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JAPAN: Remembrance of Things Past

3 minute read
TIME

In Tokyo last week, Japan’s once-dreaded policemen made themselves ridiculous in public. Day after day, Tokyo’s Police Chief Ken Ogura announced that his cops were about to enter the campus of Tokyo University and arrest three students. Day after day, fearful of the riot that was sure to be touched off by their appearance on campus, Ogura’s cops failed to make good on the chief’s threat, while inside the three students held triumphant press conferences for newspaper and television reporters.

The defiant students were members of the executive committee of the Zenga-null the 290,000-member Japanese student federation. The crime for which they were wanted was leadership of a Zenga-kuren phalanx, which three weeks ago spearheaded a frenzied demonstration of 27,000 Tokyo leftists outside the Japanese Diet. They were protesting Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi’s drive to conclude a new U.S.-Japanese security treaty. At the height of the riot, in which 500 police and demonstrators were injured, 3,000 Zengakuren bullyboys fought their way through a police cordon onto the steps of Japan’s Diet building, and to demonstrate their contempt for parliamentary democracy indulged in mass urination against the massive Diet doors.

To many Japanese, the Zengakuren’s regular indulgence in this kind of violence makes the organization painfully reminiscent of the prewar Imperial Way Group—an association of young Japanese army officers who in the 1930s terrorized Tokyo by assassinating a series of senior military officers and politicians, including one Prime Minister. Like the members of the Imperial Way Group, the extremists of the Zengakuren come largely from peasant families, are driven by a deep hatred of capitalism and the U.S. All 30 of the Zengakuren executive committee call themselves Marxists, and think themselves the only true Communists. Says one student leader. “Khrushchev, who shook hands with Eisenhower, is an international scab and strikebreaker.”

Curiously, although a majority of Japanese approve of Kishi’s proposed new treaty with the U.S. and were shocked by the Diet riot, there have been few public demands for action against Zengakuren. Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s largest daily, saw the riot as a warning to Kishi that if he persisted in “relying on his majority” to push the treaty through, he would be endangering Japanese democracy.

Why the reluctance to see the police crack down on the Zengakuren? Explained one Japanese: “It’s because we are afraid of history repeating itself. If police enter universities and arrest students, there may be no end to it short of thought control.” Apparently Japanese democrats had forgotten that the blind violence of fanatics had contributed at least as much as thought control to the downfall of Japan’s precarious prewar democracy.

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