both the practical basis of the project and a significant limit to his knowledge of his friend.

Separation and Lasting Protection

The Pioneers divided in 1976. The following year, Fukaéri escaped the community and came to take refuge in Ebisuno’s home; at about the same time, the dissident faction adopted the name the Dawn. The sequence gives the old friendship a direct consequence in the present: Ebisuno’s bond with Fukada becomes the route by which Fukada’s daughter reaches safety, even as the community her father built fractures into rival paths. The account does not present the escape as evidence that Ebisuno and Fukada had resolved their political differences. Instead, it shows trust outlasting the structures and affiliations around them.

Ebisuno’s later conduct toward Fukaéri echoes this history of protection. He receives her after her flight from the Pioneers and gives her a home; the available account does not specify that Fukada arranged this refuge or describe a request between the two men. The distinction matters: the relationship establishes a history of intimacy and trust, but it does not license an invented explanation for how Fukaéri came to Ebisuno. What is clear is that their friendship makes her refuge intelligible within a network of old family ties, and that Ebisuno assumes responsibility for her after the community from which she came has split.

The relation also exposes the limits of friendship as a source of knowledge. Ebisuno can narrate Fukada’s political rise, dismissal, apprenticeship at Takashima, and communal project from close acquaintance, yet he does not know the source of Fukada’s financing. His testimony is therefore intimate without being omniscient. The friendship’s significance lies precisely in that combination: it supplies a credible history of trust, difference, and care, while leaving parts of Fukada’s life unaccounted for.