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Hidaka Rokuro, 1917-2018 – The Life and Times of an Embattled Japanese Intellectual
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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Hidaka Rokuro was born in Qingdao, China, 11 January 1917 and died in Kyoto, Japan, 7 June 2018. His life therefore spanned much of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. He was a witness to the Japanese empire at its height and to its catastrophic collapse and the subsequent rise of a different sort of Japan, as economic superpower and close ally to its former enemy the United States. From the time he entered Tokyo Imperial University (as it then was) in 1938, for 31 years he observed momentous events from the perspective of student, assistant, then professor, at the nation's key institute of higher learning. Eventually, and dramatically, he resigned in protest against its crackdown on the then burgeoning student movement in 1969. His greatest travails were then still to come. They are discussed in the following under the heading of “The Hidaka Affair.” This essay does not purport to be a biography but hopes to shed some light on moments in the life of a remarkable individual living in remarkable times.
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References
Notes
1 Since Rokuro wrote that his father had been a witness to the Boxer rebellion (1899-1901) he presumably arrived in Beijing in 1901. (Hidaka Rokuro, “Ozaki Yukio ‘bohyo no kawari ni’,” Sekai, February 2000, pp. 184-198, at p. 184.)
2 According to Rokuro, (Kurokawa So, Hidaka Rokuro 95-sai no porutore daiwa o toshite, Shinjuku shobo, 2012, p. 37).
3 As Rokuro explained (Kurokawa, p. 37). See also Hidaka Rokuro, Senso no naka de kangaeta koto, aru kazoku no monogatari, Chikuma shobo, 2005.
4 Kurokawa, pp. 38-40
5 Kurokawa, pp. 46-49
6 “Manshukoku to Nippon,” Akatsuki, No. 80, 25 January 1935, ibid, frontispiece.
7 Kurokawa, p. 53, Senso no naka de kangaeta koto, p. 210.
8 Rokuro Hidaka, The Price of Affluence: Dilemmas of Contemporary Japan, translated and edited by Gavan McCormack and others, Kodansha International, 1984, Penguin Australia (with Foreword and Afterword by Gavan McCormack), 1985, p. 57.
9 Miyake Yoshio, “Higashi Ajia shisoka to shite no Hidaka Rokuro,” Sekai, August 2018, pp. 224-233, at p. 226.
10 Ibid, p. 227.
11 “Kokusaku tenkan ni kansuru shoken.” For the full text, see Senso no naka de kangaeta koto, pp. 235-257. Included here is the somewhat foreshortened version Hidaka included in his 1980 book, in my translation as originally published in 1984 in The Price of Affluence, pp. 168 to 176.
12 The Price of Affluence, p. 176.
13 Ibid., p 168.
14 Kurokawa, p. 88.
15 Kurokawa, p. 103.
16 Kurokawa, p. 116,
17 Kurokawa, p. 119.
18 His colleagues and contemporaries, all of whom he eventually outlived, included Maruyama Masao, Kato Shuichi, Kuno Osamu and Tsurumi Shunsuke.
19 Hidaka Rokuro, “Kokka wa kanri taisei kyoka,” Asahi shimbun, evening edition, 7 June 1982.
20 1970s and 1980s. On Hidaka's 1974 visit to Kim Dae-jung (then under house arrest) in Seoul, Kurokawa, pp. 137ff.
21 Kurokawa, p. 126.
22 Kurokawa, p. 127.
23 Erihi Furomu, Jiyu kara no toso, Sogensha, 1951
24 Hidaka Rokuro, “Mitsu no 40 nenme -‘kioku o ikiiki to tamotsu koto’ no imi,” Sekai, September 1985, pp. 23-34.
25 “Background Briefing,” ABC radio, 10 July 1983
26 Geoffrey Barker, “An anarchist for the eighties,” The Age, Melbourne, 22 September 1983.
27 The Australian government record of this affair, minus certain deletions of “security” material, was released in March 1984 under a Freedom of Information Act application and constitutes the major record for the following discussion. See my Foreword and Afterword to The Price of Affluence, and in Japanese, “Demokurashi fuashizumu – Hidaka mondai o megutte,” Sekai, February 1985, pp. 254-7. For Hidaka's own reflections, Kurokawa, pp. 133ff.
