Over the past decade, campus political activism in liberal-democratic nations has come under critical scrutiny for many perceived excesses: woke groupthink, illiberal de-platforming tactics, intimidation, violence and, more recently, anti-Semitism. But less sensational cases where the kids (or profs) get it right tend to fall out of the news cycle quickly.<\/p>\n
A recent student protest<\/a> against an invited speech by populist Sanseito party leader Sohei Kamiya at the University of Tokyo is one instance of them getting it mostly right, even if the speech was canceled by an anonymous bomb threat. That threat attracted more mainstream media attention than the protests did.<\/p>\n A few student and external groups<\/a> began organizing protests against Kamiya\u2019s planned speech at the school\u2019s May Festival after it was announced by his host<\/a>, a conservative University of Tokyo student club titled \u201cJapan Association for Strategy and Technology.\u201d An X account<\/a> set up by two anonymous University of Tokyo students, \u201cFor a May Festival without Disinformation and Discrimination\u201d deserves praise for its reasonable dissent against Kamiya\u2019s invitation. But I also want to air my disagreements with their strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past decade, campus political activism in liberal-democratic nations has come under critical scrutiny for many perceived…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36708,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18367,251,8,27295,11119,2352,5125,22560,3720],"class_list":["post-36707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-censorship","tag-education","tag-japan","tag-koichi-kawakami","tag-lgbtq","tag-sanseito","tag-sohei-kamiya","tag-universities","tag-university-of-tokyo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}