Two, Three, Many 1960s

Two, Three, Many 1960s

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/schieder150610.html

by Chelsea Szendi Schieder
15.06.10

The global Sixties began in Tokyo on June 15, 1960, with the death of
Michiko Kanba, an undergraduate at Tokyo University. On the night of
her death she had joined a group of fellow university students at the
front of a massive demonstration -- 100,000 people deep -- facing off
against the National Diet Building. At first, officials claimed she
had been trampled to death by other demonstrators, but the autopsy
showed signs that she may have been choked, and a medical examination
by a Diet member indicated that it was likely the riot police who had
strangled her. While debate on how she died continues, it was clear
that she and her fellow students, many of whom had suffered injuries
meriting hospitalization, had been greeted at the gates of the Diet
with great force. Her death made the violence of the supposedly
democratic Japanese state visible.

The crowd of thousands was gathered in opposition to the renewal of
the US-Japan Security Treaty. Known in Japanese as Anpo, the
agreement authorized American military bases on Japanese soil and, in
the protesters' eyes, made Japan complicit in American adventures in
Korea and Southeast Asia. Under the terms of Anpo, Japan's
sovereignty was questionable and its relationship to its ambitiously
pacifist "peace constitution" became ambiguous.

The month leading up to the June 15 protest was a tumultuous one:
news footage reveals brawls among Japan's top politicians, citizens'
and workers' groups pouring into the streets for protests and
petition drives, and Eisenhower's press secretary had to be rescued
from a mob by a marine helicopter. It was typhoon season.

Ike's scheduled visit to Tokyo to celebrate the renewal of Anpo,
which was ultimately forced through by Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi,
had to be canceled. The American president reassured his people in
the "Report to the American Nation on His Far Eastern Trip" that
"These disorders were not occasioned by America; we in the United
States must not fall into the error of blaming ourselves for what the
Communists do; after all, Communists will act like
Communists." Never mind that postwar American policy had forced
Japan to abandon neutrality while allowing the country's war crimes
in Asia to go unaddressed. Never mind that the people of Okinawa,
who had suffered under Japanese imperial policy, remained in effect
colonized under US military occupation. Never mind that the United
States kept nuclear weapons on their bases in Japan, in spite of the
extreme unpopularity of such a decision among a population that
considered themselves uniquely intimate with the horrors of nuclear
warfare. Never mind that Prime Minister Kishi himself was a Class-A
war criminal rehabilitated under American Cold War direction.

Cold warrior Japan-watchers offered less paranoid analyses perhaps,
but declared the ruckus as symptomatic only of Japan's "immature
democracy," implying that such an event could never occur where the
fruits of democracy were ripe, i.e., in the United States. Their
paradigm, in which democracy's maturity was measurable by its
middle-class consensus, would be turned topsy-turvy by the events of
the 1960s. By the end of the decade dynamics similar to those of
1960 in Japan would play out on American streets. If this subversive
spirit of the 1960s is to retain any political urgency for the left
today as opposed to providing slogans for the latest GAP advertising
campaign, we need both a longer and more critical view of the 1960s
beyond the iconic year of 1968. This view must include June 15,
1960. On that date in Tokyo, the contours of student protest were
revealed, themes that would become more pronounced over the
decade. First, we can see in the Anpo protests the birth of a "new"
left dynamic, which encompassed risk-taking students. Second,
coverage by an ever-expanding mass media was critical in shaping the
outcomes of the confrontation. And, finally, the mainstream
political response refused to engage with the students' radical
critique of late capitalist society. These factors would rise to
prominence in all student movements throughout the advanced
industrialized nations, and in those of many developing nations as
well. And there would be casualties.

By the late 1960s students from New York City to Paris, from Mexico
City to Prague were embroiled in movements that self-consciously
identified themselves as a new left-leaning alternative to both
American and Soviet strategies of hegemony. These young, often
comfortably middle-class, activists took increasingly provocative
risks in confronting police on city streets and on university
campuses, while the news media made it possible for the whole world
to watch. Prime ministers and presidents dismissed these protests as
youthful antics. They sought to rhetorically neutralize student
dissent by infantilizing it, and by asserting that they heeded the
ostensibly homogenous middle-class citizen. No matter how noisy the
antics of student radicals would get, Prime Minister Kishi in 1960
and President Nixon nearly ten years later claimed to hear only the
"voiceless voices" and the "silent majority" respectively.

