The Era I Had Loved

By Lillian Tsay

I first heard of Bob Dylan’s song “My Back Pages” from a book with the same title by the Japanese writer Kawamoto Saburō. In his memoir, Kawamoto documents how Japan’s tumultuous social movements against the United States–Japan Security Treaty in the 1960s inspired his passion for student protests. After graduating from the best university in Japan, the University of Tokyo, he became a journalist in a major liberal newspaper. One day, he met a radical student leader K who led Kawamoto to believe that they shared a dream to change the unfairness in Japan and the rest of the world. However, the “revolution” turned out to be nothing more than the crime of murdering a self-defense officer. K immediately gave Kawamoto away as complicit in covering up evidence, which cost Kawamoto not only his job but also his freedom as he was sentenced to 10 months in prison. After his release, Kawamoto became a freelance cultural critic and maintained his distance from social activism. This experience was so painful that it took Kawamoto ten years to write this book.

I encountered this book as a junior-college student in Taiwan who didn’t know Japanese. The Chinese title of this book was not the direct translation of the Japanese title “My Back Pages” but something more intriguing – it was translated as The Era I Had Loved, with the subtitle “At that time, we thought we could change the world.” It was not a coincidence that I picked up this book from the bookstore shelf. We were girls in our late teens who idolized Che Guevara despite not knowing much about him. My friends and I often spend our weekends in indie bookstores, where we would pick up Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer and brag, “Hey, have you read this? I heard that it’s really good.” At the same time, as a student majoring in English and European literature, I was gradually losing interest in studying worlds so far away. Comparatively, although Japan seemed to be a foreign country, it had a past connected to my own. I was first introduced to some classics: Mishima Yukio, Kawabata Yasunari, Dazai Osamu, and when I failed to understand the difficult prose and themes in these works, I turned to more popular writers like Murakami Haruki.  

While I was not fond of Murakami’s exaggerated plots about unexplainable love, sex, and suicide, I adored the silent lament hidden in his prose on the passing of an era that could no longer return. In Norwegian Wood, there is a scene when students burst into the classroom, shouting that now is not the time for Greek tragedies. Now is the time to fight against war and imperialism! Reading Murakami and Kawamoto, who shared the same translator, I learned that from the 1960s on, Japanese students launched multiple social movements. As the generation who did not experience Japan’s aggressive war in the Asia Pacific, they felt that it was their responsibility to do what they could do: to prevent their country from plunging into another bloodbath, to maintain peace, and to fight against the inequality in capitalism. They had dreams for the future for themselves and their children, and Kawamoto was one of those student agitators.

In these romanticized pictures of the past, the endings were always full of sorrow and tragedy. In the 1970s, some student movements radicalized and turned into terrorist groups. It was no longer just protesting on the streets, but some protestors began to hurt or kill their own comrades for not being progressive enough. As Japan’s economy boomed, most college graduates who once held the dream of revolution all entered the giant corporations or government institutions, becoming the adults they once despised.

A friend once told me, “We were born too late – too late to witness the era of noise and change.” Indeed, born in the peaceful 1990s, we belonged to a belated generation. After decades of dictatorship, Taiwan democratized in the late 1980s in a relatively peaceful way. We did not even have the chance to miss that nostalgia to witness the birth of a young democracy. We tried to write songs and poetry about the sorrow we had not experienced. We yearned for something big to happen, something historic to witness.

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On the morning of March 18th, 2014, the day when Taiwanese students first occupied the Legislative Yuan (the Diet), I was sitting in my dorm as a senior college student. I didn’t even know what was happening until I saw some classmates who never participated in any of those movements talking about it on Facebook. The story gradually came into view: the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with China would lift the current protectionism on both sides and open trade in service industries such as restaurants and salons. In other words, people in Taiwan and China could open businesses on the other side freely. There were many concerns about the pact, but it was passed in thirty seconds without proper review. People were angry at many things at the same time: the unequal trade with China, the perfunctory way that legislators passed the pact, and the fear that Taiwan was gradually losing the autonomy and democracy our predecessors had fought for.

