Although many of my classmates were affected in various ways by the Zenkyoto movement, and although even choosing not to participate required a reason—or rather, a philosophy—for not participating in that difficult era, I am a person of the same generation for whom it “does not feel real at all.”
The reason is that, even if it resulted from family and personal circumstances—as readers know, I was forced to leave home at the age when people ordinarily enter university—at one point during that process, while I was in Kyoto, I thought, “There is no need for me to go to university,” and I was a person who acted upon that thought.
However, many of my classmates…when I happened to return to my hometown, I saw the face of one of my classmates among a group of Tohoku University students marching through the city center in a demonstration that had thrown the area into an uproar…and, as someone who was unmistakably a person of the same generation in that respect, there is something I want to say to this author and to the reviewer.
In the world of the Internet, where criminals lower than beasts and genuinely feeble-minded people take advantage of anonymity to loudly say whatever they please, and where truly vulgar worshippers of money do contemptible things in order to sell what they call information products,
I have recently grown disgusted with writing the truth for free, and therefore I do not particularly want to write very much of the truth.
But, collecting myself and writing nevertheless, while it is only natural that the author does not understand that point, I felt somewhat perplexed that Nakashima, who always writes reviews with such passion, also appeared not to have noticed it.
As readers probably know, among my classmates there was a close friend who was truly the type of person destined for great achievement late in life.
Unlike me, he had personal—that is, family-related—troubles, and those troubles became the real factor that determined the course of his life.
It was precisely when the Zenkyoto movement was sweeping across universities throughout Japan that he frequently sent postcards and letters to my family home, although I had disappeared from before my classmates and no one knew what had become of me.
Incidentally, he attended one of Japan’s foremost and exceptionally distinguished schools, and after spending an additional year preparing for the university entrance examinations for the personal reasons mentioned above, his talent blossomed, he became the top student in the entire school, and he occupied a position from which he could have gone wherever he wished, whether the University of Tokyo or anywhere else.
To Sato Shin, the author, and to Nakashima:
I am convinced that the Zenkyoto movement imposed a great ordeal upon my classmates because, the moment they completed their entrance-examination studies and entered university, the activists confronted them with the question: “Does the fact that we are at the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Tohoku University, etc., not ultimately mean that we are merely placing ourselves on the side that discriminates against the masses?”
I was probably the only person who had already established, during my high-school years, a philosophy capable of instantly demolishing that question.
I am convinced that the sole truth is that every serious person, every person genuinely committed to scholarship, came to a standstill before this question, and that many of them joined the ranks of the activists.
As for the answer that my one and only close friend was hoping for at that time, I will write about it someday in the “e-book” that I have begun writing.