ABSTRACT
During the politically heated summer of 1969 the Japanese government succeeded in pushing through the Diet the Law of Provisional Measures Concerning University Administration. Despite its somewhat innocuous title, the bill and the events surrounding it represented the culmination of a tumultuous controversy between Japan’s conservative and progressive camps that was clearly the major political and media event of the year, and possibly of several years. The problem from 1952 to 1954 emerged as very much a continuation of the 1951 efforts to pass legislation altering the administration and management of the national and local public universities. In 1959–1960 there was a dramatic upsurge in protest activities revolving around the renegotiated US-Japan Security Treaty, a nearly two-year coal mine strike at Miike in Kyushu, the U-2 incident, and a host of related issues that allowed the sparks of left-right hostilities in Japan to blaze forth in full.
