ZENGAKUREN, the All-Japan Federation of Autonomous Student Bodies is
a mass revolutionary organisation, with a militant tradition of
struggle against American Imperialism and the Japanese ruling class.
In 1960, it organised strikes and continuous demonstrations, in which
many were wounded, outside the Tokyo Diet, against the Ratification
of the Japanese – US Security Treaty. These reached such an
intensity that the US Government thought it advisable to cancel a
proposed Eisenhower visit to Japan.
The Zengakuren have
recently called for the establishment of an anti-war International.
They are supported in this by the Committee of 100, the Student Peace
Union in the US, the Socialist Students Organization of West Germany
and many other organizations opposed to both American and Russian
tests. On August 17, 1962, representatives of the Zengakuren,
including Nemoto, their President, attended the Leningrad Conference
of the International Union of Students. On their way, they had
demonstrated in Red Square against all nuclear tests. They had been
arrested, then released and `closely watched during the remainder of
their stay`.
We publish below an
extract from Zengakuren Information Bulletin No.3, describing their
discussions with representatives of the Soviet Student Council (SSC):
Soviet Student
Council (SSC): Are you
fighting against the nuclear testing of any nation other than the
USSR? Do you realize that the Soviet Union is not the first country
to engage in nuclear tests?
Zengakuren:
We are engaged in a militant mass struggle against American nuclear
tests. Our slogan in this struggle is, `Against tests of USA and
USSR`. We oppose any nuclear activity by any country, be it England,
France or China. Of course, we are fighting against the nuclear
armament of Japan. You who sponsor the I.U.S. Congress should have
known such a well-known fact.
SSC:
Granted, but what country began the first nuclear tests and how many
times were such tests carried out before the Soviet Union began?
Zengakuren:
That is of no consequence. We accuse all countries engaged in testing
of promoting the arms race and of suppressing the working class and
people.
SSC:
We are glad to hear that you oppose the American nuclear tests and
can appreciate your stand against these tests. We lost millions of
lives in World War II. This tragedy was due to the fact that our
military forces were weaker than those of the Fascists. We do not
want to be the second Hiroshima. If during the war Japan had had
nuclear weapons at their disposal, the tragedy of Hiroshima would not
have occurred.
Zengakuren:
We oppose your dangerous view. According to your logic, you encourage
the Japanese Imperialists to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. Do
you really think that this is an effective way to stop the nuclear
race and to prevent nuclear war?
SSC:
The best way to prevent war is obviously total disarmament, but the
next best procedure is to continue Soviet nuclear tests.
Zengakuren:
Your policy, based on such a philosophy, wields an immeasurably
harmful influence on the anti-war struggle of the working class. Do
you know the slogan that is being used in Tokyo, New York and London
to fight N-tests? `Against
tests by the US and USSR`. These students and workers attempt to
obtain peace not with nuclear weapons but by their own struggles.
SSC:
You believe that if the Soviet Union stopped its tests, the working
class movement would increase in strength and the imperialists’
tests would stop. We cannot be sure of such an outcome.
Zengakuren:
Are you suggesting that the workers of the world stop their struggles
and support Soviet testing? By holding such a view, you cause
dissension among the workers of the world and make them oppose each
other. The workers must unite. Soviet nuclear testing does not
support peace. It provides America with an excuse to continue their
tests and intensify the arms race. Any nuclear testing suppresses the
workers of the world and subjects them to the domination of the
ruling class. Aren’t you yourselves the slaves of nuclear weapons?
SSC:
We can appreciate your point of view, but we are of totally different
opinions.
Zengakuren:
The justice of our views will be borne out by the continuation of the
world-wide struggle against N-tests.
SSC:
Your opinion sounds quite sincere; continue your work as you like,
but don’t forget that you are in the USSR now.
During the Tokyo Olympics multiple team GB commentators repeatedly failing to understand what those giant Gundam statues were. In addition to calling it a transformer during the speed climbing, I remember hearing the talking voices for a marathon fixture get the name right but trip over pronouncing it. "Gan-damn" its pronounced Gun-dam, though some Japanese voice actors put an extra syllable on the end sometimes.
It's a mammoth of a franchise, has lasted decades and has spun off a mountain of products and creative directions. Taken as a whole it's arguably the largest, most in depth attempt to grapple with militarism, conflict and its associated traumas. At least when it isn't being a light-hearted comedy or a show about a martial arts tournament with giant mobile suits.
It's not surprising that none of the team GB hangers on knew about Mobile Suit Gundam, because it practically doesn't exist here if you're too old to be an avid consumer of fansubs and torrents. The title says short, and it will be, because there just isn't much to talk about.
A quick primer, the "robots" aren't robots they're mobile suits, most of them have a pilot inside them who directs what they do, it's more accurate to think of them as human shaped tanks or jet fighters. Not every mobile suit is a Gundam, but don't worry, you'll know when one shows up. Broadly speaking the television shows and movies are set in a future where humanity has begun to explore the solar system, there's usually space stations and cities on the moon. And the story is usually concerned with war and its effects on people and the environment, though comedy is still found, and some outlier series are more light-hearted.
While Gundam as a franchise has been in existence from 1979 to the present with projects queued for release in the future it's had surprisingly little impact in English-speaking territories, and this was especially the case for the UK. The first official major release of the franchise was the English dub of Gundam Wing on the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, in the early 2000s. Gundam Wing was released in Japan in 1995 and was a standalone continuity. If there was an earlier official release of a Gundam property I could find no evidence, the closest I could find is American VHS tapes which could be second hand.
Wing was quite popular in the United States, I can't find much information on how popular it was in the UK, I watched it, and remember there were some toys in shops, not the famous model kits, these were more like action figures with detachable accessories (guns, swords, shields) and alternate limbs. Anecdotally speaking, none of my friends and schoolmates who liked anime were into it, I think I met one over kid who watched it. Cartoon Network at the time was only available on Satellite and Cable, so quite limited in audience reach back then. And also in general English-speaking circles Wing hasn't left a very big impact, outside its prominence in popularising same sex pairing fan fiction in the west.
In North America, watershed events included the broadcast of the anime series Gundam Wing - Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-cultural Fandom of the Genre
In my experience this largely what gets Wing talked about to this day, the only exceptions I can think of are when a Gundam forum user talks about it as part of rewatch and is amazed at how well it holds up or is baffled by how poorly it holds up. Personally I'm in the latter category.
