The Battle of Tokyo U.

Elaborately equipped police swirled around a barricaded building while ragged defenders struggled to hold them off. Helicopters clattered overhead broadcasting calls for surrender; tear gas billowed and missiles flew. While millions of Japanese watched on television last week, the storming of Tokyo University brought a violent end to a bitter, year-long student strike.

Until the last moment, it seemed as if the fight might be avoided; most of the striking students had called it quits long before the final skirmish. They had struck in the first place to protest the old order -- outdated lectures, remote professors, inflexible administrative practices. And they had won resound ingly. Acting President Ichiro Kato and the administration of Japan's greatest institution of higher education had agreed to a 10-point program that promised the students a large share of authority.

Among other things, it all but barred the presence of police on the campus, practically eliminated any form of uni versity discipline over students, and promised a review of all existing rules restricting student activity.

But an ultraradical splinter group from the Zengakuren students' union was not about to settle for any peaceful solution. Like militants on other campuses the world over, they wanted a violent confrontation with authority.

They barricaded themselves in university buildings and prepared for a long siege.

The attacking force of 8,000 riot police was under orders to do the job quickly and to avoid injuring students wherever possible.

They moved in at dawn, carrying thick plastic shields, batons and protective nets.

Peripheral buildings were cleared by midmorning.

Then, under a deluge of rocks, Molotov cocktails, bottles of sulphuric acid and lengths of pipe, the police closed in on mock-Gothic Yasuda Hall, the main building on the campus.

They tear gassed the defenders and trained water cannons at students on the roof. Using power saws, sledgehammers and blowtorches, they battered and burned down the barricades while a police helicopter sprayed tear gas down on the building. Resistance ended the afternoon of the second day and the beaten Zengakuren were led off to jail. There were 631 arrests, but, amazingly, only three students and two policemen were listed as seriously injured.

The damage was so extensive that Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, a 1924 graduate himself (seven of Japan's ten postwar Prime Ministers attended Tokyo University), wept when he visited the scene. Dazed professors walked through ravaged offices and laboratories, ankle-deep in rubble and water. Even the marble wall of the main entrance had been broken up. The bill for the damage may run as high as $1,000,000.

The intellectual damage was even heavier. Angered at what it thought was vacillation by the university administration, the government ordered cancellation of entrance examinations for the incoming class, a move that will cripple the university for years to come. Most faculty members, in turn, are bitterly resentful of the government's insistence on hard-line tactics.

Deep Divisions. The student body remains deeply divided between the ultraradical anarchists and Maoists, the somewhat calmer Marxists, and the majority, who merely want to get on with their education. The radicals have no real interest in achieving academic reforms; they want to overturn the established order of society, and they chose the university as a convenient target. Last fall they organized a bloody riot at Shinjuku railway station to protest the Viet Nam war. Their next objective, they say, will be to create national political tumult as the 1970 date for review of the U.S.-Japanese Security Pact approaches.

With an eye to a chaotic future, defeated Radical Student Leader Yoshitaka Yamamoto crowed from his sanctuary in private Nihon University: "We may have lost the battle, but we have won the war." And he promised that there would be further disruptive action in Tokyo and at other state schools.

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