Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 558, The All Seeing Eye, Part 5.

On October 12, 1960, Japan's voting population got to see the consequences of conspiracism

broadcast live over the airways.

He be a public call in Tokyo was host on that day to a televised debate for the upcoming general elections planned for November,

which had just been called by the new Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato as a way of shoring up his own mandate within his badly fractured Liberal Democratic Party.

Ikeda, you see, had just replaced the previous LDP Prime Minister, Kishi Nobuske,

whose career had been absolutely destroyed by a series of protests, driven by Kishi's own

handling of the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty.

Kishi had attempted to force the treaty through the Diet, the Japanese Parliament,

with minimal debate in order to score a big foreign policy win, but underestimated how much

pushback his behavior would cause.

Massive protests rocked the country as a result of Kishi's actions, and in particular,

Kishi ordered cops into the

Diet Building to break up a sit-in by the opposition Japan Socialist Party, which was trying

to block the treaty, and then called a vote to ratify it after every single socialist

member of Parliament had been physically ejected from the building.

This did work.

The treaty was ratified, but it destroyed Kishi's career.

The specter of police entering the parliament building to clamp down on opposition was just

a bit too much of a pre-1945 vibe, so to speak, for a Japanese population that was well

aware of how new and fragile its democratic rights actually

were. And so Kishi had resigned his leadership of the ruling liberal Democrats, and the new

...