Wandering Traveler of Knowledge - Ryu Mitsuse and the Situation of Higher Education in Postwar Japan (1950s-1960s)

Wandering Traveler of Knowledge - Ryu Mitsuse and the Situation of Higher Education in Postwar Japan (1950s-1960s)

In the 1950s, when the postwar confusion finally began to settle down, Ryu Mitsuse, who grew up in Tokyo, evacuated his family to the town of Maesawa in Iwate Prefecture at the end of the war. Although he was only there for a few years, he continued to speak of his love for his hometown in later years. During the demobilization and reconstruction of Japan, the educational system was reorganized, and while higher education became a symbol of "upward mobility," the mobility of career paths was also increasing.

Against this backdrop, Mitsuse applied to Toyo University, Meiji University, and the Faculty of Agriculture at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, but gave up halfway through. He eventually entered the Faculty of Agriculture at Tokyo University of Education, majoring in zoology, but later transferred to the Philosophy Department, from which he also dropped out. It was like an "itinerant journey" in search of learning itself.

He himself derisively referred to this experience as his "university journey," symbolizing the gap between the strong thirst for learning and the reality common to students of the postwar generation. In an era when employment was considered a sign of stability and success, Mitsuse's way of life, in which he continually shuttled between academics and literature, was sometimes considered heretical, but at the same time it was a time to cultivate the soil for a creative artist.

Eventually, while working as a biology teacher at a girls' school, he met Takumi Shibano and joined the coterie magazine "Uchujin" (Space Dust). His intellectual wanderings finally came to fruition in the expressive field of science fiction. The term "university-less" was imbued with a spirit of freedom and pride as an intellectual wanderer who was not constrained by the framework of his academic background. Amid the footsteps of rapid economic growth, Ryu Mitsuse was not at ease with the system, but rather found a place for himself outside of it.