Tokyo–
It had been the wettest monsoon season in decades, only the rats, frolicking in the sewers and among the mounds of garbage heaped on street corners in every machi suburb, had not wearied of the downpour. By mid-summer the city lay limp and mildewed, while down the New Tokaido in Osaka half the Expo ’70 pavilions had three inches of water on their floors.
Ampo Day – the day marking the automatic continuation of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty – broke murky and humid, but dry. And Tokyo, even by early afternoon, was jumpy, with a kind of seismographic expectancy in the air. The earthquake was coming, no mistake about that. The only question was: how long will it last and how much damage will it do?
Two days before, despite the deluge, nearly 150,000 people across the nation had protested the perpetuation of the treaty at more than 200 rallies sponsored chiefly by the Japan Socialist Party and Sohyo, the mammoth trade union council. There had been some violence – triggered mostly by radical student cadres who banzai-charged rostrums and commandeered P.A. microphones – and the riot police had clubbed their way in. They arrested 154 in all, 51 of them in the capital.
But this riffle of skull busting had been merely a squall before the typhoon of the main treaty protests. Ampo Day fell on a Tuesday, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had mobilized more than 14,000 extra karate cops to insure that the anti-Ampo (Ampo is acronym us Japanese slang for the security treaty itself) snake-dancers confined their venom to the swirling of red banners and the chanting of communist slogans.
The MPD riot corps is probably the best disciplined, and certainly the spookiest looking, force of its kind in the world. They resemble something straight out of a Burroughsian yage dream. Standing behind their eye-slitted steel shields (which reach to the shoulder, since the average cop is only five foot five), all one can see is a tough brown face masked in a plastic visor and encased in a black crash helmet. They have no visible firearms, other than tear gas guns, but carry long kendosticks – nasty tape-handled things effective both as a spear and as a bludgeon – at the ready. The feudal leather armor buckled onto their wrists and forearms adds just the proper samurai touch to their black fatigue uniforms. They never smile, and one has the feeling that they are the only people in Japan who genuinely hate baseball.
By one o’clock the U.S. Embassy, with its Everytown lawns, white stucco walls, Old Glory sagging in the Kanto smog, the ghost of Douglas MacArthur haunting the second-floor-front bedroom, had lost its gingerbread hauteur and taken on the air of a manor under siege. Horsey embassy wives were whisked away in official Chevrolets, snapping directions at white-gloved Japanese chauffeurs. A column of grey MPD goon buses had drawn up across the street from the embassy entrance. The buses are almost as sinister as the riot-breaker police they transport. They have no windows and are equipped with bulletproof tires. Their tops are laurelled with barbed wire to discourage the more acrobatic demonstrators. Four nozzles, which can dispense high-pressure jets of water, tear gas or red marking dye, protrude from a plastic bubble behind the roof of the cabs. Their drivers slump at the wheel, waiting, stiff and impatient. There is probably more money in pushing a kamikaze 130-yen taxi; but one gets the impression that, for these guys, it would be too dull.
More police lined the sidewalk all the way to the embassy annex, four blocks north near the Toronomon intersection and the Aeroflot ticket office. But these were not the elite. They were middle-aged and beyond, supernumeraries who once spelled GIs on Occupation guard duty nearly a quarter of a century before. Most of them looked as if they would rattier be home, lolling in summer yukata kimono, watching a dubbed Franchot Tone movie on the Sony color “tele-vee.”
By twilight there had still been no action at the embassy. Even the goon-drivers were yawning. But across the city the armies of the Lafcadio Hearn night were forming ranks. Their muster-point was a broad piazza in one corner of Meiji Park, literally in the shadow of the Olympic stadium. They came by Toyopet and Cedric, by Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha; by subway, streetcar, bus and electric train. The last three-quarters of a mile, from the Aoyama san-chome crossing, they took to foot. Chanting and weaving, five abreast with the front rank gripping a thick bamboo alignment stave, they advanced head to shoulder, double-timing in tromp-step cadence to the blasting whistles of their squad leaders.
Close at hand, swelling roars burst out of the concrete teacup of a baseball stadium where Rikkyo and Hosei – two universities whose student bodies are more interested in jock-strapping than in politics – were battling into extra innings. Counter pointing the guttural incantations of the serpentining marchers (“Ampo, funsai, toso, shori!” – roughly, “great victory over the treaty”) the crescendo gave one the feeling that an entire emerging generation – a generation that doesn’t give a Buddha’s damn about tradition, the Gross National Product or Expo – had lifted its voice in one cosmic, gonadal shout of rage.
