Japan: Violence in Shinjuku Station

Mobs of screaming students last week swarmed through the vast Shinjuku rail way station, Tokyo’s largest. Wearing plastic helmets, the lower half of their faces masked with towels as a protection against tear gas, the students scrambled over tracks and platforms, smashing train windows, disemboweling seats, splintering and setting fire to doors, benches and stairways. One rioter shinnied up a pole to smash the signal lights — he touched a high-voltage line and crashed to earth in a shower of sparks, critically injured.

As railway employees raced to put out the fires, riot police assembled in the darkness down the tracks and charged. They were met but not stopped by a shower of rocks. The sound of staves flailing against police shields and batons banging on plastic helmets echoed through the train shed. Bodies rolled in hand-to-hand combat. The battered and bleeding were carted off by rescue squads of both sides.

Purple Dye. Student reinforcements poured into the wide plaza outside the station. To the bleat of whistles, the students trotted forward in their snakedancing columns, chanting, “Oppose the Viet Nam war!” and “Down with the Security Pact!” Many were stained by the purple dye which had been mixed with the water in fire hoses used to fight them off in an earlier attack on Japan’s Defense Headquarters. Though students had also tried to assault the Diet building and the U.S. embassy, Shinjuku had been chosen as the major target because it is the departure point for many of the supplies sent to U.S. forces in Viet Nam. But the rioters’ declared aim was to force the suspension of the U.S.Japan Defense Pact.

The police knew the identity of their enemy: four splinter groups in Zengakuren, the faction-ridden Japanese student federation. The vast majority of Zengakuren members, including the Communists, stayed away from the riots. Those who did riot, like the New Left everywhere, regard the Communists as bourgeois and politically backward and consider themselves the “conscience of the nation.” $1,000,000 Damages. As the battle for Shinjuku station wore on through the night, the Public Safety Commission held an emergency session and ordered the imposition of the antiriot law, which provides penalties of up to ten years in jail. Previously, rioters had been charged only with misdemeanors, which are punishable by small fines. By 2 a.m., the riot police had cleared the station and the square. They could tot up damages of close to $1,000,000, with 140 persons hospitalized, including 61 police, and over 700 in jail.

It was the worst rioting Tokyo had seen since 1960, when the Zengakuren prevented President Eisenhower’s state visit to Japan and toppled Premier Kishi. But even then, though much more unified and with far more public support than today, Zengakuren could not prevent the signing of the U.S.-Japanese Security Pact. The pact, replacing the earlier Security Treaty of 1951, was signed in 1960. It actually gives Japan a greater voice than before in any U.S. military activities on Japanese territory, and pledges both countries to take unspecified action if either one is attacked in territories under Japanese administration. It is scheduled to be reviewed in 1970, and either nation can withdraw from the pact by giving a year’s notice of such a decision. What is much more likely to happen is that neither Washington nor Tokyo will do anything —in which case the pact will remain automatically in effect.