Other than that, in 2007-8 the UKs first and so far only channel dedicated to Anime, Anime Central aired Gundam Seed, I never watched Gundam Seed at the time, but I do remember seeing adverts for it in between shows I did watch, mostly Cowboy Bebop! Again the potential audience was very limited, Anime Central was only available on Sky Satellite and shutdown within a year. And that's it for TV broadcasts as far as I know.
It's not the most gripping branding, but it got the point across.
There is however one other area where the Gundam franchise made its presence felt in the UK, video games. Despite only seen one series and film (Endless Waltz) I considered myself a fan of the franchise because I really enjoyed playing them. The most popular where Gundam spin-offs of the Dynasty Warriors games, a serious I've enjoyed for a long time. Dynasty Warriors was still a niche product in the UK but it had a fanbase and that fanbase grew over time. In fact, I can remember a tv show that reviewed video games having a brief introduction to the setting before it reviewed one of the games, it ended with a sarcy "what do you mean you've never heard of it?"which I probably remember out of a sense of satisfaction since I had in fact heard of it.
I first learnt about Amuro Ray and Char Aznable through playing their story missions in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 1 and 2. There were other games released by other developers, but I don't remember them very well. It was also through these games that I first began to grasp just how vast this setting actually was, there were characters from dozens of shows and films with their original art styles that stretched over 40 years of animation developments. Mashing the square button and occasionally throwing in a random triangle for flavour was quite engaging and got me curious. So I turned to the net, where most of the Gundam franchise was available in varying quality. If you live in the UK and you had opinions on Gundam pre-2015, you almost certainly encountered it on the internet or via an anime club that ripped DVDs of fansubs without the teacher finding out. Thanks to these shady means, I was able to explore a large chunk of the available media, but there's so much of it that from 2010 to now I've still only experienced a minority of it. And I occasionally I have to google lists of releases to check if I'm missing something.
At the present DVDs and Blu rays, have gradually increased in availability, though it's dependent on the US market getting a release with the UK being a secondary route of sales. In still more positive news Netflix the dominant streaming service which is now available in over half of all homes in the UK also shows some of the franchise, mainly Iron Blooded Orphans and Gundam Unicorn, both very new shows, but occasionally alternating some older shows. Currently, they have a number of movies released in the 1980s to 2021.
The IP holders have also released a youtube channel Gundaminfo which cycles through the franchise. And as a result of this growing official presence, and it's less than legal channels the audience within the UK and in English-speaking parts of the web generally has been steadily growing, though it still lags behind other parts of the world, especially Japan, but also Italy and Latin America. There's never been a better time to check it out if you're in the UK.
Recently I watched a presentation on Anarchism in Japan recorded before the COVID-19 lockdown. During the presentation the speaker referred to a small group of Anarchists from the famous Japanese student protest movements that paralysed much of the country through extreme rioting and campus occupations. Collectively they're known as the Zengakuren and there coloured helmets, banners and pole weapons are quite infamous.
They used coloured helmets as a way of distinguishing between themselves, different groups used different colours. Because aside from agreeing on what they were against, capitalism, militarism, American military presence, the Imperial system, the fascist generation etc, they were deeply divided along ideological lines. Zengakuren students who identified with Anarchism wore Black Helmets. So I started trying to look up Zengakuren Black Helmets, this didn't turn up much, except for a strange video called アナキズム
Strange is an understatement, I found this video uploaded to several sites and all from an account with the same Nietszchean name Azsacra Zarathustra (AZ). The comment sections are disabled and there is no contact information besides a facebook so contacting him to answer some questions looks like it won't happen. Anyway the video itself is bizarre, there's an opening "Production credit" for NihillihiN (yes that extra capital N is deliberate) and then cuts to an interview of a group of Japanese young people. Sadly it is unsubtitled and my spoken Japanese skills are almost non existent so I have no idea who they are or what they are saying. We then get a slow zoom in on a wounded Japanese young man smiling, and then the title card flashes up アナキズム, then we get a collage of clips of clashes between the police and Zengakuren factions while a Japanese song plays in the background. Halfway through the collage of petrol bombs and baton charges the song ends and another Japanese song starts, this one is sung by a woman and it seemed eerily familiar to me at the time. Then when that song ends there is a cut to credits in Japanese and English, I couldn't read the Japanese but the English bits thanked among other people Edwin O. Reischauer who was a United States diplomat to Japan and was injured when a Japanese rightist stabbed him. He died in 1990, so I think the credit is something of a joke, oh and the song playing over the credits is I Put a Spell on You by Creedence Clearwater Revival. And just before it ends it credits a A Z and one other initial for editing and closes out on a stylised A with the year 2017 written underneath. 2017 is the date the video was uploaded onto the various channels.
So very strange indeed, I had more questions then answers. I was able to find out that アナキズムis a way to write Anarchism or Anarchy in Japanese, and that AZ is into esoteric nihilistic philosophy with an orientalist fixation. I needed help, and fortunately I knew where to turn, I've been a follower of Cinema Nippon a review channel for Japanese cinema for some time and have assisted them with research on two of their videos. I hoped they could help and they did. Unfortunately it still wasn't enough to get to the root of the video, and left us with even more questions than before.
Here's what was found
AZ probably was the creator of the video (the two production cards at the start and end threw me at first) and edited together disparate clips
The Japanese credits were just listing archive sites where we think he found the clips, like "Manichi News Archives" and "record of incident at Yasuda Hall No 1" which weren't very helpful.
The Japanese above Edwin O. Reischauer says something like "Heart of Japan" which neither of us understand, unless its a reference to his stabbing or as his role as diplomat and cultural commentator.
One of the credits is just 無 which is a character associated with Buddhism and other spirituality philosophies and usually represents "Nothing" or "Oblivion"
The first song is a 1970s pop song by a group called Garo, and the song is Gakuseigai no Kissaten, Student Street Cafe or alternativelyCoffee House of University Quarter.
After the second song is an alternate version of the same song, only this time its credited to Hatsune Miku, which explains why it sounded so familiar and on hearing it again it definitely has a Vocaloid sound to it.
Sadly there was no listing for the interview segment at the beginning of the video, which is unfortunate since I feel that was the key to understanding just what the point of the whole thing is. Having to guess based on the video and what I've seen of AZs other interests it looks like he's a fan of esoteric nihilism with a strong fixation on the "orient" he's really into Hindu and Buddhist culture and I'm guessing the appeal of the Zengakuren for him lies in a fixation with rebellion and death. Looking through his work he isn't a fan of national anarchism and likes regular anarchism and believes the two are incompatible which honestly surprised me, but I don't really understand what his objections national anarchism are. English isn't his first language, he appears to be Russian, but beyond language barriers there's very little coherency to any of his blog posts. One thing that became clear was that he often takes concepts and then changes them slightly to give the veneer of authenticity, he uses a lot of Nietzsche terms in ways Nietzsche wouldn't or couldn't, he ripped of the surrealist Theatre of Cruelty concept with his own Theatre of Cruelty NOH, and what NOH means is not explained. The NihillihiN from earlier, if you put that term into a search engine the only results are AZ blog sites that talk about a very strange and confused nihilist theory AZ is the author of.
