refuge for students and intellectuals exasperated by the then-current sectarian and bureaucratic Marxism. As a result, Yoshimoto's anti-sectarian philosophy of independence and individualism became a major influence and theoretical resource in the 1960s and 1970s for the Zengakuren, Zenkyoto, and other 'non-sect' New Leftists. He was regarded as required reading for participants in the 1968–69 Japanese university protests. This was in spite of his remaining aloof from, and taking a critical stance toward, the student protests of the later 1960s, a stance which was a consequence of his aversion to sectarianism and party-driven movements. Yoshimoto eventually concluded that even the radically egalitarian and highly individualistic New Left protest groups were not individualistic enough, and were still part of the same form of "communal fantasy" (共同幻想, kyōdō gensō) which had led Japan into World War II. From the 1980s Beginning in the 1980s, Yoshimoto published a theory of the masses, The Mass Image, and particular a theory of the city in The High Image I-III. At this time, Yoshimoto appeared in the women's magazine AnAn wearing clothing by Comme des Garçons. Criticized by Haniya Yutaka as "wearing capitalism itself", Yoshimoto was criticized for turning right. Indeed, afterwards Yoshimoto did become more politically conservative, becoming a supporter of Ichirō Ozawa. In the latter part of the 1980s, Yoshimoto criticized the anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons movements started by intellectual advocates of postwar democracy such as Kenzaburō Ōe as 'Anti-Nuclear Fascism". In the 1990s, after characterizing the yoga practices of Asahara Shoko of Aum Shinrikyo as expressing the inner core of early Buddhist asceticism, Yoshimoto was criticized along with Nakazawa Shin'ichi as a defender of Aum following the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. In August 1996, Yoshimoto was in critical condition after falling unconscious while swimming in Toicho, Shizuoka Prefecture, but survived. After the mid-1990s, his work tended towards informal essays. In 2003, he won the Kobayashi Hideo Prize for his book Reading Natsume Sōseki (夏目漱石を読む), and his collected works received the Fujimura Memorial prize. Philosophy and reception Yoshimoto was a wide-ranging author who wrote on literature, subculture, politics, society, and religion (including Shinran and the New Testament). Yoshimoto is known as a giant of postwar thought, and had an enormous influence in the 1960s and 1970s in Japan. He published many dialogues with overseas intellectuals visiting Japan, such as Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Ivan Illich, and Jean Baudrillard. Yoshimoto, who