Transcription
During the Cold War, there was a lot of political upheaval around the world, and Japan was no exception in this matter. The country was a strategic point for the United States, with many US military bases throughout the country to exert their influence in the region. Therefore, Japan was a vital ally to the US, which is why they needed Japan to be stable and pro-capitalist. So much so that the CIA even funded the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan for most of the time after the Second World War.
But to think that Japan was politically a stable country would be a mistake. As from around 1950 until around 1970, multiple protests swept through the nation. I will talk about some of the biggest protests in Japan at the time: the Anpo protests. The name of the protests is an abbreviation from the Japanese term for security treaty. So what is this security treaty exactly, and why did it make so many Japanese citizens angry?
The treaty is a cooperation and security treaty which states that both the U.S. and Japan will protect each other and that the US can place military bases inside of Japan. This treaty had to be signed by Japan to end the US occupation, which lasted from 1945 to 1952. The US military placed in Japan could also be used to combat civil unrest like large scale strikes and protests.
Immediately, the Japanese government began pushing for a revision of the treaty, which at first was rejected by the United States. But after some protests called the Sunagawa struggle from 1955 until 1957 and the Girard incident where a US soldier killed a Japanese citizen, the US government agreed to a revision of the treaty. Although for the Japanese the revised treaty was a significant improvement, many of them were still not happy about it. Many Japanese on the left side of the political spectrum, but also some conservatives on the right wished for Japan to follow a more neutral path during the Cold War. Therefore, opposing the ratification of the revised treaty.
During the spring of 1959, a coalition of organizations coordinated the nationwide protests, which grew larger in size during the following years. But there wasn't only unrest in the streets, as inside the national diet the Socialist Party, which at the time held one third of the seats, tried to do anything it could to prolong the process of ratification, to give the protests more time to grow in size. Kishi's government was running out of time as the diet session was about to come to an end and they wanted to ratify the revised treaty before a planned visit by the President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower. This fact would cause a string of events which would only worsen tensions.
First, Kishi's government called for a 50 day extension of the diet session, which was against long standing norms within the diet, angering even people within his own party. In a response to this, the Socialist Diet members organized a sit-in in the halls of the diet. Prime Minister Kishi was having none of it and ordered 500 police officers to remove the complete opposition from the diet chambers. This incident, later called the May 19th incident, caused a spark of outrage across the whole political spectrum. And after this, the Anpo protests would be held daily and increase significantly in size.
Less than a month later, the next incident would occur, called the Hagerty incident. On June 10th, Eisenhower's press secretary, James Hagerty, arrived in Japan to prepare for Eisenhower's arrival. While being picked up by the US ambassador, they drove on purpose into the huge crowd of protesters. This resulted in the protesters surrounding the car for more than an hour while smashing the car and singing anti-American protest songs. To get Hagerty out of this difficult situation, the US used a military helicopter to pick him up, creating some iconic photos of the time.
And if this incident wasn't enough, only days later, the next incident would occur on June 15th. During this day, around the country, over 6.4 million workers went on the largest strike in Japanese history, and the hundreds of thousands joined the protests around the National Diet Building in Tokyo. At around 5 p.m., a group of a thousand artists, actors, writers, and critics marched from the main gate to another gate to present a petition to sympathetic diet members. While marching, they were attacked by right-wing counterprotesters from the Imperial Restoration Action Corps. The protesters were rammed by two trucks and attacked by counterprotesters, using sticks with spikes, leaving many wounded.
To complete the chaos, only minutes later at the south gate of the National Diet Building, a group of radical left-wing students, some part of the left-wing student association Zengakuren, succeeded in taking down the south gate and proceeded to enter the national diet grounds. Here, the students would give speeches and sing songs for 2 hours until the police returned to push the students back to the gate. During this struggle, a student lost her life. This student was named Kanba Michiko, who was a communist and part of the Zengakuren. According to the police, she was trampled to death after being knocked down. While other students claimed that she was killed by physical assaults from police officers.
The news of her death spread quickly among the crowds, and soon protesters would attack the main gates repeatedly. Around 1 a.m., the police were allowed to use harsher measures, which would end the protests. This incident appalled the nation, especially the death of Kanba Michiko. Even though she wouldn't be the first or last person to be killed during the protests, she was from an upper middle class family, her father was a university professor, and she was a student at the elite Tokyo University.
All these incidents resulted in the cancellation of the US president's visit to Japan and the resignation of the Kishi cabinet. The protests failed to block the treaty from going into effect, but it did influence how the Japanese government would handle the treaty and how the U.S. government would handle Japan in the near future. The protests would be smaller in the coming years, but there would still be quite a few notable ones like the 1968-1969 Japanese university protests and the 1970 Anpo protests.
If you like this topic, I left some sources down in the description. You can check them out for yourself if you want to. Thank you so much for watching my video and leave a comment if you have any questions or want to say something. So yeah, thank you for watching and have a nice day.