I'm grateful to Cinema Nippon for their help here, while I'm still lacking on information on the Black Helmets and I don't think アナキズム has much for me I appreciate the strange ride we went down together and I kind of like Gakuseigai no Kissaten.
Eldoniĝis, fine de aprilo, monumenta verko 900-paĝa, nomata
"Biografia Leksikono de la Japana Anarkista Movado".
Ĝi enhavas ĉirkaŭ. 3000 kapvortojn-nomojn de anarkiistoj japanaj kaj alilandaj, kaj aliaj influintaj al la japana movado. La eldonejo estas komerca eldonejo Paru-Shuppan.
La verko estas japanlingva sed ĝi portas ankaŭ Esperantan titolon kaj la antaŭparolo estas dulingva Japana-Esperanta.
En ĝia redakta komitato laboris interalie du SAT-membroj-L.L-anoj, k-doj Tomiita Atusi kaj Tezuka Tosio.
Inter la 3000 kapvortoj inkluziviĝas, krom la japanaj anarkiistaj pioniroj, Osugi Sakae, Kotoku Shusui, ankaŭ SAT-anoj : Hukuda Kunitaro (la unua SAT-ano japana), Aisaka Tadasi, Yamaga Taizi, Mukai Kou (forpasinta 2003) ; alilandaj esperantistoj kaj aliaj : Sifu, Bakin, Lusin ; Eroŝenko, Lanti, Zamenhof, George Orwell kaj Han Riner, ktp.
A monumental 900 page work, called "Biographical Lexicon of the Japanese Anarchist Movement" was published at the end of April.
It contains around 3000 headwords- names of Japanese anarchists and anarchists from other countries, and other influences on the Japanese movement. The publisher is the commercial publisher Paru-Shuppan.
The work is in the Japanese language but it also carries an Esperanto title and the forward is in two languages, Japanese and Esperanto.
Two SAT- and L.L. members worked on its editorial committee, comrades Tomiita Atusia and Tezuka Tosio.
Included amongst the 3000 headwords, apart from the usual Japanese Anarchist pioneers, Osugi Sakae, Kotoku Shusui, there are also SAT members: Hukuda Kunitaro (the first Japanese SAT member), Aisaka Tadasi, Yamaga Taizi, Mutai Kou (passed away in 2003); Esperantists form other countries and other influences ; Shifu, Bakin, Lusin, Eroshenko, Lanti, Zamenhof , George Orwell and Has Rinner etc.
The names of SAT and Esperanto appear several times.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice the correlation between young people engaging with words like `Socialism` and sentiments like `Eat the Rich` with anime avatars? Currently everything that can present itself as an alternative to capitalism from religious spiritualism to Anarchistic terrorism is experiencing a boom in popularity.
The other thing the kids are into right now is mass market Japanese pulp entertainment lumped under the banner of anime. Now Anime (I'm also including the stuff that comes with it like comics, games, toys etc.) is incredibly divisive, there have been arguments about its artistic merits if any, workplace practices within the industry, this one has a consensus that its generally low paid highly demanding work, but what is to be done about it is still pretty controversial, and its political content. Oh boy, that last one can get fierce.
The way I see it Anime isn't a genre or art style its a medium, animation. All anime are cartoons and all cartoons are anime. Overall Japan's animation industry is like anyone else's, its also become increasingly incorporated into the global animation industry, the credits of most of them include South Korean and Chinese studio's for example. Some films were created by Directors because it was their life long ambition to make them, others were churned out by committee so a corporation to milk a trend before the consumer base moved on to something else.
Cyber punk and Blade Runner were also hugely influential in the 80s and 90s, so there are a lot of shows from those periods about fighting the big bad megacorps. Bubblegum Crisis is one that gets highly rated for this.
However this does mean that their are some really interesting stuff for anyone if they're willing to look. For example I don't like Japanese jokes, even when I understand the pun its just a lame pun, but I really enjoy trashy, gory horror flicks, and I've been enjoying anime versions of these since I was a child, thank you very much SciFi channel and that German language channel on diamond cable.
If you're feeling misanthropic, then there are plenty of direct to video movies from the lte 80s-early 90s made by creators whom sincerely believed that humanity was a mistake and so made miserable films about humans being really horrible to each other.
If that doesn't suit you, then there are plenty of fluffy slice of life comedy series that are just about friends being hanging out and being good friends. Like Azumnaga Daioh, Lucky Star, Free! etc.
And I know of at least one Anime that called Angel Cop, which was made to promote Nazi party anti-Semitism. That is not a joke or me reading into something, the plot of Angel Cop is that a Communist terrorist movement and an American multinational corporation are both attacking the prosperous and independent nation of Japan. It turns out that both are being controlled by "The Jews"... Incidentally that was one of the earlier animes to be released in the West, you know how they handled the anti-Semitism? They just cut out the references to Jewish people, and left all the other nationalism and bigotry in.
Fortunately overtly political message anime tends to lean the over way, a number of famous and influential directors, writers, artists and animators came out of the Japanese New left of the 1960s and 70s. Including the very famous Hayao Miyazaki, and so I've decided to compile a list of socialistic ( a broad sense) anime's. For both the anime leftist and confused new comer alike. This is just a list and brief description of merits, I have seen more in epth reviews of a number of these shows and will include them, though do bear in mind I don't necessarily agree with everything the say.
Steam Boy
A story about the invention of a revolutionary new form of steam power that could improve the whole of mankind. Essentially cold fusion but with steam. Unfortunately the cost of developed this new power meant the inventors had to get investment funds from a company called O'Hara and while its pleased the research project was successful, it really wants dividends on its investment as soon as possible and the fastest way to get a quick profit is of course weapon sales.
In a sense its about how property holds back technological development. The British Imperial Government gets involved, and at first it seems noble compared to the O'Hara mega company, but it becomes clear that they wish to get a hold of the steam technology to develop their own weapons programs and prevent O'Hara from selling weapons to its Imperial rivals.
So neither government or capital come out of this film looking very good, they're both self interested and hypocritical. There's a battle scene between the police and a private security army, highlighting the similarities.
