 He was also a powerful democratic opinion leader, going far beyond the academic world and wielding great influence regarding the Treaty of San Francisco and the student movements of 1960.However, in the late 1960s he was strongly denounced by the students front as a symbol of self-deceiving postwar democracy.He criticized this student movement, especially when his research room at University of Tokyo was ransacked by occupying students in 1969, an episode he characterised as an act of "barbarism not even Nazis did".