The events accompanying the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 aroused strong emotions among those involved, making it difficult for a long time to discuss what took place in a disinterested manner. Now, more than four decades later, the political is gradually being transformed into the historical, and a fresh look at this important juncture in Japan's democratic development seems possible.
The renewal of the treaty by the U.S. and Japanese governments, headed respectively by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, former minister of munitions in Tojo's war Cabinet and a convicted war criminal, was intended to consolidate Japan's position as part of the U.S. military empire. Many Japanese saw this as the first step toward remilitarization and the restoration of prewar structures, and when Kishi used police force to get the treaty passed in the Diet in time for Eisenhower's planned visit to Japan, a storm of popular protest erupted. The presidential visit had to be canceled and the Kishi government fell as a result.
The Japanese government as well as the American press, both firmly entrenched in their Cold War positions, consistently portrayed the protesters as a single-minded, violence-prone mob manipulated by the Socialist and Communist parties. In "Organizing the Spontaneous," author Wesley Sasaki-Uemura argues convincingly that such a characterization is not only highly ideological, but downright wrong.