Our hero is a working class lad from Manchester and his inventor Grandad whom wanted to build a new society using the nearly unlimited energy of this new invention he largely pioneered. Its animation is beautiful, it has a very steam punk look, with tanks and fighter planes as they might have looked in the 1860s. It did get some criticism from purists because it was an early adopter of Computer Graphic animation, but it blends with the traditional animations pretty well in my opinion.
If you can, I'd recommend watching the English dub, the dialogue is full of nineteenth century colloquialism's and the cast even manage to pull off Mancunian accents.
The Wings of Honnêamise
No I don't know what a Honnêamise is either, googling just brings up this anime film. I'm just going to call it Wings from now on. Wings is a lot like Steamboy, its about an attempt to put a man into space. Its like Yuri Gagarin the anime. It set in a world that isn't really earth, they're all humans but the nations and history and cultures are very different.
The space agency is incredibly underfunded, and the only way for them to get some support from their government to get a rocket ship and capsule built and ready for launch is to highlight its potential military capabilities. They're all dedicated to space exploration and have no interest in war but they're desperate for funds. One drawback is that a hostile nation now views the program as a threat and tensions between the two nations increase.
Again naked greed and self interest from the powerful actively impedes scientific progress and discovery. It ends with Lhadatt the cosmonaut getting into space and reflecting and praying for humanity to improve itself.
And unfortunately I'm not doing it much justice, its very beautiful in both its looks and its music and sound design.
There's a video review that does show some of that off, but it does also go into extreme detail about the plot and characters so use with caution.
There is however one flaw in this film which I should mention, at one point there's an attempted rape scene. I don't why its there, its uncomfortable and doesn't seem to add anything to the story or characters, if anything it diminishes it. It doesn't last long, but it does stick out there. I've been told there are censored versions that just cut that part out, I don't know if that's true, but if it is I'd recommend watching that version.
The Great Adventure of Horus Prince of the Sun
The Adventure of Horus was an early project of Hayao Miyazaki. He and his colleagues had a mission statement to make a film about `Socialist principles`. What this meant in practice is a fairy tale like fantasy film set in a Vikingish land where Horus and his fishing village must work together to defeat an evil Wizard. The villains are all guilty of selfishness in one form or another, wealth, immortality at the expense of other lives etc, and unlike most fantasy stories where the hero and maybe a band of warriors does all the work Horus does need the help and support of the village to resist and defeat the Evil Power.
Personally I think this is perfect for young children, it has lovely singing, and talking animals, including an adorable bear cub called Koro. Gundam 0083 - War in the Pocket
Gundam is a massive franchise, and I mean massive. There are dozens of anime series, some have continuity with others, some don't, there have been multiple films, video games, comic series, novels toys and model kits. It can be incredibly overwhelming. I've started getting into it, but I had to use a guide written up by a mega fan who had seen it all to figure out where to start and what to skip.
The franchise is famous for its criticisms of war and militarism and given that its been in existence since 1979 and is still going strong today, it maybe the longest running criticism of war and militarism in existence. Unfortunately the quality and extent of that criticism can vary wildly depending on what part of the franchise is being looked at.
With that in mind I've picked War in the Pocket as out of what I've seen its both the most damming in its criticism and accessible to newcomers. It was the first series I'd seen, I didn't really know much at all about the franchise but I had no trouble getting it.
Its six episodes long, and fairly self contained, it does have connections to other shows in the franchise but it isn't vital. It concerns a young boy in a fair away colony. There's a war going on but so far its left their part of space alone, Alfred and his friends like most young boys when there's a war on far away are obsessed with it. Trading stories and war toys etc. Then the war comes home and Alfred still obsessed with the exciting adventure gets caught up in it, makes friends with some soldiers and well the ending is very bitter.
SFDebris did a review of each episode of the series if you'd want more info, massively spoilers though.
Berserk
I've already talked at length about Berserk previously, so I'll just quickly summarise Berserk is in my opinion about power. Domination be it economic, political or personal is never benign. The rich and powerful are cruel even if they don't intend to be, those whom pursue power and wealth do so at the expense of others.
As a consequence of this the series is full of depictions of violence, torture, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, death in many forms, bigotry, discrimination, persecution, exploitation, slavery, etc. But unlike certain animes that indulge in these things for marketing its all key to the themes, plot and character development.
Guts the protagonist (with the big sword) is a damaged young man who was raised by a mercenary whom while teaching him how to fight and having a sort of paternalistic affection for him, also relentlessly exploited the power and influence he had on the boy and ultimately betrayed him. It takes him years to even start coming to terms with his trauma's and in a way he never has done. The reason he's such an excellent fighter, is revealed to be because fighting in a life or death struggle was the only way he knew how to cope with the emotional turmoil he was in. It takes him years to even tolerate being physically touched by even a friend.
Authorities of every type, religious, military, financial, governmental are shown to be self interested and harmful to the common people.
There's a review of the 1997 series
And a review of the 1997 series and manga
The Flying Ghost Ship
This one is admittedly quite light, its more a fun mystery adventure then a meaty stew of themes and political discourse. It starts out like a anime version of Scooby Doo, it even has an intelligent Great Dane. This was also another early film Hayao Miyazaki worked on in 1969. It was also the first anime to be shown in theatres in the Soviet Union, and is so popular in Russia that they redubbed it in the 90s, though I've not been able to find a reason why.
Its a light mystery involving a ghost ship, a giant robot that menaces the city, and a conspiracy between private companies and the government complete with a Roger Moore era Bond villain secret base. It has something for everyone. I won't spoil the plot since its a mystery show, but I will tell you that involves the pushing of an addictive soda drink.
Its probably the most spotty in terms of animation, at one point a character is literally slid onto the screen. But all the parts that need to look good, the robot attacks, the Ghost ship, the tanks moving into the city etc. I heard Toei had funding issues at this time, if so then they prioritised very well, the set pieces all look and move very well.
AKIRA
This is controversial for me, I know a lot of people responded to AKIRA as a story about punkish youths getting caught up in a government conspiracy to do... well something, and its probably something bad given that this a pretty authoritarian government with a powerful and very active police and army.
And if you've never seen it its worth watching. Its interesting it looks great, and I do know a few people who responded really well to a general impression of anti establishment resistance the film gives off.
But politically speaking its incredibly vague and kind of a mess, Kaneda the youth on the iconic red bike just stumbles into the plot because a mate of his gets nabbed and he's really attracted to Kei, and her rebel group is shown to be puppets of a corrupt politician. It doesn't help that the plot of the film is itself vague and kind of a mess.
