The Japanese student-protest movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s had much in common with its American counterpart, from its massive street demonstrations to its taste in music (The Beatles and Bob Dylan) and movies (anything with Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson).
But it was also quite different, as I am reminded nearly every time I see a Japanese film set in the period, from Koji Wakamatsu's stark 2007 docudrama "Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama Sanso e no Michi (United Red Army)" to Nobuhiro Yamashita's new "My Back Page," a rambling but grippingly nuanced drama based on autobiographical nonfiction by essayist, translator and film critic Saburo Kawamoto.
For one thing, the influence of the American counterculture was understandably weaker here. Hair was longer among the protestors than the short-cropped mainstream male norm, but the concept of politics as theater of the absurd (as seen in the career of jokester-cum-revolutionary Abbie Hoffman) was less in evidence than on the streets of Berkeley. Japanese radicals were extremely serious types and, on occasion, murderous.