Young people singing and dancing, chants of “No war!” and posters reading “Don’t change Article 9” have accompanied tens of thousands of protesters mobilising around Japan since February. The most recent protest was on 3 May, the country’s Constitution Day public holiday. The protests include people of all ages, but what’s notable is that more young people are getting involved. Demands focus on retaining the constitution’s anti-militarist provision amid the reality of growing militarism and imperialist war in the Middle East.
The protests began soon after the election of conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, and were motivated by anger at her push to remilitarise Japan. Article 9 of the 1945 constitution renounces war and prohibits Japan from maintaining a military except for self-defence. Conservatives have long wanted to repeal the provision.
Japan has a largely unreported history of anti-imperialist protests. With memories of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh, anti-war and anti-imperialist protests peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. These were popular struggles by workers and students in which the revolutionary left played an important role. The protests pushed back against US imperialism and forced concessions from both the US and Japanese governments. At their peak, hundreds of thousands of people marched on the streets and occupied parliament and Tokyo airport, workers went on strike and students occupied their campuses. All the while, protesters faced down violence from police and right-wing thugs.
Early postwar protests
Following its World War Two surrender in 1945, Japan was occupied by US-led allied forces. The country soon became integral to US imperialism and its fight against communism in the region. Although its new postwar constitution renounced both war and the creation of a military, Japan, under the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled almost continuously from 1955 to the present, has been tied to US war planning.
Protests against the US-led occupation began soon after the arrival of US forces. Initially, people protested for access to food as well as housing, which in major cities had been destroyed in the war and some of which the occupation forces had grabbed for themselves. Within a few years, the US bases and conservative Japanese governments’ collaboration with aggressive US militarism in Asia became the focus of opposition.
In 1951, the US-led occupation officially ended, but the US-Japan Security Treaty became active the following year. The treaty granted the US the right to retain more than 2,800 military facilities in Japan (excluding Okinawa, an island chain in the south), some of which were bases housing tens of thousands of US servicemen and women. The US maintained Okinawa as US territory and fortified the islands, using them as a launching pad for B-52 bombers and to store chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. These bases were a crucial US asset in its invasions of Korea and Vietnam, while Japanese industry provided US forces with vital military supplies, transportation, equipment and food.
The left played a significant role in mobilising the anti-US bases protests. The Communist Party and its affiliated unions and student organisation kicked off the movement in the early 1950s in opposition to the signing of the security treaty. On May Day 1952, three days after the treaty came into effect, more than a million people demonstrated throughout Japan to oppose it. Four hundred thousand marched in Tokyo. The day is known as Bloody May Day because of the police violence unleashed on the crowd.
The protest movement continued, but the struggle against the expansion of a US base near Tokyo in 1955 was the most significant. The planned extension of the base’s runway would demolish Sunagawa, a nearby village, evicting more than 100 farming families, many of which took part in the protest. The Bloody Sunagawa battle and sit-in was popularly supported and was the largest and bloodiest anti-US base struggle of the 1950s. The protest sent a powerful message to the US and the government of the recently formed LDP, a merger of two conservative parties to counter the influence of the left and the union movement.
The Eisenhower administration cancelled the base’s expansion and, in 1957, announced US troop numbers in Japan would be reduced by 40 percent. In 1959, the arrested protest leaders were acquitted by the Tokyo District Court on the grounds that the law, the stationing of US troops in Japan and the security treaty were unconstitutional.
A rising tide of opposition to the security treaty
The Sunagawa struggle focused public attention on the security treaty, which was due for renewal in 1960. In response, left groups started to organise opposition. They called protests opposing US imperialist aggression and its increasing militarism in Asia, and against the growing nuclear threat at a time of increasing Cold War tensions. Protesters also opposed the LDP’s unwavering support for the US, which stemmed from its fear of the growing influence of the left and the union movement in Japan. The early protests were mostly organised by left groups, but as the deadline for renewal approached, anger spread to a broader layer of the population. In the lead-up to the June renewal, protests occurred almost daily.