Prior to this day, I had visited several social movements. Visit is the correct word, for I was never really dedicated to anything. I never stood in the front line against the excavator or the police. I never led the angry calls. I never made a poster. I always stood far away, afraid. I was not different from a tourist, watching things happening and doing nothing. Being there was just like reading those difficult modern Japanese novels, almost a kind of self-hypnosis that I was present, I was involved, and therefore I cared.

If my classmates who had never been to social movements were there, then there was no excuse for my absence. After grabbing lunch, I headed to the Legislative Yuan where the protests were taking place. There were tons of people – mostly students of my age – standing there, watching what was going on. For a brief moment, I thought I saw them as my previous self, not knowing what to do on this kind of occasion. But perhaps there was something we didn’t dare to say out loud: we were excited, we finally had something to fight for.

The movement quickly went viral. Everyone was talking about it on social media before it became the headline of the news. There were many different opinions regarding the trade pact. Some were against it because Taiwan’s economy is made up of small businesses, and the pact did not promote an equal trade. Some were against it because it was China we were trading with – a powerful neighbor that had never given up its intention to “reunify” Taiwan with military power. Some were against it, but they could not understand the students’ motives to conduct such “violent” acts as occupying a governmental building. There were also different opinions on how to proceed with the movement. Some argued that the police were just doing their jobs and could not be blamed, whereas some considered them a part of the system that deserved to be torn down.

This is what they don’t tell you in the class of “Social Movements 101” or any of the nostalgic memoirs: the government cut off all the water and electricity inside the Legislative Yuan, so the protestors had no choice but to urinate in plastic bags and have them carried out by legislators from the opposition parties. Parents screamed at their children for becoming mobs after investing so much in their education. Friends you had known for years accused you on social media of having been brainwashed. The police didn’t care about shedding blood while doing their jobs. Certain media outlets spread fake news, telling the public that the students who participated in the movement knew nothing about the actual content of the trade pact. Gang leaders “passed by” making threats.

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The night the students marched to and occupied the Executive Yuan, I was hiding in a small apartment nearby with my partner on his day-off. He was serving his compulsory military service then. As a graduating senior, I was still living in the girls’ dorms. Whenever he was on leave, I would book a hotel room or apartment in Taipei for us to stay in together. To meet up with him, I left the Legislative Yuan earlier than usual that day. He was technically a soldier at the time, and soldiers could not be seen participating in those movements.

“Is a revolution happening?” I asked in the rented apartment, watching the television and browsing my Facebook. My mind was blank.

“Maybe?” As someone who majored in political science and was once an active member of multiple social movements, my partner sounded extremely calm.

“Why are we sitting here then, doing nothing?”

“You can do something if you want,” he replied, “if you have already weighed the cost and are willing to pay it.”

The cost was that, that night, the government sent for more police forces, and on the television I saw the movement’s participants beaten until they were bleeding. Young people around my age were screaming, calling out the names of the ones they loved and cared for.

It was a horrible night, but even the darkest night ends with the arrival of dawn. Thankfully, nobody died, although many people were hurt. The police quickly arrested and scapegoated a student leader who was not even present at the protest.

No one really knew who ordered that sudden attack. There were rumors that a leader of the movement knew that this change in venue would end in failure – it was different to occupy the Legislative Yuan and the Executive Yuan. The former belongs to the people, whereas the latter belongs to the government. Crossing the line meant that there would be violence, and violence would beget public anger and sympathy.

No matter who was behind it, the “plan” worked. The bloody injuries of young students triggered public compassion and empathy. The tides turned as more people supported the students, and soon the movement had room to become “peaceful” again.

After the night of the Executive Yuan, a rock band composed a song “Island Sunrise” dedicated to the movement. The tone and lyrics do not call for anger or hatred but ask people to give each other more tenderness.

Dawn is near, let’s sing out loud
Until the sunlight shines upon everyone on this island

By the end of May, the movement dissolved as the government finally agreed to retract the pact with China due to immense public pressure. The leaders of the movement declared, “We will continue spreading the seeds of the sunflower to every corner.”  With a closing ceremony, the movement ended.

It should have been a happy moment. We made it – our forces pressured the government to retract the unequal treaty. Back in front of the Legislative Yuan, we did not have names. We were all supporters of the movement. The next day, we were back to our role as the good student or the good employee. We became ourselves again, but some parts of us were left there on the streets for good.

