The Alarmingly Short Distance From Five Million Voices to Twelve Bodies

In March 2026, two voices went silent in the waters off Henoko. During a protest against the construction of a new U.S. military base in Henoko, Nago City, Okinawa, two boats capsized, killing a high school student and a pastor. They were not wielding weapons. They were not occupying buildings. They had gone out to sea to make their voices heard. As I followed the coverage of this accident, I found myself tracing backward through decades of history. The trajectory of Japan’s left-wing movements is a story of ideals raised high, violence embraced, internal collapse endured, and civic revival attempted. What connects a 1960 student protester crushed outside the Japanese parliament to a high schooler drowned off the coast of Okinawa in 2026 is not ideology but the enduring tension between the right to dissent and the temptation of force.

Japan shook, quite literally, in 1960. The Anpo protests erupted across the country in opposition to the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. An estimated 5.6 million people participated in strikes, making it the largest political movement in Japanese history. Hundreds of thousands gathered daily around the National Diet building in Tokyo, demanding the treaty revision be stopped. The movement drew from a deep well of postwar anxiety. Only fifteen years had passed since Japan’s defeat, and the generation that had lost family members to the war was still in the workforce. The fear of being drawn back into military entanglements was not abstract ideology but something closer to a survival instinct. For international readers unfamiliar with this period, the scale is worth emphasizing: in the weeks surrounding the treaty vote, Tokyo saw demonstrations that drew hundreds of thousands on a single day. University professors, novelists, labor union members, housewives, and students all raised their voices from their own positions. The movement was not monolithic. It encompassed pacifists, socialists, communists, and citizens with no particular ideological affiliation who simply did not want Japan entangled in another conflict. Violence existed at the margins, particularly in clashes between demonstrators and police, but it did not define the movement’s core character.

One young woman’s death became the movement’s symbol. On June 15, 1960, Michiko Kanba, a 22-year-old literature student at the University of Tokyo, was killed during a demonstration inside the Diet compound. She was crushed to death in a clash with police. Her death shocked the nation and became a lasting emblem of the cost of political dissent. Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi resigned after the treaty was automatically ratified. At this point, the left-wing movement still commanded broad public sympathy. It was a movement of citizens, not extremists. The political establishment took notice: the treaty revision passed, but the political cost was enormous, and the subsequent prime minister, Hayato Ikeda, pivoted away from security issues toward an income-doubling plan that sought to defuse public anger through economic growth. The lesson appeared to be that popular mobilization, when it remained rooted in broad civic participation, could shape the direction of national policy.

By 1968, the landscape had transformed. Student movements fueled by opposition to the Vietnam War, demands for university reform, and aspirations for social transformation spread across the country. A total of 127 universities entered a state of conflict. Organizations called Zenkyoto were formed at campuses nationwide, and barricade blockades and strikes became routine. On January 18-19, 1969, 8,500 riot police were deployed to forcibly remove Zenkyoto students who had barricaded themselves inside Yasuda Auditorium at the University of Tokyo. The operation lasted 36 hours and resulted in 767 arrests. Television cameras broadcast the siege to the entire nation. The students spoke of toppling imperialism, democratizing university governance, and ending the war in Vietnam. But the means of expressing those ideals had already become inseparable from violence. The critical difference from the 1960 Anpo movement was not the scale of participation but the nature of the participants: the broad civic coalition of professors, housewives, and workers had been replaced by increasingly radicalized student factions that defined themselves through confrontation. The movement’s language grew more abstract and dogmatic, its organizational structures more sectarian, and its tolerance for violence as a legitimate political tool steadily expanded.

From here, the descent accelerated rapidly. On March 31, 1970, nine members of the Communist League Red Army Faction hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 351 and defected to North Korea. The 122 passengers were eventually released, but some of the surviving hijackers are believed to have been involved in North Korea’s abduction of Japanese citizens in subsequent years. Commandeering an airplane and crossing national borders was no longer within the realm of civic protest. Whatever the content of their political demands, the means had begun to devour the message. What strikes me when I read through the materials from this period is the speed at which the distance between idealism and violence contracted, measured not in years but in months.

