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Title: Anarchism in Japan
Author: Chushichi Tsuzuki
Date: AUTUMN 1970
Language: en
Source: Government and Opposition, AUTUMN 1970, Vol. 5, No. 4 (AUTUMN 1970), pp. 501-522
Notes: Cambridge  UNIVERSITY TRESS  Anarchism in Japan Author(s): Chushichi Tsuzuki  Source: Government and Opposition, AUTUMN 1970, Vol. 5, No. 4 (AUTUMN 1970), pp. 501-522  Chushichi Tsuzuki  Anarchism in Japan  Cambridge

Chushichi Tsuzuki

Anarchism in Japan

Chushichi Tsuzuki Anarchism in Japan

It would seem curious to an outside observer that the dissolution of the

Nihon-Anakisuto-Kenmei (Japanese Anarchist Federation) should be

formally announced in January 1969, at a time when militant students

were determined to defend their ‘fortress’, the Yasuda auditorium of

Tokyo University, which they had occupied for several months, against an

attack by the riot police. The anarchists themselves called the

dissolution ‘a deployment in the face of the enemy’. Yet they had to

admit at the same time that they had reached a deadlock in their

attempts within the Federation to formulate new theories of anarchism

and to hit upon new forms of organization for the new era of direct

action which they believed had begun.1 Indeed, they remained very weak

numerically, and they had only a limited direct influence among the

student movements which appeared in their eyes to have ushered in this

era. It has been said that acceptance of democracy in post-war Japan

encouraged the spread of anarchism as a sentiment, and this, in turn,

rendered anarchism as a movement ‘superfluous’.2 One of the stalwarts of

the Todai-Zenkyoto (Council of United Struggle, Tokyo University)

cheerfully declared that they were ‘aristocratic anarchists’. Their

struggle, he said, was ‘not the one fought by the maltreated, nor even

on their behalf, but was the revolt of the young aristocrats who felt

that they had to deny their own aristocratic attributes in order to make

themselves truly noble’.3 It has also been pointed out that the concept

of student power and the tactics of campus occupation were in the line

of anarcho-syndicalism in spite of the professed political sympathies

(Trotskyism or Maoism) of the movement’s leaders. Yoshitaka Yamamoto,

the leader of the Todai-Zenkyoto admitted that the term anarchism had

been used as an epithet as derogatory as ‘left-wing infantile disease’

or ‘generational struggle’. 1 Jtyu-Rengo (‘Libera Federacio’), 1 January

1969. 2 Michio Matsuda, Anaki^umu (Anarchism), Tokyo, 1963, p. 61. 3

Joky6 (Situation), No. 8, 1969, p. 37. 601

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI These, he said, had been freely levelled by the

‘bureaucrats’ of the Communist Party and the ‘authoritarian’ professors

of universities (both formerly champions of the post-war democracy)

against what he called ‘incalculable human (revolutionary) passions’. He

felt, however, that anarchism had been unduly neglected and ought to be

re-examined.4 Indeed, there was an element of anarchism in all this.

Anarchism, or rather nihilism, as a sentiment, however, flourished in

post-war Japan not so much because of the apparent progress of

democracy, as because of the fact that parliamentary democracy, still a

delicate plant in a hostile soil, began to show signs of atrophy under

the perpetual rule (or misrule) of conservative governments. Moreover,

there was nothing novel in nihilism as such. As the pioneer anarchists

sometimes remarked, the spirit of total negation can be traced to the

influence among other things of Buddhism and of Taoism,5 6 and it

provided a moral seedbed for the introduction of anarchism as a body of

European thought. This was a profound shock to the authoritarian

government of Meiji, which drew its sustenance from another national

tradition, that of conformity. In the following account I propose to

deal mainly with anarchism as an intellectual movement in Japan and its

bearing on the students’ revolt in the 1960s. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND It

is noteworthy that anarchism in Japan has been closely related to the

movement against war. In fact, it had its origin in an anti-war campaign

during the Russo-Japanese war, when Shusui Kotoku, editor of the

anti-war socialist paper Heimtn (Common People), read Kropotkin while in

prison. It is also significant that Kotoku approached socialism and

anarchism in terms not of working-class politics but of the

self-sacrificing devotion of the high-minded liberals of lower Samurai

origins. Within the short-lived Socialist Party of Japan, he led the

‘hard’ faction of direct actionists against the ‘soft’ parliamentarians,

at a time when neither parliamentary action nor direct action in the

form of a general strike was possible for the socialists. He was

involved in a premature plot against the Emperor 4 Y. Yamoto,

Chisei-no-Hanran {Revolt of Intellect), Tokyo, 1969, p. 195; Asabi

Journal, 6 July 1969. 6 For instance Shusui Kotoku in Hikari (Light), 15

December 1906. 602

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN Meiji, and in the treason trial of 1910-11, which was

largely rigged by the prosecution, 26 anarchists (including three

Buddhist priests) were indicted, 12 of whom, including Kotoku, were

executed. Some anarchists were spared, simply because they were already

in prison for other offences. Sakae Osugi, one of the prisoners, who was

destined to succeed Kotoku, came from a family of distinguished soldiers

and had introduced himself as ‘the son of a murderer’ when he joined the

anti-war movement led by Kotoku. For some time after the treason trial

he concentrated upon literary work, and in this less provocative way he

was able to develop his own anarchist thought under the influence of

Bergson and Sorel, Stirner and Nietzsche. The nature of the social

system which would come as the result of economic progress, he argued,

would depend upon ‘an unknown factor’ in man’s reasoning to be developed

by ‘a minority who would strive for the expansion of each one’s self’.6

He applied his philosophy of life to the labour movement which, he

declared, was ‘an attempt on the part of the working man to regain

himself’ and consequently ‘the problem of life itself’.7 During the

first world war, the Japanese socialists and anarchists remained too

powerless to raise even the feeblest voice of protest. The rapid

expansion of industry during the war, and the inspiration given by the

Russian revolution, however, led to a real awakening of the labour

movement. Osugi flirted with the Comintern for a while, but soon broke

with those who organized the clandestine Communist Party in 1922. This

Ana-Boru Ronso (dispute between the anarchists and bolsheviks)

