"Japan's 1968 commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, the "return" of governance from the Tokugawa shogunate, which inaugurated a modern, centralized state and located a supposedly primordial institutional authority in a "restored" imperial rule. The calendar year opened with an event highlighting a rather different source of transcendent authority, with the imminent arrival of the nuclear-powered (and likely nuclear-armed) USS Enterprise to US Fleet Activities Sasebo naval base in Nagasaki Prefecture, en route to Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf. Activists assembled from across the country to oppose its arrival, and they faced thousands of massed riot police likewise mobilized from throughout the nation. The visit was years in the making, part of a plan to desensitize the Japanese people to nuclear-powered ships in advance of the anticipated reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty with American military basing rights intact, as well as continuing Vietnam War missions. The plan was for "conditioning the Japanese to military nuclear matters." This primary, though disavowed, mission relied upon the fiction of the Japanese government's "three nuclear principles"-neither to manufacture, nor to possess, nor to permit the introduction [mochikomi] of nuclear weapons-which dissimulated the regular transit of nuclear armaments as per the secret agreements appended to the United States-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960.
The arrival came in the wake of major protest events at Haneda Airport, where activists seeking to block Prime Minister Sato Eisaku's departure for Saigon forcibly clashed with police on October 9, 1967, the "First Haneda Incident." Again, on November 12, in the "Second Haneda Incident" activists opposed Prime Minister Sato's departure (to the United States to meet with President Lyndon B. Johnson) and were met with massed security police - some 5,000 in the vicinity of the airport alone. While a range of groups protested these trips for their participation in the Vietnam War, press coverage focused on the actions of the Sanpa Zengakuren (Three-Faction Alliance, or Sanpa), a recent coalition of three radical student groups within the Zengakuren: the All-Japan Federation of Students' Self-Governing Associations. Sanpa was united in a commitment to direct action against the quiescent majority Minsei Zengakuren, an affiliate of the equally quiescent Japan Communist Party (JCP). The First Haneda Incident inaugurated the new policy of Sanpa members to don helmets and use staves and rocks to fight riot police (who were armed, as perusal, with meter-long truncheons, duralumin shields, visored helmets, tear-gas guns, water cannons, and armored vehicles).
While violence was nothing new in post-World War II protest in Japan, events at Haneda commenced the use of violence in order to prevent the exercise of declared state policy-thereby foregrounding the issue of force and its legitimacy in confrontations between protesters and the state. Mainstream press reaction to both Haneda events was dominated, however, by negative appraisals of student "violence" and featured few serious attempts to consider the substantive issues involved. Writing underground in the group's newspaper, Zenshin, Honda Nobuyoshi, the leader of the Chukaku sect (one of the three Sanpa groups), complained:
The organs of the bourgeois press and their official critics... obscured [our] focus - "oppose the Vietnam war, obstruct the visit" - with the so-called problem of violence, castigating the Zengakuren struggle as a "violent demonstration" and "armed demonstration," while simultaneously maneuvering to conceal and defend the fundamental problem of state violence... On October 8, Zengakuren had its right to demonstrate stripped from it: wasn't it police headquarters and the public safety commission whose suppression through outrageous violence ensured that Zengakuren would be unable to exercise its right even to a one-meter-long march without forcibly breaking through the riot police's obstructing line? And isn't it police headquarters and the public safety commission that for seven years since Anpo have mobilized the well-armed riot police against Zengakuren's unarmed demonstrations, inflicting bloody oppression by blows, kicks, and arrests, causing near-fatal injuries for dozens? For one, the right to be armed and to strike, kick, and arrest; for the other, in order to declare an anti-war intent, the right to be struck, kicked, and arrested - only this is permitted. If this isn't state violence, what is? But on October 8, police headquarters and the public safety commission usurped the right even to be hit, kicked, and arrested.
Delighted by such dismissals of protest actions as irrational, criminal, or worse, the government green-lit an even harsher stance to be taken against demonstrators in advance of the USS Enterprise's arrival in Sasebo. The Japanese and American governments both likewise were SSN visits since 1964 to routinize such events; both countries had sanguine about the perceived success of their program of successive witnessed decreasing protester numbers and press coverage, and they looked forward to a successful visit to take their program of nuclear desensitization to the next level.
The visit, together with the anticipated deployment of state violence against protesters, was thus intended to facilitate closer coordination between the US and Japanese governments in their synchronized strategic posture and support for American cold and hot wars. Likewise both governments looked ahead to the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty in 1970 and hoped to curtail, overawe, and delegitimize likely sources of protest. Yet all of these plans for an edifying spectacle risked backfiring impressively, particularly in the event of a "fluke," either by a deserter from the ship revealing its actual nuclear armaments or by the accidental creation of a martyr among the protesters."
With such concerns in mind, police paid attention to members of the then-small anti-war "Peace in Vietnam!" Citizens' Committee, Beheiren. The group's pamphlets appealed to American soldiers to consider resistance at all levels, from letter writing and symbolic desertion - which they had memorably facilitated in the fall, assisting the departure of the "Intrepid Four" sailors from the USS Intrepid, including their escape from service and from Japan through their semi-independent JATEC (Japan Technical Committee for Assistance to Anti-War US Deserters) group. Beheiren had also been frequently visited by seventy-three-year-old Yui Chunoshin, a longtime peace activist and Esperanto advocate who set himself on fire outside of the prime minister's residence the night before the Second Haneda Incident.
