Another factor straining relations with the United States was rapidly rising concern over Okinawa. It is surprising that the separation in 1945 of Japan’s 47th prefecture from the rest of the country and its continued rule by the American military had not stirred up a quicker reaction within Japan proper. But in the early postwar years the Japanese in the main islands were too demoralized and too concerned with their own economic recovery to worry much about Okinawa. The Okinawans themselves were at first somewhat ambivalent in their attitudes. They spoke a decided variant of Japanese, closer to the ancient language; they had had a partially separate history before the late nineteenth century, having had their own kings; and they resented the second-class status mainland Japanese had accorded them before the war and the fact that they had suffered more heavily than other Japanese during the conflict. But American military rule soon made them the most patriotic of all Japanese, and they began demanding their return to Japan long before the rest of the Japanese became much concerned over the issue.
In the peace treaty of 1952 Japan had promised to support American proposals that Okinawa be made a trust territory of the United States, but it had soon become evident that the United Nations would not grant such a trusteeship. Secretary of State Dulles then began to speak of Japan’s “residual sovereignty” in the islands. The term came to be understood as a promise that Okinawa would be returned to Japan some day, when strategic conditions in East Asia permitted. But this remained a distant goal, and in the meantime most of the attention of the Okinawans remained focused on winning better economic treatment and more political autonomy.
In 1965, however, along with increased worries over the Vietnam war, there was a considerable rise of interest in Japan in the Okinawa irridenta, and within two years the clamor for “reversion” had become intense. In June 1968 the return to Japan of the small and lightly populated Bonin Islands, strung far out in the Pacific south of Japan, did nothing to alleviate the situation. It seemed intolerable to many Japanese that close to a million Japanese in Okinawa should be ruled by Americans in what amounted to the only colony in the world created since World War II. A comparable situation between the United States and its European allies was unthinkable, illustrating how unusual the Japanese psychology had been after the war, and also, perhaps, the racist attitudes Americans had brought with them to Asia. It became increasingly clear that a quick solution to the Okinawa problem was necessary.
Reversion was no simple matter, however. With the exception of the naval port of Yokosuka near Tokyo, the extensive bases in Okinawa were the most important American bases in all of East Asia, and while the Vietnam war was going on, there was great reluctance on the part of the American military to surrender full control over them. But political sentiment was such in Japan that the limitations of the 1960 security treaty would have to apply to these bases, as it did to the others, when Okinawa reverted to Japan. The Japanese called this the “mainland level” (hondonami) formula, and it meant no nuclear weapons and no “free use” of the bases for direct military action elsewhere without “prior consultation” with Japan—in other words, without Japanese consent.
The problem was finally solved in a communiqué issued by Prime Minister Sato and President Richard Nixon on November 21, 1969, which stated that Okinawa would soon be restored to Japan and that the limitations of the security treaty would thereafter be applied to the American bases there too. Since this would put the use of the American bases in Okinawa for the defense of Taiwan and South Korea under a virtual Japanese veto, Sato sought to reassure the Americans by mentioning in the communiqué the importance Japan placed on “the security of the Republic of Korea” and the “peace and security of the Taiwan area.” But most Japanese took great alarm at these statements, believing that they indicated a Japanese commitment to the defense of these areas and therefore signaled that the Japanese government was moving toward rearmament. The formal agreement for the return of Okinawa was signed in June 1970, and control over the islands finally reverted to Japan on May 15, 1972.
One basically extraneous matter that became related to the troubles over foreign policy in Japan in the late sixties was the worldwide student unrest, which reached its apogee in Japan as elsewhere in the world during these years. After 1960 the Zengakuren had splintered in a way typical of radical ideological movements. By the late sixties there were three main radical factions, each controlling the student movement in some universities or in certain faculties of universities, and all battling desperately with one another for supremacy. By this time the activists had come to wear brightly colored construction-worker helmets for purposes of protection and identification. They used square-cut wooden poles as their chief weapons and, on occasion, steel pipes and Molotov cocktails. Larger and better-disciplined student organizations were under the control of the Communists, the Socialists, and even the Soka Gakkai, but for the most part these remained out of the fray, though they were available for coordinated political action if the opportunity arose.
Student unrest derived from many sources, not simply from foreign policy. There was dissatisfaction with the universities themselves—their increasing tuition rates, inadequate student facilities, and general system of organization. There was also a great deal of criticism of the less desirable aspects of modern urban society that were becoming increasingly evident in an affluent Japan. Such attitudes prevailed throughout the industrialized world, but in some ways Japanese students were even more concerned with them than were their contemporaries in the West. Japan had become a socially egalitarian country, but one of strict educational hierarchies. A person’s future depended almost entirely on his or her education, and the pressure to get into the best universities, through extremely mechanical examinations, extended downward until Japanese children were subjected to the psychological stress of educational competition at the elementary school level. The university entrance examinations came to be known as the “examination hell.” Those who failed to win entry to the university of their choice on their first try commonly tried again and again, becoming what were called ronin, the name given to the “masterless samurai” of the Tokugawa period.
