Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest

The 1960s opened in Japan with mass protests and strikes against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.  While these failed to break the Japanese state’s entanglement with America’s cold and hot wars in Asia and the world, the subsequent escalation of the Vietnam War, together with a nuclear China and a possible second Korean conflagration, positioned the treaty’s renewal in 1970 as a potentially explosive event.  Yet by 1967, public attention was waning, and the left was in disarray.  All of this changed in the space of three months, inaugurating a period of renewed popular political mobilization, nationwide university seizures, and the possibility of governmental collapse.

My paper focuses upon the complex politics of violence in all of this: specifically, the adoption by student activists in late 1967 of a strategy of physical confrontation with the implementation of state police.  The confrontation of force with force promoted public recognition of the nature and purpose of such demonstrations, and of the broad meaning of state violence.  In this moment, prior to the advent of more serious bombings and other tactics, violence became a means to disclose hidden forms of domination and connection, serving complex purposes often beyond the self-understandings of the groups that employed it. 

These initial confrontations focused media and public attention, while temporarily limiting police responses, to create a space in which new forms of activism could arise—and where non-violent tactics could again become effective.  Widening public concern created an atmosphere in which increasing numbers of “ordinary” people found the desire and the means for political engagement.  Confrontations in October of 1968, however, reset the dynamics of state force and legitimacy, bringing about a terrain in which police could again isolate and suppress dissent—and prompting a politically ineffective escalation of violent tactics among some protest groups.