#206 - Andrew Hall (Kyushu University)

This was the final in-person interview I could conduct at the LiC Studio™ before I departed for five months of research travel in the United Kingdom. Dr. Hall kindly provided me with a large PowerPoint file that served as a repository of 30 years of photographic media information on the topic “The postwar socialist student movement in Fukuoka.” Kyushu University has always had a strong sense of its history, and its new university museum takes up a large, warehouse-sized building in its East Zone. Andrew Hall laid out the reasons why the area local to the university, which was an area of primary industries, and the university itself is so steeped in socialist movements:

(12:05) Coal mines were brutal. They had much higher death rates than similar coal mines in Europe throughout the 20th century. They're always way behind that. Just lots of injuries and deaths are going on this way. They're not being taken care of very well at all. So there is a strong sense amongst workers, that are at least many workers, that something needs to change. And this revolutionary ideology that people like Sakisaka are bringing in appeals to a lot of them. Okay, now in the universities, Japanese universities are very dominated by the left in the immediate postwar. So, you know, the leftist professors who had, who had become pretty prevalent, let's say, in the 1920s academia - at least the humanities side - the academic very dominated by socialist thinkers in Japan in the 1920s, but then there's a series of political repression in the late 20s and in the 30s that arrests them, kicks them out of the university. 

(18:55) There's a desire not to be dominated by another country, just the Japanese style. And there's this debate, well, what it is, what is the Japanese? What does it mean to be a Japanese leftist?… One big split is going to be this question of how much do we direct, how much do we reject the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union is dominating, of course, the leftist movement at this time; they've got the common, their international communist organization is giving money to leftist groups and trying to encourage them to form their own communist parties and have success in their countries, either through revolution or through politics, been on the place and the time, and we can say that there are people in Japan and a lot of people at the university. So some people are just pure Communist Party. And the Communist Party has a reputation in Japan of being very top-down and very. You know, you take your orders and you follow your orders, and we're very disciplined. They're very, very good at creating this disciplined organization, sure, but these kind of freedom-loving university people who want to have their own ideas, and they don't; a lot of people don't like that very much. So a lot of people break away from them, and one of the things they reject is that they see the Soviet Union as being just as imperialistic as the United States. 

And this led to concerns that the weapons of imperialism, whether coming from the Soviet Union, Communist China, or the ‘Imperialist’ West, were not in the best interests of Japan.