Throughout the 1950s, the continued presence of US military bases on Japanese soil served as a lightning rod for discontent over the terms of the 1952 US–Japan Security Treaty. American Cold War military planners predicted that a first – possibly nuclear – strike by the Soviets might well be aimed at their interests in the Pacific. The case for maintaining, even developing, their bases in Japan seemed clear. To a good many Japanese, however, fed up with being asked to profess pacifism while tolerating foreign militarism in their midst, this kind of logic seemed circular and self-serving. Surely if the source of Japan’s vulnerability to another atomic attack was the US military presence, then that presence – which by the end of the 1950s amounted to nearly 50,000 American troops spread across hundreds of installations on Japan’s four main islands alone – ought to be ended, not expanded.
Sunagawa quickly became the kind of cause célèbre for which artists and protestors had been waiting. Villagers found their ranks swelled by artists and documentary-makers, along with leftist politicians, trade unions, the radical student organization Zengakuren, and even a number of Buddhist priests, beating drums to help lift demonstrators’ spirits. Surveyors responded by bringing more police with them each time they tried to return, until in September 1955, a thousand policemen – accompanying an inspection team of just nine people – clashed violently with nearly 2,000 farmers and activists. With the national media looking on, protests spiralled from there.
The imagery at Sunagawa was perfect for whipping a local concern into a national tipping point. There was the injustice of simple farming livelihoods under threat. The poignancy, even Freudian resonance, of young girls sobbing as government surveyors drove stakes into their paddy fields. The tragic imbalance of the poor and the young, mostly unarmed, caught between a still-mistrusted Japanese police force and the military hardware of a rising imperial power. Nakamura captured it all in sketches and in one of the era’s best-known paintings, Sunagawa #5. These he followed up two years later with Gunned Down, after a middle-aged housewife named Sakai Naka was shot dead – rumour had it, deliberately – while on a US army firing range collecting brass shell-cases to sell for scrap.
Sunagawa #5 (Nakamura Hiroshi, 1955): a sketch and the finished work Gunned Down (Nakamura Hiroshi, 1957): a single incident turned into a vision of a country prostrate and humiliated In both the Sunagawa and the Sakai cases, the sense of drama created by combining culture with protest was heightened by contributions from the courts. Bitter, protracted arguments over whether William S. Girard, the US serviceman involved in the shooting of Sakai, should be tried under American or Japanese jurisdiction laid bare Japan’s subordination. Parallels were painfully apparent with the ‘unequal treaties’ of the nineteenth century, despised for the extraterritoriality arrangements that allowed foreigners who committed crimes on Japanese soil to be tried by their own countrymen. The case for trying Girard under Japanese law was eventually won. But the outcome, a three-year suspended sentence, had the effect of intensifying public anger even further.
Where the Sakai case provided momentum to the campaign against Japan’s foreign policy arrangements, a more direct intervention in the issue came in March 1959, when a judge in the Sunagawa case handed down an extraordinary ruling. Acquitting seven leaders of the struggle, who had been accused of trespass for entering Tachikawa Air Base two years before, he declared that the presence of US bases on Japanese soil was unconstitutional because Article nine of Japan’s new Constitution forbade the maintaining of ‘war potential’ on its soil.
The US eventually dropped its plans for expanding Tachikawa. But the swiftness with which Japan’s Supreme Court reversed the March 1959 ruling – reasoning that Japan’s constitution did not advocate ‘defencelessness’, while US bases could not be considered ‘war potential’ because Japan had no control over them – was used by protestors to bolster their claims that powerful American influence was at work behind the scenes in their democracy.
The timing of the controversy was enormously significant. The widely disliked Security Treaty, to its critics the source and symbol of Japan’s semi-colonized state, was coming up for renewal in 1960. Those planning to protest found in the main champion of treaty renewal the perfect pantomime villain. A man whose name, less than a decade before, the Americans had spelled out on a Sugamo Prison placard as a potential war criminal was now Prime Minister, and the Americans’ best hope of saving the alliance with Japan.
