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JAPAN: “1968”—HISTORY OF A DECADE

Claudia Derichs

The history of the “1968” movement in Japan is really the history of more than a decade because the fi rst radical political event of the postwar period occurred in 1960. The US and Japan intended to extend a bilateral security agreement that year that Prime Min- ister Yoshida Shigeru had negotiated simultaneously with the peace treaty of San Francisco in 1951. Part of the prime minister’s “Yoshida Doctrine,” a political program that initiated Japan’s ties with the West, the security agreement fi rmly linked Japan to the US, giving the US special conditions. For example, it did not even need to consult the Japanese government if it chose to engage in military actions from Japanese territory. Opposing the proposed ten- year extension, the Japanese populace erupted in protests, which undoubtedly presented a test for the young democracy.

In the political Left that had developed in Japan since 1945, a tightly organized Communist Party as well as an eff ective union movement arose. Later, the Socialist Party of Japan also formed a part of this camp. In retrospect, this Left made up the “Old Left ,” because in 1957, the “New Left ” was formed, directing itself primarily against the stul- tifying hierarchy of the party organizations and their “Stalinism.” The early New Left derived most of its members from student circles; its groupings were understood as tôha—party factions. Over the course of a decade of splits and new foundings, four dominant, ideological strands emerged by 1967 in the whole New Left movement: the Trots- kyist, structural reformist, Maoist, and socialist strands spawned in association with the Socialist Party. Common to all these New Left groups was a confrontational stance toward the Japanese Communist Party ( JCP), which they believed could no longer claim to be avant- garde. Nevertheless, the “old” ( JCP) and New Left worked together to fi ght the extension of the security treaty in 1960. Yet despite storming the parliament and forcing President Eisenhower to cancel a visit due to lack of security on June 14 that year, the New Left was not able to prevent the extension from being ratifi ed.

The mass demonstrations of the 1960 movement suggest that 1968 was not the year that launched the Japanese student movement and the militant and terrorist groups that followed it. The late 1960s, to be sure, contributed to these developments, and especially, thereaft er,

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to the Japanese Red Army, but a dynamic shaped by events other than Japan’s eff orts to come to terms with its ultra-nationalist past had already emerged before that time.

Loose and spontaneous: Beheiren and Zenkyôtô

The protest and organizational structures of 1960 had been domi- nated by established parties and unions. The well-rehearsed zig-zag

march—the snake dance—of the student umbrella organiza- tion Zengakuren, not only made it famous but virtually sym- bolized the group’s rigid organization, for example. In the mid-1960s, however, spurred by the Viet- nam War and later by the global wave of student power, pro- test structures were transformed. In civil society, a movement against the Vietnam

War developed that had a markedly loose organizational structure. Led by Oda Makoto (one of the most prominent social critics and peace activ- ists in the country), this movement, known as Beheiren (Betonamu ni heiwa o! shimin undô [Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam], was non- partisan, emphasizing voluntary, non-binding participation in demon- strations. Zengakuren [All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations] and Zenkyôtô (Zengaku kyôtô kaigi [All-Campus Joint Struggle]) constituted the opposite poles of the student movement of the late ’60s. Zenkyôtô members, unlike their Zengakuren counterparts, consciously avoided grouping themselves into party factions, calling themselves non-sects, or non-poli, to strengthen their apolitical stance. In fact, primarily concerned with particular demands of university students, they were principally geared toward the “Campus Struggle,” which, nonetheless, was just as militant as the street fi ghting.

However, New Left groups tried to infi ltrate the Zenkyôtô associa- tions to recruit them for the political struggle. Consequently, in

Masked and armed with wooden sticks, Zengakuren members participate on Oct. 21, 1968, in a demon- stration on International Anti-War Day in Tokyo.

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1969, an all-Japan Zenkyôtô was founded in which eight New Left factions forged an alliance, although it didn’t last long—despite dramatic and militant street and campus battles, the movement petered out by the end of the year. With the decline of the student movement in sight, controversial, ideological strategy debates erupted, resulting in a few, strong cadres, and later in the terrorist branch, the Red Army of Japan. The various cadres of the New Left thereaft er competed with one another in recruiting new members and for the hegemonic leadership of the movement. Two prominent ones were the Chûkaku and Kakumaru factions, which continued to use violence to wage their ideological battles even aft er 1969.

Such violence was typical of the phase of uchi-geba [internal violence] that lasted from the late ’60s and early ’70s. In retrospect, uchi-geba can be regarded as one of the specifi c characteristics of Japan’s New Left . In 1971, most cadres had begun to form armed “guerilla units,” whose activists went underground. They perceived themselves as being in a state of war against enemy cadres within their own move- ment, as well as against the Japanese state. The spiral of violence escalated aft er 1970, becoming a much-discussed topic among Japanese intellectuals. Professionalized mechanisms of retaliation were deployed, accompanied by ritualized self-criticism and the ideological justifi cation of attacking and killing people.

Japan’s “1968” took place within this mix of factors and factions. Students protested conditions at the mass universities but, for the most part, did not address the war generation’s failure to deal with its past. For the Left , the emperor remained the symbol of the fatal, imperial war, yet even the large left ist parties did not succeed in dethroning him while he lived. Clearly, behavioral continuities with the prewar period contributed to this: even if the emperor had become merely human aft er the country’s defeat in 1945, he still deserved respect and loyalty. The debate about his war guilt never evolved into a wide, public discussion during his lifetime (he died in January 1989); no historians’ dispute (like the one in 1986 in Germany) was carried out in the national newspapers and journals to come to terms, vehemently, with past events.