culminated in a bold attempt by Osugi to capture the nascent trade union

movement for anarcho-syndicalism, but all his efforts in this line were

frustrated by government intervention. Meanwhile, some anarchists,

especially those organized in a secret society called Girochinsha

(Guillotine Society), were driven to acts of terrorism. Ironically,

Osugi himself fell, victim to the ‘white’ terrorism of the military

police which followed the Kanto earthquake of 1923. He was murdered in

an army barracks. Thereafter, there was a revival of anarchism as a form

of reaction against the political achievements of ‘Taisho Democracy’

embodied as they were in the Universal Suffrage Act of 192 5, which was

accompanied by a safety measure, an act for the maintenance of internal

security. While the inaugural conference of the Peasants- 6 Osugi,

‘Kusari-Kojo (The Chain Factory)*, Kindai-Shiso (Modern Thought),

September 1913. 7 Osugi in Kodo-Undo (Labour Movement), October 1919,

June 1920. 503

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI Workers Party was dispersed by the police, anarchist

stalwarts of various factions arrived on the scene to denounce the

beginning of the workers’ participation in parliamentary politics, and

from this rather unseemly protest was born the Black (Youth) Federation.

Sakutaro Iwasa, a veteran anarchist, who had set up a Social

Revolutionary Party among the Japanese immigrants in San Francisco when

Kotoku visited there, now exerted a decisive influence upon the

Federation. He was an exponent of ‘pure anarchism’, according to which

all the socialist parties and trade unions would only assist the

progress of capitalism with the ideology of class war, which was ‘a

sham’. ‘The workers who work under big capitalists’, he declared, ‘are

sharing and promoting their masters’ exploitation.’ They themselves

would exploit the people if they were successful in revolution; only an

anarchist minority could achieve a revolution for the people because

they desired freedom and emancipation, but not power for themselves, and

consequently would attain their aims by freeing other people from

exploitation and from power.8 By calling for a boycott of all forms of

organization, however, Iwasa and the Black Federation crippled the newly

created syndicalist federation, the National Association of Trade

Unions, which had had an auspicious start with a combined membership of

over 10,000 in 1926.9 Shortly afterwards, yet another syndicalist

federation came into existence with the assistance of, among others,

Sanshiro Ishikawa. Ishikawa’s anarchist convictions, which dated from

before Kotoku’s, had been strengthened by reading Towards Democracy and

other writings of Edward Carpenter. ‘I have for a very long time been

dissatisfied with mere mechanical materialistic Socialism and the

parliamentary movement’, he wrote to Carpenter in 1909.10 Like Osugi, he

was spared because he had been in prison at the time of the treason

trial. After his release, he spent eight years as an exile in Europe,

mostly with the Reclus family in Brussels. With a knowledge of the

French syndicalist movement, he now exhorted his followers to ally

themselves with working-class organizations. 8 Iwasa, Kakumei-Danso

(Thoughts on devolution), 1958, quoted in Kiyoshi Akiyama, Nihon-no

Hangyaku-Shiso (Rebellious Thought in Japan), Tokyo, 1968, p. 164;

Iwasa, ‘Kaiho-nitaisuru-Anakisuto-no-Yakuwari (The Anarchist Role in

Emancipation), Jiyu-Rengo-Sbinbun illiberal Federation Newspaper), 1 May

1930, Matsuda, op. cit., pp. 376, 382. 9 Kensuke Yamaguchi,

‘Nihon-niokeru-Anaruko-Sandikarizumu (Anarcho-Syndicalism in Japan)’,

Shisd-no-Kagaku (Science of Thought), November 1966. 10 Ishikawa to

Carpenter, 14 December 1909, Carpenter Collection, Sheffield City

Library. 504

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN During the years of great depression, the syndicalist

unions, formed mainly among the workers employed in small firms, fought

a series of desperate struggle, the most celebrated of which was the

workers’ occupation of a dyeing factory in Tokyo in 1930, when an

anarchist worker sat on the top of a tall chimney for 15 days with a

black flag flying. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931,

government action against left-wing bodies became more ruthless and

frequent. The tenacity with which the Left held out is attested by an

attempt made in 1935 to form a united front, an ‘alliance to smash

Nazism and Fascism’ as it was called, among the left-wing social

democrats, bolsheviks, anarchists and syndicalists, though it was at

once suppressed by the police. In the same year, the syndicalist unions

received a fatal blow, the arrest of the members of a secret society

called the Anarchist Communist Party, which had been formed to organize

an armed uprising against the government. Characteristically, the

‘self-righteousness and adventurism of the intellectuals’ of the ‘party’

were condemned by the syndicalist workers.11 AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

In 1945, unconditional surrender and the physical destruction of the

country seemed to promise a new era when, free from the old government

and the old ruling classes that had gone, as it seemed, for ever, the

anarchists might be given a chance to try their ideas for the

reconstruction of society. It was with such hope that the aged Ishikawa

wrote an anarchist ‘Utopia’ entitled ‘ Gojunen-go-no-Nihon (Japan 50

Years Later)’ shortly after the end of the war. In this work, democratic

reorganization of post-war Japan, itself a pale imitation of the

European experience of the last hundred years, is followed by a peaceful

revolution; the extensive use of mutual exchange banks and the growth of

mutualist trade unions lead to the emergence of a new society, in which

the old Diet building is used only for meetings of the unions, and

culture and the economy are conducted on a co-operative basis so as to

enable each individual to live a life of artistic creation. Most of

Ishikawa’s fellow anarchists, however, do not appear to have shared his

belief in nudity as the symbol of natural freedom nor his peculiar view

that the emperor should be 11 Yamaguchi, loc. cit.y 4. 505

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI maintained even in an anarchist Utopia as the symbol

of communal affection.12 The Japanese Anarchist Federation came into

existence in May 1946, at a time when millions of hungry workers were

taking part in demonstrations all over the country demanding food and a

‘democratic popular front’. The revived anarchist movement, however,

failed to make an impression on the Left; their programme of action

remained academic, in spite of some attempts made by syndicalist

unionists to establish workers’ control of production. The anarchists

favoured ‘a revolutionary popular front’ but quarrelled among themselves

over their attitude towards the Communist Party. Their organ, Heimin,

unlike its predecessors edited by Kotoku and Osugi, ‘did not create a

great social shock’.13 It seems that the anarchists, lacking an adequate

theory of transition, could not compete with the communists or

socialists in practical proposals for the reconstruction of society.

