Tokyo in 1967

When you think "Summer of Love," you think of Hippies on acid in San Francisco, Andy Warhol's Factory parties in New York, and maybe Pink Floyd taking psychedelic rock to new heights. But the image of students in Tokyo getting high on imported birdseed doesn't jump to the fore.

"The simplest way for people to get marijuana was in pet stores," recalls Koji Takazawa, a leader of Zenkyoto, an alliance of Japanese student movements in the 60s. "There were hemp seeds in the birdseed, so people bought the birdseed and grew their own marijuana."

In the West, little is known about Japanese youth movements of the 1960s, but the Zenkyoto, Zengakuren, and other movements were hugely popular in Japan, protesting Japanese involvement in the Vietnam War, spurring interest in Western music and art, and calling a generation to action, as parallel movement did around the world. "In Europe and all over the world, the student movement was growing at that time and in Japan, the students didn't want to lag behind."

Birdseed joints aside, the Japanese youth movement was mostly political in nature, as students rallied to oppose to Japan's tacit support of the Vietnam War. "Because it signed the Joint Security Treaty with the US, Japan was being used as a staging area for the war in Vietnam," says Pat Steinhoff, a University of Hawaii professor who studies Japanese contemporary history. "There was a lot of opposition and it was perceived as both a domestic and international problem for Japan."

The student movement began to mobilize in 1960, when the Japan-US Joint Security Treaty was signed and thousands of University students took to the streets in protest. In the following years, protests grew louder and angrier, as the military campaigns escalated. "1967 was the year the student campaign really escalated," says Takazawa. "A student was killed in a conflict with riot police and as a result, there was a huge outcry and a big wave of protest." From 1967 to 1970, students at 167 Japanese universities went on strike as part of the Zenkyoto movement.

The political upheaval was accompanied by a creative explosion that combined influences of people like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan with local traditions. "Some years later, nearly all the popular musicians in Japan had come out of that cultural stream," says Takazawa, who says members of the 60s youth movements used the Japanese cartooning tradition, Manga, in their posters and art, transforming it into the cultural force it has become. "Before that, Manga was basically educational material read by good children."