On April 28, 2013, the Japanese government conducted the ‘Ceremony to Commemorate the Regaining of Sovereignty and Return to the International Community’ in an effort to resurrect this forgotten date in national memory. The ceremony came in the wake of the March 2011 natural and nuclear disasters, which seemed to signal the closure of Japan’s long ‘postwar’ that formed in the mid-1950s, defined by subordinate independence to the US and a national identity based on technical and economic prowess. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) led by Abe Shinzō returned to power and quickly countered with its ‘Abenomics,’ sending stock prices soaring. It also resumed its political campaign to ‘break away from the postwar regime,’ giving rise to the amnesic celebration of April 28.

‘Sixty-one years ago today, Japan started to walk with our own strength again. It was the day when Japan regained its sovereignty and Japanese people regained Japan as our own country with the effectuation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty,’ the prime minister’s statement read. ‘What did our grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, and mothers feel when sovereignty was regained in 1952?’ Characterizing the seven-year occupation as a humiliating blemish on Japan’s long history, he called on every Japanese to ‘deeply think about’ this question. Citing Emperor Hirohito’s poem about resolute perseverance in the face of the foreign occupation which spoke for the Japanese people, the answer was a given: after enduring the unendurable defeat and occupation, they embraced the peace and independence that finally arrived.¹ As protests against this effort to enshrine April 28 as the triumphant ‘return’ of Japan on the international stage showed, memories of the heavily contested nature of ‘peace and independence’ at this historic moment remained alive. The anger was especially strong in Okinawa, where the date has been remembered as the ‘day of humiliation’ when the islands were abandoned under US military occupation while mainland Japan regained nominal independence. In 1952, among the protestors in the ‘Bloody May Day’ three days after this ‘day of humiliation’ was a group of Okinawan students marching with a placard reading ‘Immediately return Okinawa, Amami, and Ogasawara islands to Japan. Yankee go home from OKINAWA.’² On mainland Japan, the idea of April 28, 1952, as the ‘day of humiliation’ was shared by student radicals of Zengakuren (All Japan Federation of Student Governments) and other leftists associated with the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) during the early 1950s.

The plaza fronting the Imperial Palace had been transformed into a sacred imperial space during the militarization of the early part of Emperor Hirohito’s reign. Patriotic crowds wept and conducted banzai salutes in the plaza as the supreme military god Emperor Hirohito appeared on his white horse on the bridge above to commemorate victories. When the war ended in defeat, loyal subjects arrived to prostrate themselves to repent for their inadequate efforts. The first official gathering conducted in the space after the defeat was the inauguration ceremony of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), the imperial government’s official brothel for the incoming occupation forces with the sacred mission of protecting the ‘chastity of the race.’ Douglas MacArthur’s General Headquarters (GHQ) soon established itself in the Dai-ichi Life Insurance building overlooking both the plaza and the palace behind it. The ‘dikes of chastity’ of the RAA proved powerless and the formerly sacred space became a ‘space of love’ where occupation soldiers openly engaged in amorous acts with their Japanese girls. Military parades were conducted by the occupation forces and their soldiers and jeeps became fixtures in the area.³

Japanese leftist forces also poured into the space, conducting mass May Day rallies where the rising sun flag was replaced with the red flag, and the ‘Kimigayo’ Imperial national anthem was replaced with the ‘Internationale.’ In contrast to the constant silence of Emperor Hirohito, the raucous leftist rallies were overflowing with words, including calls for the abolition of the emperor system. After a brief period of peaceful coexistence of the occupation forces and Japanese leftist forces, the cancellation of the general strike in February 1947 became a turning point leading to their eventual clash. The term ‘People’s Plaza’ came to be used by the leftist forces to stress their claim to the politically contested space over both the Emperor and the occupation forces.⁴ Three days after the occupation formally ended, the intensifying conflict between the ruling government seeking to reestablish its control over the plaza and the nation, and the leftist forces seeking to counter such efforts, culminated in a bloody clash that turned the grounds into a battlefield and overshadowed the underwhelming celebrations of ‘peace and independence’ of April 28, 1952.

‘Today the 28^th is a day of historical importance….It is the day when Japan emerges from defeat to become independent and start anew,’ the Asahi Shinbun proclaimed in its April 28, 1952, morning issue. At 10:30 PM, the moment the American occupation ended and independence formally restored to the Japanese nation, the national anthem played on radios, temple bells rang through the night, and at the Imperial Palace Plaza, a small crowd of about 20 people shouted ‘Long live the Emperor!’ ‘Long live the Japanese nation!’ Cabarets and bars in Ginza awaited customers with lanterns inviting people to ‘celebrate the peace treaty.’ Some shops prepared large amounts of champagne for the festivities. But there were few celebrators and independence turned out to be a decidedly anticlimactic event. The newspaper described Tokyo at this ‘historic moment’ as ‘quiet beyond expectation.’⁵ The quiet did not last long.

On April 28, 1952, Zengakuren students conducted a ritual wake for Japan’s independence. Ignoring the prohibition of the march by school authorities, students of Tokyo University marched around campus carrying the national flag with mourning crepe, forced open the main gate and welcomed in a group of students from other universities. The flyer distributed at the rally read:

We respectfully mourn the loss of Japan’s independence! With the traitorous treaties and administrative agreement, Japan has become a colony. The Japanese people shall never be able to forget this day the 28^th. The lives of people are dark, and many women that we love have fallen to become jeep girls. All people are resolved never to forget this day the 28^th, the day of humiliation, the day of darkness. We shall fight. We believe the nation’s students will fight for peace instead of becoming slaves and scream ‘voices from the sea.’ We believe that the day of our victory is near. People of the nation. Crush the Anti-Subversive Act of war and subservience! Protect campus self-governance and academic freedom!⁶

Such virulently anti-American discourse derived from Zengakuren’s ‘anti-imperial struggle’ of 1950 that the JCP leadership repeatedly sought to suppress as ‘leftist adventurism’ by petit bourgeois factionalists (see Chap. 3). The JCP later adopted this discourse and paired it with the military struggle of the new platform of 1951 , mobilizing Zengakuren students into off-campus operations and alienating them from the Japanese and student masses (see Chap. 4). The widespread Zengakuren protests against the Red Purge in 1950 contrasted sharply with the small scale of campus protests during the following two years, when the San Francisco Peace Treaty and US-Japan Security Treaty were signed and went into effect. The sense of ‘darkness’ and ‘humiliation’ of Zengakuren students as the occupation ended was reinforced by their marginalization and powerlessness at this historically important moment.

On the day independence was restored, the Minister of Welfare repeated his prohibition of the use of the Imperial Palace Plaza for the May Day celebrations planned for May 1, defying the court order of the same day nullifying the ban. Denied access to the ‘People’s Plaza,’ the major May Day rally in Tokyo took place within the grounds of the Meiji Shrine. Thousands of people held placards protesting remilitarization, the deterioration of workers’ economic conditions, police intrusion into university campuses, the US retention of Okinawa, and ‘April 28—the Day of National Humiliation.’ As the rally drew to a close, agitators goaded the crowd to continue their march to the forbidden plaza in front of the Imperial Palace. Several groups of demonstrators marched to the palace and entered the plaza. Bloodshed ensued as police violently attacked the crowd with batons, tear gas, and pistols. A young worker and a university student were killed in the clash.

Mainstream newspapers such as the Asahi Shinbun provided similar accounts of the ev...