AMPO:REVISION OF THE US-JAPAN SECURITY TREATY, 1960
In 1958, a now independent, much strengthened Japan under the
leadership of Prime Minister (and formerly indicted war criminal as a high-ranking bureaucrat in Manchuria) Kishi Nobusuke, set about to revise the peace treaty signed
with the US ending the Occupation in 1952. The new version was more favorable
to Japan in several respects (Japan did not have to share costs to have US bases
in Japan, for example) but it was still unpopular with the Left, with labor,
and with students. Why? Because it seemed to go against the notion of Japan
being a nation of peace--as prescribed by the constitution--by firmly allying
Japan with the US and placing Japan under America's nuclear umbrella. Many Japanese
wanted Japan to be a neutral, pacifist nation; perhaps even a democratic-socialist
one. They felt that being an outpost of democracy and capitalism in East Asia--a
floating battleship or aircraft carrier for the US--could be a source of friction
with China and North Korea, and perhaps even Southeast Asian countries that
Japan had victimized during the war.
There was a deeper context as well. The 1954 Lucky Dragon #5 Incident, when winds shifted and a Japanese tuna fishing boat drifted too close to the Bikini Atoll where the US had been testing a hydrogen bomb irradiating the crew, one member of which died, sparking a widespread opposition to nuclear arms and helping to ground a reinvigorated peace movement. Women were especially active in this movement such as in the Suginami Ward Appeal, a petiton to abolish nuclear weapons which garnered more than 20 million signatures. Against this renewed citizens' focus on the hibakusha, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki., and Gensuikyo, the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was formed. This organization secured the passage of the Atomic Bomb Victims' Medical Care Law in 1957. Gensuikyo also played a dynamic role in the struggle against Ampo.
The year 1960 was also the year of the Mi'ike Miner's strike on Kyuushu, a 9-month futile effort to improve working conditions in the mines. It became a cause celebre for the Left and for Labor. But two months into the 312 day strike there were bloody confrontations when the company tried to reopen the mine, and one miner was killed. Labor supporters from all over Japan made pilgrimages to Mi'ike to walk the picket line with the miners. But the strike ended badly for labor when a mediation proposal was accepted, over the objections of the local union, leaving the original union leaders and their families in tears.
Also, liberals were distrustful of Kishi because of his previous
attempt to alter the constitution and to strengthen the state's police powers.
Kishi had sought to revise the Police Law and amend the Constitution prior to
1960, but his efforts ended in failure. This attempt to revise the Police Law
was widely interpreted as giving the police prewar levels of power. The new
legislation-- drafted after secret consultation with the Public Safety Commission--
would have enabled the police to conduct searches and seizures without warrants
in order "to maintain public security and order" and to prevent crimes.
This sounded an awful lot like the language of the old "Peace Preservation
Law" of 1925 that was so instrumental in thwarting the prewar Left and any and all opposition to increased militarization and military aggression in China. Kishi's proposals had to be abandoned in the face of protests
by both the Left (Sohyo called a general strike) and from within the LDP. Three
members of Kishi's Cabinet resigned to protest his bill to increase and centralize
police power. His effort to revise the Constitution, which he undertook even
before the 1958 election, dragged on interminably, and was finally abandoned
by Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato in favor of a "low posture" in the
wake of the tumult over the Security Treaty revision in 1960. Richard Sameuls
includes an interesting anecdote in his profile of Kishi which is available
online. Amidst rumors that Kishi raised funds illegally, including going hat-in-hand
to the CIA, Samuels notes:
A half decade earlier, during the battle for control of the
party in 1957, he had been attacked by Ishii Mitsujiro, formerly of the Liberal
Party, for raising dirty money. Ishii remarked of Kishi that "no matter
how tightly you seal a bucket of shit, you still can't put it in the tokonoma
(place of honor in a Japanese home)." Years later Kishi commented on
the charge that "there are plenty of buckets of shit to go around."(See
the citation for Samuels' article at the bottom of this page.)
