Japan in Upheaval

The Origins, Dynamics and Political Outcome of the 1960 Anti-US Treaty Protests

Dagfinn Gatu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000577082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

This book examines the widespread protests which took place in Japan in 1960 against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and assesses their far-reaching impact. It emphasizes the scale of the protests, at the climax of which hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan's National Diet building on nearly a daily basis, and large protests took place in other cities and towns all across Japan. It considers the results of the protests, which included the cancellation of President Eisenhower's state visit and Prime Minister Kishi's removal from office, and argues that although the protests apparently failed in that the Security Treaty was renewed and the Liberal Democratic Party remained in power, nevertheless the protests brought about subtle lasting changes in Japan: they revealed many latent societal and political tensions, and they compelled the ruling establishment to reshape itself, having to take seriously non-militarization and the need to listen to the people. The events are analysed in terms of social movement dynamics, with comparative references to the Western European protests of 1968.

1 Treaty regime Subaltern Japan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003248651-2

Occupation features

Following Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the United States occupied the country for the next six years and eight months, until April 1952. Two reasons have been given for the occupation’s length: the intensified Cold War and the administration of reforms (Masamura 1985 vol. 1: 321–2). The latter thrust upon the Japanese people a dramatic experience. Not only was rule by a foreign power a historic novelty; its reform ambitions, historian John Dower notes, were truly extraordinary, encompassing the entire political and socio-economic edifice, ‘and in the process changing [their] very way of thinking’ (Dower 1999: 78). Fundamentally, this design implied reshaping Japan in the United State’s own image. Much controversy surrounds the specific impact of the occupation reforms. Our treatment below is confined to those features bearing on the present study, thus omitting an overall description.

Reform objectives

The Tokyo-based agency immediately in charge of the occupation was designated the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), which was run by the US General Douglas MacArthur and his General Headquarters (GHQ) – henceforward, SCAP denotes the occupation authorities generally. The expression ‘allied powers’ is deceptive: the United States was in complete command as the bodies representing them – the Allied Council for Japan and the Far Eastern Commission – never ‘had the slightest influence on policy anytime’ (Schaller 1997: 8). General MacArthur’s ‘emperorlike image’ notwithstanding, basically, SCAP policies were decided in Washington and ‘generally reflected the thinking of the mainstream of American policymakers’ (Gordon 2003: 234).

At the level of treaty regime, Japan was effectively subordinated to the United States, so that their ‘post-World War II histories … became inexorably intertwined’ (Guthrie-Shimizu 2010: 244). Rather than a clearly demarcated period, therefore, the occupation years impacted in such a lasting sense as to warrant an extended treatment. The reforms’ domestic implications had a constant as well as a variable element. The former referred to basic policy orientation and hence carried decisive weight. In brief, it prioritized a broadly conservative agenda overseeing capitalist reconstruction – a policy objective facilitated by ‘routine contact between Americans and those already in power which created shared interests. These sanctioned status quo and widened the distance between SCAP and the opponents of the old regime’ (Schaller 1985: 46). This is not to deny, though, that the occupation instituted a far-reaching democratization relative to pre-surrender Japan, as evidenced by the post-war history of the political left defending the more liberal reforms – the new constitution in particular – against conservative attacks.

The generally subsidiary role of the variable facet – often given the misnomer ‘the reverse course’ – signified shifts within the constant reform current. Beginning in 1947, these entailed a greater concern with rebuilding the economy and the police and armed forces at the expense of the originally defined goals of democratization and demilitarization. This policy move was in important respects designed to contain leftist challenges to US intentions. Only in a very restrictive sense did initiatives of the kind qualify as reversals. To repeat, conservative consolidation was throughout the US leitmotif. The main concern of this section is to clarify the ultimate limit of the US reform ambitions by setting out how US practices often contravened their solemnly propagated ideals of democracy and equality.

Although operating within the constant parameter, the variable US policy means – their relative shift to the right over time – often had major consequences for domestic power relations. To cite the foremost historian on the occupation period, Takemae Eiji, ‘the policy switch was palpable and was felt immediately by those struggling from within to stretch and expand that [conservative] framework: labour, the media, the Korean minority, the peace movement and progressive Japanese in general’. The shift had an enduring effect: ‘the acute sense of betrayal felt by many Japanese who lived through those turbulent years even today is heavily freighted with meaning and emotion’. (Takemae 2002: 473)

Variable means covered a broad repertoire. Some directly resuscitated the conservatives by de-purging wartime leaders and terminating indictment for war crimes, paralleling the simultaneous restoration of the pre-war elite and re-Nazification in the Western Zone of occupied Germany (Graf 1984: 166–7). A major variety was acquiescence in conservative demands, for example, the authorization of a national police force and of integrated corporate groups (to replace the dissolved family-owned holding companies).

