Commentary | Nick Kapur, When Revolutions Fail
In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters hoping to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2020, commentators in Japan immediately compared the incident to an incident that took place in Tokyo six decades ago—the storming of Japan’s National Diet by radical student activists at the height of the Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in June 1960. On the surface, both incidents appeared similar enough: groups who had lost faith in legal, legislative, and electoral remedies for their complaints had chosen attacking the main symbol of their state’s democracy as an alternative means for expressing their dissent; and in both cases a young female member of the invading group was killed in conflict with the police. A consideration of significant differences between the two events reveals how this type of facile, one-to-one comparison is off the mark. At the same time however, broader similarities in the public reaction to the two events and a close examination of the Japanese case may hint at some consequences for American society going forward.
As I detail in my recent book, Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo, the 1960 protests in Japan were the largest and longest series of popular protests in Japan’s modern history, involving an estimated 30 million people (approximately one third of Japan’s population at the time) in some kind of protest activity.[1] At issue was an attempt by the conservative government of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke to pass a revised version of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (known colloquially as “Anpo” in Japanese)—the treaty which to this day continues to allow U.S. military forces to be based on Japanese soil. Over a period of more than a year, a broad, nationwide mass movement arose in opposition to the treaty, bringing a range of leftist political parties, labor federations, and student groups into coalition with more centrist civic organizations and even some conservative groups that opposed the treaty on nationalist grounds.
Unable to make headway in passing the treaty through the National Diet using ordinary parliamentary procedures in the face of popular opposition and stalling tactics by the opposition parties, Prime Minister Kishi on May 19, 1960 took the drastic step of violating longstanding parliamentary norms by suddenly cutting off debate and calling for a snap vote on the treaty. When members of the opposition Japan Socialist Party attempted a sit-in in the halls of the Diet, Kishi shocked much of the nation by having his political opponents physically removed from the Diet by police and passing the treaty via a voice vote with only some members of his own Liberal Democratic Party present. Kishi thereafter had his party approve a Diet recess, because parliamentary rules at the time dictated that a treaty passed by the Lower House of the Diet would automatically be approved 30 days later if not voted on by the Upper House.
Kishi’s anti-democratic actions on May 19 outraged much of the nation, and thereafter the anti-treaty protests reached their greatest size, as hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens took to the streets in cities across the nation on a near-daily basis over the next 30 days in a last-ditch effort to stop the treaty as well as to get Kishi and his cabinet to resign. At the climax of these protests on June 15, right-wing counter-protesters attacked peaceful marchers with spiked staves, injuring 80. A few hours later, leftist student activists from Zengakuren, the nationwide student federation, forced their way into the Diet compound, precipitating a bloody battle with police in which a female Tokyo University student named Kanba Michiko was killed. In the aftermath of the violence, the treaty still passed automatically on June 19, but Kishi was forced to resign in disgrace, and a planned visit to Japan by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower was humiliatingly cancelled for fears that his safety could not be guaranteed.
Like Donald Trump, Kishi was an extremely polarizing figure. A member of Tōjō Hideki’s wartime cabinet, he had been imprisoned by U.S. Occupation authorities as a suspected class-A war criminal following Japan’s defeat, only to be later depurged as part of the “Reverse Course” and returned to power with the assistance of the United States, which in a new, Cold War context, favored his anti-communist stance. Promising to restore Japan’s lost pride from an earlier era, Kishi energetically pursued revision of Japan’s 1947 constitution to remove its anti-war Article 9, and openly spoke of restoring aspects of the prewar system.
However, unlike Trump, Kishi did not instigate the assault on his own parliament. Rather, leftists stormed the Diet compound in an attempt to bring down Kishi and overturn his policies. Moreover, whereas Trump supporters were motivated by Trump’s entirely unfounded claims of electoral fraud, Kishi had, in fact, attacked democratic norms by ramming the Security Treaty through the Diet with only members of his own party present, such that even conservative newspapers had called for his resignation.
Most significantly, the underlying ideologies motivating the people invading their respective national legislatures were entirely distinct, and even diametrically opposed. Trump supporters who stormed the capital issued explicit threats of violence against specific politicians, inflicted deliberate damage to people and property, and explicitly sought to use the threat of violent force to intimidate or physically prevent politicians from carrying out their constitutionally mandated duties. Ideologically, Trump’s supporters evinced an admixture of white supremacy, religious activism, pro-capitalist anti-communism, and authoritarian, anti-democratic sentiments. In contrast, the student activists who crashed into the Diet compound in 1960 did not seek to overthrow their government or threaten violence against specific politicians. In fact, they did not seek to enter the Diet building itself. Rather, they sought primarily to “occupy” the Diet courtyard and create a media spectacle for the arrayed television cameras that might attract greater public attention to their anti-treaty cause. In their clashes with police, they specifically avoided arming themselves with any type of weapon or even helmets or body armor, in order to emphasize that it was the police who were the aggressors. Ideologically speaking, the students defined themselves as opposing monopoly capitalism, authoritarianism, fascism, and American imperialism. These stark differences, in terms of both behavior and ideology, render simplistic one-to-one comparisons such as those offered by various Japanese television commentators completely unhelpful and even deceptive.