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I have always wondered why Bob Dylan writes, “I was so much older then, I’m much younger than that now.” I felt the opposite. Kawamoto and Murakami wrote in their memoirs and novels about the difficulty of dealing with the emptiness after the curtain fell. We had hopes that once the trade agreement was retracted, a better world would await us. Instead, there were still low wages, incredible housing prices, and inequality everywhere the eye could see. But with the movement gone, we didn’t know what else we could do. What’s worse, one leader of the movement was later exposed to have sexually harassed some women in the group. Some other leaders tried to use the movement to brand themselves for their own benefit. The political party we supported began to disappoint us once they were in power.

Right after the Sunflower Movement, I left Taiwan to pursue my studies in Japan, and later in the United States. Year by year, I grew more detached from social activism and focused on my own studies and career. Like those Japanese college graduates in the 1960s who ultimately chose a stable income over the revolution, my commitment to social change dried up day by day.

As a graduate student in history, I sometimes found myself an outsider among colleagues who eagerly called for bringing down the capitalist system or any other institution while we were all sitting in a comfortable seminar room. I never dared to ask: Have you been beaten bloody by the police? Have you considered that people might die in such a movement?

I wanted to ask because I admit that I am a coward. During the Sunflower Movement, never once did I enter the occupied Legislative Yuan because I knew the cost of taking that simple step. Because of one small mistake, I might be arrested and leave a mark on my record for good. During that night of the Executive Yuan’s violent attacks, I was hiding inside a loan apartment rather than fighting against the riot police’s clubs or standing against their high-pressure water hoses with my fragile eyes and body. My partner warned me that with Taiwan’s authoritarian past when the government once massacred and mass-incarcerated dissidents, the risk that my life would be in danger was never zero.

Unlike Kawamoto, I was not betrayed by any of my comrades. Frankly, I did not even deserve his frustration.

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On February 24, 2022, after Russian President Putin launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, I watched the documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom released in 2015 on the first anniversary of Euromaidan, or Maidan Uprising, which took place in Kyiv from November 2013 to February 2014. I had almost forgotten about this incident, although there were vague memories that something big happened in Ukraine, a country far, far away, before we marched on the streets of Taipei in March 2014. The two movements happened around the same time, and both fought against an unpopular treaty.

The documentary ends with a list of numbers: 125 people killed. 65 people still missing. 1890 were treated for injuries. The following conflict in Eastern Ukraine resulted in at least 6000 deaths. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is still ongoing, and every day the deaths accumulate.

I found myself in tears at the end of the documentary when one participant said, “No one can make a free person kneel.” Somehow, Ukraine’s resistance reignited a familiar passion in me to fight against injustice, yet people paid for that ideal while I was still here leading a comfortable life. Compared to Ukraine in 2014, my troubles in Taipei around the same time were so insignificant. We were so lucky that there were no causalities in the Sunflower Movement. We were lucky that our movement paid off with the least sacrifices.

Despite my distance from politics all those years, from time to time I found myself searching for the song “Island Sunrise.” I was probably drawn solely to the music, or I did not dare to admit that I missed my previous self, who was willing to take to the street, fighting for a worthwhile cause.

Dawn is near…
We will become braver people…

Witnessing social movements dwindling in Japan, both Murakami and Kawamoto had no choice but to bid farewell to their youthful pasts. They might no longer believe that they could change the world, but their quest for freedom never ended. The last bit of their gentleness turned to writing, where their love for this world might be passed down through generations of readers. Years ago, their writings inspired a reader, and have continued to influence her ever since.

I am no longer that young girl with wild dreams, yet from time to time, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” repeated in my head as that spark was kindled again – that I once believed that we could change the world – I realized that it has always been there. Just like Kawamoto who still loved those old days despite the betrayal, I have loved, and will always love that era of mine.

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Lillian Tsay is an ESL writer born in the U.S. and raised in Taiwan. She is currently a doctoral candidate in modern Japanese history at Brown University. Her creative writing has appeared in Atticus Review, Lumiere Review, Milk Candy Review, Translunar Traveler Lounge, among others.

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