Nevertheless, in 1960 the revised treaty was signed and needed
to be approved by the Diet; a visit by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was scheduled
for June 19. Kishi was eager to get the treaty approved well in advance but
Socialist representatives in the Lower House maneuvered against him. They even,
at one point, surrounded the Speaher of the House and the government had to
send in police to free him with force. Then, Kishi "rammed" the treaty
through a plenary session after midnight without the opposition's knowledge.
This action provoked a huge uproar and even treaty supporters were dismayed
at Kishi's "high-handed," undemocratic tactics. The opposition movement
took to the streets and soon became the largest mass demonstration in Japan's
history!
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens joined the protest while
radical students like the Zengakuren (descended from the same student organization
that protested the treatment of Professor Takigawa of Kyoto University in 1933)
organized the "snake-dancing" students who were in the forefront of
the demonstrations. The throngs encircled the Diet and challenged the police
to keep order. They clashed with police who mainly used water cannons and sometimes
tear gas to keep the hordes at bay. So there was some violence, but not a great
deal. When one female student from Todai was inadvertently trampled to death,
a mass funeral/protest was held and more clashes with the police followed. Then,
Ike's Press Secretary, James Haggerty, flew into Tokyo to make arangements for
the President's visit. His car was surrounded by angry protestors and it was
clear that the government could not control the situation. Eisenhower's visit
was cancelled. It really seemed for a moment as though Japan was on the verge
of a monumental political transformation.
There was genuine resistance among Japanerse citizens to the presence of US bases on Japanese soil, their extraterritoriality, and the fact that they compromised Japan's neutrality and allied Japan squarely with America in the Cold War. So, the Ampo treaty was fairly unpopular with many Japanese. From the spring 1959 to the fall 1960, some 16 million citizens took to the streets to protest the treaty. Originally, radical students and labor unions took the lead, but by May 1960, citizens from all walks of life joined the marches on the Diet Building. People signed petitions, joined strikes and marches, carried placards and posters in protest. On May 19, when Kishi used the police to oust socialist and communist Diet members from the room in order to forcibly ram the treaty through, many Japanese citizens felt betrayed and felt that a trend toward reversing the democratic reforms of the early postwar years was being culminated. For others, it meant that the ideal of a pacifist, neutral and progressive Japan was no longer in reach. It was a climactic and truamatic moment in modern Japanese history. Along with May 19, June 15 is also remembered by protestors as the day tht right-wing groups violently attacked the protestors. As one participant in the movement, China scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi, noted, "until the dictatorship is overthrown, it is useless to argue about whether one opposes or supports the Ampo treaty." As Wesley Sasaki-Uemura notes, however, the Ampo struggle did not happen completely spontaeously. Rather, it "was the culmination of years of activity among citizens groups trying to resist the state's drive to restore prewar structures and create alternate visions for postwar democracy. (See Welsey Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous, p. 3 and also p. 26 for the Takeuchi comment.)
Yet, the bottom line was that Kishi resigned (over the Haggerty
affair), and was replaced by Ikeda Hayato (former Education Minister during
the 1933 Kyoto University Incident), a member of Kishi's faction, and Ikeda
promptly announced his "income-doubling plan." The storm dissipated and many historians
would argue that Japan retreated from this zenith of political engagement into
a life of complacency, consumption and material betterment. It was a triumph
for Japan's conservative leadership, especially the LDP, which oversaw the next
15 years of high-speed, double-digit economic growth. It also signalled the
decline of an effective leftwing opposition movement in Japan involving students,
union leaders, socialists, communists, and in this instance, housewives, salaried
workers and a cross-section of ordinary Japanese people.
See some further comments below.
THE SECOND PHASE OF CITIZENS' MOVEMENTS AND PUBLIC PROTEST
by
Victoria Lyon Bestor excerpted from
The 1960 revision of the US-Japan Security (AMPO) Treaty became an important
focus of citizens' action. Reacting to Prime Minister Kishi's high-handed ramming
of the AMPO Treaty's approval through the Diet, opposition from Diet members
and leading liberal and leftist intellectuals promoted the formation of a citizens'
faction mobilized into a sizable protest. Those efforts eventually led to the
cancellation of President Eisenhower's proposed visit to Japan in June 1960
and eventually resulted in Prime Minister Kishi's downfall.
