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Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage & Grief: Hamaya Hiroshi's Photos of the Anti-Security-Treaty Protests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Justin Jesty  and
John Dower
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In earlier issues of APJ, we introduced three image-driven treatments of protest in prewar and postwar Japan: Andrew Gordon, “Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905”; Christopher Gerteis, “Political Protest in Interwar Japan: Posters & Handbills from the Ohara Collection (1920s-1930s,” part 1 & part 2; Linda Hoaglund, “Protest Art in 1950s Japan: The Forgotten Reportage Painters.” The following “visual essay” by Justin Jesty, also from MIT's online Visualizing Cultures project [visualizingcultures.mit.edu], addresses perhaps the most famous of all 20th-century Japanese political protests: the 1960 demonstrations against renewal of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty. Based on unrestricted access to the classic photojournalism of Hamaya Hiroshi, “Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage and Grief” is a vivid reminder of the breadth and dynamism of grassroots movements in early postwar Japan.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 9 , March 2015 , e2
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2015

References

Notes

1 Snow Country (Yukiguni) (1956) and Japan's Back Coast (Ura Nihon) (1957) are Hamaya's signature works. They cemented his reputation in the 1950s and represent major contributions to the history of photography in Japan. In addition to these, he had published Observations of China (Mite kita Chūgoku) (1957), Poetry's Home (Shi no furusato) (1958), and A Children's Regional Chronicle (Kodomo fudoki) (1959). Hamaya became a contributing photographer to Magnum in 1961. Contributing photographers were defined as “independent photographers who have been close friends of Magnum,” and included Ansel Adams, Philippe Halsman, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Herbert List, and Wayne Miller. (In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, p. 454.)

2 As laid out in a foundational document of U.S. occupation policy, “U.S. Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan (SWNCC150/4/A).”

3 Dower, John. Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1951 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard, 1979), p. 394.

4 Welfield, John. An Empire in Eclipse: Japan in the Postwar American Alliance System (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 25.

5 Quoted in Dower, “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems,” in Postwar Japan as History, edited by Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993), p. 11.

6 September 21, 1952. Reproduced in Shiryō sengo nijūnenshi: shakai (vol. 5) (Documents of Twenty Years of Postwar History: Society), edited by Shimizu Ikutarō, et al (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1966), p. 118.

7 Dower, John. Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1951 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard, 1979), p. 384.

8 Wada Susumu, “Keizai taikokuka to kokumin ishiki no henbō (Change in Public Opinion amid Japan's Growing Economic Prowess),” in Kenpō kaisei hihan (Critique of Constitutional Revision), edited by Watanabe Osamu, et al. (Tokyo: Rōdō Junpōsha, 1994), and Tsurumi Shunsuke, “Seishin kakumei no jitsuzō (The realities of the Spiritual Revolution),” in Sengo Nihon senryō to sengo kaikaku: sengo shisō to shakai ishiki (Occupation and Reform in Postwar Japan: Postwar Thought and Social Consciousness), edited by Nakamura Masanori, Amakawa Akira, Yoon Keun Cha, and Igarashi Takashi, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), iii, p. 14. Cited in Mari Yamamoto, Grassroots Pacifism in Post-war Japan: the Rebirth of a Nation (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), p. 215.

9 In Mari Yamamoto, Grassroots Pacifism in Post-war Japan, p. 114.

10 Ibid., pp. 115-16.

11 Packard, George R. III. Protest in Tokyo: the Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 261.

12 See Sasaki-Uemura, Wesley. Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), pp. 118-126.

13 On student movements in the 1950s, see Hasegawa Kenji, “Waging Cold War in 1950s Japan: Zengakuren's Postwar Protests,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2007).

14 Ibid., p. 151.