Thus they were driven either into political and industrial struggles

outside their own ranks or back into the realm of the ideal, in which

they were unrivalled. By the end of 1946 the tone of the Heimin had

become more intellectual and idealist and more conspicuously

anti-Marxist than before. When SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied

Powers) issued an injunction against a general strike prepared by a

Joint Action Committee of communists, socialists and their trade union

allies on behalf of the underpaid governmental workers, an industrial

offensive which threatened the overthrow of the conservative government,

the anarchist organ indulged in Schadenfreude by criticizing what they

called ‘the conservative nature of the strike of the bureaucrats (namely

governmental workers)’.14 SCAP sought to contain communist influence

among government employees by depriving them of the right to strike,15

to the relief of the government and to the delight of the anarchists,

who insisted that the civil servants were ‘the agents of

authoritarianism’. The anarchists, it seems, failed to see the nature of

the power wielded by SCAP, just as the communists had for some time

after the war regarded the American forces as an army of liberation. In

the meantime, the pre-war debate on the difference between 12 Published

in Shisd-no-Kagakuy December 1966. 13 Michio Osawa,

‘Sengo-Nihon-no-Anakizumu-Undo (The Anarchist Movement in Post-war

Japan) IV’, Jtyu-Rengo, 1 October 1964. 14 Heimin-Shinbun, 12 February

1947. 15 Ibid., 9 August 1948. 506

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN ‘pure anarchism’ and anarcho-syndicalism was revived,

and the resulting division within the handful of participants in the

debate led to the dissolution of the Japanese Anarchist Federation in

October 1950. The disintegration, however, should be considered against

the background of the cold war and the change in American policy towards

Japan. The implementation of the new democratic peace constitution gave

way to measures for the swift recovery of the national economy which

encouraged employers to take the offensive against the workers. The

virtual suppression of the Japanese Communist Party by SCAP in June 1950

preceded the outbreak of the Korean war, and the conclusion of the San

Francisco Peace Treaty in the following year cleared the way for the

return of war-time leaders in almost all spheres of national life.

Indeed, 1950 marked a turning-point in the post-war history of Japan,

and the decline of anarchism was only part of the general crisis which

threatened the Japanese Left about this time. THE STUDENTS The post-war

student movement had consolidated its strength by 1948, when the

students set up the Zengakuren (Zen-Nihon-Gakusei-Jichikai-Sorengo or

All Japan General Federation of Student Unions) with a militant

tradition already established through a series of struggles against an

increase in tuition and fees and against those whom they regarded as the

enemies of peace and democracy. Their relations with the Communist Party

were tenuous from the start, though their militancy was encouraged for a

while by the latter when the party, confronted with the Cominform

criticism of 1950, abandoned its previous policy of peaceful revolution

and adopted one of guerrilla warfare and armed insurrection. It is,

however, noteworthy that the students’ demands for ‘local communes’ and

their insistence that ‘it was high time to take over university power by

themselves’ can be traced to their struggles of this period.16 The

Communist Party’s futile policy of ‘extreme-leftist adventurism’, and

its dismal failure, left the student movement in low spirits and

confusion. It was not until 1956, when the revelation of the Stalinist

enormities in Russia stirred world opinion, that left-wing forces

outside 10 Akira Yamanaka, Sengo-Gakusei-Undoshi (History of the

Post-war Student Movement), Tokyo 1969, p. 154. 507

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI the Communist Party found strength to stand on their

feet again. In this year, what was called ‘the second foundation

congress’ of the Zengakuren was held, and it was decided that the prime

responsibility of the student movement was to promote the struggle for

peace. In the same year, the anarchists revived their Federation with

the Kurohata (Black Flag) as its new organ. Meanwhile, the cautious

response of the Communist Party to the events of 1956 (they regretted

that the criticism of Stalin had gone too far in Hungary) led to the

rise of ‘Independent Marxism’ which politically took the shape of a

Japanese Trotskyist Federation, formed in January 1957, soon to be known

as the Kakukjodo (Kakumei-Kyosanshugisha-Ddmei or Revolutionary

Communist League). In the following year, a muddled debate over the new

draft constitution of the Communist Party further encouraged the

‘Independent Marxists’ as the draft appeared too ‘nationalist’ and

conservative. Japan, it declared, was still a ‘semi-dependent’ country

‘half occupied by American imperialism’, and would require a two-step

revolution: a people’s democratic revolution through the establishment

of a ‘National Democratic United Front’ (itself a re-statement of a

similar ‘front’ advocated in 1949) which would allow an alliance with

‘national’ capitalists; and a socialist revolution which would follow.

