Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (31 page)

Concerning remilitarization, Hatoyama was more zealous than his predecessor Yoshida had been in supporting rearmament under the security treaty, but his reasons for doing so were by no means unambiguously pro-American. Rather, Hatoyama and his supporters desired accelerated rearmament of a more “autonomous” sort that in the long run would hasten Japan's escape from the American embrace. Just as the Security Treaty was a doubleedged sword from the American perspective—simultaneously enlisting Japan as a Cold War ally and instituting U.S. controls over Japan—so also was advocacy of accelerated rearmament double-edged to the more ardent Japanese nationalists. On the surface, this policy accorded with U.S. demands for rapid Japanese rearmament, and the conservatives were indeed ideologically receptive to aligning with the Americans in their anti-Communist crusade. At the same time, however, nationalists in the Hatoyama and Kishi line also endorsed accelerated remilitarization to reduce military subordination to their Pacific partner as quickly as possible. Here, in any case, their aspirations were frustrated, for popular support could not be marshaled in support of such a policy. The general public proved willing to accept slow rearmament
in the mode established by Yoshida, with little concern about the sophistries of constitutional reinterpretation that this program required of the government's legal experts. As Hatoyama learned, however, just as other conservative leaders learned after him, to the very end of the Sh
ō
wa period the public was not receptive to either rapid rearmament or frontal attacks on the constitution.

In attacking the conservatives the opposition essentially appropriated the slogan “peace and democracy” as its own, but exactly what this phrase meant was often contested among these critics themselves. As the intellectuals associated with the influential Peace Problems Symposium developed their “peace thesis” (
heiwaron
) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was argued that mobilization for peace must proceed through three levels: from the “human” (
ningen
) level, through the “system” (
seido
), and only on this basis to engagement in broad “international” (
kokusai
) peace issues. In the Japanese context this emphasis meant immersion in the “human” suffering of World War II (and, in actual practice, an outpouring of writings focusing on
Japanese
suffering in the battlefields abroad and under the air raids and atomic bombs at home). The Japanese “system” of overriding importance was to be found in the interlocking basic values enshrined in the new constitution, namely, people's rights, democracy, and pacifism. Finally, rooted in appreciation of these human and systemic values, the Japanese peace movement could move on to pursue basic goals conducive to the creation and maintenance of international peace. By the time the 1955 System was created, these goals usually were expressed as unarmed neutrality, backed by guarantees of support from the United Nations. In addition, inspired by two related events in 1954—the Bikini Incident, in which Japanese fishermen suffered radiation poisoning from the fallout of a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific, and a spectacular grassroots petition drive against nuclear testing that was initiated by Japanese housewives and collected an astonishing 30 million signatures—by 1955 the Japanese peace movement also had come to focus especially keenly on the global abolition of nuclear weapons.
²⁰

Maintaining the constitution was of course the bridge that linked defense of peace and pacifist ideals to defense of democracy, but the latter cause extended beyond constitutional issues per se. Phrased softly, the opposition also was committed to protecting the livelihood (
seikatsu y
ō
go
) of the working class, which undeniably was being squeezed in the concerted quest for rapid industrial growth. In more doctrinaire terms, the overtly Marxist opposition wished to destroy monopoly capitalism and bring about a socialist revolution in Japan. The latter agenda predictably was endorsed by only a portion of the anticonservative opposition; and, predictably again, it caused the left to splinter in self-destructive ways that did not happen on the right, where factionalism was less ideological and more personally oriented. Thus, while the 1955 System began with a Socialist merger and the anticipation, by some, that in time a genuinely two-party system might evolve in Japan, in actuality the left failed to hold together or grow. As early as 1958 the political scientist Oka Yoshitake already had characterized the new political structure as a “one and one-half party system.” Two years later a portion of the Socialist Party permanently hived off to form the less doctrinaire Democratic Socialist Party. By the end of the 1960s, after the quasi-religious Clean Government Party (K
ō
meit
ō
) also had emerged on the scene, it was common to speak of the political system as consisting of “one strong, four weak” (
ikky
ō
shijaku
) political parties.
²¹

