Students and stage fans will see whether a hastily arranged series of performances of Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera" this weekend can break a decades-long standoff over the closure of Japan's oldest student dormitory: the wooden Yoshida ryō (Yoshida Dormitory) at Kyoto University.
The Japanese-style building that has been run by the 170-plus residents of its single, shared and communal tatami-mat rooms since it opened in 1913, has been under threat since the 1970s. Yet even with student activism in the air back then, it survived as lots of other self-governing dormitories were demolished for fear they may foster anti-establishment communities.
In 1986, a deadline to leave the building was simply ignored, and residents have since been astutely changing the rules in line with the authorities' requirements — accepting female students in 1985, and foreign students in 1990. So when a closure notice declared that the dormitory had to be vacated by Sept. 30, 2018, most thought it was just another bump in the road — and indeed the date passed with little fuss.