They came, their legions undulating like animated kanji script, their shellacked helmets bobbing lavender, red, blue, pink, orange, white, yellow and black, by the tens of thousands.
Their uniforms were as distinctive as those of the riot cops who watched, silent and almost invisible in their black helmets, black fatigues and lifted face visors, from the shadows of the side streets and alleys. The traditional blue serge student regalia, with its celluloid collar and Toonerville Trolley cap, was nowhere in evidence. The marchers, male and female alike, wore sneakers and blue jeans. Colored towels, held in place by the straps of their plastic protective headgear and designed to filter out tear gas, masked their faces. It gave them the appearance – especially those who wore horn-rimmed glasses – of stray Venusians on a bad acid trip.
God, they were young. Some of them, high school students cutting class in favor of a one-day seminar in living Japanese history, couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16. The demonstration was coeducational, with a vengeance. The chicks – ranging in age and maturity from middle-school nymphets to cool, protest-wise college girls – were out in force. Their planed, earnest faces aglow with that sort of Pearl Buck-ish fervor that seems to be the special province of Asian women, especially angry Asian women, they held ranks solidly in the human-noodle dance, unabashed as male comrades gripped their plump scent, Levi-covered buttocks from behind.
All the factions were there, identified by the color of their helmets, as the armies – close to 100,000 strong now – hunkered down in the square under a canopy of hammer-and-sickle banners and tribal flags: the Nons, the Communist Improvication Vll, the MLs (the Marxist-Leninist splinter of the Zengakuren), the Kakumaru actionists, the Revolutionary Marxists, the Beheiren (Peace-for-Vietnam Committee), the Antiwar Youth Committee, the Chukakuha Middle Core, a few Old Guard Trotskyites, an all-girl contingent that could have been anything from the Daughters of Hiroshima to the Japanese version of the Sexual Freedom League, and even a couple of gawking GIs up from Vietnam on R&R furlough.
The rally, like the dozens of others being held throughout Tokyo and tile prefectures at that moment, was almost electrically anti-U.S. But beyond the occasional snarl of “Damn Yank!” there was little personal animosity directed at the handful of Americans on the periphery of the gathering. One tousel haired blond preppie – Holden Caulfield comes to Tokyo – slouched through the crowd, blithely recording it all with his Yashica. Angels, apparently, watch over toddlers, drunks andexpatriate Midwest teenagers.
The speeches took about two hours. Blinking under the glare of television lights, the communist and socialist speakers alternated on the platform. The oratory, shrilling over the static-prone sound system, varied little either in content or style. The deliveries were all terse, urgent and at times tinged with a kind of dental hysteria. The straight-arrow Japan Times in its edition of the previous morning (the English-language daily also predicted smugly that the leftists would assemble less than 100,000 at their Ampo Day rallies, missing the mark by at least 700,000) had remarked that the protesters were “only going through the motions” since the extension of the Security Treaty was already in effect after the expiration of the pact’s first decade. If this was the case it didn’t cool the forensic ardor one whit. The arguments against the treaty ran the standard Com-Soc gamut: it contributes to the tension in the Far East and puts Japan in the path of possible nuclear retaliation from America’s enemies; Japan must not continue to be a pawn of the U.S. imperialists, a lackey of the “murderers” in Vietnam; American forces on Okinawa, with their nuclear capabilities, have in effect enlisted Japan in an Asian atomic-terror club. Those bases, and the network of U.S. airfields and Army camps peppered throughout Japans could no longer justified on the grounds of “defensive” necessity. They had grown far too muscular for that. Like Ampo, the bases had to go. Ima – now!
While the speeches droned on groups of thirsty stragglers trekked off to slurp down Cokes at small neighborhood stores in the nearby Sendagaya district. Corner vendor wagons did a Fourth of July business selling soft drinks and hot dogs, the latter forked up besogged in soy sauce and featuring the world’s mini-est frankfurter, three inches long and about as big around as a sumo wrestler’s pinkie.
