Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan
Based on Wikipedia: Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan
In June 1960, the official documents that would bind Japan's military fate to America's had to be smuggled to the Prime Minister in a candy box. Protesters surrounded his residence in such numbers that Foreign Minister Aiichirō Fujiyama couldn't risk being seen carrying the ratification papers. A few days earlier, a female university student had been killed in clashes with police outside the parliament building. The American president's visit had been canceled after his press secretary's car was mobbed for over an hour by thousands of demonstrators. The Prime Minister himself would resign in disgrace within weeks.
Yet the treaty those papers contained would go on to become the longest-lasting unchanged agreement between two major powers since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. That's nearly four centuries of diplomatic history surpassed by a document signed amid chaos and smuggled past angry crowds.
This is the story of the United States-Japan Security Treaty, known in Japan simply as "Anpo."
The Occupation's Bitter Inheritance
To understand why hundreds of thousands of Japanese took to the streets in 1960, you need to understand what they were protesting against: not the new treaty, but the old one.
When World War II ended in 1945, American forces occupied Japan. For seven years, the United States ran the country. When the occupation finally ended in 1952, America extracted a price: Japan would sign a security treaty allowing U.S. military bases to remain on Japanese soil indefinitely.
The original 1951 treaty was, to put it plainly, humiliating.
It contained no promise that America would defend Japan if Japan were attacked. Think about that for a moment. Japan was hosting foreign military bases, but the country hosting those bases had no guarantee of protection from the country that put them there.
It allowed American forces stationed in Japan to be deployed anywhere in the "Far East" without even informing the Japanese government, let alone asking permission. Japanese territory was essentially a launching pad for American military operations throughout Asia, and Japan had no say in how it was used.
Most gallingly, the treaty included a clause explicitly authorizing American troops to suppress domestic protests within Japan itself. A foreign military had written permission to put down Japanese citizens exercising their democratic rights on Japanese soil.
There was no end date. No mechanism for Japan to withdraw. The treaty would simply continue forever unless America decided otherwise.
The Pressure Builds
The Japanese government began pushing for revision almost immediately after the occupation ended. For years, Washington refused.
What changed American minds wasn't Japanese diplomacy. It was Japanese anger.
In the mid-1950s, a powerful anti-base movement emerged in Japan. The Sunagawa Struggle of 1955-1957 saw farmers and activists resist the expansion of an American air base, creating dramatic confrontations that captured national attention. Then came the Girard Incident of 1957, in which an American soldier shot and killed a Japanese woman who was collecting spent shell casings on a firing range. The soldier received a suspended sentence and was returned to the United States, provoking outrage across Japan.
The Eisenhower administration finally recognized that the status quo was unsustainable. Negotiations began in 1958.
A Better Deal, But Still a Deal
The revised treaty, signed in Washington on January 19, 1960, was genuinely better than the original. It committed the United States to defend Japan if attacked. It required consultation before American forces could be deployed from Japanese bases. It removed the clause about suppressing domestic disturbances. It set a ten-year initial term, after which either party could withdraw with one year's notice.
Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi expected gratitude, or at least acceptance. He invited President Eisenhower to visit Japan in June 1960 to celebrate the ratified treaty. If the visit had happened, Eisenhower would have been the first sitting American president to set foot in Japan.
Kishi badly misread the national mood.
Why They Fought
Many Japanese didn't want a better treaty. They wanted no treaty at all.
The opposition wasn't simply about the specific terms. It was about sovereignty, identity, and the lingering wounds of war and occupation. American military bases meant American soldiers, and American soldiers meant incidents, accidents, and the daily reminder that Japan's security depended on a foreign power.
An umbrella organization called the People's Council for Preventing Revision of the Security Treaty formed in 1959. Note the name carefully: they weren't opposing the treaty itself, but its revision. Their goal was to block any new treaty, hoping that continued paralysis might eventually lead to the bases' removal entirely.