Aggretsuko
Aggretsuko is a short series about modern Japanese worklife. Retsuko is an officious worker whose treated very poorly like most staff, however a combination of her being very nice and eager to help and being a woman means she's singled out for additional abuse and exploitation. She works long hours in a career that's stalled for an abusive manager whose literally a sexist pig.
She can complain about his behaviour, but her coworkers and friends point out how nothing will probably happen to him apart from alerting him that she tried to get him in trouble. Her only consolation is going to a Karaoke booth after work and screaming out Death Metal tirades about how terrible her boss and work is.
The whole show is about alienation at work and sexism. Later on she does befriend two women who are higher up in the company whom help her and she reaches a sort of truce with her sexist manager. This has put off some people who were really into the show. However this does lead to a really important bit, after some confrontations her manager reflects on why he's been so personally abusive and exploitative of his power over the office staff.
He hasn't just been demanding the staff commit to the workload and follow the companies rules, he's been dumping his own work on them and demanding of servant like behaviour too. He realises that back when he was a grunt in the company his managers treated him in the same way, only it was worse because back then there were fewer safeguards and an even more hostile workplace culture rooted in seniority. So when he became a manager he took out all his frustrations on the employee's beneath him and exploited everything shred of power he had.
There's a pretty good review of it here.
Jin-Roh
This ones a bit different, you may have seen an image of what looks like a future Nazi stormtrooper, being shared around on forums and social media, something like this
This character is from Jin-Roh. Jin-Roh is a sort of alternative history film. Japan is largely a police state with a very large and very active militant left wing revolutionary movement. The opening of Jin-Roh is a riot with a very well armed resistance taking on armed riot police. In response to this social upheaval the government created another police unit specifically to destroy armed terrorists.
Those are the fellows in the armour and glowing red eyes. Essentially they're a death squad. That and the look is probably why right wing types on the net love sharing images and clips of the film. Out of context its a powerful and intimidating image of right wing power. For me though I just assume they haven't bothered watching the film, because in context he doesn't say what they want it to say.
Jin-Roh is the story of one of the members of these special units. You may wonder why I'm including this here, well its because the film doesn't actually glorify these Special Units at all. On the contrary it comes across rather critical, the plot involves power plays between the Special Units and other rival police forces who are constantly jockeying for position in this authoritarian regime. Its also concerned with the question of how much humanity does someone in that position have left? The answer is not much, its incredibly dehumanising, that armour may look cool and intimidating but do that job for long enough and eventually all you are is a bit of armour and a gun, a miserable, sad and lonely existence. Kill La Kill
Kill La Kill (KLK) is basically the reason I thought about making this list. When I first noticed that internet users with anime avatars were no longer just spewing racist bile or calling me a Jewish agent, a lot of the openly left wing ones had avatars based on characters from KLK or were sharing meme's images and clips from this show. So I got curious.
It popped up on Netflix and I binged the show in a couple of days. Its very watchable and I can see why it appealed. The first scenes open on a lecture about the Nazi party and it uses school uniforms and clothing in general as a metaphor for social conformity and oppression. The main character Ryuko Matoi the girl with the black hair with the red stripe, (incidentally I don't think her red and black colour scheme is coincidental) is new student, she's a rebel at heart who rejects all arbitrary rules. She quickly finds herself in conflict with the school authorities whom have a regime based on strict discipline and hierarchy.
And its quickly revealed that theirs a whole social system being built on the same lines throughout Japan, and there's a clothing company that's busy monopolising the global textile markets in the background.
Its a great show, unfortunately there is one area that I know from experience does put off some people from getting into it. KLK involves a lot of scenes with scantily clad high schools. Unlike some anime's I don't remember it showing this in a leering way, the tone is usually self aware joking, but it still is jokes about high school students beating each other up in skimpy costumes. I don't recommend searching KLK at work, even some of the official promotional material and merchandise would raise some eyebrows.
For me its the weakest part of the show, and I can't really blame anyone for being put off because of it. Though that is a shame.
Tokyo Godfathers
Tokyo Godfathers is a film about three homeless people whom discover an abandoned baby at Christmas. They decide to look after the baby they call Kiyoko, for a night or two before handing her over to the authorities because they fear the baby will grow up to associate Christmas with abandonment. While doing this they decide to track down the parents to reunite the baby, or at least find out why the baby was abandoned in the first place.
This leads to a wacky adventure full of coincidences. The film is like a mix of Down and Out in Paris and London, a Charlie Chaplin era physical comedy. While their are jokes, the fact these people are homeless is never mocked or the subject of a joke, the humour comes from the personalities. Being homeless is depicted as rather bleak even with close friends and a sort of support network. It's full of examples of how homelessness in Japan is treated (about as poorly as everywhere else) and how the homeless survive. We see the three -a transwoman who worked as a drag queen at a cross dressers bar, a young girl runaway and Gin a man who due to debts had his family life destroyed- deal with all sorts of obstacles just moving through the city.
Official society, especially the police are no help at all and aside from handouts from a Christian group who give them a meal in exchange for being proselytised to, they're only help is from other outcasts. They could just give the baby up to the nearest police station, but all that will happen then is that the baby will be swallowed up and passed around by the foster system. At least this way the baby has a chance at family life first.
They essentially form a quasi family and mutual aid group, by working together and pooling what money and connections they have they're able to make it across Tokyo while looking after a baby.
Its really emotional, but due to the subject it covers a lot of pretty raw topics. Hana the transwoman is called a man and several slur words (at least that was how the subtitles translated them*) throughout though Hana is not ridiculed by the film and is shown to be accepted by the other homeless and the character who does insult her a lot is shown to be an well meaning but flippant and ignorant arse. Its not depicted as malicious and he is shown to care about her deeply and they have a weird surrogate relationship going on.
It also covers abandonment, the destructive power of debt, social prejudices, trauma, suicide, relationship breakdowns and how hard it can be to reconnect with family members even when both sides are willing to give it a go.
Despite the humour and the strong emotional core its still quite a sad film.
*I watched this subtitled without an English language track. Apparently while Tokyo Godfathers was localised and released internationally the company that did it didn't bother to dub it at all.
A review
Skip to around 07:42 to avoid a tiresome tangent about subbing and dubbing.
Manga's Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths
Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths is a fictionalised autobiographical manga by Shigeru Mizuki based on his experiences as a conscript in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) sent to Papua New Guinea. When pushed Mizuki has stated that about 90% of it is fact. During the war the most of his compatriots were killed and he lost his left arm, and while I recall a lot of the men dying I don't recall a character losing their left arm, so I guess that was the 10% fiction.