Then came the definitive turning point. The Yamazaki Base Incident, unfolding from late 1971 through early 1972, was the moment that severed the left-wing movement from Japanese society. The United Red Army, formed from the merger of the Red Army Faction and the Keihin Anpo Kyoto, retreated to mountain hideouts in Gunma and Nagano prefectures. There, under the guise of sokatsu, a form of self-criticism session recast as ideological purification, they subjected their own comrades to systematic brutality. Twelve people were killed. Some were beaten to death. Others were left to freeze. Still others were strangled. The killers were not the state, not the police, not political opponents. They were comrades who had shared the same revolutionary dream, slept in the same mountain cabins, and pledged their lives to the same cause. Every time I read the details of this incident, I feel my jaw clench involuntarily. The moment when words spoken in the name of an ideal become the instrument that silences the people who speak them is something I can only describe as the weaponization of purpose itself.

The shock continued without pause. On February 19, 1972, five United Red Army members who had fled the mountain purge took a hostage at a mountain lodge in Karuizawa and barricaded themselves inside. After a ten-day siege, riot police stormed the building and arrested all five. The hostage was rescued safely, but two riot police officers and one civilian were killed, and 27 were injured. NHK’s live broadcast of the final assault drew a viewership rating of 89.7 percent, the highest in the history of Japanese television. What the nation watched on their living room screens was the spectacle of young people who had once spoken of ideals now holding guns and taking hostages. Public support for the left-wing movement was irretrievably destroyed in those ten days. The Asama Mountain Lodge siege became a defining cultural reference point in postwar Japan, a moment when the abstract debate over leftist ideology crystallized into a visceral, televised spectacle that ordinary citizens could see with their own eyes. The disconnect between the revolutionary rhetoric and the reality of armed hostage-taking was too stark to reconcile. For an entire generation of Japanese, the image of the siege became the definitive image of what left-wing activism had become.

The violence then crossed national borders. On May 30, 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army opened fire with automatic rifles at Lod Airport in Israel, now Ben Gurion Airport, in a joint operation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Twenty-six people were killed, the majority of them Puerto Rican pilgrims. Approximately 80 were wounded. Japanese leftist extremists massacring civilians at an airport in the Middle East: the fact itself was a brutal measure of how far the movement had traveled from its origins. On August 30, 1974, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front detonated a bomb at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in Marunouchi, Tokyo, killing eight people and injuring 376. The stated justification was retaliation against Japan’s economic imperialism in Asia. The actual victims were ordinary office workers walking near the building during their lunch break.

Organizations that could no longer fight outward turned inward. The uchigeba, or internal factional violence between the Kakumaru-ha and Chukaku-ha, two rival Marxist organizations, continued for more than thirty years from the late 1960s through the 1990s. Members of organizations that professed the same ideology attacked each other with steel pipes and metal bats on streets and university campuses. The cumulative death toll exceeded 100. In 1975, the Kakumaru-ha assassinated Nobuyoshi Honda, secretary-general of the Chukaku-ha, triggering a cycle of retaliatory violence that showed no sign of ending. By this point, there was no longer any trace of opposition to the security treaty, or of anti-Vietnam War sentiment, or of university reform ideals. What remained was organizational survival and hatred of rival organizations. The complete destruction of public trust in the New Left was the direct consequence of this internecine warfare dragging on for decades.