Kishi Nobusuke had served in the late 1930s as the highest-ranking bureaucrat in Manchukuo. There, as one of the most ambitious of the era’s ‘reform bureaucrats’, he had turned his genius for finance to planning in detail the kind of state-controlled and total war-ready economy that he and others advocated for mainland Japan. A prime example of the kind of colonial abandon that can ensue when an empire’s officials live and work far from domestic scrutiny, Kishi’s less savoury activities ran to money-laundering, corralling millions of Chinese – from the unemployed through to captured POWs – into industrial slave labour, consorting with drug-traffickers and yakuza, and making the most of his power over those around him to feed a legendary libido.
After three years in Sugamo, where he broke prison bread and played board games with the wealthy gangster Kodama Yoshio (whose henchmen he would later use for crowd control), Kishi found himself released without trial. He drove straight to the Prime Minister’s residence, where his brother Satō Eisaku – a future Prime Minister, currently serving as Chief Cabinet Secretary – helped him to change out of his prison uniform and into a business suit. ‘Strange, isn’t it,’ Kishi commented, ‘we’re all democrats now.’
Officially de-purged from political life in 1952 and winning his first Diet seat the following year, Kishi set his considerable talents, contacts and personal finances to undermining Yoshida Shigeru, whose popularity with the voters was by this point in freefall. Yoshida finally resigned at the end of 1954, and the next year Kishi became one of the prime movers in a merger of the country’s two conservative parties, from which was born the Liberal Democratic Party (Jiyū Minshutō). Electoral success followed swiftly, and in 1957 ‘war criminal Kishi’, as opposition politicians liked to refer to him (others called him yōkai: monster), found himself at the helm of party and country alike.
Kishi’s nostalgia for Japan’s pre-war political arrangements showed itself quickly, in an attempt to re-empower the police to search private property at will and without a warrant – simply on suspicion that a crime might be committed at some future date. The thwarting of this measure by a broad coalition of Diet politicians (including some in the LDP), 4 million striking workers and a cross-section of Japan’s newspapers offered a reminder – right on the eve of treaty renewal – of the lessons from recent protests: that a single issue could be used to highlight a wider national predicament, people could be persuaded to care, and that real policy change could be achieved.
Kishi tried to sell treaty renewal, the details of which were hashed out in Washington in January 1960, as a rebalancing of power in the US–Japanese relationship: the US would now have to negotiate with the Japanese government before making use of its troops stationed in Japan, and these forces could not be used to intervene in the event of a Japanese civil war (a scenario for which the previous version of the treaty had rather ominously allowed, deepening the sense of de facto occupation). He was unsuccessful. Protests against the treaty – its Japanese name abbreviated to ‘Anpo’ – began to gather pace, encouraged by the Japan Socialist Party, the Japanese Communist Party, the General Council of Trade Unions (Sōhyō), Zengakuren, and prominent intellectuals including the political scientist Maruyama Masao. Events reached a climax on 19 May, the day that renewal had to pass through the Diet in order for President Eisenhower to be able to make his planned celebratory visit to Japan. As masses of protestors gathered outside the Diet building, Socialist Diet members trapped the Speaker of the House in his chambers in an attempt to stall proceedings. Kishi called in the police, and
around 500 uniformed officers helped to drag his opponents away. Treaty renewal ended up being passed in the middle of the night, with no opposition Diet members in sight.
The country was pitched into turmoil. Millions now went out on strike, and weeks of large-scale demonstrations brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the street, shouting ‘Anpo hantai! Anpo Hantai!’ – ‘No to Anpo! No to Anpo!’ On 10 June, student protestors surrounded, stoned and threatened to overturn a car carrying President Eisenhower’s press secretary, who was in Japan to lay the ground for the presidential visit. He narrowly escaped by military helicopter and the presidential visit was promptly cancelled. A few days later, a Tokyo University student by the name of Kanba Michiko was killed during a confrontation with riot police outside the Diet building, further inflaming the situation and bringing 300,000 people out onto the streets around the Diet. Kishi was eventually forced by his LDP colleagues to resign. But the renewed treaty remained in place.