It was under these circumstances that the revived Anarchist Federation

at its annual conference of 1958 reviewed its whole attitude towards

revolution. The delegates argued that the people would soon be forced to

choose between atomic death and social revolution, and peaceful

co-existence would only serve the interests of the rulers of the two

world states. They would support the militant students and workers ‘from

behind’ with an advocacy of ‘People’s Direct Action’ against the danger

of a nuclear war.17 The anarchists, however, remained a group of

devotees without allies. The workers on the whole were engaged in their

own struggles for higher wages, which they were assured as long as they

would work for higher productivity; while the militant students came

largely under the influence of the Trotskyist movement. From the

‘Renaissance’ of the student movement there emerged greater militancy

and vehemence in the ‘Main Stream’ or ‘Anti-Yoyogi’ faction (Yoyogi

being the name of the district in which the headquarters of the

Communist Party is located) of the Zengakuren. Militant students now

declared ‘the Kishi government, tied as it was to the forces of

international imperialism’, to be their ‘enemy at 17 Kurohata, 1

December 1958. 508

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN home’, and sought to turn the peace movement into a

class struggle. They saw ‘the crucial phase of a decisive battle in

class war’ in every issue that cropped up. A pattern of protest was

formed at that time, when the government, in a rash attempt to

strengthen the police system, failed to pay due respect to parliamentary

opposition, and thereby provoked extra-parliamentary opposition by the

indignant workers and students. The crisis was overcome by an agreement

among top politicians to drop the matter altogether: this was a

‘compromise’ (itself an immoral concept in Japanese terms) that appeared

to the students to be a criminal ‘betrayal’ on the part of the

working-class ‘establishment’, the Socialist Party and its ally the

Sohyo (Nihon-Rddd-Kumiai-So-Hydgikai or General Council of Trade Unions

of Japan), the major trade union federation. The range of negation for

the militants was thus greatly extended. The pattern was repeated on a

much larger scale, with more serious results in i960, when the nation

was given for the first time a chance to decide its attitude towards the

Security Treaty (or military alliance) with the United States. The ‘Main

Stream’ Zengakuren had tried to invade the premises of the Diet, and had

been at loggerheads with a National Council of socialists, communists,

Sohyo, and some intellectuals, who favoured orderly petition against the

treaty. In May when Kishi enraged his adversaries by rushing the

controversial treaty through the Diet with the aid of the police,

overthrow of his government and defence of parliamentary democracy

became the immediate targets of the national movement. Huge

demonstrations were organized almost daily around the Diet, and a series

of protest strikes was staged by the Sohyo and other unions, involving 4

to 6 million workers, with considerable public support. Although the

magnitude and vehemence of the protest led to the cancellation of

Eisenhower’s proposed visit and also to the resignation of Kishi, the

opposition forces failed in their primary object of destroying the

Security Treaty. And what had become of democracy? The Kurohata had been

appealing for a general strike. Now the anarchist organ commented that

‘we have learned by experience . . . that politics which plead for

democracy in the form of political parties, parliament, and political

power, must inevitably lead to dictatorship’. The Anarchist Federation

had joined with the ‘Main Stream’ Zengakuren in demanding fighting

rather than demonstrations, and in this, it claimed, they were supported

by ‘the people’ who had ‘surpassed’ those who had in the past acted as

their leaders. In this sense ‘the anarchist revolution had begun’, and

had been 509

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI suppressed by the National Council.18 Hence the charge

of dictatorship. However fanciful many of the anarchist claims may now

seem, there is a grain of bitter truth in their allegation: belief in

parliamentary democracy was now seriously shaken, and the gap between

the militants and the existing left-wing parties was unbridgeably

widened, especially as the communists condemned ‘Trotskyist* tactics as

responsible for the death of a Zengakuren student in a skirmish with the

police. The Kurohata also pointed out that the ruling party, the liberal

democrats, had amassed many votes by bribery and other means and

therefore the demonstrations around the Diet had also been directed

against ‘dirty politics.19 Yet there was a temporary lull after the

storm. As ‘doubling of income and ‘high economic growth* became not only

the shibboleth of the government but also the signs of actual prosperity

that marked the years after the i960 struggle, the unbroken rule of the

liberal democrats seemed assured in the Diet. At the same time the

oposition parties consoled themselves with the modest achievement of

retaining one third of the Diet seats, which would enable them to

forestall an attempt to eliminate the peace clause of the constitution.

The Zengakuren militants busied themselves with endless debates over the

niceties of revolutionary theories and tactics which divided and

subdivided their forces into warring sects. The anarchists seem to have

had second thoughts on the Zengakuren sects and the movement of the ‘New

Left* in general, which they thought were making their leaders into

‘little Stalins*. They were particularly suspicious of the Trotskyist

Kakukyddo (Revolutionary Communist League) whose allies among the

students, the Maruga-kudo {Marukusushugi-Gakusei-Domei or Marxist

Student League), had captured the Zengakuren executive. In fact, at the

general election for the House of Councillors in July 1962, the

Trotskyists put forward one of their leaders, a young philosopher who

preached a ‘subjective materialism* of human alienation. ‘Extravagant*,

said the anarchists, ‘is the farce of the Kakukyddo twisting

anti-Stalinism into a dogma, suppressing the creative opinions of its

members in the name of building a true and only party of the advance

guard . . . and enshrining its sacred founder in the bourgeois

temple.*20 The excitement of the early summer of i960 had by now been 18

Kurohata y 1 July i960. 19 Ibid. 20 Kurohata y 1 February 1962. 510

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN replaced by a bitter feeling of frustration among the

Left, which led to recrimination, confusion, and apathy, but also to

some soulsearching attempts to find a new basis for fresh and possibly

more successful activities. The socialists began to talk about ‘vision’

and (together with some communists) about ‘structural reform’. The

anarchists, too, launched an ambitious debate on ‘the need for

emancipating anarchism from the classical theories of revolution’. Among

the anarchist ranks, those who had joined the movement after the war had

by now come to the forefront of its activities. Masamichi Osawa, one of

the leading theorists of the younger generation, started questioning the

validity of the revolutionary ideas that his predecessors had inherited

from the 19th century. The cult of fixed principles had hampered the

revolutionary movement in Japan, he declared, taking his cue from

Professor Maru-yama’s famous analysis of the subject. In the pages of

the Jiju-Rengo (‘Libera Federacio’) which had succeeded the Kurobata,

Osawa dealt with the new type of poverty in mass society, dehumanization

or alienation. It was a novel argument, certainly among the anarchists,

and from it he drew lessons for revolution: the upper, rather than the

lower, strata of the proletariat would fight for the control, rather

than the ownership, of the means of production; multiplication of free

associations and communes rather than the seizure of political power

would be the form of revolution. The change, he went on, would be

gradually carried out through structural changes in various social

groups, in each industry, school and university, local community and

individual family; hence revolution would be social and cultural rather

than political, and arts and education would play an important role in

it.21 Osawa’s propositions were soon under attack as ‘an anarchist

variety of reformism’ or revisionism. He was rightly criticized for his

neglect of Japanese realities, the mixture of elements both new and old,

the contrast of modern technology and semi-feudal social relationships;