The Narita struggle followed the same pattern. The opposition to the construction of Narita Airport, which began in 1966, was originally a legitimate fight by local farmers to protect their land and livelihoods from state expropriation. But as various New Left factions entered in support, the character of the movement shifted. In the 1971 Toho Crossroads Incident, three police officers were killed. The airport’s opening was delayed by twelve years and construction costs ballooned enormously. A movement that was supposed to protect farmers’ voices had begun operating according to a logic entirely separate from those voices. The Narita case is instructive because it demonstrates a pattern that would repeat itself: legitimate grievances attracting radical support, the radicals gradually shifting the movement’s character, and the original constituency finding itself sidelined by an agenda they never endorsed. Once again, means had consumed purpose. The farmers who had fought for their land found their cause co-opted by groups whose real interest was in confrontation with the state, regardless of the specific issue at hand.

From the 1980s through the 2000s, Japan’s left-wing movement entered a long winter. The quagmire of internal violence, the memories of terrorism, and the collapse of ideological credibility following the end of the Cold War all contributed to the decline. The bubble economy and its aftermath redirected Japanese society’s attention toward economic concerns, and the very act of taking to the streets to raise one’s voice came to be treated as anachronistic. The movement’s participants aged, younger generations distanced themselves from politics, voter turnout declined steadily, and political apathy became the dominant atmosphere. Left-wing parties followed the same trajectory of decline. The Japan Socialist Party, once the largest opposition party, rapidly lost its base and showed no signs of recovery even after renaming itself the Social Democratic Party. A brief and disorienting interlude came in 1994, when Socialist leader Tomiichi Murayama became prime minister in a coalition government and reversed his party’s longstanding positions by declaring the Self-Defense Forces constitutional and the U.S.-Japan security alliance worth maintaining. The policy reversal destroyed whatever ideological coherence the party still possessed without generating any lasting political gains. The Japanese left emerged from the Cold War era without a credible narrative for governance, without a constituency that trusted it on national security, and carrying the accumulated weight of decades of association with extremism and internal violence.

The silence was broken on March 11, 2011. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake, delivered an enormous shock to Japanese society. Fear of radiation and distrust of nuclear energy policy drew citizens who had long disengaged from politics back onto the streets. In 2012, rallies drew 16,000 participants in Fukushima Prefecture and 14,000 in Tokyo, while protests outside the Prime Minister’s residence attracted up to 200,000 according to organizers. What was notable was how fundamentally different this movement was from the left-wing activism of the 1960s and 1970s. It was not driven by New Left organizational mobilization but by spontaneous civic participation. It was not animated by ideology-driven revolution but by the urgent desire to protect one’s family and children’s health. Violence was explicitly rejected, and nonviolence was the foundational premise. For anyone who had lived through the 1970s or grown up hearing stories of the Red Army and uchigeba, the sight of ordinary mothers with strollers and elderly couples standing outside the prime minister’s residence was a striking departure. The anti-nuclear movement demonstrated that Japanese civic activism could exist without the organizational baggage of the New Left, and that the act of raising one’s voice in public could be reclaimed from the shadow of its violent past.

In 2015, a new generation stepped forward. SEALDs, a student organization opposing the security legislation that would enable the exercise of collective self-defense, was formed, and its rallies outside the National Diet drew 120,000 according to organizers, though police estimated 30,000. The gap between these figures itself reflected Japan’s political polarization. SEALDs committed to nonviolence, utilized social media effectively, and carried stylishly designed placards. It attracted attention as the first large-scale student movement since the 1960 Anpo protests, but its character was fundamentally different from Zenkyoto. It was civic rather than revolutionary, and the organization chose to dissolve itself in 2016. They had gathered not to pursue revolution but to oppose a specific piece of legislation, and when that limited objective could not be achieved, they made a clean exit. The contrast with Zenkyoto could not have been sharper. Where Zenkyoto escalated when confronted with failure, SEALDs withdrew with discipline. Where Zenkyoto’s organizational logic drove it toward ever more radical action, SEALDs designed its own dissolution as a feature, not a bug. Whether SEALDs achieved lasting political impact remains debatable, but its organizational choices represented a conscious effort to break the historical pattern in which Japanese left-wing movements destroyed themselves through escalation.