Three thousand protests during the Tokugawa era. Countless more from Meiji through to the 1930s. Farmers, tenants and teachers. Shishi and samurai. Feminists and freedom activists. Factory workers and young military officers. Putting up with perceived injustice and vigorously protesting against it seemed to run as two rich and sometimes complementary threads through early modern and modern Japanese culture, the pent-up energies of the former giving extraordinary physical and moral power to the latter. In all of this, the summer of 1960 earned itself a special place. Where the vast majority of those older protests had been sectional in their support – village, region, profession, class – and accordingly specific in their aims, the people on strike and surrounding the Diet, some trying to surge inside, came from all walks of life and had gathered at the heart of the nation to protest (and reclaim) its very purpose.
When those protests ultimately came to nothing, and the Anpo moment passed, the failure of an existential cause wrought existential consequences. Some tried to claim that with so many people taking an active part in the all-important contest for Japan’s public realm – and in the most literal and vivid way, by filling the streets with bodies and flags and noise – democracy in Japan had at last been ‘indigenized’, as Maruyama Masao put it. Freedom, after all, is not something to be passively possessed, like an object. It is something you do, perform or exhibit. But for a great many of Japan’s young especially, politics in general now lost its allure: it seemed no longer to be a route to meaningful change, or a worthwhile foundation of identity either for the individual or for society at large. Other avenues would have to be tried.
In any case, as participants in the protests pointed out, if this was ‘Japanese’ democracy, it was disturbingly open to hijacking by money and violence. Demonstrators had been attacked by hundreds of club-wielding counter-protestors, successors to the political thugs (sōshi) of the pre-war era. One drove a truck into the crowd. These people regarded themselves as anti-communist patriots, but they took part in – and were often paid for – the breaking of strikes and the beating up and intimidation of peaceful protestors. Most worrying of all was the broader nexus of business, politics, policing and gangsterism, of which they appeared to be a part. Brokering these post-war connections were the likes of Kodama, who was released from prison at the same time as Kishi and rapidly began expanding a customer base that was widely rumoured to extend to the CIA.
Meanwhile, to the dismay of anti-Anpo activists, Socialist and Communist Diet members had joined the newspapers in piously and simplistically condemning the violence on all sides. The leader of the Zengakuren accused the Communist leadership of frustrating a genuine mass movement by trying to contain and control it. The Anpo cause increasingly seemed not just to have been lost, but to be actively contributing to the fragmentation of the left into ‘old’ and ‘new’.
Anti-Anpo protestors in 1960: Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke’s head on a stick, and ‘We Dislike Ike!’ Worse was to come, with Japan’s new Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato serving up his income-doubling plan in December 1960 as a soothing Christmas present for the nation. The LDP proved to have a talent for tacking towards the centre and offering domestic sweeteners whenever they were forced to put controversial policy goals on hold. They were assiduous, too, in courting ever broader voter support. Rice price regulation protected farmers – many of them now tilling their own land for the first time – from shifts in the market. And small businesses were taxed comparatively lightly and shielded from large corporation competition with rules preventing the latter from locating themselves in small neighbourhoods.
Japan’s companies, for their part, were increasingly willing to woo workers with assurances over long-term job prospects and salaries, alongside an array of corporate benefits running from health-care to subsidized accommodation and holidays. Even the United States made efforts to pacify the Japanese public, launching a programme to reduce troop levels in Japan by 40 per cent, including the withdrawal of all ground forces.
Meanwhile, as the post-Anpo reckoning reverberated across the arts – with calls for the stereotyped imagery of much reportage painting to be exchanged for more penetrating analyses of power – it was becoming increasingly clear that Japan’s culture war would have to be fought not just on canvas and on the streets but also on the airwaves and on screen.