Now it was dark. A surrealistic ganglion of op-art vines in a floating neon jungle, the Tokyo signscape twinkled to life in the purpling smogopolis night. It was time to move out. The squads and companies and regiments of students regrouped, stilt-legged from three hours of squatting. In arm-locked, twisting caterpillar columns they churned out of the piazza. Behind the square the shadow cops, running easily, had moved into position to block any divergence from the agreed-upon route of march. From the very beginning it was obvious that they meant business. This was war – not a street theater Noh play. The MPD phalanxes would be stationed at every key intersection along the march to Hibiya Park downtown, feet planted wide, shields up, helmet visors down, brows beetled in the classic Yojimbo manner, buckled combat boots spit-shined and cocked for delivering a karate kick to the throat or groin. And in the front row, center, would be a police photographer, eager to get a fall-on shot with his flash camera, for later identification, of any attacker who got within range.
In the deserted square a hundred or more fires, lit from the carpet of communist propaganda throwaway sheets, flickered eerily. The smoke trailed toward the dervishing students as they zigzagged down the Aoyama-dori.
“Ampo, funsai, toso, shori!” The litany rose from 80,000 throats, primal and fierce. Some of the students took up the Internationale. They sang without shyness, showing white, un-bucked teeth; the sons and daughters of the New Japan.
The march had begun.
They moved like a cleansing wind. Their crusade banners, proud and lofty, rode the rising breeze from bamboo poles that cleverly unscrewed, on the order of trick pool cues, into three wicked clubs. It wasn’t long before those weapons were put to practical, and violent, use.
Past the Speed Shop, the Playmate Snack Bar and the Style New Affluence boutique the legions whirled. From plaster balconies and lanterned alleyways the work-a-day citizens stared. A kimono-ed oba–chan, her fiery-cheeked cherub of a grandson strapped to her back, shook her head in disbelief. Others, still flushed from long soaks in the public ofuro baths, stood with plastic rinse-basins under their arms, seeing for themselves what the younger generation was coming to.
Now the Meiji demonstrators were joined by additional thousands fresh from their own rally at Yoyogi Park, a long mile away. One hesitates to call an Asian throng of any kind a horde; but that’s what they were, damn it, the converging mass of marchers and the uncountable cast of extras tagging along on the sidelines. How many were there in all? Around 800,000? A million? More? Who could tell? The crack-the-whip rope of grunting, cursing humanity was so long that, star-ding on an overpass above, it made you seasick to watch them. One realized then why there were no sympatico elders in the ranks; because only the young and physically tough could stand the pace. This wasn’t so much a march as a sprint. The reason for the arms on-hip-in-front alignment became obvious, too: if you fell down in that mob you were dead, baby. And being trampled to death is not a nice way to die, even for a cause.
After less than a kilometer the battle erupted. A dozen Marxist-Leninist students burst from formation and charged the police. The cops, tucked behind their steel and plastic, were ready for them. Chunks of concrete, torn by hand from the street, thunked against the metal shields. Two Molotov cocktails – called kaenbi, flame bottles, by the Japanese enrages – splintered futilely on the payment, a yard short of the hunched MPDs.
It was all beautifully choreographed. The cops moved forward, quarterbacked over a transistorized bullhorn by their captain who stood, squat and vulnerable, in the Plexiglas command bubble atop a halftrack. The students retreated. The police advanced. The march resumed its frantic tempo. The police retreated to their original positions.
Far up ahead there were more skirmishes. Then the walking wounded began limping back, staggering through the curiosi who jammed the sidewalks. A high school kid – her mother probably thought she was staying overnight with a chum – held a dainty hand up to any eye that looked like a raw Kobe beefsteak. A cop’s kendo prod had found its mark. Other students, their foreheads bloodied and their faces that leaden-ash hue that usually portends a fractured skull, were half carried to the rear by their compatriots.
Somebody had screwed up the choreography. The dance was turning into a Donneybrook.
They thundered on, chanting in time to ten thousand shrilling whistles. Then the cops began using tear gas. The students drew their face towels tight, like highwaymen. They swung past the big dip at Kasumi-cho and started up the hill toward Roppongi, one of the several swinging quarters of the city that claims the distinction of being the “Greenwich Village of Tokyo.” The cafes and bars were shuttered. Even Mama Ginbasha’s Night and Day, a gaudy cabaret famed for its far-out john (the walls, ceiling and floors are solid mirrors, giving the illusion that ninety of you are in there at the same time) had bowed to the anti-Ampos and bolted its door.
