Late 1960s to 1970s

Late 1960s to 1970s is the historical span in which the Master explains the origins of Fukada’s radical politics and the split that produced the Pioneers’ competing factions. What begins as a remembered era of intellectual excitement and student revolt becomes an account of incompatible meanings of revolution: for Fukada, ultimately a necessary metaphorical challenge to the system; for the students he had organized, a real armed struggle.

Intellectual life and the student unrest

In the 1960s, the Master and Tamotsu Fukada were close friends and colleagues in the same university department, despite having very different temperaments and views of the world. The Master was about ten years older. Both married late, had daughters soon after marrying, and lived with their families in the same university housing, so their households were closely acquainted. Their careers prospered as well: the media presented them as leading intellectuals and repeatedly published their photographs. The Master remembers this as an exceptionally exciting period.

By the end of the decade, however, the atmosphere had changed. During the 1970s, student protests against the Japan–US Security Treaty expanded into university blockades, clashes with riot police, bloody internal struggles, and deaths. The Master resigned. He says the university system itself had never suited him, but the unrest finally made him loathe it. He had come to see both support for and opposition to the established system as expressions of organizational struggle, and lost confidence in organizations of every scale. When Tengo remarks that university life had returned to normal by the time he enrolled, the Master agrees that the party was over.

Fukada’s path diverged. Influenced by Mao Zedong’s revolutionary thought, he supported China’s Cultural Revolution at a time when, as the Master recalls, Japanese intellectuals knew little of its brutality. Carrying Mao’s Little Red Book had become an ideological fashion among some of them. Fukada organized students into a radical group modeled on the Red Guards, led a university strike, and drew participants from other faculties. At its height the group grew substantially. University authorities called in riot police, who entered the campus; Fukada and his students, barricaded inside, were arrested and sent before a criminal court. Fukada was subsequently dismissed. His daughter Eri was still very young, and the Master assumes she remembers none of these events.

From university expulsion to communal life

After Fukada’s dismissal, roughly ten students from the remaining core of his former Red Guard group followed him into the Takashima Course. Most had been expelled from university and needed somewhere to go. The Master describes Takashima as a practical refuge, and notes that the media reported on the move at the time. The group’s transition from campus activism to communal living carried its political commitments into a different setting rather than ending them.

Fukada later rejected collective ownership of all property. Though politically extreme, the Master characterizes him as clearheaded and realistic: he sought a moderate form of communalism rather than a society organized like an anthill. The system divided the community into units in which people could live cooperatively but flexibly. Personal possessions remained individually owned, rewards were shared to a degree, and dissatisfied residents could transfer to another unit or leave the Pioneers. Contact with the outside world was permitted. The Master says there was virtually no ideological re-education or brainwashing; Fukada had learned at Takashima that a more open, natural arrangement produced better work.

Under Fukada’s initial direction, the Pioneers’ farms were organized successfully. Yet the very flexibility of the unit system allowed distinct political positions to consolidate. One faction, built around Fukada’s former Red Guards, treated its farming community as preparation for revolution. Its members concealed their purpose behind agricultural activity and intended to take up arms when the time came. The other faction was more numerous on the farms. It also opposed capitalism, but kept its distance from politics and sought self-sufficient communal life in nature. Ordinary farm work did not necessarily divide the two groups; decisions about the community’s overall direction did. Their recurring disputes made compromise increasingly difficult.

The meaning of revolution and the split

As the possibility of compromise diminished, Fukada was forced to choose between the factions. He had come to understand that Japan in the 1970s was neither the place nor the time for revolution. What he retained was revolution as a possibility, and more deeply as a metaphor or hypothesis: he believed that destructive, anti-system thought could act like a healthful spice within society. The former students, by contrast, wanted an actual revolution in which real blood would be shed.

The Master does not absolve Fukada of responsibility for the divergence. Under pressure, Fukada had told his students stirring stories about revolution and helped create the risky myth they took literally. He had not clarified that revolution should be understood in quotation marks, as a concept rather than a real undertaking. The account presents him as honest, highly intelligent, and professionally capable, but also as prone to intoxication with his own eloquence and lacking deeper optimism and self-examination. His ideas had supplied both factions with a shared vocabulary, but not a shared destination.

The Pioneers divided in 1976. The moderate faction remained in the original village, while the militant faction moved about five kilometers away to establish a base for its revolutionary movement. Fukada’s family and the other families stayed with the Pioneers. The separation was initially more or less amicable; Fukada appears to have arranged funding for the departing group. The two agricultural settlements continued a limited, practical cooperation, exchanging necessary provisions and using the same distribution networks for their produce because both needed mutual assistance to survive.

That contact soon ceased in practice as the groups’ aims proved too far apart. Fukada nevertheless continued communicating with the extremist students he had once organized. He felt responsible for them: he had led them and brought them into the mountains of Yamanashi, and could not simply abandon them for convenience. His secret source of funding was also indispensable to the dissident community. Thus the break between the settlements did not sever Fukada’s personal and material ties to the armed faction.

Eri’s escape and the new name

In 1977, the year after the Pioneers split, Eri escaped the community and took refuge with the Master. At about the same time, the dissident faction adopted the name L’Aube. The two developments mark the period’s consequences beyond organizational politics: the division of a community becomes part of the circumstances of a child’s departure and refuge, while the militant group acquires a distinct identity of its own.

When the Master names L’Aube, Tengo recognizes the name but finds his recollection confused, composed only of uncertain fragments that seem to belong to reality. He asks whether the group has recently been involved in a serious incident. The narrative therefore makes this historical account a bridge between the community’s origins and a later event, while leaving the details of that event outside this period’s history.

Historical and narrative significance

The account distinguishes two forms of dissent that initially grew from the same rejection of the established order. The Master’s departure from the university follows his disillusionment with organizations on both sides of the political divide. Fukada, meanwhile, carries revolutionary ideas from the campus into communal agriculture, where flexible self-governance makes room for both moderation and militancy. The resulting split is not simply a clash between political commitment and apathy: both factions oppose capitalism, but disagree over whether communal life is an end in itself or a staging ground for violence.

Fukada’s position lies between those outcomes, and his failure to make the metaphorical status of his revolutionary language explicit helps explain why the students interpret it as a literal program. Through the Master’s retrospective account, the period becomes both a history of political disillusionment and a study of how ideas acquire material consequences: a university strike leads to arrests and dismissal, radical students become a rural faction, and an internal disagreement creates L’Aube. The remembered 1970s thus supplies the political background for later developments without reducing them to a single cause.