Sanpa mobilized with an eye to Sasebo becoming a "Third Haneda" and possibly finally breaking through to trigger mass opposition to Japan's participation in the Vietnam War. A broad set of other protest groups likewise mobilized, including rightists (estimated by police at around 46,000) in support of the visit, but press attention was overwhelmingly drawn to the "newsworthy" attractiveness of anticipated battles between police and the expected 2,000-3,000 Sanpa members. As the American embassy recounted, on January 17, two days before the Enterprise's arrival, as hundreds of reporters and cameramen looked on, about 375 plastic-helmeted, stave-carrying and rock-throwing [Sanpa] students charged about four times as many riot policemen at a bridge directly in front of the US naval base. After taking the first student thrust, the police responded with their own billy club charge, supported by tear gas and water cannons. The peak of the clash coincided perfectly with the noon television news and millions of television viewers were permitted to see the full force of the police counteroffensive by direct television relay.
Such heroic exercises in symbolic opposition drew rapt press and public attention, with unanticipated results.
The stunning effect of direct television coverage combined with a popular press thrilled to market such dramatic imagery set the stage for a major reversal in the perceived legitimacy of state force in support of its policies. Hurling concussion grenades and liberally spraying eye-irritant water cannons, the police, over the next several days, enacted something akin to a police riot before the assembled live cameras, reporters, and some 10,000 citizens of Sasebo; officers were captured in acts of indiscriminately dramatic violence. Group beatings of unresisting protesters in hospital courtyards received iconic photographic coverage; likewise, early accounts of citizens and reporters falling victim to unprovoked and coordinated police attacks worked to reverse public perceptions of the legitimacy of such state force-and drew attention to precisely the issues the government had hoped to police with this orchestrated event. The danger of such entanglements was driven further home by the Enterprise's diversion after Sasebo to respond to the January 23 seizure of the vessel Pueblo during its naval and NSA surveillance activities off the coast of North Korea - events that threatened the outbreak of a second Korean War involving Japan directly, even as they recalled Japan's colonial legacy and support for the prior war. The January 30 launch of the Tet Offensive added further doubts and concerns, discrediting American claims about the scope and progress of the war and, by extension, the supportive stance of the Japanese government.
The subsequently named "Enterprise Incident" effected a watershed in the possibilities for political subjectivation and action. On the one hand, fearful of a subsequent incident of repression igniting precisely the kinds of conflagration dreamed of by Sanpa and the like, the government reversed its prior repressive stance and directed the riot police to a new and severely restrained posture. On the other, new attention now converged on the meaning of these confrontations. After years of waning public interest - and occasional summary state violence in the absence of that interest - the media now excitedly covered each subsequent protest in hopes of catching similar spectacular confrontations. Public polls, media discussions, and US embassy assessments alike confirmed new attention to strategic and security treaty issues, as well as to their connections to both state actions and daily life in Japan. But even more broadly, the transformation in perception by which protester concerns became reasonable, and police action (and the state policies it supported) violent and illegitimate, in turn prompted a wave of political subjectivations. Illegitimate violence at home echoed not-so-distant illegitimate violence, especially the Vietnam War - and attentiveness disclosed abundant direct connections between the two.
Moved by such concerns, so-called "ordinary people," "typical students," "citizens," the "nonpolitical" all found cause to engage in activism and sought new forms adequate to their understandings of the moment. They particularly swelled the ranks of antihierarchical organizations such as Beheiren, which offered a flexible, horizontal coalition (any group could call itself Beheiren if it adopted the three principles of peace in Vietnam, Vietnam for the Vietnamese, and opposition to the Japanese government's complicity in the Vietnam War), with each group responsible for its own policies and for communicating across this network. Ordinary people also formed the basis for the explosive spread of the nonsectarian All-Campus Joint Struggle League, or Zenkyōtō. These latter groups, emerging mid-1968 from the developing University of Tokyo and Nihon University conflicts, proliferated across hundreds of university campuses to create more than sixty-seven campus seizures or lockouts by year's end (and 127 in 1969). It was Zenkyōtō that made dissensus into their very motto, calling for their own self-negation [jiko hitei] as elite students within a hierarchical and compromised educational system that itself required complete disassembly [daigaku kaitai, "dismantle the university!"] to end its furtherance of domination.
In short, "1968," in the sense of a global moment, truly begins in this space of restrained policing and daily eventfulness, of diminished state legitimacy and intensified concern to the wrongs such legitimacy previously concealed, both near and far. This politics inaugurates new engagments, with novel perceptions and personal reflections that bring forth new actions and collective identifications. It is at this level that we should consider questions of comparability, of how such politics becomes thinkable, and of the proper approach to address the nature of this politics.
- William Marotti, "The Perception of Violence, the Violence of Perception, and the Origins of Japan's 1968," in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68. London and New York: Verso, 2020. p. 57-65.
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