Between the Dream of Revolution and the Failure of Revolution Kazumi Takahashi and the Spiritual History of Postwar Intellectuals: From the 1950s to the 1970s

Between the Dream of Revolution and the Failure of Revolution Kazumi Takahashi and the Spiritual History of Postwar Intellectuals: From the 1950s to the 1970s
The literature of Kazumi Takahashi depicts the tension between the desire for ideals and the despair of reality that the postwar Japanese intellectuals faced in the most caustic way. After the war's end, democracy and peace took root as institutions, but for many young people, this was not a world they had independently chosen, but an order given to them from the outside. Takahashi felt a strong sense of discomfort in this otherworldly postwar period and was drawn to revolutionary thought and Marxism, but this was a choice made not from a political standpoint but rather as an ethic on which to stake one's own existence. The characters depicted in the film are isolated, betrayed, and doomed because of their belief in ideals. The film reveals a cul-de-sac in which one cannot live without ideals, but if one has ideals, one is forced to sever oneself from reality. This contradiction deepened in the 1960s, when the language of revolution lost its power amid high economic growth an
d the struggle for the National Security Treaty. Takahashi did not offer a story of overcoming setbacks, nor did he rationalize defeat. This unyielding stance is the most sincere objection to the stability and maturity that postwar Japan prematurely chose.