The Anpo protests, also known as the in Japanese, were a series of massive protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960, and again in 1970, against the United States–Japan Security Treaty, which allows the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil. The name of the protests comes from the Japanese term for "Security Treaty," which is , or just for short.
The protests in 1959 and 1960 were staged in opposition to a 1960 revision of the original 1952 Security Treaty, and eventually grew to become the largest popular protests in Japan's modern era. At the climax of the protests in June 1960, hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan's National Diet building in Tokyo on nearly a daily basis, and large protests took place in other cities and towns all across Japan.
On June 15, protestors smashed their way into the Diet compound itself, leading to a violent clash with police. During the confrontation, a female Tokyo University student, Michiko Kanba, was killed. In the aftermath of this incident, a planned visit to Japan by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower was cancelled, and conservative prime minister Nobusuke Kishi was forced to resign.
A second round of protests occurred in 1970 at the time of the 1960 Anpo treaty's automatic renewal. Although shorter in duration, these later protests also achieved significant size.
Background
The original US-Japan Security Treaty had been forced on Japan by the United States as a condition for ending the US military occupation of Japan following the end of World War II. It was signed on September 8, 1951, along with the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, formally ending World War II in Asia. The Security Treaty went into effect on April 28, 1952, in tandem with the end of the occupation of Japan. The original Security Treaty had no specified end date or means of abrogation, allowed US forces stationed in Japan to be used for any purpose without prior consultation with the Japanese government, had a clause specifically authorizing US troops to put down domestic protests in Japan, and did not commit the United States to defend Japan if Japan were attacked by a third party.
The Japanese government began pushing for a revision to the treaty as early as 1952. The Eisenhower administration, however, resisted calls for revision until a growing anti-US military base movement in Japan culminated in the Sunagawa Struggle of 1955-1957, whereby a US Air Force base expanded into a nearby village.
Popular outrage in Japan escalated even further in the aftermath of the Girard Incident of 1957, in which US Army Soldier William S. Girard, for his own amusement, fired an empty grenade shell at a housewife salvaging scrap near the military base where he was stationed. This resulted in her death, Girard being convicted of manslaughter along with being subsequently demoted, and the US Supreme Court case Wilson v. Girard. This made animosity towards the status quo even more apparent.
The United States agreed to a revision, negotiations began in 1958, and the new treaty was signed by Eisenhower and Kishi at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on January 19, 1960.
From a Japanese perspective, the new treaty was a significant improvement over the original treaty, committing the United States to defend Japan in an attack, requiring prior consultation with the Japanese government before dispatching US forces based in Japan overseas, removing the clause preauthorizing suppression of domestic disturbances, and specifying an initial 10-year term, after which the treaty could be abrogated by either party with one year's notice.
Because the new treaty was better than the old one, Kishi expected it to be ratified in relatively short order. Accordingly, he invited Eisenhower to visit Japan beginning on June 19, 1960, in part to celebrate the newly ratified treaty. If Eisenhower's visit had proceeded as planned, he would have become the first sitting US president to visit Japan.
Origins of the protest movement
Many on the Japanese left, and even some conservatives on the right, were united in hoping to chart a more neutral course in the Cold War, and thus hoped to get rid of the treaty and the U.S.–Japan Alliance entirely. Therefore, even though the revised treaty was manifestly superior to the original treaty, these groups decided to oppose ratification of the revised treaty.