Fierce anti-communism loomed large. Already in September 1946, General MacArthur spoke of the left as the paramount enemy in Japan (Schonberger 1989: 63–4). ‘By 1947 American and Japanese conservatives alike openly attacked the reform programme and its proponents as communistic’, so that thereafter ‘the raison d’étre of virtually every programme of the Occupation was its contribution to the struggle against communism in and outside of Japan’ (Ibid. 284). This trend saw the eclipse of the liberal-inclined so-called New Dealers among the occupation personnel.

A member of the British liaison mission in Tokyo characterized SCAP policy in 1948 as an anti-communist ‘witch hunt’ of ‘almost hysterical’ dimensions, with ‘steadily increasing’ media attention to the ‘menace’ of communism – inducing Japanese officials to exploit the opportunity for their own ends. Travels in the northern island of Hokkaido, he further reported, revealed the falsehood of the SCAP-claimed ‘hotbed of communist activity’ there, supposedly issuing in union violence and anarchy (Schaller 1985: 134).

US interventions

Another set of policies impinged on the left (and occasionally somewhat beyond) on a large scale and in a sustained manner, thus hitting hard. One policy category entailed direct SCAP interventions that imposed severe constraints on movement practice as well as on freedom of expression; the other had a more indirect, yet ubiquitous character.

Beginning with the former, one target was left-wing unionism. SCAP’s initial stance of non-intervention in labour disputes proved ephemeral. To curb union militancy that allegedly went too far – in seeking to democratize the shopfloor order – it resorted to an array of pro-management interventions. These were of three types, depending on the degree of severity. The softer kind involved various pressures on the unions, typically warnings not to go ahead with planned strikes directed at ‘rationalizations’ and dismissals. Strikes were condemned as contravening occupation policy, raising the threat of prosecution, in addition to being ‘unpatriotic’.

The intermediate category was highly diverse. One approach sought to fence in union challenges by enacting stricter labour laws in June 1949. So harsh were these revisions that not only left-wing but also the moderate unions opposed them. For example, payment of wages was proscribed during strikes; employers were granted increased levers in collective bargaining; a 30-day cooling-off period prior to strike action was mandatory if prime minister-designated vital services were affected; governmental bodies gained enhanced powers in resolving labour disputes and over union certification; and, ‘most importantly, the law refused to recognize unions “which principally aim at carrying on political or social movements”’ (Takemae 2002: 472).

Other intermediate measures penetrated union management. These included fomenting intrigues behind the scenes to oust members of the Japan Communist Party (JCP) or counteract the party’s union influence by backing rival unionists (Schonberger 1989: 122). An alternative stratagem was to produce an action plan to aid management at Toshiba, a major manufacturer of electrical equipment, to defeat a prolonged strike. Brazenly unilateral, the plan called for annulling the labour-management agreement and government contracts, and ruled out bargaining while the strike was in progress (Takemae 2002: 470–1).

The ultimate weapon in the interventionist arsenal signified brute force, as when troops were deployed to terminate the four-month-long dispute at the Tōhō Motion Pictures Studios, Tokyo. In protest against the company invalidating the union contract and firing 1,000 employees, 1,500 actors and workers occupied the Studio and ran it by themselves. Following, first, an eviction decree by the Tokyo district court and, second, the Tōhō management request for police action, as ordered by the US commander of the Tokyo military government team, the commander then issued an order, Takemae writes,

to despatch Military Police and a platoon of 50 dismounted cavalry backed by six armoured reconnaissance cars and five tanks to remove the striking workers…. On 19 August, with three scout aircraft … circling overhead, US troops, armoured cars, tanks and 2,000 helmeted Japanese police armed with axes, saws, scaling ladders and battering rams moved into position. In the face of insurmountable odds, the strikers abandoned their action and left the studio peacefully, avoiding bloodshed…. The suppression of the Tōhō struggle was a prelude to the “rationalization” offensive and mass dismissals that management would unleash against organised labour in 1949.

(Ibid., 465–6)

In effect, these measures were jointly enforced by the Japanese government and SCAP.

