Tokyo 1968 : A Year of Friendship and Struggle

1968 was a year of mass protest: it was a pivotal moment in which students worldwide built barricades and launched radical critiques of war and capitalism, and decried universities for their role in perpetuating both. Tokyo 1968 introduces how this global moment played out in Japan, through the unique story of two young women, Hiromi and Kazuko, studying at the overwhelmingly male University of Tokyo during a turbulent period in history. Grounded in extensive research, this is the first literary work (in any language) to foreground women’s experiences and relationships in Japan’s late-1960s student movement.

Through a fictionalized graphic rendering based on archival and interview sources, Tokyo 1968 offers a sense of the textured everyday life in which personal relationships intersected with political commitments. Hiromi and Kazuko become involved in the student movement and bring readers with them as they explore urban and activist spaces. The book depicts how they encounter systemic and casual misogyny, and grapple with differing visions of how one realizes social and political change while participating in dramatic events that captured the attention of the nation and the world. The characters’ debates on how to engage in the larger wave of youth activism speaks to dynamics common in social movements, particularly regarding what prompts people to come together collectively and what threatens the unity of a movement.

Far from orientalist clichés about an essentially harmonious and apolitical Japan, Tokyo 1968 introduces a critical but often overlooked movement in global youth protest history. It highlights how these efforts set the stage for subsequent women’s liberation, ecological, and radical activism, and introduces readers to the gendered and political context in which young women participated.