The coalition was remarkably broad. Labor unions. Farmers' organizations. Teachers' groups. Poetry circles and theater troupes. Student activists and women's organizations. Groups affiliated with the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. Even some conservative business groups joined.
By March 1960, the People's Council had grown from 134 member organizations to over 1,600.
Democracy Dies in Daylight
Kishi faced a deadline. Eisenhower was scheduled to arrive on June 19, and Kishi wanted the treaty ratified before the President's plane touched down. But Socialist members of the Diet, Japan's parliament, were using every procedural tool available to delay the vote.
On May 19, 1960, Kishi made a decision that would define his legacy.
He called for a snap vote. When Socialist Diet members attempted a sit-in to block it, Kishi brought 500 police officers into the parliament building. The elected representatives of the opposition were physically dragged from the chamber by uniformed officers. Then, with only his own party's members present, Kishi rammed the treaty through.
This is what's known in Japanese history as the "May 19 Incident."
Whatever people thought about the treaty itself, what Kishi did was undeniably anti-democratic. He had used police force to remove elected legislators from their own parliament so he could pass legislation without opposition votes.
The protests exploded.
The Streets Erupt
The Sōhyō labor federation, Japan's largest union umbrella group, launched a series of nationwide strikes involving millions of workers. Marches filled city streets across the country. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered around the National Diet building almost every day.
On June 10, thousands of demonstrators surrounded a car carrying James Hagerty, Eisenhower's press secretary, who had arrived in advance of the president's planned visit. They slashed the car's tires. They smashed its tail lights. They rocked it back and forth for over an hour while Hagerty sat trapped inside. He was eventually rescued by a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter.
Five days later came the tragedy.
Radical student activists from the Zengakuren, a nationwide student federation, attempted to storm the Diet compound itself. In the fierce battle with police that followed, a twenty-two-year-old Tokyo University student named Michiko Kanba was killed.
Her death shocked the nation. To this day, exactly what happened remains disputed—whether she was trampled, beaten, or died in the crush of bodies pressing against locked gates.
Kishi's Desperate Gambit
With Eisenhower's visit just days away and the streets in chaos, Kishi considered extreme measures. He wanted to call out the Japan Self-Defense Forces—the Japanese military created after the war—to restore order. He also planned to deploy tens of thousands of right-wing gang members provided by his associate Yoshio Kodama, a man with deep ties to the yakuza, Japan's organized crime syndicates.
Kishi's own cabinet talked him out of it.
Without military or paramilitary forces to clear the streets, Kishi had no choice. He canceled Eisenhower's visit, citing concerns for the president's safety. Then he announced his own resignation as Prime Minister.
But the treaty itself survived.
Victory in Defeat
Under Japanese law, a treaty automatically takes effect thirty days after passing the lower house of the Diet. Kishi's strongarm tactics on May 19 had started that clock ticking. The protesters could force out the Prime Minister and humiliate the American president, but they couldn't stop time.
On June 23, 1960, Japanese and American officials exchanged the ratification instruments—the ones smuggled in a candy box—and the new treaty took effect. The old treaty expired. The security alliance continued.
Once the treaty was official and Kishi was gone, the protest movement rapidly faded. The immediate crisis had passed.
Healing the Rift
The cancellation of Eisenhower's visit brought U.S.-Japan relations to their lowest point since the war ended. The new American president, John F. Kennedy, moved quickly to repair the damage.
Kennedy appointed Edwin O. Reischauer as ambassador to Japan. Reischauer was an unusual choice—not a career diplomat but a Harvard professor and Japan expert who had grown up in Tokyo as the son of missionaries and spoke fluent Japanese. His Japanese wife, Haru, became a beloved figure in her own right.
Kennedy also invited Japan's new Prime Minister, Hayato Ikeda, to be the first foreign leader to visit his White House. At their June 1961 summit, the two leaders agreed that the alliance would function more like the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain—one of genuine consultation between partners, not diktat from patron to client.