and it was indeed against this curious mixture that new revolt was soon

to raise its ominous head. The lively debate that followed, however,

made it clear that the anarchists agreed to differ on the vital question

of how to achieve revolution. THE VIETNAM ISSUE The American bombing of

North Vietnam which began in February 21 Jiyu-Rnego, 1 June 1965. 511

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI 1965, and the menace of total war thus created,

provided the occasion for the left-wing forces to intensify their

campaign against war. Thus they were able to recover from the effects of

the years of disarray which had been worsened by the impact of the

Sino-Russian dispute. As for the anarchists, however, their attitude

towards the Vietnamese war was rather complex: they believed, as the

Jiju-Rengo put it, that struggle for national emancipation in

underdeveloped countries would lead to world war rather than world

revolution, and nationalism in these countries would lead to national

capitalism in spite of its socialist mask. The anarchist alternative to

the nation states should be village communes that would provide centres

for the development of agricultural societies. Therefore, the anarchists

should work for immediate cessation of hostilities, and they were

prepared to join in forming an anti-war movement which would be a loose

federation of various left-wing opinions.22 In fact, such a movement had

just begun in the form of Betonamu-ni Heiwa-wo Shimin-Rengo (Citizens’

Federation for Peace in Vietnam) soon to be known as Beheiren, and the

anarchists, bearing the black flag, had participated in the

demonstrations which led to its formation in April 1965. Its founder,

Minoru Oda, who had studied in America, drafted what he called ca

Citizens’ Pact between Japan and America for Peace and against War’, in

which he declared for ‘international civil disobedience’. He

distinguished between ‘democracy for the people’ and ‘democracy of (and

by) the people’, and saw in the latter the principle of his own movement

which was to be translated into demands for direct democracy and direct

action by the citizens.23 Indeed, Oda’s views had much in common with

anarchism, but the anarchist movement as such does not seem to have

exerted much influence on the activities of the Bebeiren, which sought

to attract attention by publishing an advertisement for peace in the New

York Times and by actively aiding the American soldiers who deserted

while on leave in Japan. In 1965, the anti-war movement was further

accelerated by events which appeared to confirm Japan’s deeper

involvement in the war in Vietnam: her rapprochement with South Korea,

including close economic co-operation, and the dispatch of the Korean

‘Tiger’ Division to South Vietnam. Ratification of the treaty with South

22 Jiyu-Rengo, 1 June 1965. 23 Oda,

‘Genri-toshiteno-Minshushugi-no-Fukken (Rehabilitation of Democracy as a

Principle)’, Tertbo (Prospect), August 1967. 512

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN Korea was forced through the Diet in the teeth of

opposition both inside and outside. It was a repetition of the i960

struggle, another crisis in parliamentary democracy. It was said, argued

Osawa, that the government’s rash action was an ‘outrage’, but a bill on

internal security or on foreign and military affairs had rarely been

passed without such an ‘outrage’. Each time an ‘outrage’ took place, he

went on, a ‘threat to parliamentary democracy’ was talked about by

journalists, and two camps of party politicians inveighed against each

other and then contrived a truce. ‘This is the scene we have tirelessly

watched for the 20 years since the end of the war.’ He asked whether

parliamentary democracy could thrive at all in Japan, where class

division was so intense and involved that mediation or moderation

through parliament appeared almost impossible. Moreover, he believed,

parliamentary democracy was becoming outdated, as a dominant political

institution throughout the world and was sooner or later to be replaced

by direct democracy and federalism. So he urged his followers to raise

the voice of no confidence in political parties and the Diet.24 From the

protest against ratification of the treaty with South Korea was born a

new working-class organization called the Hansen-seinen-i

(Hansen-Seinen-Iinkai or Anti-War Youth Committee), which was soon to

provide young activists from the ranks of trade unionists to co-operate

with the Zengakuren militants in a series of direct actions against war.

It is true that the initiative in launching the Hansenseinen-i was taken

by the Youth Section of the Socialist Party in August 1965, in

conjunction with the Youth Department of the Sohyo and the Shaseido

(Shakaishugi-Seinen-Ddmei or Socialist Youth League connected with the

Socialist Party) with a view to creating a nation-wide youth movement

against the war in Vietnam; and militant trade unionists played a

prominent role in several demonstrations and sit-ins around the Diet

during the Korean Treaty struggle. In spite of the socialists’ pretence

of patronage, however, the new organization developed into a movement

for protest against the very existence of the Socialist Party and the

Sohyo. ‘Post-war democracy’, remarked one of the movement’s leaders,

‘has come to mean the existing political order for petit-bourgeois life

. . . “Democracy” has been emaciated into the petty act of voting, and

trade unions, which had been highly valued as a blessing of post-war

democracy, have become service organs which would secure for us

sufficient wages to maintain the standard of petit-bourgeois living

through 24 Jiju-Rengo, 1 December 1965. 513

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI “democratic” parleys between capital and labour.’25

