- Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo by Nick Kapur
Japan at the Crossroads is a broad and ambitious work. Nick Kapur reevaluates the 1960 Anpo protests as a critical inflection point that led to a reshaping of US-Japan relations and Japanese domestic politics, culture, and society. His project generally succeeds, but occasionally disappoints.
Each chapter deals with a distinct aspect of Kapur's overall argument, beginning with an introduction that excellently summarizes the background, events, and ambiguous outcome of the protests. This chapter should be required reading for courses in modern Japanese history and politics, but the fact that it is only an introduction signals that the book is more substantially about the long-term changes that flowed from that movement.
The focus of the protests was the revision of the US-Japan Joint Security Treaty, known by the acronym Anpo, that had been forced on Japan at the close of the Allied Occupation in 1952. In addition to allowing the United States to occupy Okinawa indefinitely, the original treaty let US troops continue to be stationed throughout the country, ostensibly as a security umbrella since the new Peace Constitution did not permit Japan to maintain offensive military forces. The highly unequal treaty also allowed the United States to use its stationed troops for any purpose in or out of Japan, including to put down riots inside the country, but did not oblige the United States to aid Japan if it was attacked; it also had no end date or arrangements for revision. However, as Japan recovered during the 1950s, large segments of the population chafed under the continuing presence of massive US forces and other unequal aspects of the treaty. Japan's repeated requests for renegotiation were ignored until President Dwight D. Eisenhower finally agreed to reopen talks and began to draw down US troops in 1958. Within Japan, the Left and many moderates thought that Japan should be neutral and wanted US troops removed entirely, while the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), under the conservative leadership of former war criminal Kishi Nobusuke, supported treaty revision.
At the end of 1958 Prime Minister Kishi set the stage for the protests by trying to ram through the Diet a bill strengthening and recentralizing the police. A broad coalition of leftist political parties, plus labor unions, student organizations, and civilsociety groups mobilized initially to fight the police bill; when that bill was defeated, the coalition expanded to lead massive nationwide protests against revision of the security treaty from 1959 to June 1960, including a series of successful general strikes in spring 1960 and large protests around the Diet Building.
When Kishi called for a vote to extend the Diet session on 19 May 1960, the opposition Socialist Party members began a sit-down strike to prevent other Diet members from entering the chambers. The subsequent spectacle, carried live on television [End Page 185] after midnight, included five hundred police dragging out the Socialist Party legislators one by one to end their sit-in. Then, with only the LDP Diet members present, Kishi suddenly called for a vote on the treaty bill and passed it in the early hours of 20 May.
By law, since the bill had passed the Lower House of the Diet it would become law automatically after thirty days even if the Upper House did not act. The sudden maneuver enraged the treaty's opponents and brought onto the streets new civil-society groups and intellectuals who believed the government's high-handed tactics threatened Japan's fragile young democracy. Even though the revised treaty was now a fait accompli, the final month produced even larger protests, bloody confrontations, and the death of one student demonstrator. Kishi had timed the ratification vote so that a planned visit by Eisenhower would coincide with the day the bill would become law, but the continued protests forced Eisenhower to cancel the visit and Kishi to resign as prime minister in mid-July. Overall, the outcome of the Anpo...