Its incredibly bleak, the men are exhausted, starving and eaten by the wildlife and that's before the American army arrive to shoot at them. The style is like a newspaper cartoon with characters heavily caricatured, the exception is scenes of brutality which are almost photorealistic. Its a chilling contrast. Onwards doesn't just say war is physically hell and leave it at that though. It actively depicts military discipline and the officers as brutal, and it ridicules and denounces the militaristic propaganda and the bizarre cult of death prominent amongst Japan's right wing.
A character actually asks a superior why the IJA aren't allowed to surrender after a hard fight, it can't be that surrendering is a form of weakness, the European and American soldiers are allowed to surrender and their winning the battle and the war. The only answer he gets is a smack in the mouth. The unit is eventually order on a suicide march against a superior opposition.
Capital
Capital is a two volume Manga that explains and illustrates various parts of Karl Marx's economic work Das Kapital. Not really much to say really, their is an linking story of a business that grows from a simple one man workshop into a massive cheese production factory. If you're having trouble with the original I recommend giving the manga a try.
This week, we cover the Miike coal mine strike of 1960. As labor and management do battle over the future of the mines, how will the future of the country be shaped by their clash?
Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode
245 the Summer of Rage Part II. Last week we covered the protests that brought
down the Kishi government and set the tenor for the next half century of
Japanese politics. A consensus on economic growth and nothing else. This week I
want to talk about another protest which also stretched into the summer of
1960, and which helped set the tone for the future of post-war Japan.
Last week we looked at what is by any measure the beating
heart of Japan, Tokyo itself. This week our focus is about as far away from
that as you can get, a small called Miike, split between Fukuoka and Kumamoto
Prefectures in central Kyushu. The area would be insignificant in the grand
sweep of Japanese history except for one thing, it was one of the few areas in
Japan with serious natural resource deposits. Specifically Miike was loaded
with coal. Coal mining in the region goes back to the mid 1700s, when the local
ruling clan the Tachibana, first started up a small mining industry to fuel a
very minimal for coal. Used primarily during the Tokugawa period for the
manufacture of salt.
However Miike transformed from a niche product exporter to a
major cog in the Japanese economy after the Meiji restoration. Japan’s newly
industrialising economy needed naturally a large volume of coal, to fuel its
factories and to power it’s trains and ships, especially those last ones as the
Imperial Japanese Navy was growing by leaps and bounds. Mines like Miike let
the Meiji government acquire coal domestically rather pay out the nose for
imports. In 1872 the Miike mines were nationalised by the government, however
as was the case with most of the early Meiji experiments in state-owned
corporations, they proved to be a bit of a flop. Samurai trained bureaucrats as
it turned out had plenty of understanding of why coal was important, but no
idea of how to you know actually run a coal mine.
So instead the mine was sold in 1899 to the Mitsui Zaibatsu.
The Zaibatsu were remember these powerful economic mega conglomerates where a
single family would control an economic empire owning companies in fields
ranging from steel to weapons to energy to shipping to banking to God knows
what else. They had tremendous wealth and influence, especially in the
industrialised areas of the economy. And man Miike was a cash cow for Mitsui.
The coal Miike produced became a crucial fuel for the industrialisation of
Japan and for the economic expansion of Mitsui. At the same time conditions in
Miike were terrible, safety precautions were relatively minimal and until a
1930 law forbade the practice, convicts were regularly forced to labour in the
mine as part of their sentence.
Remember that a few years back we did an episode on the
Socialist and Feminist Kōtoku Shūsui*? Well it was when she lived in Miike with
her first husband and saw conditions at the mine, that this daughter of social
privilege who had never really worked a day in her life became a radicalised
socialist. It was really that bad. And yet coal mining was better than any of
the other work reliably available in Kyushu, so people kept coming for the job.
But they wanted protections and so they did the natural thing, they unionised.
Unionisation during the first half of 20th
century Japanese history was to say the least, risky business. Unionised labour
was considered one step from banner waving socialism and trying to unionise
would get you uncomfortably close scrutiny from the government in many cases.
The Miike union in particular suffered constant attacks from the government
which was concerned that unionised labour could interrupt a vital supply of
coal that was crucial to Japanese industrialisation. It wasn’t until after
World War II that a progressive American backed occupation government allowed
the unfettered right to unionisation, something that the Miike workers took
full advantage of.
However just as the Miike workers thought they were securing
their future, the economic winds shifted. Generally speaking the post war
government of Japan was hesitant to rely too much on imports. The legacy of
World War II taught the Japanese government just how vulnerable Japan was to
targeted embargoes; particularly in the energy sector. However post war Japan
was also not a military power and didn’t have to worry about fighting new wars
any time soon. It could afford to calculate its future based on the economic
bottom line and the economic bottom line was that importing energy was a lot
cheaper than domestic coal was.
Natural gas and petroleum were both cheaper than coal,
especially thanks to the help of the good old US of A, which was more than
prepared to prop up it’s Cold War bastion in Asia, by helping to arrange
favourable terms for energy imports. This was particularly true in the case of
petroleum which was produced in large quantities in the American South and
which had also been recently discovered in ample quantities in a previously
back water place known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
So the Kishi government decided it was time to cut down on
domestic coal production in favour of imports and even after Kishi left office
the new government of Prime Minister of Ikeda Hayato stayed the course. Kishi
and Ikeda may have had very different views on foreign policy, but in the end
both men were career bureaucrats, they knew how to read a balance sheet. The
decision was passed onto Mitsui which was informed the government would be
purchasing less coal in the future. And Mitsui in turn started laying people
off.
For the families of Miike the resulting economic catastrophe
was to say the least devastating. Thirty two thousand nine hundred workers lost
their jobs in 1959 as the result of coal mine closures and could not support
their families as a result. Perhaps the most stark indicator of the resultant
catastrophe was that the 1959 health survey of the region found only 7% of the
children in the area to be in good health. The rest were suffering from
inadequate health care brought on by the inability of their parents to afford
doctor’s visits, or that old classic malnutrition.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the announcement
by Mitsui that a further 60,000 labourers were scheduled to be let go in 1960 with
further layoff planned for the coming years. Overall some 100,000 people were
scheduled to be let go by 1963. Layoffs on the scale by Mitsui planned would
have devastated any community economically but in the Japanese case they were
uniquely troubling. The Japanese economy was remember built on a system of
lifetime employment. Employers essentially offered iron clad guarantees of job
security after hiring, this was quite comforting if you kept you job, but if
you lost it good luck finding a company that was ever prepared to hire someone
not coming straight from out of school. In such a nonelastic labour market
finding a decent new job was far from guaranteed.