The story of dissent in the 1960s is an international story, as is
the story of the New Left. The details of that story, however,
retain national inflections. The international context in which the
USSR's naked display of power in Budapest -- contrary to the promises
of Khrushchev's Destalinization Speech -- and support of US policy
over the Suez Canal estranged comrades worldwide in 1956, and deeply
affected the Japanese left as well. Within Japan, leftist activism
celebrated a long tradition by the mid-twentieth century. The
socialist critique of capitalist society had arrived at the same time
as industrial capitalist society itself. Advocates of communist and
anarchist alternatives played a lively role in modern Japanese
history, and -- in spite of various Japan experts who would have it
advertised differently -- labor in Japan has its own bloody saga of
struggle. Silenced by wartime authorities, communists in Japan
emerged from prisons with the surrender in 1945 as the only imperial
subjects who had resisted the call to war. In the context of Cold
War American foreign policy, this distinctive claim to moral
authority did not protect prominent communists from a Red Purge of
public officials under the Allied Occupation in 1950.

In this unfriendly milieu, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP)
employed underground tactics, encouraging university students to
leave school and foment revolution in the countryside. When the JCP
renounced this approach in 1955, it left a generation of students
feeling betrayed. Several literary works recorded this
disillusionment, including Sho Shibata's 1964 novel Saredo warera ga
hibi (Well, That's Our Lot); this text, which follows the chronic
disappointments of former university student activists, was
subsequently dubbed the "Bible" of the student movement in the late 1960s.

Students in Japan at this time were doubly disappointed by actually
existing socialism and the JCP, and sought to craft a New Left. Two
elements of this project get dropped out if the New Left is seen in a
narrowly chronological or geographical perspective. The first is the
significant influence of Third-Worldism, which found agency and
inspiration in the actions of "the wretched of the earth" in a way
not seen before or since. The most compelling challenges to the
status quo emanated from the forests of China and the mountains of
Cuba, rather than in the Comintern or the University. A comparison
of this with contemporary ads for human rights organizations that
pose the people of the southern hemisphere in the pitiable poses of
victims demonstrates how the discourse has shifted.

The second factor in the making of the New Left was the rapid
expansion of Marxian analysis to understand exploitation in terms
that expanded beyond class. Similar to trends elsewhere, subsequent
movements of ethnic minorities and women in Japan borrowed from the
language and strategies of the New Left. Neither trend, however, was
an unqualified achievement. A quick look at how they developed in
the Japanese case shows that the images of liberation from Algeria,
the Congo, and Vietnam were often embraced with a romantic enthusiasm
lacking a meaningful analysis, and that a move away from an emphasis
on class-based struggle allowed students to remove themselves from
workers in Japan. This last development led to the isolation of most
segments of the student movement in Japan, as its adherents became
increasingly involved in inter-factional disputes, to the point of
uchigeba -- internal violence -- late in the 1960s. This development
represented a clear tactical break from the strategies of the student
left of the 1950s, which often sought to create after-work "circles"
at factories that were focused on art, poetry, or music, and thus
created close-knit groups of workers that engaged politically as well.

Over the decade, a split widened not only between the student
movement and labor in Japan, but also between an increasingly radical
student movement and the general public. A tendency toward daring
action was already present among the students who considered
themselves the vanguard of the mass protests on June 15, 1960. The
seven major newspapers in Tokyo issued a joint statement condemning
the acts of the students on the following day, although disagreements
remained within the ranks of journalists about who was to blame for
the aggression that resulted in Kanba's death in addition to many
hundreds of injuries. These discrepancies were often based on what
various reporters saw happening in the streets. The hundreds of
thousands of citizens also on the scene at the time witnessed and
therefore interpreted the events for themselves. In this way, many
bystanders became activists merely by being caught between a police
stick and a student.