28 The Red Army sect was already infamous for the hijacking of a Japan Air Lines plane to Pyongyang in 1971, for the machine-gunning incident at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv in May 1972.
29 Hidaka letter to Professor J.V. Neustupny, Monash University, and Dr Yoshio Sugimoto, La Trobe University, 14 February 1981.
30 John Menadue, Secretary of DIEA, to Professor Neustupny, 9 February 1981.
31 Kuwabara Takeo (Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University), Maruyama Masao (Professor Emeritus of Tokyo University, and the doyen of Japanese political scientists), Nagasu Kazuji (Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture), Kato Shuichi (Professor at Sophia University), and Edo Nobuyoshi (President of Kyoto Seika University).
32 As one journalist put it (Ken Merrigan, The Sun, 11 July 1981).
33 Most of these are reproduced in the Higher Education Supplement of The Australian, edited by Dr John Bremer, whosc coverage of the affair from September 1981 was exhaustive.
34 Comment by Mr Horvath in Tokyo, quoted in a memorandum of 10 April 1981 on the DIEA file by Mr R. U. Metcalfe, Assistant Secretary of the Department.
35 “Ocker” – an Australian term meaning uncouth, uncultivated. (Mr W. A. Higgie, Memo of 28 April 1981 to Mr Metcalfe.)
36 Hidaka, Statement of 2 February 1981, and letter to Menadue, 30 June 1981.
37 Hidaka Rokuro, “Watakushi wa sono riyu o shiritai,” Asahi janaru, 24 July 1981, pp. 92-94
38 Text in full in “Higher Education Supplement,” The Australian, 16 September 1981.
39 Menadue to Neustupny, 9 February 1981.
40 Memorandum on file, dated 24 July 1981.
41 In interview with Tokyo correspondent, Alan Goodall, The Australian, 16 December 1981.
42 The head of the passport section of the Ministry, Asahi shimbun, 14 December 1981,
43 Minutes of the Budget Committee of House of Representatives, 1 March 1982. And see John Bremer in The Australian, 24 March 1982. (And see Kurokawa, p. 160.)
44 The Australian, 2 December 1981.
45 Ibid, 28 April 1982.
46 See The Australian, 5 January 1982
47 Ibid., 9 December 1981
48 DIEA Memo, 9 March 1982, author name illegible.
49 Inter alia, and apart from the original inviting institutions, Monash and LaTrobe Universities, the Federation of Australian University Staff Associations (FAUSA), the Asian Studies Association of Australia, the Japanese Studies Association of Australia, the Sociological Association of Australia and New Zealand, and the School of Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University.
50 The eight folios of material released by DIEA covering the period January 1981 to July 1982 contain 1428 pages.
51 The translation was undertaken by a group of Australia-based Japan scholars as part of the struggle to reverse the visa ban. Rokuro Hidaka, The Price of Affluence – Dilemmas of Contemporary Japan, New York and Tokyo, Kodansha International, 1984, and (including Foreword and Afterword by Gavan McCormack), Ringwood, Penguin Australia, 1985.
52 Diet proceedings, 1 March 1982.
53 Memo by L. B. Woodward, “Personal Explanation for Mr McPhee,” draft for a possible statement to parliament (not in the end made), 17 March 1982.
54 For a further discussion of this point, see my “Our Japan scholars need funds but at what cost?” The Australian, Higher Education Supplement, 23 May 1990, p. 19.
55 This author recalls hearing from Hidaka at the time that no sooner had he learned of the refusal of the Australian visa than a courier arrived from the Japan Foundation to demand return (in cash) of the moneys advanced towards the Australian visit.
56 Asahi shimbun, 3 June 1982. Writing in that same paper a few days later (7 June 1982) Hidaka pointed out that, despite Japan being the only country to have experienced nuclear attack, it opposed the resolution against nuclear weapons adopted at the UN General Assembly session of autumn 1981 by a vote of 121 to 19, with 6 abstentions.
57 Ishimoto Yasuo, “Shuken no sen-etsu,” Sekai, November 1981, pp. 14-19
58 On this later case, of Kuboyama Aikichi, see Hidaka in Asahi janaru, 22 January 1982.
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