This second round of layoffs also targeted a different
population than the previous ones. In particular the layoffs started targeting
the mines that were affiliated with the miners union called Tanro a wing of
Japan’s largest Union Sohyo, the one that called the general strike against
Kishi. Tanro dominated mines had previously enjoyed a lot of autonomy in how
they were run, with most of the major operational decisions made by a sort of
workers council. The first round of implemented layoffs was not coincidentally
designed to target the leadership of these councils and the Union more
generally. At first Mitsui attempted to couch the move by sending letters to
about 1,000 workers suggesting that they “voluntarily resign”.
When the workers burned those letters Mitsui pulled out the
big guns and fired them. And so in January 1960 Tanro called a strike. This was
not the first time this had happened, in 1953 Mitsui had attempted to
rationalise the workforce of Tanro dominated mines by forcing workers over 50
as well as women and quote unquote “bad character” out of the mines. The
resulting Tanro strike cost Mitsui over 4 billion yen and led to resignation of
Mitsui’s president and only resulted in only half the proposed layoffs ever
going forward with the by the by a promise extracted from Mitsui `never to
attempt unilateral dismissals of mine employee’s again`.
So it was not unreasonable for Tanro to expect to win out.
After all they’ve done it before, so they can do it again right? That was
particularly true because even if Mitsui could get scabs-workers to replace the strikers- into the
mines, Tanro had one other card to play. The miners could physically block the
trains carrying the coal from leaving their stations preventing Mitsui from
fulfilling its coal contracts. This time however Mitsui was confident in its
ability to beat its miners, it was prepared to take bigger losses than it had
in 1953 in order to break the power of the Union. And this time it had the
backing of other coal producers who agreed to service Mitsui’s contracts while
the Miike mines were shutdown. After all if Mitsui could break the Union’s
power, it would be good for all coal producing companies not just Mitsui. In
addition
Mitsui had two other cards to play, the first was the
support of the national government, which was prepared to deploy police to the
area to “keep order”. The second was the fact that the local Yakuza offered
their services to Mitsui, remember the Yakuza has a very long history of
anti-leftist activity, going back to Japan’s very first elections. Union
busting was a speciality of theirs. Thugs associated with the Yakuza started
attacking the miners in March of 1960. On March 29th Kubo Kiyoshi
one of the leading members of Tanro was stabbed to death by a member of the
Yakuza who managed to sneak through the picket lines.
This violence did succeed in intimidating some of the
workers who broke off from Tanro to form a new union that was prepared to
accommodate some of Mitsui’s demands. Partially from the economic pressure and
partially because some of the union members were afraid that militant workers
calling for an ongoing strike, were tied too tightly to the Japanese Communist
Party. It looked like the workers were now starting to turn on each other,
which meant it was only a matter of time before Mitsui won out. Indeed some
three thousand miners, about 20% of the mining workforce -not the broader
workforce of the town generally affiliated with Mitsui- did go back into the
mines and resume mining in the middle of March despite violent attempts by the
strikers to stop them. The coal trains still couldn’t leave the station but the
mines were technically open for business once again.
At the same time Mitsui was very carefully containing the
protest and preventing it from spreading to its other holdings. Other Mitsui
owned coal mines such as the Bibai mine in Hokkaido were not subject to
mandatory layoffs. Instead Mitsui returned to the old canard of voluntary
retirement, essentially offering severance bonuses to ease people out instead
of forcing a confrontation. It really looked that this was going to work, Union
solidarity was breaking down, strikes in other Mitsui mines hadn’t
materialised.
But what kept the protests going was ANPO. In light of the
growing security treaty protests in Tokyo events in Miike took on a new aura.
No this was not just a labour dispute it was one wing of a broader struggle
against businesses and government bureaucrats who wanted to roll back the
reforms of the Occupation and return Japan to the bad old days.
National Unions started to take up the Miike cause. Calling
a wave of strikes in support of the Miike workers; the largest covered 300,000
workers across Japan. Activists also started flooding into the area itself,
many of them in fact the same activists who’d just been protesting ANPO. They
made their way south after the treaty passed and Kishi resigned in June and
July. Unions across the country also started to send representatives to join
the miners and their strikes and to begin collections to support the miners.
The story grabbed national headlines right next to ANPO. My
personal favourite example is a letter from a Junior Highschool girl from Miike
named Tanabata Sumiko published in Sohyo run newspaper in April 1960, the
letter itself was from December. The letter reads in part:
“My father has done
Union work for the Miike local Union since before I was born. He also works in
the mines. Because my father is easy going every morning I get to talk with him
a little bit about his work. My father spends every day organising or
participating in Union demonstrations down at the mine, but I’m worried about
him. My older sister said something the other day I think shows how things are
here. `Cut off the heads of those who would cut off ours`”.
That really demonstrates I think the ferocity of feeling
among the miners and their families who perceived their very livelihood’s as
being fundamentally under threat. That line about slitting throats Ku-bi-o-Ku
(Phonetic approximation, trans ed) in Japanese, is a reference to a Japanese
colloquialism, Kubini Naru, which is a very euphemistic way of saying someone
is fired, literally that their head is rolling. The letter closes by the way on
a sadder and less violent note:
“soon it is going to
be New Year’s and there is nothing I really want for a gift. Because my father
is being laid off money is pretty tight. My family is going to be spending the
New Year’s season by taking care of each other.”
The letter was likely selected by Sohyo of course to publish
because of its heart wrenching ending, but it also demonstrates the extent to
which this was a life and death battle for the miners. The protests continued
the whole summer and into the fall, it wasn’t until October that an exhausted
Miners Union caved in. Its strike funds were running out, popular interest was
drying up and so on November 1st 1960, the strike ended.
The Union agreed to sit down with Mitsui and a team of
outside mediators to determine where things should go from here. In the end
Mitsui had the resources to wait out the protests. The mediators decided
overwhelmingly in Mitsui’s favour, the layoffs mostly went ahead, safety
improvements were never made and Tanro as a Union had its power broken. Mitsui
had proven they could be beaten.
In 1963 a mine explosion killed 450 people and injured over
800 more at Miike, another explosion in 1984 claimed over 80 lives. The mine
was eventually shuttered all together in the 1990s. If as some protestors
claimed the Miike and ANPO struggles were linked attempts to defend the New
Japan against those who wanted to roll back the tide, those attempts were it
seemed failures. The miners lost, the protestors in Tokyo lost.