Before the opposition congealed as a permanent minority, however, it succeeded in mobilizing popular support in a series of massive protest movements that—like the earlier struggle against the occupation-period reverse course—dramatized the relationship between international and domestic politics. The first and most spectacular of these protests wedded opposition to revision and renewal of the Security Treaty (scheduled for 1960) to Kishi's assumption of the premiership in 1957. That Kishi, T
ō
j
ō
's former vice minister of munitions, could assume the highest office in the country just twelve years after the war ended—and become, simultaneously, the symbol in Japan of the U.S.-Japan military
relationship—graphically exemplified how far, and fast, Japan had moved away from the early ideals of demilitarization and democratization. In the end, the opposition drew millions of demonstrators into the streets and both lost and won its protest: the Security Treaty was retained and revised, but Kishi was forced to resign. In the process, a variety of concerned citizens were baptized in the theory and practice of extraparliamentary democratic expression.

This tumultuous campaign against the Cold War treaty and old-war politician overlapped, moreover, with the last great labor strike in modern Japanese history, which pitted workers at the Miike coal mine against an archetypical old-guard employer, the Mitsui Mining Company. The Miike struggle began in the spring of 1959 and in January 1960 turned into a lockout and strike that lasted 282 days and eventually involved hundreds of thousands of people. At Miike, the radical wing of organized labor confronted a broad united front of big business and the government, which correctly perceived the struggle as a decisive test for the future of state-led industrial “rationalization.” And at Miike, labor lost. The defeat of the miners in late 1960 smoothed the path for the heralded “income doubling” policy of the new Ikeda Hayato cabinet, which assumed power when Kishi was forced to resign in July.

The interplay of domestic and international politics resurfaced dramatically in the late 1960s, when massive protests against Japan's complicity in the Vietnam War intersected with a wide range of domestic grievances. Indeed, in this struggle the linkage of peace and democracy was recast in stunningly new ways. Under the influence of the New Left the anti–Vietnam War movement introduced a more radical anti-imperialist critique to the discourse on peace and democracy. Essentially, the late-1960s radicals argued that under the Cold War alliance Japan not only profited materially from the misery of other Asians but also contributed to the support of corrupt and authoritarian regimes outside Japan. Peace and prosperity for Japan, in short, were being purchased at the cost of war and the repression of democracy elsewhere. Vietnam and Korea were the great examples of this repressive profiteering for
the protestors of the mid- and late 1960s, especially after Japan normalized relations with the authoritarian South Korean government in 1965, under strong U.S. prodding—thereby contributing measurably to the ability of the Seoul regime to send troops to Vietnam in support of U.S. forces there. The radicalism of this critique lay in its attempt to think of democracy as well as peace in truly international and nonparochial terms, while situating the vaunted “income-doubling” policies of the 1960s in the specific context of the imbrication of Japanese bourgeois capitalism and U.S. imperialism. In the New Left critique, “peace and democracy” as the Old Left and liberals and ruling groups all imagined it was self-centered, self-serving, quintessentially bourgeois.