This time the Marxist-Leninists, the militant Red and Whites, sprung to the attack with steel bars. Their helmets strapped tight, yelling through their towel-masks, they barreled head-on toward the Azabu police station. One of their kaenbifirebombs exploded inside the entrance. Flames rose. A policeman doused the blaze with a roam extinguisher. Another Molotov cocktail. “Eeee-taiii!” A cop was down, hit full in the face by the bomb. (Later it was feared he would lose an eye.)
The MPDs fought back, swinging their clubs with a kind of Zenisitic detachment. There somehow seemed to be nothing personal about what they were doing. One is born, one lives, one batters a few unruly students about the head and shoulders with a blunt instrument, one dies. Kwatz!
There was nothing impersonal, however, about what the Red and Whites were doing to the station police chief at that moment. They were trying to beat him to death. The chief, one Miharu Ogawa, had made the mistake of getting too far out in front of his men. The MLs grabbed him. Three hard punches and he was on the ground. Then a kick or two to the short ribs. The traditional riot script in Japan says that both sides can have their moment of face-saving glory as long as nobody gets hurt too badly. The Reds and White, however., had thrown away that script. Like the mutual Security Treaty, it no longer reflected the t1mes, or the mood of the “New Left.”
Counterattacking, the police pulled the badly mauled Chief Ogawa back into the comparative safety of the station. For a time it looked as if the militants would mount a new assault on the Azabu kiosk. But at that juncture a daredevil taxi driver, seeking a shortcut across the maze (the marchers had snarled traffic for more than five hours in all directions) whizzed right through the center of the battleground. Even the police, who understandably are not noted for their humor under fire, had to grin at that little number. For the time being the tension was broken.
On the students wended, through the vales of tear gas. They were growing weary and hoarse. After all they had double-timed for almost five miles. At the Akasaka crossings nearly a thousand MPDs were waiting for them. It was a natural trouble spot. The Sanno Hotels a U.S. military billet located smack-dab in the center of the Tokyo Millionaire Strip where land is worth about $3,000 per square foot, figured as a perfect target for the demonstrators. It had been hit often in the past and the police were fully expecting it to be hit again. And off to the northeast, only a few blocks away, the U.S. Embassy also remained braced for the worst.
There was a half-hearted scuffle at the intersection. But the snake dance had lost most of its wiggle, if not its bite. Nobody veered toward either the Sanno or the Embassy. The marchers pressed past the Diet Building. That imposing cairn of grey sandstone fairly bristled with police. Cordoned in front of super powerful spotlights, they look as if they would bust the first face that so much as even smiled at them wrong. Apparently word of the misadventure of Chief Ogawa had been relayed to them. Like police everywhere, they can get very uptight when one of their own falls victim to violence.
At last, running the final gantlet through nearly a solid half-mile of double-lined police, the students arrived at Hibiya Park. There were a few more desultory speeches, but only a smattering stayed to listen. Footsore and still blinking away the effects of the tear gas, yet sporadically intoning the familiar “Ampo, funsai, toso, shori!” they limped off, many of them, to catch a late train home.
But one group, the all-girl squad in the lavender helmets, was seeing It through to the bitter end. They sat there on the chill pavement of Hibiya Parks their heads resting on their knees, their helmets dished in a neat stack behind them. Three of the girls were bleeding from club blows to the face. The tear gas had left their eyes red and swollen.
They didn’t know it then, but of the 501 persons arrested nationwide that day, 73 had been women. Neither did they know that it had been the largest turnout of its kind in Japan’s history, nearly doubling the half million who attended the anti-treaty rally ten years earlier, when they were still in elementary school. Statistics, now, held little interest for the girls. They were sick and hurt – and maybe a little afraid to go home and face their parents.
With atrocious timing, a slightly drunk Japanese, a businessman type probably in his middle 50’s, began to lecture them.
“You are only children,” he said. “You have no reason to take part in a shameless demonstration such as this.”
The girls looked up at him. One of them – God knows where she learned it – said to him flatly, in English, “Go to hell.”
On that note, Ampo Day ended. The lavender helmet children, and a million of their comrades, had made their point.
Were you listening, Nixon-san?
Received in New York on August 20, 1970.
©1970 Darrell Houston
Darrell Houston is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This article may be published with credit to Darrell Houston, the Post-Intelligencer, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