Back home, Ikeda took a deliberately non-confrontational approach. He shelved plans to revise Japan's pacifist constitution. Instead, he announced the Income Doubling Plan, a bold initiative to double the Japanese economy within a decade. The message was clear: stop arguing about the treaty and start getting rich.
Japan did get rich. The economic miracle of the 1960s transformed the country and, perhaps more than any diplomatic initiative, made the security treaty politically sustainable by giving people something else to focus on.
The Secret Deals
The trauma of 1960 left a lasting mark on how the alliance operated. Both governments learned a lesson: never again put contentious issues to a public vote.
Instead, they negotiated in secret.
Over the following decades, a series of hidden agreements—known in Japanese as "mitsuyaku," or secret pacts—quietly expanded the scope of the security treaty without public debate or parliamentary approval.
These secret deals allowed American naval vessels carrying nuclear weapons to pass through Japanese ports, despite Japan's official policy of not permitting nuclear weapons on its territory. They allowed nuclear-powered American ships to discharge radioactive wastewater in Japanese waters. They permitted the United States to keep nuclear weapons on American bases in Okinawa even after the island reverted to Japanese control in 1972.
The Japanese public wouldn't learn about these arrangements until decades later, when researchers and journalists pieced together the documentary evidence.
1970: The Second Chance That Wasn't
The revised treaty had a ten-year initial term. After 1970, either country could withdraw with one year's notice. Left-wing activists spent the entire decade of the 1960s preparing for that moment, hoping to build a movement that would finally persuade the Japanese government to end the alliance.
By 1970, Japan was a very different country. Student riots had shaken campuses in 1968 and 1969. Anti-Vietnam War sentiment ran high. Various activist groups, including the anti-war organization Beheiren, organized protest marches.
Prime Minister Eisaku Satō—who happened to be Nobusuke Kishi's younger brother—handled 1970 very differently than his brother had handled 1960. He simply ignored the protests entirely and let the treaty automatically renew.
No drama. No confrontation. The moment passed.
Since then, no serious attempt has been made by either country to end the alliance.
The Okinawa Question
If you want to understand the ongoing tensions around American bases in Japan, you need to understand one number: seventy-five percent.
That's the share of all U.S. forces in Japan stationed on a single island prefecture. Okinawa is the southernmost part of Japan, a subtropical chain of islands that was administered separately by the United States until 1972. American bases cover roughly one-fifth of Okinawa's main island.
For Okinawans, the security treaty isn't an abstraction. It's the jets screaming over residential neighborhoods. It's the environmental contamination from military operations. It's the crimes committed by American service members that periodically inflame local anger. It's the sense that while the alliance may benefit Japan as a whole, their small prefecture bears a grotesquely disproportionate share of the burden.
As of 2010, there were still approximately 85 U.S. military facilities in Japan, housing nearly 45,000 American military personnel and a similar number of their family members. The majority remain concentrated on Okinawa.
The Longest Peace
The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty has now been in effect, unchanged, for over six decades. No other alliance between major powers has lasted this long without amendment since the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648.
Why has it endured?
Partly because of the Cold War, which gave both countries a shared enemy in the Soviet Union. Partly because of Japan's extraordinary economic growth, which made the costs of hosting American bases seem trivial compared to the benefits of access to American markets. Partly because of China's rise, which has given the alliance renewed strategic purpose.
And partly because of what happened in 1960.
The massive protests, the student killed outside parliament, the president whose visit was canceled, the prime minister forced to resign—all of this made both governments deeply reluctant to ever again put the alliance to a public test. Better to negotiate quietly, to expand the relationship through administrative agreements and secret pacts, than to risk another democratic confrontation.
The alliance survives not despite the 1960 protests but, in a perverse way, because of them. The trauma of that year taught both sides that some things are too important to be debated openly.
Whether that's a victory for stability or a failure of democracy depends on how you think nations should make their most consequential choices.