And then there is Henoko. The opposition movement against the construction of a new base at Henoko, Nago City, Okinawa, has been sustained since construction began in 2014. Sit-in blockades at the gate of Camp Schwab, canoe-based obstruction of construction vessels at sea, and the erection of unauthorized tents have been recurring features. In October 2016, Hiroji Yamashiro, chairman of the Okinawa Peace Movement Center, was arrested on charges of property destruction and forcible obstruction of business and held in detention for approximately five months. He was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended for three years. The prolonged detention drew criticism from international human rights organizations. The Henoko protest movement is clearly different in character from the extremist groups of the 1970s. Yet reports of physically blocking construction vehicles, obstructing Japan Coast Guard patrol boats, and making physical contact with police officers indicate that some actions have entered a legal gray zone.

Surveying these sixty years, I notice a recurring cycle. People raise their voices in the name of ideals. They choose violence as the means of realizing those ideals. Violence consumes the ideals. Public opinion turns away. The movement becomes isolated and further radicalized. The 1960 Anpo protests held the power to force a prime minister’s resignation precisely because they commanded broad public support. But by the 1970s, violence had transformed from means into end, the citizens who had been supporters withdrew, and organizations imploded within their own sealed spaces. The Yamazaki Base Incident was the most horrific form of that implosion. Then, when civic movements explicitly rejecting violence emerged after 2011, the left-wing movement came close to recovering the connection with public opinion that had been severed decades earlier.

Henoko sits at the front line of that reconnection. The fact that 71.7 percent voted against the base in a prefectural referendum, and that anti-base candidates have won three consecutive gubernatorial elections, represents an immovable expression of Okinawan democratic will. But the existence of democratic mandate does not automatically legitimize every form of protest. Is a sit-in that blocks a road a lawful act of protest or an obstruction of business? Is canoe-based interference with vessels at sea an exercise of free expression or a dangerous act? These lines are drawn and redrawn daily at the Henoko site. And when two people died in the March 2026 capsizing, the question left the realm of theory and confronted the weight of human life directly.

I cannot place a simple conclusion anywhere in this history. The urgency felt by those who raised their voices during the Anpo era is undeniable. Michiko Kanba’s death demonstrated that dissent against state power could be a matter of life and death. At the same time, the process by which that dissent mutated into violence, leading through the Yodo-go hijacking, the Yamazaki Base massacre, the Lod Airport shooting, the Mitsubishi bombing, and more than three decades of factional warfare, is equally undeniable as fact. Ideals justified violence, and violence killed the ideals. The memory of that violence then generated a deep wariness in Japanese society toward the very act of raising one’s voice. Attending a demonstration, speaking out in protest, declaring a political position: the vague discomfort that many Japanese feel toward these acts has its roots in the violence of the 1970s.

The tension between dissent and force defines this history. The civic movements that emerged after 2011 attempted to step beyond that tension by making nonviolence an explicit principle. The young people of SEALDs chose a consciously different path, informed by the failures of Zenkyoto. Many of the Henoko protesters hold nonviolence as a personal conviction. But at the actual sites where movements unfold, the boundary between nonviolent principle and physical resistance is perpetually unstable. Sitting down at a gate to stop construction vehicles is nonviolent, yet it is also physical obstruction. Within that ambiguity, the entire history of Japan’s left-wing movements is compressed.

How should we hear the voices of the two who died? They were not people who chose violence. But their deaths are inescapably placed within the vast context of sixty years of left-wing movement history. The 5.6 million who raised their voices during Anpo. The twelve whose voices were silenced in the mountain purge. The more than one hundred who died in factional violence. And the two who lost their lives in the waters off Henoko. Within this sequence of numbers, the full picture of the path Japan’s left has walked emerges. I am not yet able to judge which parts of that path were wrong and which were right. But I know what to watch next. As construction at Henoko continues, how will the forms of protest evolve? Will the principle of nonviolence hold at the site, or will the boundary waver again? In each of those moments on the ground, sixty years of Japan’s left-wing history is being tested.