At the same time, the anti–Vietnam War movement intersected with highly charged domestic protests against the social and environmental costs of growth, the grasping hand of the state, and the autocratic governance of the universities. The latter, as the critics framed it, were turning into mere service organizations for the bureaucracy and big business. Antipollution movements centering on the mercury-poisoned community of Minamata and other tragic examples of environmental destruction peaked in the period between 1967 and the early 1970s. With them came a renewed appreciation of grassroots democracy, exemplified in an impressive variety of “citizens' movements” (
shimin und
ō
), “residents' movements” (
j
Å«
min und
ō
), and “victims' movements” (
higaisha und
ō
)—all legacies, each in its own way, of the 1959–60 street demonstrations and community protests against the Security Treaty and Kishi and in support of the Miike workers. The Sanrizuka struggle opposing forced sale of farmland to build the new Narita international airport was initiated by the farmers themselves in 1968. And the student struggles, which began with a five-month strike at Waseda University in 1965–66, reached a crescendo in 1968–69. At the peak of the student demonstrations more than 40 percent of the nation's 377 universities were affected by strikes, and most of these campuses were under occupation. Although many of the grievances voiced by student protesters were directed at
university affairs, the student radicals—like many other citizens in the late 1960s, in Japan and in Europe and America as well—immersed themselves in the broad gamut of domestic and international issues. And at their ironic best they cleverly captured the interlock of internal and external developments. One of the slogans of student radicals at the University of Tokyo, for example, was “Dismantle the Tokyo Imperialistic University”—neatly meshing the notion of a revival of prewar autocracy (when the elite University of Tokyo had been named Tokyo Imperial University) with the argument that higher education in postwar Japan once again was serving primarily the purposes of an expansionist state.
²²

It is estimated that between 1967 and 1970 alone, more than 18 million Japanese took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and demand the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. Uncounted others were involved in the university struggles and citizens' movements against the ravages of the growth-oriented state. As elsewhere, “people's power” entered the Japanese lexicon at this time as a legitimate and essential alternative to bourgeois parliamentary politics; and, as elsewhere, the theory and practice of “people's power” ranged from peaceful protest to wanton violence. By the mid-1970s the nationwide people's movement was moribund, but it left as legacies the memory and experience of grassroots mobilization that could be evoked in more particularistic causes thereafter.

At the most conspicuous level the major controversies concerning military and international policy in postwar Japan involved left-wing criticism of the government's acquiescence in the San Francisco System. Almost all of the contentious issues of later years were encoded in the peace settlement and separate peace, the Security Treaty and U.S. military bases in Japan, commitment to Japanese rearmament, detachment and semicolonization of Okinawa, entanglement in U.S. nuclear policy, and collusion in U.S. support of right-wing client regimes in the divided countries
of Asia (China, Korea, and Vietnam). Inevitably, criticism of such government policies was inseparable from criticism of the United States. True to the early vision of the Peace Problems Symposium, the opposition position generally espoused an essentially non-aligned international role for Japan, although pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese allegiances also were conspicuous on the left. At critical moments in the postwar debates opinion polls indicated that a large number of Japanese also supported the option of neutrality. Fifty percent of respondents to a survey in 1959 endorsed this option, for example, and at the height of the peace movement a decade later as many as 66 percent of Japanese questioned in one poll favored neutrality.
²³

It is misleading, however, to see the conservative and opposition positions on these issues as completely antithetical. Both sides were crisscrossed with schisms. At the same time, on many critical issues the two sides shared, if not common ground, at least comparable skepticism concerning the wisdom of U.S. policies. Beyond the usual factionalism endemic to the left, the unity of the opposition was undercut by all the familiar postwar traumas of the international Communist and socialist movements—the repression in Hungary and critique of Stalin in 1956, the Sino-Soviet split that followed soon after, the Cultural Revolution in China and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Communist concerns with “Trotskyist” deviations that accompanied the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, and the acrimonious debates over “capitalist and imperialist” nuclear weapons as opposed to “socialist and defensive” ones (which came to a head in Japan in 1963, when the left split on whether to support the Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty). The conservatives, too, although relatively cohesive in their anti-Communism, nonetheless bifurcated into so-called Asianist and pro-American camps. This split was openly signaled in December 1964 and January 1965, when LDP members coalesced around either the staunchly pro-American Asian Problems Study Association (Ajia Mondai Kenky
Å«
kai) or the more Asia-oriented Afro-Asian Problems Study Association (Ajia-Afurika Mondai Kenky
Å«
kai).
²⁴