ANU Dean presents special CAPSTRANS seminar

Jun 21, 2007

‘Smash the University! The University Struggles of 1968-69 and the Interrogation of Progressivism in Postwar Japan’ was the subject of a special seminar hosted by CAPSTRANS held at UOW on 20 June.

The Dean of the Faculty of Asian Studies and College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Professor Rikki Kersten, presented the seminar.

In 1968-69, university campuses all over Japan exploded in violent, seemingly anarchic revolt against authority. While Japan appeared to be part of an international phenomenon, the heart of the university struggles featured angst and despair of a kind that was particular to postwar Japan.

At the epicentre of this fierce revolt was the interrogation of the intellectuals and ideas that had charted the course of idealism in the postwar world up to that point.

Professor Kersten said though the term ‘progressive intellectual’ would assume a pejorative hue even before these struggles began, it was those same progressive thinkers who had provided the demonstrators of 1968-69 with the conceptual toolkit for their movement.

The seminar questioned what drove the savage rejection and mockery of progressivism in the late 1960s.

Professor Kersten examined whether the university struggle was truly revolutionary in intellectual terms or was it rather a logical and consistent outcome of the core ideas of postwar idealism?

The struggle that erupted at Japan’s most prestigious university, the University of Tokyo, was examined and how different actors and thinkers responded to this emergency.

Professor Kersten is a graduate of Adelaide and Oxford universities where she majored in modern Japanese history. After serving in the Australian diplomatic service for five years (including Tokyo), she moved to the History Department at the University of Sydney where she lectured in Modern Japanese History. She also spent several years as Research Manager and later Director of the Research Institute for Asia and the Pacific, a think-tank and consulting arm of the University of Sydney.

Before her current ANU post, Professor Kersten was Professor of Modern Japan Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Her current research interests include political thought in modern Japan (especially democracy and fascism), debates over war apologies and war guilt in Japan, Japanese policy towards North Korea, and contemporary Japanese politics.