Thus the campaign of the militant unionists against war was also a form

of protest against the ‘false’ prosperity of the workers. Moreover they

were ready for direct action in the streets, but apparently not in the

factories. Direct action in the factories was left in the hands of more

professional revolutionaries, the anarchists. They had, however, no

following among organized labour, and consequently their ‘propaganda by

deed’ took the daring form of a few determined men sneaking into a

munitions factory and cutting off the supply of electricity for io or 15

minutes. This was what actually took place when twelve or thirteen

anarchists raided a machine-gun factory at Tanashi, Tokyo, in October

1966. This raid, and another in Nagoya, were organized by a Behan-i

(Betonamu-Hansen-Chokusetsu-Kodo-Iinkai or Anti-Vietnam War Direct

Action Committee), which consisted mostly of anarchist students. This

body published details of the munitions industry in Japan under the

heading of ‘Group Portrait of the Merchants of Death’, and called for

‘factory occupation’ and ‘sabotage’ against them.26 Indeed, bold action

earned sympathy and support for the anarchist students, but some

anarchists distrusted what they called ‘the prelude to terrorism’ and

irresponsibility.27 In fact, the Behan-i soon disintegrated, with the

disturbing result that the leader of a group called Haihansha (Revolt

Society), who had taken part in the Tanashi raid, later became a police

spy.28 THE 1967-8 CLIMAX 1967 was the year when the militant students,

with the aid of activist workers of the Hansenseinen-i, started a series

of direct actions against the war in Vietnam: a sit-in demonstration at

the American air base at Tachikawa (Sunagawa) in May, and the ‘Haneda

Incident’ in October when, in an attempt to prevent Premier Sato’s visit

to South Vietnam, about 2,500 students and their working-class allies

clashed with the Kidotai (riot police) near Haneda Airport. Direct

action, which inevitably meant a battle with the well-armed police, now

fashioned the style of their protest: the students armed themselves 25

Keishi Takami, Hansen-Seinen-Iinkai, 1968, p. 131. 26 Behan-i (ed.),

Sbi-no-Sbdnin-e-no-Cbdsen {(Challenge to the Merchants of Death), 1967,

passim. 27 Jiyu-Kengo, 1 February 1967. 28 Asahi-Shinbun, 7 August 1969.

514

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN with wooden staves and helmets painted with the

colours and name of the sect to which they belonged. By this time the

Zengakuren had recovered from the chaos that followed the i960 struggle

and the ceaseless transmutation of its various sects now yielded

temporarily to relative stability, as the sects were grouped into three

Zengakurens, each with an esoteric name: the Kakumaru-Zengakuren

dominated by the Kakumaru (Kaku-meiteki-Marukusushugi or Revolutionary

Marxist) faction of the Trotskyist Marugakudo

(Marukusushugi-Gakusei-Domei or Marxist Student League); the Sanpa-kei

(Three School Faction) Zengakuren which consisted of three sects - the

Chukaku (Central Core) faction of the same Marxist Student League, the

Sbagakudo (Shakaisbugi-Gakusei-Ddmei or Socialist Student League),

consisting primarily of those students who had been expelled from the

Communist Party (formerly Communist Student League), and the Kaiho

(Emancipation) faction of the Sbaseido (Shakaishugi-Seinen-Ddmei or

Socialist Youth League), a body which had been expelled from the

Socialist Party but maintained its original aim of establishing an

alliance of the students and workers; and finally the Communist

Zengakuren which was then called the Heimin-Gakuren

(Heiwa-to-Minsbushugi-wo-mamoru-Zenkoku-Jicbikai-Rengd or National

Federation of Student Unions for Defence of Peace and Democracy) and

soon to be called the Minsei-kei-Zengakuren, Minsei being the communist

sponsored Minsbu-Seinen-Ddmei or Democratic Youth League. The above

outline of the Zengakuren may be confusing enough for the uninitiated;

it suffices to add that divisions could and did go further as

differences of opinion developed as to the degree of militancy or the

relative priority of each article of faith, such as anti-imperialism or

anti-Stalinism, or priority in actions, such as extra-campus struggles

or confrontation within each university. Indeed, the Sanpa, the most

heterogeneous of the three, later split, and the anti-imperialist

Zengakuren, a motley collection of Trotskyists and Maoists, emerged. It

seems that the students were utterly incapable of stable alliance, and

their intolerance was illustrated by uchigeba (internal violence),

physical fights between the sects and factions including several cases

of brutal beatings. The anti-communist Zengakuren remained a minority,

and the communist students, who took a more active interest in campus

democracy and student welfare, were said at the time of the Haneda

incident to have controlled nearly 80% of all the student unions.29 29

Asabi-Sbinbun, 9 October 1967. 515

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI In the following year (1968) the students’

extra-campus struggles ‘escalated’ as they fought increasingly violent

battles with the Kidotai: the massive demonstrations in January against

the visit to Sasebo of the American nuclear submarine Enterprise; the

raid on the Oji US Field Hospital in Tokyo; support for the stubborn

resistance of the peasants who refused to sell their land as a site for

a new international airport at Narita in the spring; and the riotous

demonstrations in Shinjuku (Tokyo) on ‘International Anti-War Day’ in

October when more than a thousand students and others were arrested.

‘The Opening of the Era of Direct Action’ encouraged the anarchists as

it coincided with the radicalization of student movements abroad, in

particular the ‘May Revolution’ in Paris. In Japan, too, ‘it is a

well-known fact’, remarked the Jiyu Rengo ‘. . . that university

education is becoming a process of mass production as in the factories,

and resistance to such tendency provides the mainspring of the students’

revolt. ... It is only natural that they should lead the revolt against

the system because they are intellectual workers under training, soon to

be sent to the key positions in the process of dehumanization now

developing. From this point of view we may say that the time will soon

come when the student movement will unite with the workers’ movement.’30

Yet the students did not appear anxious to co-operate with the workers.

