Tombo Times: Japanese Student Movement part 1

And-Yet- another- Tombo- Times- article. I decided to continue the theme of "History Corner" which I started last time with the article on Richard Sorge.
This time I decided to write about the Japanese student movement, a pet interest of mine ever since I wrote this paper for a class at Calvin.
The Tombo Times editor generously offered to let me do it as a two parter so I could expand on it a bit more.
Unfortunately, because of the format of the Tombo Times, even split into two pages it is still less space than I had when I wrote up my report in my Calvin days. And, because I had learned more about the Japanese student movement over the past few years, I was esseintally trying to cram more information into less space.
Anyways, here's the article. Part 2 will follow next month. This article, as well as the rest of the Tombo Times, can also be read on-line here

History Corner: Japanese Student Movement Part 1
The 1960s is often an overlooked part of Japanese history. In America and other Western countries we often mythologize the student protests in the 1960s (or, depending on our political viewpoint, demonize). But, despite the fact that 1960s were much more turbulent in Japan than in America it has been almost entirely forgotten by the succeeding generations.

It is very hard to find any reference to this part of Japanese history in the modern media. And if you bring the subject up with a Japanese friend in their 20s, you're more than likely to simply get a blank stare. It isn’t just that they don’t know about it in detail, many of them aren’t even aware that the student demonstrations even took place.
The blame for most of this can be placed on the Japanese school system, which prioritizes ancient history at the expense of recent history. Many Japanese teachers are struggling just to get to the second world war before the end of the year arrives, and anything that happened after the war isn’t considered old enough to be history.
(If we are more cynical, we might also credit a worldwide trend by the powers that be to downplay the significance of this era of mass rebellion, and instead present it simply as a time of cheesy rock music and bad fashion.)

However, if we think of the 60s as an era of world wide student rebellion, a case can be made for Japan being the epicenter of this movement. Large scale student demonstrations in Japan began in 1960, when the rest of the world’s universities were still largely apolitical. The same year C. Wright Mills wrote his famous “Letter to the New Left” in which he urged the American youth not to be discouraged by their sense of powerlessness, but to look at the example of student power in Japan. When rebellion finally did spread to America in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Clark Kerr, the Berkeley administrator, blamed the whole thing on Japan and said it was inevitable the Japanese student rebellion would eventually spread to America.

If you talk to anyone old enough to remember the era though, it is possible you might here some interesting stories. The old men in your office might look pretty boring, but a few of them have some battle stories that they’re eager to tell if only prodded with the right questions. (Proceed with caution whenever bringing up politics in a Japanese office. But of course you know that already).

The Japanese student Movement can be roughly divided up into two waves. The first wave, at the beginning of the 1960s, is the one that influenced students in the rest of the world. By the second wave of student protests in the late 60s, things had come full circle and then Japanese students where being influenced (and borrowing rhetoric from) student demonstrations in Europe and America.

The first wave of protests grew out of two different causes: Nobusuke Kishi becoming Prime Minister, and the renewal of the security treaty between the US and Japan in 1960. Kishi was one a member of the old guard from Japan’s militaristic days. He had been the vice minister of munitions under the Tojo government, and a suspected Class A war criminal. Under the original occupation rules he had been barred from holding government office, but the allied policy was reversed in 1952. After which, partly under the guise of anti-Communism, many members of the old guard began to creep back into public life (as in Western Germany). And, as in Western Germany, there was a fear bordering on hysteric paranoia among the left that this was signaling a return to fascism.

The second issue was the security treaty between the US and Japan. This treaty was unpopular because the left wanted to preserve Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution, and they feared that close military ties with the US would force Japan into the middle of the cold war.

The result was several months of massive student protests in 1960 which ended in several hundreds of injuries on both the police and student side, burned police cars, the Prime Minister’s residence broken into twice, and one student death. In a huge embarrassment to the Kishi government the visit of President Eisenhower had to be cancelled because Japan could not guarantee his safety.

In the end it was a split victory. Kishi was forced to resign from his post as Prime Minister, but the security treaty passed despite overwhelming opposition.

The peace protesters would continue throughout the decade (occasionally featured for interviews in American magazines like Life) but after the massive 1960 protests Japan enjoyed relative quiet. Until the second wave of student protests began at the end of the 60s.

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Peter Bratt's take on the Democratic Primary