Thread by @nick_kapur

The MAGA invasion of the US Capitol recalls similar events in Japan - the 1960 Anpo protests also saw an invasion of the National Diet and one woman killed.

I wrote a whole book on this!

A thread on similarities, differences, and consequences for US society going forward...

On June 15, 1960, radical left-wing activists smashed their way into the National Diet compound, precipitating a bloody battle with police that injured hundreds and killed a female Tokyo University student, Kanba Michiko.

At issue was arch-conservative prime minister Kishi Nobusuke ramming through an unpopular renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which is the treaty that to this day allows US troops to be based on Japanese soil.

(pictured: Kishi; Kishi and Eisenhower sign the treaty in 1960)

Like Trump, Kishi was an extremely polarizing figure. Part of Tōjō's wartime cabinet, he was imprisoned as a war criminal by the U.S. after WWII, only to be depurged in the "Reverse Course" and aided in his spectacular return to power by the CIA (since he was anti-communist).

However, unlike Trump, Kishi was not leading a rightist assault on his own parliament. Rather leftists were trying to bring down Kishi.

And while Trump supporters were motivated by Trump's completely unfounded claims of electoral fraud, Kishi *had* attacked democratic norms by ramming the treaty through the Diet with only members of his own party present, having had opposition lawmakers dragged out by police.

In sum, despite several superficial similarities, the underlying ideologies were completely different (even diametrically opposed) with the Anpo protesters being leftist, anti-fascist, anti-authoritarians opposing American imperialism, and the MAGA protesters the total opposite.

These stark differences render facile 1-to-1 comparisons like this one from conservative Japanese television channel TV Tokyo's "World Business Satellite" program completely off the mark:

That said, one broad area of similarity is the nationwide shock felt across the political spectrum in the wake of these incidents (even if they shouldn't have been so shocking).

The much larger anti-Security Treaty movement in 1960 in Japan did *not* support the Diet invasion.

This kind of national shock inevitably has consequences, even though the Japanese Diet-crashers did not succeed in stopping the treaty (the US still has 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 suggests that while these consequences might not be as bad as people fear, they will also not be as good as people hope.

While in the short term the GOP will not be able to indulge in the level of crazy they did under Trump, there will also be intense, spoken and unspoken pressure from a broad mass of Americans, many of them centrists" or else just not very politically-minded...

...for a type of consensus politics and a return to status-quoism. Both right and left radicalism will be tarred with the same brush (as we already see happening in the US).

This is the ideal breeding ground for the rise of a kind of milquetoast Bidenism, and will make enacting radical reforms more difficult in some ways.

As I describe in my book "Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo," while shock at the chaotic climax of the 1960 Anpo protests did force Kishi to resign and forced the conservative Liberal Democratic party to retreat from its most extreme positions...

...it did help the LDP cement its hold on power and push through new policies allowing them to crack down on dissent and behaviors perceived to be radical, such as labor activism.

In the end, neither the left nor the right got what they wanted. The true victors were the centrists who wanted a return to a newly re-imagined status quo of a "harmonious" "consensus" Japanese society that was in some ways liberal but in other ways stifling.

(Of course it takes only the briefest glance at Japan's long history of endless revolts, uprisings, protests, and riots as well as the 1960 Anpo protests themselves to give lie to the notion that Japanese culture is in any way innately "harmonious.")

For a much more nuanced discussion of these events and their consequences, you can read my book (it's on JSTOR!)

Or if you just want a detailed account of the actual protests themselves you can read this excerpt from the book's introduction here:

apjjf.org/2020/18/Kapur.…