Problematic participation

Watanabe, then in her 20s, had been following Yamamoto since around autumn that year, filming the daily protests and meetings taking place inside the University of Tokyo. However, being a young, female photographer with no visible affiliation to the various sects involved in the dispute proved problematic.

“I was viewed with suspicion. Some thought I was a spy, others thought I was a newspaper reporter,” Watanabe says. “Then one day, I was given an armband that read ‘Zenkyoto,’ essentially making me a part of them, and that gave me access inside.”

Many of Watanabe’s photographs from those months are compiled in a collection titled “Todai Zenkyoto 1968-1969.” The images depict Yamamoto as a slim, handsome man with a beard. The lens would capture him orating at rallies, or wearing a helmet and speaking to fellow protesters.

However, an arrest warrant would soon be issued for Yamamoto, forcing him to go underground. Watanabe wasn’t deterred — at that point she was already transfixed by the heat of the movement and flitted between the University of Tokyo’s Hongo and Komaba campuses, documenting scenes that would become the definitive images chronicling the historic struggle in Japan’s most elite university.

The fervor reached its boiling point in January 1969 in what would later be called the “fall of Yasuda Auditorium.”

“Radical students holed up in Tokyo University’s Yasuda Auditorium Saturday withstood a 10-hour siege by riot police who seized control of 16 other buildings held by the students on the university’s Hongo campus,” The Japan Times reported in its Jan. 19 issue about the previous day’s clash that involved 8,500 riot police sealing the campus. “The students hurled blazing Molotov cocktails, acid bottles and huge chunks of concrete slabs and rocks at the policemen from the roof of the auditorium.”

In its Jan. 20 issue, the paper said the auditorium “lay devastated Sunday evening after riot police completed their sweep, arresting more than 370 students who had holed up there.”

It described the day as the “end of more than six months of occupation of the auditorium by the students who seized it on July 2,” adding, “radicals spearheaded by medical students first occupied it on June 15 but were evicted by riot police two days later,” an event that “ignited the anti-establishment feeling of all Todai students.”

Yamamoto, who pursued a career in academia following his days as a student activist, typically declines all interview requests regarding his time as the University of Tokyo’s head of Zenkyoto. He did, however, contribute an essay for Watanabe’s photobook, looking back at the tumultuous period and describing her stills as depicting both the “sense of liberation and, strangely, calmness” inside the barricades.

Student activity soon began to wane as the government drafted new legislation that granted police more authority to crack down on campus disturbances and, by the end of 1969, much of the barricades at universities had been taken down. By 1970, student activism had been almost entirely suppressed by police, while the economy continued to grow at a fast pace — as the nation became wealthy, people were no longer sympathetic to radical student movements.

In June, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was renewed and, apart from some extremists who formed the Japanese Red Army that went on to launch terrorist attacks both at home and abroad in the name of world revolution, most students returned to a state of political apathy.

Watanabe’s zeal also began to fade as the movement subsided.

“How should I describe my feeling … it was as if there was nothing left, and I didn’t want to remain in that depressing state,” she says. “There were others who went through much harder times. Some became sick, some committed suicide.”

It was an end of an era, and the sense of emptiness that nagged at Watanabe prompted her to leave the country.

“I decided to embark on a journey,” she says. This was 1972, and for the next quarter of a century she would travel for extended periods in Southeast Asia and South Asia, particularly India and Nepal. Her work no longer reflected the impassioned ideals of youth but assumed a tone of spiritualism and deep meditation.