Maiden Martyr for "New Japan": The 1960 Ampo and the Rhetoric of the Other Michiko

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Shōda Michiko, the commoner who married Prince Akihito in 1959, gained iconographic status in the media (Bardsley 2002). Around the same time, another Japanese woman who happened to have the same given name attracted as much if not more attention. Her name was Kanba Michiko. A Tokyo University coed and Zengakuren activist,¹ Kanba was killed in a violent confrontation between Ampo protesters and the police in June 1960.

This essay examines the rhetoric surrounding Kanba Michiko and her death that appeared in a popular weekly magazine, Shūkan Asahi (Asahi Weekly). I describe how Shūkan Asahi portrayed the Ampo struggle as a polarized opposition of old, diehard fascism pitted against a newly emerging democratic force, with the fascist camp having the upper hand until the sacrificial death of a maiden martyr. As I hope to show, this clearcut depiction inevitably positioned the middle-class nuclear family as the critical element in the Ampo protests. Moreover, as I will argue, by positing the death of the maiden as a case of thwarted motherhood, Shūkan Asahi limited the definition of women's political activism to forms of middle-class motherhood. In this sense Shūkan Asahi's portrait of Kanba Michiko not only echoed the prewar ideology of a nonpolitical "good wife, wise mother" (ryōsai kenbō) but reflected and foretold the rise of "housewife feminism" in postwar Japanese society as well.

Ampo, Gender, and the Media in 1960

In February 1960, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presented a bill to renew the revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Nichibei Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku, abbreviated in Japanese as Ampo) to the House of Representatives for approval. The Ampo bill quickly met with fierce opposition from the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) and Japanese Communist Party (JCP), both of which saw the Ampo treaty as creating the potential for Japan's remilitarization and as imposing restrictions on the nation's sovereignty. Consequently, debate on the bill soon reached an impasse. Finally, when only one week in May remained before the end of the session, the LDP took desperate measures to secure passage of the bill, using police force to push it through the House on May 19. This aggressive action outraged millions of Japanese, fueling massive anti-government demonstrations and rallies across the nation. This volatility, in turn, resulted in cancellation of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's visit to Japan, which subsequently forced Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke to resign. Despite the scale and vehemence of the protests and Kishi's resignation, the treaty went into effect in June 1960. Yet to this day, the 1960 Ampo turmoil often serves as a key reference point in narrating postwar Japanese history. What is it about this event that continues to exert such power over the collective psyche?

Unlike most studies to date, which approach the Ampo controversy as party politics, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura addresses the question of its direct impact on public and personal memory. He characterizes the Ampo protests as "a struggle over the form Japanese democracy would take rather than a critique of international relations" (Sasaki-Uemura 2001, 3). Examining civic groups involved in the Ampo dissent, Sasaki-Uemura details how they perceived themselves "as small grassroots groups with fluid organization and fluctuating memberships" (7). His analysis sheds light on these movements' impact on the ensuing oppositional praxes in Japanese society. Sasaki-Uemura identifies four factors as crucial to explaining the large-scale mobilization of people involved in the Ampo struggle:

1. 1. Memories of World War II were still a palpable presence in the minds of most people, who remained apprehensive about the possible return to wartime conditions;

2. 2. Many of those who participated in the Ampo movements had been initiated into political activism through various bunka sākuru (cultural circles) active in the 1950s—small, spontaneous groups that gathered for cultural activities organized at people's workplaces or residences;

3. 3. Out of the actual practices in the circle movements and contemporary debates among the leftist intellectuals, a new ethos...