AP/Wide World
Rioting students, with variously colored workers’ helmets to distinguish different factions, meet a line of armored riot control police.
Once accepted into a university, students found classes boring and graduation almost automatic in a very lax, large-scale, and impersonal system. Many devoted themselves more to political agitation, hobbies, or sports than to study. Enrollments had increased enormously, but this increase had not been met by a corresponding investment in higher education on the part of society. Many of the new government schools were inadequately equipped and staffed, and the private universities were simply overwhelmed. The war had wiped out what endowments they might have had, and the lack of tax benefits to donors and the absence of a tradition of this sort of giving meant that private universities were almost entirely dependent on tuition and on fees for entrance examinations. On this wholly inadequate financial base they tried to accommodate about 75 percent of the student population. (By way of contrast, only about 40 percent of the university students in the United States, and virtually none in Europe, were in private universities.) Not surprisingly, almost all private universities in Japan were hopelessly in debt. The quality of Japanese university education was further impaired by the Germanic tradition of putting research above teaching and by faculty control, which resulted in weak university administrations and powerful faculty interests that discouraged innovation in teaching methods and the development of new fields of study. All in all, university education was one of the areas of most obvious trouble in an otherwise highly successful and smoothly running society.
Student outbreaks mounted steadily in frequency and violence in the second half of the sixties, until by 1968 a large number of Japanese universities were in serious trouble. Buildings were seized and vandalized, univers
ity officers and professors were held prisoner and tried by kangaroo courts, and pitched battles were fought between rival student groups or with the police. Prestigious Tokyo University was partially inoperative for more than a year, and many other universities were forced to suspend normal activities for months at a time. The chief object of student animosity was the universities themselves, but the students also seized every opportunity to oppose the Vietnam war, American bases, and the whole relationship with the United States. Starting in November 1964, American nuclear-powered submarines on guard in the Pacific had been allowed to enter American bases in Japan for rest and recuperation for the crews, and the protest demonstrations these visits had at first sparked had gradually died away. But when, in January 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, was unwisely allowed to enter port, it produced an outburst reminiscent of those of the spring of 1960. Student extremists were delighted to serve once again as the vanguard in a great anti-American crusade.
The rising excitement in the late sixties over breaking the relationship with the United States, combined with the assumption that LDP control of the Diet was nearing its end, gave rise to a feeling that 1970 would see a great political explosion and a drastic shift of Japanese domestic and foreign policies, but nothing of the sort occurred. The November 1969 communiqué promising the return of Okinawa defused this issue before it could become part of the expected conflict over the renewal of the security treaty in 1970, and in any case the security treaty battle never materialized. Because the Japanese and American governments avoided any proposals for change, the treaty remained automatically in effect; hence there was nothing, such as Diet debates or ratification procedures, on which discontent could focus. Most important of all, the Vietnam war showed signs of coming to an end. This was clearly signaled by President Lyndon Johnson’s decision in the spring of 1968 to put a limit on further increases of American troops in Vietnam and Nixon’s start of a slow withdrawal the next year. Although the war was to drag on until the cease-fire of 1974 and the complete collapse of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975, anxieties over Vietnam were already diminishing in Japan by the beginning of the seventies, and the war gradually faded as a major issue.
At the same time, student unrest waned as a significant political force. The public, remembering prewar “thought control,” had been extremely tolerant of student violence at first, and the universities, insistent on their long-established academic autonomy, had strongly opposed any police interference in university disorders. But gradually public opinion soured on the students. The probable turning point came on January 18–19, 1969, when the police finally laid seige to the main hall of Tokyo University, long held by students, and drove them out. On August 3 a bill was passed in the Diet that provided for the reduction of professorial salaries in long-disrupted universities and for eventual dissolution of the institutions if they could not put their houses in order. The result was a marked drop in serious disturbances.
Some student extremists remained active, but the bulk of their followers became interested in other things. The opposition parties, realizing that the public was disenchanted with student violence, took care to dissociate themselves from the remaining activists who, though reduced greatly in numbers, became all the more extreme and violent. Gradually they turned their attention away from the universities and even from the American defense relationship and focused instead on society as a whole. Divided into small sectarian groups, they turned to terrorism, including the hijacking of a jet on March 31, 1970; a murderous attack on passengers at the Tel Aviv airport in Israel on May 30, 1972; the bombing of the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Tokyo in 1974; and numerous bloody clashes between rival groups and executions of their own recalcitrant members. Student extremists of this sort had become irrelevant in Japanese politics, and only occasionally could they find causes that brought them back into touch with the mainstream. One such cause was the fight to prevent the construction of Tokyo’s new international airport at Narita, in which they were joined by local farmers and environmental groups. Starting in 1966, this controversy culminated in a violent fracas in 1971. The opening of the airport was successfully delayed until May 1978, with occasional violence continuing even after that.