The Japanese Red Army: Japanese perceptions

As the student movement lost momentum in 1969 and “internal violence” reigned, protesters asked themselves, “What next?” Some chose the cadres mentioned above; others opted to take

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up the armed struggle beyond Japan’s borders; and, on activist Shiomi Takaya’s initiative, the Red Army Faction (RAF) of Japan was founded. Yet when Shiomi was arrested, the group found itself without a leader. As political leadership in Japan is exceptionally personality-oriented—even in offi cial politics—this circumstance had a profound eff ect on the remaining activists and sympathizers, whose views on how they should carry on diverged. Those loyal to Shiomi, who continued to call themselves the Red Army Faction, espoused concerted action in Japan. To this end, they allied them- selves with a group within the so-called United Red Army that specialized in stealing weapons.

In the West, the conception of the Japanese Red Army primarily derives from a group, Nihon Sekigun [The Japanese Red Army], led by Shigenobu Fusako, which went to the Middle East. In Japan, however, the image is shaped much more by the United Red Army because of the dramatic and widely broadcast events triggered by this group there. Fleeing police persecution, about two dozen ac- tivists of the United Red Army had absconded to the Japanese Alps north of Tokyo in the winter of 1971 amidst ice and snow. They had to stay “underground” because warrants for their arrest had long since been issued for armed attacks, theft of weapons and money, and serious bodily injury to others. In this situation, the question of control and hierarchy within the group became more important than the revolution they strove for. To hold the group together ideologically, a system of ideas had to be created to give the group a raison d’être and lend legitimacy and necessity to its actions. At issue was the survival of the collective, which was to be preserved by a process of “communist transformation.” Although the details of the process were not given, all the members had to subject them- selves to it, critically examining their own bourgeois attitudes and behaviors and eradicating them to become better revolutionaries. The collective investigated personal fl aws and weaknesses, where- upon individuals tried to overcome them, yet no one managed to do this to the satisfaction of the leaders, who then punished them with increasing severity: fourteen members died from the tortures infl icted upon them, and all the others surmised that they would be next.

This internal murder ended in February 1972 when the police battled these Red Army members in a resort town in the Japanese Alps. As the confl ict was broadcast live on Japanese television, the

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images, above all, took root in popular memory. Five members of the United Red Army had taken a hostage, preventing the police squad from storming their hideout right away. On the tenth day, the police squad leader decided to proceed with water cannon and tear gas, freeing the hostage.

This episode left indelible traces in Japan’s collective memory. The wave of horror over the murders and the armed confl ict with the police washed all the way to the Middle East, where the Japanese Red Army was active. Its “reaction” to events at home consisted in planning and executing a suicide attack at Israel’s Ben Gurion Air- port in May 1972. Whereas the attack is commonly regarded as an expression of the Japanese terrorists’ solidarity with the Palestinian liberation war, Shigenobu’s personal descriptions emphasized its connection to the events in the Japanese Alps.

“Aftereffects” of the “68ers”

The lynchings and the United Red Army’s battle in the mountains paralyzed the entire New Left movement. This paralysis must have been at least partly to blame for the failure of sections of the New Left to become integrated into the “new social movements” of the 1970s. No political party arising from transregional, social movements— like the Green Party in Germany—was founded in Japan.

In short, the political infl uence of “1968” in Japan does not seem to have been very great. When asked about it today, most students consider the infl uence of the movement on later political occur- rences “marginal” in comparison to the developments in Europe (such as the Green Party). Rather, it was the events and episodes themselves that continue to have aft ereff ects in Japan’s collec- tive memory: among others, the spontaneous protest against the Vietnam War (before 1968), the founding of Zenkyôtô to counter Zengakuren, internal violence, and especially the history of the United Red Army.

As some of the cadres from that time are still active—they have been “converted” to peaceful environmental NGOs and critics of global- ization that now get along, by and large—it seems that no conclud- ing evaluation of their early activities and infl uence can be made at this point in time. Late reconciliations and cooperative endeavors among them have nearly obscured their violence-prone phase from memory. Nonetheless, the ’68 movement in Japan—1960,

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Vietnam, and the 1970s, for example—certainly gave Japanese society a “shove.” However, ever since that time, the movement has been unable to prepare proactively for action but has only been able to react to events in society.

To be sure, Japan has movements—women’s, environmental, and anti-nuclear power ones, for example—that would see their roots in “1968,” yet with very limited causality. Consequently, the discourses on anti-authoritarian child-rearing, women’s emancipation, and other such themes have made their way into other contexts for which the direct descent from the events of the late ’60s can hardly be discerned. The members of the New Left were “conformist” in their organizational structures, and also in their lifestyles and value systems. These facts contributed to the comparatively low level of infl uence they exerted. At the same time, the events of that time may have had triggered impulses that will only be visible in the future.

Claudia Derichs is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, with a PhD in Japanology and numerous publications on a broad range of Japanese and Asian political themes.

94 1968: MEMORIES AND LEGACIES