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‘Chūsha hantai! Chūsha hantai!’ – ‘No to injections! No to injections!’ The language of Anpo was filtering into Japan’s schools, as children took to the corridors to protest against the inoculation schedule. Meanwhile, at religious ceremonies, little boys could be found exchanging traditional attire for turbans and capes, the costume of Gekkō Kamen (‘Moonlight Mask’), Japan’s first crime-fighting television superhero. Some even tried to emulate his feats of athletic bravery, leaping between tall buildings – leading to the common sight in hospitals around the country of pint-sized patients wrapped in towels, sheets and sunglasses being treated for cuts and scrapes and broken bones. It wasn’t long before a child died trying to recreate one of the programme’s stunts, resulting in the cancellation of the series in 1959, after barely a year on air.
As television spread across Japan, critical commentary in its old-media rivals – coloured, of course, by considerable envy and anxiety – focused heavily on the new technology’s effects upon children. Some were trivial: children from television-owning households were said rarely to be bullied; instead they were guaranteed the best roles in sword-fighting games, while their friends were condemned to play the baddie – although it was reported that when the game was ‘Anpo protest’, no one at all was willing to be Kishi. Other observations were more worrisome. Children were spending less time exercising or doing their homework. At dinner, they gawped across the room at the TV, clutching their rice-bowls, rather than engaging with their parents or siblings – except to argue over the channel. At night, they went to bed late, and without doing much reading. Their use of language was increasingly vulgar and melodramatic. And imaginations that ought to roam free and far seemed to alight on characters like Gekkō Kamen – whose theme song was sung incessantly – and become stuck there.
Alongside the disturbingly addictive nature of the new medium, claimed detractors, ran the terrible quality of its content. Television seemed to be struggling to escape its formative impulse: to attract pedestrians passing the first public sets by offering simple spectacle, from pro-wrestling to song contests. The critic Ōya Sōichi famously likened glancing at the television to spotting two dogs mating on a street corner: it was compulsive viewing, but you felt stupid afterwards. An early TV prank said it all. Someone was paid to enter the supporters’ section at a baseball match and wave the flag of the opposite side, resulting in a fight. Japanese television, Ōya concluded, was creating a ‘nation of 100 million idiots’.
Concern about the corrosive effects of modern mass culture – as dangerous or dumb, or both – did not begin with television. From 1925’s ‘Tokyo March’ to the ‘Apple Song’ twenty years later, critics lamb
asted talented musicians and writers who were willing to shun refinement in favour of payment. A journalist at the Asahi newspaper had described the film Soyokaze (Soft Breeze), in which the ‘Apple Song’ featured, as being of value only to people seeking to make themselves physically sick – adding that the first ten minutes alone ought to do the trick. Namiki Michiko wasn’t ‘especially attractive’ to begin with, the crude cinematography made her face look dirty, and the whole thing just reminded him of Japan’s defeat.
Pop music in general, during and after the Occupation, was accused of blending banality with subservience to American styles and values: Japan as a mere cultural as well as political satellite of the United States. ‘Yokosuka Dance’ of 1952 was considered especially disturbing proof. Dreamed up by a local chamber of commerce to promote the city of Yokosuka, its lyrics revolved around sentimentalized intimations of sex – envisioned, it seemed, as taking place between a Japanese girl and an American GI, Yokosuka being home to a military base. One critic called it a ‘masterpiece of colonial literature’. Alongside the sleaze ran the song’s liberal use of imported Americanisms like beri naisu and suīto hōmu. This lyrical trend, together with the tendency of star singers like Eri Chiemi to mix Japanese and English phrases when they sang, raised the prospect of little girls growing up forgetful of, or at the very least confused about their own culture, singing songs that cast them unwittingly as the objects of American sexual appetites.
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