Militant students, especially those in the Trotskyist sects, began to

regard themselves as the main army of revolution rather than the advance

guard or even the ‘detonator’ of the working-class revolution.31 STUDENT

POWER AND INTELLECTUAL TRENDS The immediate issue within the campus was

redress of such grievances as increases in fees, the internship system

for medical students, the reluctance on the part of the university

authorities to give full autonomy to the students in the management of

their hostels and union buildings, and more generally the inevitable

defects of mass education: enormous classes and overworked professors,

and resulting ‘alienation’.32 When the students believed that they had

dis- 30 Jtyu-Rertgo, 1 July 1968. 31 Koken Koyama,

‘Zengakuren-no-Senryaku-to-Senjutsu (The Strategy and Tactics of the

Zengakuren)’, Rodo-Mondai, July 1968. 32 It is interesting to note that

the students did not complain much about the 516

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN covered the ultimate cause of their complaints in

‘alienation’ and combined this with theoretical ‘situations’ provided by

Japanese ‘Monopoly Capitalism’, ‘American Imperialism’, and ‘Russian

Stalinism’, it required little mental exercise for them to conclude that

they should strive for revolution, even world revolution, total negation

of all their enemies. Yet this mental process, which is in fact more

nihilist than anarchist, wrought havoc in the Japanese universities. At

the height of the campus disputes it was estimated that i io out of the

489 universities in Japan were in serious trouble, nearly a half of them

occupied by the students.33 One of the strongholds of student power was

Nichidai or Nihon University, the largest example of ‘private

enterprise’ in education, where irregularities in university finance

incurred the wrath of a good many of its 86,000 students, who repudiated

the spirit of ‘money-making’ in a ‘mass-production university’.34

Another, and more symbolic, battlefield was provided by Todai or Tokyo

University, where a dispute over the status of graduate students in the

notoriously autocratic faculty of medicine and an allegedly erroneous

judgement passed by the governing board on one of the militant students

led to devastation of much of the campus. The movement for student power

was led by an organization called Zenkyoto (Zengaku-Kyoto-Kaigi or All

University Council for United Struggle). This body, a loose alliance of

some of the anticommunist sects (especially the Chukaku) and ‘non-sect’

radical students, attracted attention when the disputes at Nichidai and

Todai took a serious turn in May-June 1968. A Zenkyoto sprang up in each

storm-centre and was acclaimed by its supporters as an excellent example

of the activists uniting with the ‘student masses’. After the dramatic

battle fought between the Zenkyoto students who had occupied the Yasuda

Auditorium of Tokyo University, and the Kidotai who attacked them from

the land and the air, their influence further extended, and occupation

of many other campuses followed. The National Federation of Zenkyoto,

which was set up at a rally held at Hibiya Park in September 1969,

appeared perhaps most menacing of all the student organizations, an

alliance of eight offshoots of the former Sanpa-kei-Zengakuren. Yet the

National defects of meritocracy: the intense competition for more

promising schools, universities, and jobs, which distorted their

adolescent life. 33 Asahi-Shinbun, 4 August 1969. 34

Hangyaku-no-Barikeido {Barricade for Revolt), 1968, passim. 517

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI Federation was a sign not of the strength but of the

weakness of each sect. Yoshitaka Yamamoto, the leader of the

Todai-Zenkyotd, who came to take the chair at the rally, was arrested by

the Kiddtai -it was reported that he ‘even seemed to have come to be

arrested’.35 Yamamoto, then a 27-year-old graduate student of physics,

had played an important part as a ‘non-sect’ radical in co-ordinating

the warring sects of the ‘New Left’. The ideology of those whom he

represented has been described as that of ‘self-negation’, ‘a subspecies

of anarchism’.36 In his opinion, campus occupation with barricades

signified ‘negation of the university which produces men to serve

capital as if in a factory, and also negation of the existence of

students whose only future was to be cogs in the power machine thus

created’. Occupation of professors’ studies and research laboratories

had to be carried out as an act of negation of scientism, which he

regarded as the achievement of the ‘hollow’ post-war democracy and also

as a prop of neo-imperialism. The university struggle was only ‘a form

of manifestation of social contradictions’ - therefore ‘there is no

half-way house in the struggle before the establishment of student

power’, the ‘power of fighting students with a clear perception of the

whole social struggle’.37 A mixture of elitism and nihilism can easily

be discerned in these bold assertions. Characteristically, he took

little interest in history. These peculiarities would explain the

absence of reference in his writings to a theory of transition. Indeed,

history meant to him and to his fellow students only the history of the

ignominious post-war democracy that ought to be rejected if possible by

direct action. When action seemed doomed, it appears, he surrendered

himself, an act which could be construed as motivated again by the same

spirit of negation. The activist students, especially ‘non-sect’

radicals, sought emotional as well as theoretical justification of their

action in the translations of Marcuse, Guevara, and Cohn-Bendit. Their

intellectual needs were also met by some Japanese writers, such as

Takaaki Yoshimoto with his doctrine of the state as a system of communal

illusions, and Goro Hani with his panegyric of autonomy in free

universities as well as free cities. Yoshimoto has been referred to as

‘an anarchist intellectual’, and has published An Ode of Resistance in

support of the anarchist 35 Asahi-Shinbuny 5 September 1969. 30 Shingo

Shibata (ed.), Gendai-Nihon-no-Rjadikari%umu (Japanese Radicalism

Today), Tokyo, 1970, pp. 342, 346. 37 Yamamoto, op. cit., pp. 86, 92,

138. 518

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN Behan-i (Anti-Vietnam War Direct Action Committee).

