Hello, the episode you're about to listen to is part of a multi-part series introducing an overview

of Japanese history.

This is a repeat of one of the original projects the History of Japan podcast was built on,

and is intended to serve as an update and supplement to these original works.

After 10 years, my hope is to return to this approach and to do it a little bit better,

given the skills that I have improved in the intervening years.

If you haven't been doing so already, you should listen to these episodes sequentially,

starting with episode 501.

Without any further ado, enjoy the episode.

Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 538, Japan Rising.

When I teach my course on modern Japanese history, there's a newsreel clip I like to show my students about the Onpo protests, the movement against the U.S.-Japan security treaty we covered last week.

That clip is from the since shuttered British Path, which conveniently means all their footage is in public domain,

and depicts the violence of the protests in almost comical terms.

The commenter refers to the whole thing as, quote, not exactly an advertisement for democracy, but amusing enough for the onlooker,

and even sneaks in a Pearl Harbor reference in relation to the idea that Japan could be

dragged into a war its people did not want. I bring all this up because, A, it's useful for making sense of just how not seriously

Japan was taken on the international stage in 1960, and B, I've always wondered what that

commenter's reaction was five years later when Japan's GDP surpassed that of the United Kingdom itself.

You see, almost as impressive as the level of protest and social foment that existed in Japan's

immediate post-war was the rapidity with which those things disappeared, at least rapid in the

historical sense.

What I mean to say is that within a decade of 1960s massive protest, the radical left had noticeably lost steam, and by the mid-1970s it was functionally a thing of the past.

...