#anpo protests

[inejiroasanuma]

Inejirō Asanuma addressing a huge crowd at an Anpo Protest rally in Tokyo, 1960.

Asanuma fiercely opposed the 1960 Anpo Treaty, which kept U.S. military bases in Japan and subordinated Japanese sovereignty to American interests.

Later that same year, on 12 October 1960, he was assassinated by a 17-year-old ultra-nationalist while giving a speech on live television.

[imsuperfuckingangry]

“One of the great achievements of Hamaya Hiroshi’s documentation of the Anpo protests is to give us sustained access to the protests as they played out at that level, across the faces and lives of ordinary people for whom peace and democracy were a complex mixture of the high-minded and concrete, calling forth aspirations and anxieties that embraced the global while remaining highly local, even intimate.”

“In May and June of 1960 Japan was rocked by some of the largest protests in its history.”

“They erupted over the passage of a revised security treaty between Japan and the United States, titled the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (Sōgo Kyōryoku Oyobi Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku), and have become known as the “Anpo” protests from the Japanese shorthand for that treaty. Hundreds of thousands of people came onto the streets day after day, ten million signed petitions against the treaty, thousands were injured, and one person was killed. The protests forced cancellation of a planned visit to Japan by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, toppled the conservative prime minister Kishi Nobusuke, and have come to be recognized as the most significant political crisis of the postwar period.”

The Korean War - Japan

“The Korean War erupted in June 1950, pitting the Soviet-supported regime in the north against the U.S.-supported Korean government in the south—drawing the U.S. into the conflict immediately, and China soon thereafter, in December.”

“In this milieu, U.S. willingness to sacrifice democratic reforms in Japan in the name of security became more pronounced. 1949 saw the beginning of a “depurge,” in which the wartime leaders who had formerly been expelled from public life began to be allowed to return. In the same year, a parallel “red purge” began in which public employees suspected of leftist leanings were summarily removed from office. The purge spread to the private sector in 1950, removing a total of 22,000 people—mostly union activists—from their jobs.”

“For workers, the event that most forcefully brought the international situation together with everyday labor issues was the Korean War. Workers in the factories that supplied the U.S. war effort were faced with the uncomfortable reality that their livelihood was directly connected with a war in a neighboring Asian country, a scant five years after Japan’s own misadventures in Korea and Asia had come to an end. One 18-year-old worker who found work at a munitions plant after a long period of unemployment was forced to quit after two weeks of sleepless nights, unable to bear the thought that he was producing bullets that would kill Koreans.”

In Mari Yamamoto, Grassroots Pacifism in Post-war Japan, p. 114.

“The war boom, although good for the economy as a whole, also went hand in hand with crackdowns on union organizers and dramatic increases in workload. This conjunction radicalized many unions and made the security relationship with the U.S. an issue of concern.”

Ending the US Occupation of Japan

“Only four years after imposing the ‘peace constitution,’ U.S. planners found themselves pressuring Japan to allow U.S. bases to remain on its soil and to rearm, so that it could begin to participate actively in regional security. Indeed, the U.S. began to see these as conditions for ending the occupation.”

The San Francisco Peace Treaty “The Treaty of Peace with Japan, popularly known as the San Francisco Peace Treaty, was signed by Japan and 47 other nations in September 1951, laying out the terms, widely regarded as generous, for Japan to resume sovereignty in 1952. Only a few hours later on the same day, however, Japan signed a second, bilateral security treaty with the United States. This established the terms of a continued military alliance between the two countries, and locked Japan firmly within the orbit of U.S. cold-war strategy.”

“The Treaty of Peace excluded key countries, including some of Japan’s most significant neighbors and former enemies.”

“The Soviet Union, Korea, India, and—perhaps most importantly—China were not signatories. Both the Soviet Union and India refused to sign because of objections to the way the attached bilateral security treaty absorbed Japan into the U.S. imperium.”

“Korea and China weren’t invited to the peace conference at all because of disagreement about who should represent them: Korea being in the midst of a civil war, and China split between the People’s Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan.”

“Japan would soon sign a bilateral peace agreement with Taiwan, but was forced to not establish relations with the mainland as a condition for passage of the peace treaty through the U.S. Senate.”

“The treaty gave the U.S. the right to maintain military bases in Japan, and Japan was forbidden to grant bases to any third party without prior consultation.”

The Ryūkyū islands, including Okinawa, were excluded from the treaty and were to remain under U.S. military occupation, also indefinitely, in what Edwin Reischauer, ambassador to Japan in the early 1960s, later characterized as “the only ‘semi-colonial’ territory created in Asia since the war.”

“The shadow cast by U.S. policy thus limited Japanese autonomy in making peace with former enemies, and establishing foreign relations.”

