ANPO: Art X War Spring College Tour (Cornell, Harvard, Williams, Amherst) starts today!

(Photo of Tens of Thousands of Protesters surrounding the Diet Building in Tokyo in 1960)

Network for Okinawa member Linda Hoaglund, a filmmaker, explores the background of the institutionalization of U.S. military bases in Japan in her 2010 documentary, ANPO: Art X War. The film surveys Japanese artists who created visual depictions of Japanese resistance to the renewal of the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.

Through paintings (including many large-scale works long hidden from public view), photographs, anime, and documentary and narrative films, the film reveals a complex period of Japan’s history mostly unknown in the U.S. and the rest of the world

Hoaglund’s eye-opening film opens its Spring College Tour at Cornell today. The rest of the tour schedule: Harvard (April 11), Williams (April 13), Amherst (April 14), Columbia (May 4).

ANPO will also screen at the Hong Kong Int. Film Fest (March 24-27) and at the Association of Asian Studies annual conference in Honolulu (April 3).

BACKGROUND ON ANPO from the ANPO: Art X War website :

In 1951, Japan signed the U.S. Japan Mutual Security treaty (ANPO in Japanese), giving the U.S. the right to maintain armed forces on their soil, in order to regain sovereignty after Japan’s defeat and subsequent occupation. The rationale was that Japan’s postwar Constitution renounced war, so it needed U.S. military protection. In fact, the treaty also allowed the U.S. to use the bases to fight America’s new Cold War enemies as well as to suppress unrest in Japan.

To fortify Japan as a bulwark against Communism, the C.I.A. cultivated Kishi, a wartime cabinet minister imprisoned for his war crimes by the Allies, but released without trial in 1948. His ascendance to prime minister in 1957, supported by clandestine C.I.A. funds, incensed many Japanese, who remembered how militarists like Kishi had led them into a disastrous war.

In 1960, tens of thousands of protestors, frustrated by the inherent inequality of ANPO and terrified of being sucked back into war, took to the streets to fight for the promises of democracy. Their protests had been preceded by clashes over the U.S. military presence in the 1950s. When the Tachikawa Air Force base had directed police to confiscate ancestral farmlands to extend a runway in 1955, farmers had successfully resisted with sit-ins. In 1957, the Japanese public had become outraged when an American G.I. shot and killed a Japanese woman on a U.S. firing range as she collected brass shell casings to buy food for her family.

During the 1960 protests, as demonstrators encircled Parliament, Kishi rammed through a 10-year extension of the treaty, deploying hundreds of police to drag out opposing M.P.s. Outraged citizens swelled the protestors’ ranks to hundreds of thousands. Though most protesters remained peaceful some enraged students clashed with police and when a Tokyo University student lost her life in the violence, the nation mourned. Within days, the extension of the treaty was automatically ratified and it remains in force, unaltered to this day.

Nearly 90 U.S. military bases remain in Japan today, 70% of them on the small island of Okinawa, which hosts 15,000 Marines. In 1995, when a 12 year-old girl was raped by three American soldiers, the island erupted in fury, forcing the U.S. to promise to close the Futenma Marine Corps Air Base, long considered a hazard. The proposed closure was renegotiated into a re-location, to the tropical waters near the village of Henoko. Local residents, with traumatic memories of the war, have staged a decade-long sit-in to prevent their bay from being land-filled to make way for two mile-long runways.

In 2009, Japanese voters swept into power a new political party, which promised to move Futenma out of Okinawa. Eight months later, the prime minister was forced to resign because he had to break his promise under intense U.S. pressure. Aircraft continue to train daily on Futenma, the Okinawans are livid and increasing numbers of Japanese are questioning the burdens the security treaty places on Okinawa.