L’Aube’s base was the settlement established by the militant faction that broke away from the Pioneers in 1976. Its members treated agricultural life not as their ultimate purpose but as preparation for armed revolution: the departure from the original community turned a dispute over political aims into a separate organization and a distinct physical foothold. The base’s later name, L’Aube, became linked to the armed confrontation with police near Lake Motosu.

Origin and purpose

The base grew out of a division within the Pioneers, whose founder, Fukada, had organized a flexible community of agricultural units rather than a single, rigidly controlled collective. The arrangement permitted people to change units or leave, and allowed the two emerging factions to coexist for a time. Yet their differing views of revolution strained that flexibility. The militant faction, formed around former “Red Guards” trained by Fukada, regarded the farms as cover and preparation for a future armed struggle. The more numerous moderate faction opposed capitalism too, but sought an economically self-sufficient life in nature rather than a revolutionary campaign.

The disagreement sharpened over what revolution meant. Fukada had come to regard it less as an imminent political outcome than as a metaphorical possibility, or a way of keeping destructive, anti-system thought alive as a corrective to society. His former students, by contrast, wanted an actual revolution in which blood would be shed. He had helped inspire their expectations with stirring rhetoric and had not clarified that his own language was figurative. His mixed position—doubting the practical prospects of revolution while remaining unable to disown it—left him caught between his earlier followers and the community he continued to influence.

Separation and settlement

In 1976, the militant faction left the original Pioneers settlement and established a base roughly five kilometres away. Fukada’s family and the other families remained with the Pioneers. The separation was described as broadly amicable, and Fukada appears to have arranged funds to help the dissenters establish themselves. The two agricultural settlements continued to cooperate superficially: they exchanged essential provisions and used the same distribution networks for their produce, practical arrangements that helped both small communities survive.

That cooperation did not bridge the political divide. Movement between the settlements soon effectively stopped because their aims had grown too far apart. Fukada nevertheless maintained contact with the former students he had organized and led into the mountains of Yamanashi. He felt responsible for them and could not simply abandon them; the secret source of funding he controlled was also indispensable to the dissident community. Thus the base’s independence remained qualified by its continuing dependence on the man whose political vision it had carried further than he himself believed possible.

Naming and later association

The dissident faction took the name L’Aube in 1977, the year after the Pioneers divided and the year Eri escaped from the Pioneers and sought refuge with the Master. The settlement’s name therefore belongs to the same period in which the split became more than an internal disagreement: the militants had a separate base and an identity of their own.

When Tengo heard the name during the Master’s account, it stirred a confused memory of a serious incident. Professor Ebisuno confirmed that L’Aube was responsible for the armed clashes with police in the mountains near Lake Motosu. Tengo recognized the story as a major one but could not retrieve its details; the effort to remember brought on a severe physical crisis. The base is consequently introduced both as the product of a political schism and through the later violence that fixed the name in public memory. The contrast between the modest practical origins of the settlement and its eventual association with armed conflict gives the split its larger consequence: the Pioneers’ permissive structure allowed separation, but could not reconcile two incompatible meanings of revolution.