“Subordinate independence”

“Japan was supposed to have emerged from the peace negotiations as an independent state, but the terms of the security treaty were so unbalanced that people referred to it as an “unequal treaty,” while the situation in which it left Japan was similarly described as “dependent independence” or “subordinate independence.” A startling 40% of respondents in a September 1952 Asahi Newspaper poll reported there were times they felt Japan was not an independent country, and the most common reason given was the presence of foreign troops. Only 18% of the respondents said they believed unreservedly that Japan was independent.”

Zenkōwan

“The Japanese longshoremen’s union (Zenkōwan) was one of the few to defy an occupation ban and go on strike in protest of their workers’ forced participation in the war effort. They accused the U.S. of carrying out a “war of aggression” in Korea and connected their struggle for better working conditions with the fight against ‘the conspiracy of international imperialists, rearmament, war, and colonial policy.’ This was when unions began to call their first “political” strikes, meaning strikes that had political—rather than work-related—goals.”

Bloody May Day - May 1, 1952 Japan

“The unpopularity of the bilateral U.S.-Japan security treaty found dramatic expression in violent May Day demonstrations in Tokyo on May 1, 1952—just days after the occupation of Japan formally ended. Known as “Bloody May Day,” these protests left two protestors dead and 22 with gunshot wounds. Over 2,000 police and protestors were injured. Protests against the ongoing U.S. military presence in Japan continued throughout the decade.”

Anpo Protests

“Three general strikes held in June 1960 as part of the Anpo protests were all strikes of this kind, carried out to topple the Kishi government and block passage of the revised security treaty. The largest, on June 22, involved 6.2 million workers according to Sōhyō (Japan’s General Council of Trade Unions), and was one of the largest strikes in Japanese history.”

“A member of the All Japan Garrison Forces Labor Union (Zen Chūryūgun Rōdō Kumiai, or Zenchūrō) participating in a protest in front of the American embassy on June 11, 1960. This union united Japanese workers who worked in a variety of support functions at U.S. bases.”

“A farmer, part of a group from Nagano Prefecture, participates in a protest in front of the American embassy on June 11, 1960.”

“Protestors from Shizuoka Prefecture join demonstrations in Tokyo on June 11.”

“High-school students join the protests on June 11.”

“This man holds what appears to be a People’s Republic of China flag. Judging by his sash, which reads “Japanese resident,” he is probably a Chinese national residing in Japan.”

“Residents of a rural area near a U.S. maneuvering ground come to Tokyo on June 15 to lend their voices to the protests. Their straw hats and slogans written on woven reed mats hark back to peasant protests and rebellions of the feudal era.”

“Families with children participate in a rally on June 18. One child has a message attached to him that speaks in the child’s voice. Though part of the sign is obscured it probably reads something like “I hate war” (Boku wa sensō ga iya da). Many parents were politicized around the security treaty issue through their role as protectors of their children. For the people demonstrating here, the Anpo treaty was taken to be a threat to the safety of their families.”

Zengakuren (Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sōrengō, or All Japan League of Self-Governing Student Associations)

“Zengakuren (Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sōrengō, or All Japan League of Self-Governing Student Associations) was the most important network of student activists. After forming in 1948 out of a movement to resist U.S. “imperialism” in reforming the university system, it would remain a formidable bastion of anti-American sentiment and left-wing politics throughout the postwar.”

“Zengakuren students tended towards radical views and direct action. They lent moral and physical support to struggles across the 1950s including the red purges, the Korean War, and anti-U.S. base movements. The conflict over the proposed runway extension at the Tachikawa airbase near Tokyo was the most dramatic of these. Local farmers protecting their fields—pitted against the weight of Japanese officialdom carrying out the demands of the U.S. bases—came to serve as symbolic stand-ins for Japan: condensations of an enduring injustice whereby American military expansionism, assisted by Japanese authorities, preyed on local communities. Students and radical union members clashed with police many times as part of these struggles, as they would again during the Anpo protests.”

“In a fateful moment on June 15, students stormed the south gate of the Diet (parliament) building, eventually forcing their way in. Here they are met with police water cannon.”

MIT Visualizing Cultures

“Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage & Grief” was developed by Visualizing Cultures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and presented on MIT OpenCourseWare.

MIT Visualizing Cultures:

John W. Dower

Project Director

Emeritus Professor of History

Shigeru Miyagawa

Project Director

Professor of Linguistics

Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture

Ellen Sebring

Creative Director

Scott Shunk

Program Director

Andrew Burstein

Media Designer

In collaboration with:

Justin Jesty

Author, essay

Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literature

University of Washington

[horner2019]

In 1960, when Japan revised the postwar treaty that allows a U.S. military presence in Japan, the popular backlash changed the evolution of Japan's politics and culture, and its global role. Nick Kapur's analysis helps resolve Japan's essential paradox as being innovative yet regressive, flexible yet resistant, imaginative yet wedded to tradition.

Image text: “Curious why Japan had hardly any climate strikers last Friday and hardly any news coverage of climate strikes worldwide? Read my book "Japan at the Crossroads"! It considers how political protests and strikes have been delegitimized in Japan since 1960.”