And yet as with ANPO a new consensus emerged from the ashes
of Miike, that would inform the future of Japanese society. The Miike protests
you see were messy, they looked bad and they undercut the new Ikeda
administrations focus on the consensus for economic growth. If the goal was to
paper over the difference of Japanese society by focussing everyone’s attention
on getting rich, fights over how to distribute those riches were in essence counterproductive.
So government and business policy began to shift. Lifetime
employment guarantees were shored up in order to avoid the kind of direct
confrontation that Miike represented. Even as this was happening big Japanese
firms also worked to undercut the power of Unions like Tanro. After all
powerful Unions represented an organisational threat to the ability of
management to guide certain business decisions.Even if management was committing to avoiding certain kinds of actions
which would upset the Unions.
Most Japanese Unions were and are what are called enterprise
unions, in other words Unions not organised across an entire sector like
Teamsters or Sanitation workers or what have you, but across a single business.
A Mitsui Union a Toyota Union and so forth. After Miike businesses began
pushing harder for unionisation along this model figuring not incorrectly that
if a worker’s energy could be channelled into these narrower business specific
unions it would be harder to organise mass protests and easier to keep the
unions under control.
In some cases, the president of a given company would even
lead the unionisation charge and become president of the Union as well. All of
this was pitched to workers as more responsive and not unreasonably, after all
a narrower union can respond to narrow issues as well. In my mind the most
interesting way this played out was in the 1990s during the early days of the
great Japanese recession. With the overt support of the Japanese government
many firms avoided outright firings to the greatest degree possible even as
Japan’s economy ran straight into a brick wall. The economic cost of keeping
workers whose jobs no longer produced much if anything of economic value
employed was considered less than the social cost of breaking the lifetime
employment contract and inviting a new Miike on a greater scale.
And one that would hit places a lot close to the centre of
Japan than some coal mine in rural Kyushu. That’s the extent to which fear of a
new confrontation with labour became a major factor in policymaking. In the end
that’s what’s interesting about the summer of 1960. It wasn’t despite what some
protestors might have envisioned a great uprising against the forces that
wanted to turn Japan’s clock back. In the end the establishment won both cases,
a new age of progressive Japanese politics was not on the horizon.
Indeed probably the most powerful visual moment of the
summer of 1960, really underscored the degree to which the progressive dream
had bloomed in the 1940s had died. On October 12th 1960 the
Socialist representative of Tokyo’s first District, Asanuma Inejiro was taking
part in a debate with an electoral opponent that was being broadcast live on
the local NHK affiliate. Asanuma had a long history as a Socialist firebrand,
most recently for having gone on a state visit to Beijing and praised Chairman
Mao, while denigrating the United States, at a time when Japan still refused to
recognise the People’s Republic of China as a legitimate government. In the
middle of the debate a right-wing ultranationalist all of 17 years old stormed
the stage with a Katana and stabbed Asanuma to death.
Asanuma’s death became a stand in for the death of the old
Socialist Party, for a vision that the JSP could take control of Japan from the
LDP and direct the future of the country. Asanuma Inejiro was mourned
nationally and in his wake peace protests broke out across Japan. But that was
really it, the JSP and left-wing movements that had led ANPO and Miike had
become generalised peace movements content to throw out the occasional protest
while the LDP governed the country.
This shift from a left-wing that was vying for power to a
left that was content to defend what it had, a peace constitution, labour laws,
lifetime employment was not a direct result of the death of Asanuma. Instead
his murder took on a symbolic value, the death of Asanuma became a stand in for
of the old Socialist Party. And in more concrete terms it served as a threat to
future socialist politicians, `stay in your lane, don’t push to far, or else!`
In addition to a weakened left, one that had gambled on two
big victories and lost both what emerged from 1960 was a renewed Conservative
movement. Kishi’s wing of the LDP the pro rearmament crowd was now gone from
power. It would not return seriously in any meaningful sense to the political
discourse until the mid to late 2000s. When Kishi Nobususke’s grandson Abe
Shinzo got his first term -but not his last- as Japan’s Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, while Mitsui had defeated Tanro in a labour
showdown the result was not the end of Union power altogether. Unions remained
and were still capable of shows of force, but that kind of direct confrontation
between management and labour became less and less common. A new understanding
had been reached that Unions would accept what they were being given in
exchange would restrict themselves to pro forma protests, often scheduled in
advance every year with a short walk out followed by some speeches and low-key
marching followed by a return to work. A far cry from the old days of Yakuza
backed unionbusting.
In the end that transformation is what I think is really
interesting about the events of 1960. So often commenters on post war Japan
focus on this idea of harmony “Wa” of a society where conflict had been
subsumed by the greater interests of the whole. Look at Western writing on
Japan or even Japanese writing on Japan in some cases, from the 1970s and 1980s
you’ll see this brought up over and over again. Where did it come form? The
commenters wondered, something unique to Japanese institutional history,
Japanese culture too, or as some more racialistic thinkers in Japan suggested
Japanese ancestry itself?
The explanation really is a lot simpler, that emphasis on
harmony was born out of conflict. The summer of 1960 was a compressed version
of a sort of Hegelian synthesis. If that means nothing to you very simply put
Hegel proposed a sort of process of intellectual evolution for humanity in
three steps. First a new vision a thesis would be put forward, say the
progressive vision of the Japanese left who embraced Union activism, article 9
and the image of Japan as a disarmed and neutral friend to all. Then an
antithesis would come forward, an opposed agenda energised by disdain for the
original thesis, men like Kishi or the Mitsui board of directors would step
forward and oppose it. Finally their conflict would result not in ultimate
victory for one side or the other, but in compromise, in synthesis a new path
forward would be found incorporating both sides and the process would begin
again.
The system that governed Japan to the 1960s until the 1990s,
arguably still today was just such a synthesis. Born out of a desire to prevent
further confrontation and instead to refocus Japan’s energies on the one area
of agreement, on the power and importance of economic growth. It became the
guiding principle of the New Japan. And hey it worked, today that’s how ANPO
and Miike tend to get remembered. As bloody violent depressing footnotes on the
way to that synthesis. And yet I do think they deserve a little more than that,
these were events that rocked Japan, that captured headlines, that were
instrumental in driving the new Japanese order forward. The Japan of today, the
worlds third largest economy, rich, stable, it’s the product of ANPO, the
product Miike, even the product of the death of Asanuma. And everything that
grew from those moments in 1960.
That’s all for this week, thank you very much for listening.
*I believe this is a mistake as Isaac Meyer says Kōtoku
Shūsui, but seems to be talking about Kanno Sugako who was his lover and grew
up around mining companies.
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