The son of a shipwright, he was very much concerned with the indigenous

ideas and attitudes, the hopes and sorrows of the silent masses. His

wartime experience taught him to tackle seriously the doctrine of

ultranationalism which he regarded as highly suggestive for a pure

theory of the state. His studies of Marx after the war led him to

conceive of the state as illusion or fantasy: the political state, as he

saw it, was a ‘communality reached through evolution of religious

alienation’.38 Yoshimoto was against classical Marxism of ‘class’ and

‘proletariat’, and assigned to the intellectuals the role of

assimilating the unexpressed desires of the masses and standing up

against the system of common illusion, the state. The ‘old’ Marxist Hani

exerted considerable influence on the activist students through his

popular book The Logic of the Cities (1968), which is said to have sold

800,000 copies in one year, and through other writings and speeches. He

pleaded for a federation of autonomous cities, the model of which he saw

in Renaissance Italy, and which he believed would provide the foundation

of future socialism. He held that the students, like the citizens of

free cities, had the right to arm, and did no more than exercise their

rights when they erected barricades in their universities. Hani was only

one of many apologists for the students. Under the post-war democracy

which the students detested, flourished the type of publishing house

which specialized in ‘anti-system’ intellectual commodities. Indeed, the

intellectual origins of student power in Japan should be traced to the

combined influence of all these and similar writings. The latest

commodity in vogue was nihilism. Within the framework of nihilism and

the ideology of negation, the students were eclectic enough to pick up

novel ideas and slogans from whatever books and articles they happened

to lay hands on: ‘university commune’, ‘university revolution’, ‘the

illusory state’, ‘the role of the intellectuals’, ‘direct democracy’,

‘direct action’, and so on. At the height of student power, Osawa, the

anarchist writer, who was on the look-out for signs of anarchist

revival, welcomed what he called ‘the recrudescence of revolutionary

violence’. The ‘Epoch of Great Revolt’, as he called it, coincided with

the period of automation, and rationalization, and it is significant, as

he rightly pointed out, that ‘the first really rebellious violence’ in

post-war Japan should have occurred during the heroic struggle of the

armed 38 Yoshimoto, ‘Jiritsu-no-Shis5-teki-Kyoten (Intellectual Basis of

Independence’, Tenbo (Prospect), March 1965, 27. 519

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI miners against the closure of the pits at Miike in

i960. This was, however, a romantic view of the desperate fight of

unhappy men trapped in a declining industry, the rationalization of

which, under existing arrangements, resulted in the flight of capital,

leaving the men half starving by the unwanted pits. Osawa hoped that

‘revolutionary violence’ to which the students had resorted at Haneda,

Oji and Narita, would soon spread into the ranks of the workers. He

felt, however, that the ‘detonator theory’ of students’ violence had

little to do with anarchism. Violence would become oppressive and

reactionary rather than revolutionary, he said, ‘when it is separated

from the revolutionary masses and concentrated in the hands of a party

of the advance guard’, and also when it became excessive and constant.

It is for this reason that he called the violence of the anticommunist

Zengakuren ‘half revolutionary’. ‘Even if it succeeded, it would come to

a new Stalinism; if it failed, it would be absorbed by a new Fascism.’39

What Osawa feared was already taking place: there was frequent and

outrageous violence which became really oppressive; the Zenkyoto began

to lose the support of the ‘student masses’ as the campus disputes

seemed stuck in the bog of impossible demands and the real danger of

dissolution of universities loomed on the horizon. There were

extravagances everywhere, not only among the students but also

throughout the ‘New Left’. Oda of the Beheiren nonchalantly proclaimed

that he would start a citizens’ movement from outside to smash Tokyo

University if the Zenkyoto failed to destroy it.40 One sect of the

Shagakudd (Socialist Student League) called the Sekigun-ha (Red Army

faction), a body of three to four hundred extremist students, went so

far out of its senses that it decided to organize an army of revolution

to turn metropolitan Tokyo into a battlefield in November, 1969, the

date of Sato’s scheduled visit to the United States for extension of the

Security Treaty. According to this plan, ‘an armed rising and the

assassination of the Premier would lead to the establishment of a

revolutionary provisional government’.41 Their leaders were arrested,

and there were many other arrests throughout 1969, which almost crippled

the fighting capacity of the militant sects, though apparently not

enough to prevent the remaining Red Army students from hijacking a JAL

plane to Pyongyang in the 39 Osawa, ‘ Yomigaeru-Kakumeiteki-Boryoku

(Resuscitation of Re volutionary Violence)’, Kuro-no-Techo (Black

Notebook), January 1969. 40 Oda in Gendai-no-Me (Contemporary Witness),

March 1969. 41 Asahi-Sbinbun, 13 September 1969. 520

ANARCHISM IN JAPAN following year. The militants’ strength began to

collapse under the weight of their own provocations, especially under

the pressure of legislation they had provoked: the University Temporary

Measures Act which was rushed through in August 1969 after the already

too familiar spectacle of the government simply ignoring opposition both

inside and outside the Diet. Extravagance also marked the form of their

apostasy. One of the leaders of the Anti-Yoyogi Zengakuren at the time

of the i960 struggle is known to have received funds from right-wing

sources and he later became the manager of a yacht training club. It is

indeed an ominous sign that Zenkyoto’s ‘irrationalism’ was admired by a

novelist of the new Fascism.42 The new radicalism of the ‘New Left’ had

sprung up mainly because post-war democracy had not functioned as its

critics thought it should. The militants’ protests and direct action

appear to have contributed to the impairment of the already weakened

democratic institutions and practices. It was of no use the anarchists

holding out the millenarian mirror of direct democracy, as if it were a

practical alternative to parliamentary democracy. The anarchists, like

many others, often had second thoughts. Some of them despaired of the

‘emotional rebels’, and proposed a more realistic attitude towards

political democracy and Marxism. The voice of realism, however, was too

weak to make much impression at the time. As for the students’ revolt in

the late 1960s, it was clearly not anarchism as such but emotional

anarchy of nihilism that sustained student power and its violence.

Anarchism, apart from the ‘pure’ type which is always inclined to

terrorism, has played the role of a sympathetic critic of the ‘New

Left’, although the anarchists’ sympathy with direct action, especially

at an early stage of student power, seems to have somewhat blunted the

edge of their criticism. In fact, they remained as critics of the

political left, both new and old. In this respect, the views of Tatsumi

Soejima, a doll-maker and an anarchist of 40 years’ standing, expressed

shortly before his death in 1963, are worth recording: ‘I cannot imagine

a social revolution taking place in human history. All the revolutions

of the past were political revolutions, and so will those of the future

be. Anarchism, which denies political revolution, will become a moral

force and deal with the problem of how to live, and I believe in such

anarchism. ... I do no mean that there ought not to be a political 42

Shibata (ed.), op. cit.y 40. 521

CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI revolution; it is a necessity, and the essence of

anarchism lies in how to participate in that revolution.’43 Although the

new generation of anarchists is still groping its way towards new

theories of autonomy and federation, anarchism itself, it seems, has

become somewhat ethical, and this is no doubt its strength as well as

its weakness. 43 Jiyu-Rengo, i February 1963. 522