Although the government pushed the renewal bill through parliament’s lower house on 20 May 1960, protesters were not deterred. On 10 June, a crowd of more than 10,000, mostly students and young workers, trapped Eisenhower’s press secretary in his car. The protesters were brutally attacked as riot police unsuccessfully tried to release the aide, who had to be rescued by helicopter. The protesters scored a victory when the president cancelled his visit.
The movement against the treaty’s renewal continued to grow and draw in wider layers of support. It also attracted increased violence from police and right-wing thugs. Injuries from these clashes and the death of a young student angered people further. On 18 June 1960, the treaty was due to be voted on in the upper house. Crowds, which numbered more than 300,000, gathered early and occupied the area in front of the parliament. At midnight, they got word that Kishi had forced the bill through without a vote. Angry protesters flooded the streets for days and, for the first time in Japan’s postwar history, 5 million workers went on strike over a political issue. The prime minister was forced to resign.
From the mid 1960s until the security treaty’s second renewal in 1970, Japan was in constant political ferment. Protests opposing the war in Vietnam and student struggles on campuses over the authoritarianism of university managers blended into protests against the treaty.
In 1964, students and workers protested the arrival of US nuclear-powered submarines. In 1965, the Peace in Vietnam Committee was formed by well-known intellectuals with the support of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and its aligned union federation. The committee opposed the war and the renewal of the security treaty and demanded the return of Okinawa to Japanese control. The anti-war rallies drew in hundreds of thousands nationally from a cross-section of the population.
Anti-war and far-left student groups also participated. Students and young workers continued their tactic of blocking Haneda airport in central Tokyo to prevent prime ministers from travelling. And in January 1968, tens of thousands of students, workers and locals protested the arrival of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise at a US naval base in Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture. Heavily armed police attacked the protest, the images of police violence attracting public attention and support for the demonstrators. The protesters didn’t prevent the arrival of the Enterprise but did force the government to ban subsequent visits by US nuclear-powered aircraft carriers until 1983.
In October 1968, hundreds of thousands rallied on International Anti-war Day, and in the following April, 200,000 protested on Okinawa Day. Protests and occupations continued at train stations, US military trains were blocked, and workers in Okinawa went on strike against the island chain being used as a US base.
A general strike against the Vietnam War and the treaty’s upcoming renewal on 13 November 1969 is estimated to have involved 67 unions and more than 4 million workers. Despite these massive mobilisations, the LDP government pushed through the security treaty’s second renewal on 23 June 1970, but Okinawa was returned to Japan.
The legacy of the protests
By the late 1970s, the peak of the movement against US imperialism had passed. For more than three decades, it had been energetic, vibrant and militant and had radicalised hundreds of thousands, especially students and young workers. Hostility towards the US and Japanese governments had created a radical and politicised atmosphere. Although the government renewed the US-Japan Security Treaty, the anti-imperialist and anti-militarist movement had sent a powerful message to the US and Japanese governments. It had forced the cancellation of a proposed expansion of a military base and a reduction in US troop numbers in Japan. It drove one prime minister out of office and forced a US president to cancel his visit. And it halted the arrival of American nuclear-powered submarines in Japan for sixteen years.
The various anti-Stalinist left groups had organised, participated and led the protests, but the deep and irreconcilable divisions among them meant they couldn’t unite into a single organisation. These actions created opportunities to build and organise a movement, but many of the revolutionary groups instead focused on confronting the riot police and fighting one another. Only the Revolutionary Marxist faction prioritised building an independent anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary party. But it was too small to have a significant impact. Cohering and developing a serious revolutionary left aimed at winning workers and students away from the reformist Communist and Socialist parties might have allowed them to grow and influence the movement. The result was that by the 1980s, no sizeable organisation had been built.
Today, the fortunes of the socialist left in Japan are at a low ebb, but there remains a pressing need for resistance to war, US military bases and Japan’s growing defence budget, as well as the attacks on workers’ rights, the expansion of nuclear power and environmental destruction. Japan’s anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist movement of the postwar decades is inspirational and provides valuable lessons in the fight against imperialism. The ongoing and gathering momentum of the current protests is hopeful and could fan the flames of a broader resistance movement.