Clearly, the “crisis of 1970” never materialized, but in its place a new set of problems arose. Unlike the frictions that had peaked in the late sixties, these were not inherited from the time of Japan’s weakness and the Cold War, but were more the problems of Japan’s success and of changing world conditions. American withdrawal from Vietnam soothed Japanese fears of becoming involved in that war. But, together with the disorders of the late sixties in American society, it raised doubts about the reliability of American defense commitments to Japan. These were not allayed by the ambiguities of the so-called Nixon Doctrine, first enunciated by the president at a press conference on Guam Island on July 25, 1969. Nixon seemed to be calling on America’s allies to take greater responsibility for their own defense. Henry Kissinger’s concept that there was a five-sided balance of power in the world, with Japan, Western Europe, and China joining the two superpowers to make this configuration, was even more alarming to a largely disarmed and strongly pacifist Japan. Constant American grumbling about Japan’s “free ride” in defense at America’s expense was also not reassuring. It seemed possible that Americans, in their disillusionment over Vietnam, would withdraw into their traditional isolationism, leaving a militarily weak Japan exposed and isolated. The original problem in Japan’s military relationship with the United States was being inverted. The progressives’ worries about becoming involved in American imperialistic policies were being overshadowed by the conservatives’ fears that the American alliance could no longer be depended on.
This unease almost turned into panic on July 15, 1971, when the United States suddenly announced that Kissinger had been secretly negotiating with the Chinese in Peking and that Nixon would visit China the next year. Since the Japanese government had faithfully conformed with American policy on China, despite strong popular pressure for recognition of the People’s Republic, and the United States had repeatedly assured the Japanese that it would closely coordinate its China policy with Tokyo, the July 15 announcement came as a thunderbolt and was promptly dubbed the “Nixon shock.” Some Japanese feared that the United States, in acting with such callous disregard of past promises and the difficult position of the Japanese government, caught in the past between American intransigence and Japanese yearnings for relations with China, was signaling its decision to dump Japan as its chief ally in East Asia in favor of China.
This, of course, was not the case. The American-Chinese rapprochement was basically the result of mounting Chinese fears of the Soviet Union and declining worries about American aggression in Vietnam, paralleled by a gradual mellowing of American attitudes toward China. It was exactly what the Japanese government had hoped would happen, but of course not in the way it did. When Nixon went to Peking in February 1972, he did not go so far as to recognize the People’s Republic, but the Sino-American thaw did make it possible for Japan to go a step further than the United States, extending official recognition to Peking. Tanaka Kakuei, who had succeeded Sato as prime minister in July 1972, did this in a visit to Peking in September. Japan, however, continued its highly successful relations with Taiwan on an ostensibly informal and private basis, a pattern the United States itself was eventually to follow when it recognized the People’s Republic in 1978. The Nixon shock had thus produced a situation that was fundamentally beneficial to the Japanese government and people, all but eliminating what had long been an area of serious political controversy in Japanese politics. But the thoughtless manner in which the United States had acted frightened the Japanese and left continuing worries about the value of American friendship and the reliability of its defense commitments. Japanese expectations that the United States, as the stronger member of the partnership—the
elder brother as it were—would treat Japan with special consideration, or amae as the Japanese call it, had been shattered. The worries Nixon’s action stirred up at this time were revived from time to time throughout the seventies by recurring American proposals for military withdrawal from South Korea, an area Japan looked upon as its vital first line of defense.
UPI
Tanaka Kakuei campaigning in 1976 for reelection to the Diet in his native constituency in Niigata, on the west coast of Japan, two years after he had left office as prime minister.
The Nixon shock had seriously damaged Japanese pride just at a time when economic affluence and revived self-esteem were making Japanese still more dissatisfied with the continuing inequality in their relationship with the United States and restive about Japan’s position in the world community. The splendid Osaka International Exposition of 1970 and the successful hosting of the Winter Olympics at Sapporo in Hokkaido in 1972 contributed to national pride, and there was talk that Japan should be made a permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations. But this was not enough. For more than a century Japanese had seen themselves as recent and still marginal members of an essentially Occidental family of nations, in which they might never achieve full equality. This Western orientation, and particularly the heavy infusion of American influence since the war, seemed to be pulling them away from their own cultural roots. A nationalistic reaction was only to be expected, and in the late sixties and early seventies there were increasing signs that one was beginning and that Japanese were turning back to certain more traditional attitudes.
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