A second, even more, wide-ranging clampdown on movement practice partly overlapped with the first one, the commonly designated Red Purge of 1949–50, justified in the familiar terms of removing obstacles to occupation objectives. Whilst commencing before the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the purge was greatly stepped up thereafter. In summary, ‘The purge machinery put in place to eliminate militarists from public life in 1946 was now cranked up and redirected towards left-of-centre liberals, labour activists and suspected communists’ (Ibid., 480). In the process, the former category – in line with the US policy shift – was depurged, only to resume leading positions in public life. Extremely comprehensive, the purge extended to most fields, including the mass media and arts. Of the 12,150 dismissals directly connecting with the purge, 10,973 hit the private sector (Tsuji, ed. 1966: 77), their ‘crime’ being adherence to pro-communist views.

The shrill tone of the campaign is suggested by the way it was pursued against the Japan Teachers’ Union at the local level. A SCAP official, telling an academic audience that communism ‘thrives like a disease festering in filth’, demanded the firing of communist teachers whom he likened to ‘former Nazis and Japanese militarists’. This nervousness derived from SCAP educators’ belief (in 1949) that Japan was on the eve of a left-instigated revolution, calling for urgent measures to combat communist influence in schools and universities. The upshot was the discharge of some 1,000 teachers by March 1950, following a verbally conveyed SCAP order to the education minister, who in turn secretly instructed the prefectural education officials to implement the purges (Takemae 2002: 480–1).

Unsurprisingly, given the nebulous reason for the dismissals (political belief) and the high-pitched SCAP rhetoric, law procedures were exceedingly arbitrary: the authority of the removals was based on the 1946 purge instructions directed at rightists and thus lacked legal justification; there was no recourse to due process of law; the screening process was random; current law was either manipulated or simply not applied; to shirk responsibility, SCAP ‘purge orders invariably were communicated by word of mouth as informal guidance’. With the purgees’ careers and livelihood ruined, ‘the human cost of this egregious abuse of civil rights are incalculable’ (Ibid., 482–4).

The major political casualty of the Red Purge was the JCP whose radicalization from early 1950 interacted with SCAP repression. At a stroke, the party’s mass base disintegrated, while its leadership layer was debarred from public office and all political activity (see the last section of this chapter).

To government bureaucrats, however, the crusade presented ‘a unique opportunity to suppress the left and consolidate their conservative agenda while using the ensuing social tensions to pry further concessions from SCAP’. And even some socialists could reap benefits from the purge by moving into positions in the labour movement previously held by the JCP (Ibid., 485; further on the Red Purge, see Miura 1990: 102–12; Monogatari Sengo Rōdō Undō Shi Kankō Iinkai, ed. 1997 vol. 3: 87–94, henceforward Monogatari).

The third direct intervention had a virtually generalized focus: a censorship that was acutely sensitive not only to explicit criticism of the occupation but also to more oblique commentaries judged to pose a potential threat. Hence the pervasive information control exercised by SCAP, extending to ‘every form of media and theatrical expression – newspapers, magazines, trade books as well as textbooks, radio, film, and plays’ (Dower 1999: 407).

The result was a huge scanning operation. Within a single month, one censorship agency covered no less than ‘16 news agencies, 69 daily newspapers … 673 films, 2,900 drama scenarios and 514 phonograph records’. Another agency devoted 4 years to monitoring 8,00,000 private telephone conversations and inspected 330 million pieces of mail. Even the popularly favourite Kamishibai street plays (‘an indigenous art form that tells a story via a series of illustrated paper panels’) felt the strictures of the surveillance effort: 8,821 of the plays that were screened in ‘Tokyo and areas north’ from November 1945 through February 1947 (the above from Takemae 2002: 387).

The censorship machinery was yet another vehicle for frequent violations of civil and human rights. And again, a gross arbitrariness in standards of application featured. Scathing criticism was liable to severe punishment, as when three editors were penalized to 2–5 years of hard labour. Judged guilty of overstepping appropriate limits, SCAP ordered prefectural authorities to prohibit Kamishibai from the spring of 1949 (Ibid., 393). In tandem with other fields, censorship ‘mov[ed] slowly but inexorably from militarist and ultranationalist targets to left-wing ones’. And here as well, the latter categories ranged along a wide progressive spectrum. Indeed, left publications operated in a distinctly inhospitable environment, often forcin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Treaty regime: Subaltern Japan
• 2 Domestic setting: Portentous prelude
• 3 Movement configuration: Ascendant cycles
• 4 Students, intellectuals: Frontal contestations
• 5 Established left, newspapers: Orderly fixation
• 6 Popular strata: Dreaded spectre
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index