But as television became a more pervasive source of news, it created
an intimate distance. Intimate because the moving images entered the
homes of viewers, but transmitted by the television screen, they also
offered a mediating distance. One iconic image supplanted myriad
personal impressions. Filmmakers in Japan in 1960 could sense the
tremendous implications of this change. Nagisa Oshima offered his
film Night and Fog in Japan as a direct response to June 1960 in the
fall of that same year. In the film, the betrayal of the young New
Left students by an older generation of JCP leaders is dramatized in
a scene when an old-guard communist's wife denounces her husband for
watching the June 15 Anpo protests on television. Another 1960 film,
Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury, follows a young man with fascist
fantasies as he experiences the build-up to the June protests through
the images that flicker at him from televisions in shop windows and
moments stolen in front of a friend's TV set. Detached from the
greater body of activists, he settles on his own more extreme
solution: explosives.

It makes sense that those in film would be both sensitive to and
critical of the power of television to define an event. The power of
the mass media and its relationship to the global 1960s, identified
by Guy Debord in that decade in terms of "spectacle," represents one
important area of inquiry to be pursued in rethinking this
period. Indeed, the "death" of the New Left in Japan is generally
considered to be a media event. In 1972, a shoot-out between a group
of extremist students and police in a mountain lodge was broadcast
live and 90% of Japanese television viewers were tuned in to the
drama on the final day. Traffic in Tokyo was noticeably
lighter. The distance between the viewers at home and the radicals
barricaded in the mountain lodge with a housewife as a hostage was
sharply delineated. While other student activists continued to
pursue other avenues of protest, such as folk music concerts, the
media images of violent extremism became iconic. The language of the
movement had splintered, and a sector had shifted into the
spectacular, and very newsworthy, vernacular of hijackings, bombings,
and hostage takings.

As the mass media focused on extreme performances of protest, thereby
encouraging an ever more sensational repertoire, it aided politicians
who portrayed all student activists as prone to irrational
violence. In 1960 Prime Minister Kishi dismissed rowdy demonstrators
as a minority, claiming that he heeded the "voiceless voices" of the
majority of citizens. Even to the non-radical ear at the time, this
phrase sounded lame. City streets were filled with people mobilized
to counter the US-Japan Security Treaty. An anti-Anpo citizens'
group re-appropriated Kishi's phrase, and named their protest
organization the "voiceless voices." However, this dismissal of
student radicalism in the 1960s as youthful antics lingers as perhaps
the strongest political legacy of the 1960s.

The typically banal commemorative invocations of the Sixties employ a
select set of images under which student activism is conveyed as a
desire for individual freedom. Focusing on 1968 alone lends itself
to distortion, insofar as it effaces the links with the longer
history of Third-Worldism and post-colonialism. As we find ourselves
now half a century away from the 1960s, it is particularly important
to do more than revisit the images of Berkeley's People's Park or
interviews with Mark Rudd. I assert here that the 1960s began on
June 15, 1960 not to supplant this iconography with another, but to
stretch the chronology and the geography beyond the usual American
narrative. But it should be stretched further, to the civil rights
movement closer to home, and to the police massacre of black
protestors in Sharpeville, South Africa in 1960, and to the police
massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, and to all the other
confrontations between state power and protesters. It would be a
tragic understatement to say that middle-class youth were not the
only victims, although the press generated by the death of such a
youth made it clear that the obscene logic at work even in the "free"
world valued their lives more highly. The narrative of protest in
the 1960s should also be knit more intricately, to position the
figures of university students within their communities and their
families. Michiko Kanba was a daughter, a student, a demonstrator,
and -- with her death -- a martyr. More needs to be understood about
all of these aspects of her, and all these aspects of those around
her. For every iconic image or figure there is a multiplicity of
meanings. There is more than one year in the 1960s, and more than
one story. There are two, three, many 1960s.
--

Chelsea Szendi Schieder is currently writing about the history of
gender in the Japanese New Left. A PhD candidate at Columbia
University, she is conducting research at Waseda University, in
Tokyo, while on a grant from the Japan Foundation. She can be
reached at<css2125@columbia.edu>.

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