Paper short abstract:

Through rereading the 1960s best-selling diaries or posthumous notebooks of young activists, I will examine a reference relationship of their peculiar sentiment and political imagination of the time, not only as a political rise and fall, but also as a contemporary problem of "emotional memories."

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will focus on diaries and posthumous manuscripts by unsettled young leftist students in the 1960s. Generally speaking, diaries function as a device of modern introspection, and the words of young dead may have a tendency to strongly impact young generation of that time. In modern Japan, there is a historical continuity of similar cases and we can trace its genealogy back to a notable suicide of young philosophy student Misao Fujimura at Kegon Falls in 1903 (Meiji 36), where he carved on the trunk of a tree his farewell poem "Gantou no kan". But particularly among the youth in the 1960s, death of numerous activist students had a strong impact and constructed a unique space of their peculiar sentiment and imagination. Diaries and notes of the dead activists became bestsellers and played a role in mobilizing young people for demonstrations and assembly much more than Marxist theoretical texts and agitation handbills. I will reflect on several typical examples, such as Michiko Kamba's "I Would Smile in Secret", Kōhei Oku's "The Tomb of the Spring", and Etsuko Takano's "The Origin of Being Twenty". In other words, there can be identified a certain canon created by life principles of the disconcerted young people. Such a relationship has continued throughout the epoch of the rapid economic growth and sharply disappeared by mid- '70s. After this "season of political rise", a lengthy period of disillusionment and de-politicization has come where this generation's internal struggles have been explained through use of psychological vocabulary and became largely incomprehensible to later generations. This is an attempt to re-read the era of 1960s not only as a political rise and defeat of a generation, but also as a contemporary problem of "emotional memory" (Sunge).