The aftermath of the 1960 AMPO riots further pushed discussions of promoting
civil society to the periphery. However the treaty riots also demonstrated the
potential for citizens' action which began to take hold as official policy more
intensely centralized emphasis on market led growth, industrial development,
and expansion of the corporate sector at the expense of grass-roots needs and
initiatives.
The Korean War was enormously successful in rebuilding Japan's infrastructure
and setting the nation on the course that led to that economic growth and prosperity
which Japan enjoyed through the end of the 1980s. While national prosperity
through the 1960s and 70s was enormous, little emphasis was placed on the individual
nor was attention given to the needs of neighborhoods or rural communities.
As the wealth of Japanese corporations became more conspicuous, local interests
began to express the need for spreading the wealth and the creation of accepted
minimum standards by which people should live, a "civil minimum,"
as articulated by leftist political theorist Matsushita Keiichi. As the sense
that individual and local needs were getting short shrift in the priorities
of the nation, in addition to local government efforts to articulate minimum
social needs, "citizens' movements" grew focused on specific issues.
By the mid-1960s the environmental hazards produced by unbridled industrial
growth began to create a ground swell of locally-based citizens' movements.
During the 1950s the average Japanese was trying to recover from the war and
the prospect of industrial growth seemed to present future opportunities tantalizing
enough to quiet protest, despite the lack of much benefit trickling down to
the average citizen. A decade later serious and widespread incidents of industrial
pollution such as the mercury poisoning that became known as Minamata disease
and severe lung diseases in the industrial city of Yokkaichi led to action.
The urban middle class joined with rural residents who began to demand cleaner
industry and to lend support to the victims of environment degradation.
The interest of a broad range of middle-class professionals, doctors, scientists,
lawyers, school children and teachers, and the media mobilized public interest
and support both to aid the victims in their long legal battles with the polluters
and to demand that preventative measures be taken to insure that industry behave
more responsibly. The continued and intense focus of the media was particularly
important in both holding domestic Japanese attention on the problem and bringing
the issue into the international spotlight.
Other movements expanded simultaneously, including the anti-nuclear movement
and a range of vigorous and diverse consumer movements, mobilizing housewives.
These movements focused broader attention on consumer needs, on the safety of
foods, on environmental hazards as they relate more broadly to the general populace
and most importantly on the excesses of corporate Japan and its disregard of
the consumer.
Contemporary citizens' movements and popular protests stimulated interest in
the history of popular rights movements during the Meiji period including challenges
to the centralized authority of the Meiji State. This contributed to an intellectual
climate in which a popular version of civil society could be seen in the past
as well as in the present-day political, environmental, and consumer movements.
However, as prosperity spread throughout the Japanese populace and economic
growth seemed unending, a sort of complacency settled over much of the Japanese
middle class. The good life seemed within reach and many Japanese concentrated
their energies on better educating their children to get top jobs, investing
in the booming real estate market, saving, and increasingly on conspicuous consumption.
Indeed such an enormous percentage of Japanese thought of themselves as firmly
middle class that they were called "the New Middle Mass." While consumer
action, civil militancy, and social involvement continued, for the most part
it constituted smaller, more factionalized or specialized movements. However
the popularity of civic involvement experienced a resurgence in the mid to late
1980s and has grown dramatically since then.
For the whole paper, please see:
Or, see also: "Toward a Cultural Biography of Civil Society in Japan,"
in Roger Goodman's edited volume Family and Social Policy in Japan: Anthropological
Approaches, Cambridge University Press, 2002 (pp. 29-53).
Taken from: Noriko Aso's online materials at:
For an intriguing portrait of Kishi Nobusuke, the P.M. who engineered
the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, see Richard Samuels' article at:
http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:uaVqBa2OlRYC:web.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/newslet/SSJ15/SSJ15.pdf+Ampo+Protest+Movement&hl=en&ie=UTF-8