That said, it is nevertheless instructive to review how popular reactions to the events of 1960 shaped Japanese politics moving forward and to ask what consequences ensue in the aftermath of failed revolutions. One broad area of similarity between the events of 2020 and 1960 was the nationwide shock felt across the political spectrum in the wake of these incidents (even if they should not have been so shocking—Trump’s supporters made their plans openly in public fora, and the Japanese students had tried to invade the Diet compound numerous times before). The much larger anti-Security Treaty movement in 1960 Japan did not support the Diet invasion, just as many Republicans did not support a violent invasion of the capital. This type of national shock inevitably produces a variety of consequences, despite the fact that the Japanese Diet-crashers did not succeed in stopping the treaty (indeed, the US still maintains military bases in Japan to this day), and the MAGA invaders did not succeed in stopping the certification of Biden's election.
The Japanese case in 1960 suggests that these consequences may be different from what activists on either the left or the right hope or expect. Shock at the violence of June 15, 1960 in Japan evoked an intense, unspoken pressure from a broad mass of ordinary citizens for a new consensus politics that would ameliorate the ever escalating partisan warfare that had characterized 1950s Japan and had culminated in the momentous clash of 1960. In this new atmosphere, both left and right “extremism” came to be tarred with the same brush. We may already be seeing some hint of this in the U.S., as conservative commentators attempt to direct attention away from extremist right-wing violence by drawing a false equivalency between the Capitol invasion and Black Lives Matter protests from earlier this summer.
The year 1960 did not mark the end of political violence in Japan. In the aftermath of the Anpo protests, right-wing ultranationalists embarked on a spree of assassinations and assassination attempts, animated by a belief that Japan was on the verge of a communist revolution. Meanwhile, far-left students continued to engage in more confrontational protest tactics, culminating in the university takeovers in the late 1960s and even a few splinter groups resorting to terrorism in the 1970s. However, events set in motion in 1960 pushed these groups ever further out of the mainstream as ordinary citizens increasingly recoiled from and rejected not only their tactics but their politics as well.
Ultimately, neither the left nor the right got what they wanted. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty has remained in place, but the ruling conservatives had to give way on constitutional revision, and Article 9 has still not been revised. Kishi was forced to resign, but by embracing an inoffensive consensus politics, the Liberal Democratic Party was able to cement its hold on power and push through new policies allowing the state to more effectively crack down on dissent and behaviors perceived to be radical, such as labor activism. Meanwhile, a feedback loop of ever-escalating police spending was created, and the mass media became even more amenable to supporting the government policies and state goals.
Scholars and textbooks typically pay the most attention to successful revolutions, seeking to understand their causes and consequences, but less attention is given to revolutions that fail. Insofar as failed revolutions are perceived to have been near misses by the participants, they can have revolutionary outcomes nonetheless, and we might consider other recent failed revolutions such as Tiananmen, the Arab Spring, the Turkish coup, and Iran’s Green Revolution in this light. Part of the change is undoubtedly brought about through conservative counterrevolution and adaptation, but also of crucial importance are the ways in which the revolutionary actors themselves perceive or misperceive their own movement, and intensify or modify their resistance or decide to become coopted and conciliatory.
So what happens when a revolution fails? Often, you wind up with significant social, political, and cultural transformation anyway, if somewhat quieter and easier to overlook. If the case of Japan after 1960 is any guide, we can expect a broad swath of Americans to push for “healing” and “reconciliation” and to recoil from any politics that seems too “divisive,” which may render certain types of reform more difficult. As for Trump’s supporters, we can expect some to retreat from extreme forms of activism as the consequences become more clear, while others are likely to be pushed to even greater extremes. We are also likely to see powerful players such as tech companies, the media, and corporations exert various forms of pressure in favor of a return to a more restrained politics. After the 1960 protests ended, the author and critic Haniya Yutaka bitterly lamented their failure, calling them a “revolutionless revolution” (kakumei naki kakumei). By this he meant that a revolution seemed to be occurring, but in the end no revolution happened. But we can just as easily read this the opposite way: that a revolution “failed,” but nonetheless society was greatly transformed.
[1] Nick Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1.
Nick Kapur is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden, and is a historian of modern Japan and East Asia with an emphasis on transnational and comparative perspectives. His research examines the intersections between political economy, culture, and international relations. He is the author of Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018).
To cite this essay, please use the suggested entry below:
Nick Kapur, “When Revolutions Fail,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, January 20, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/QCJZ2141.