WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE JAPAN News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #337 - Ecology, Anti-airport fight in Japan: The echo of a revolutionary era (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 On February 15, clashes between police and peasants and political activists took

place near Tokyo airport. This follows an expulsion decision that was intended to
end a more than fifty-year-old struggle that has deeply marked the Japanese
political landscape. ---- After a first failed attempt, the Japanese government
chose in 1966 to build a brand new international airport on the peasant lands of
Sanrizuka, a good part of which belonged to the imperial family and the rest to
supposedly very poor peasants. are easier to get rid of. ---- On the contrary,
the harshness of the local peasant condition and the strong community spirit led
to the creation of the Sanrizuka-Shibayama Unified Opposition League against the
construction of Narita Airport with the support of the socialist parties and
communists. The league fought from August 1966 against expulsions, whether
carried out by money or force.

This struggle is taking place in a particularly tense national context. Japan was
then in the throes of many social struggles in which the Zengakuren, powerful
student unions, played a key role. They are quick to join the fight and bring
with them many tactics that turn the future airport into a battlefield. Indeed,
refusals to transfer properties will lead to escalations of violence on the one
hand and then on the other. Occupied lands are fortified and official assemblies
become battlegrounds.

The 1970s saw the start of work on the airport and the first deaths on the side
of the police and the opposition. The airport will be painfully completed in 1977
and early 1978, not without a powerful demonstration and a final ransacking of
the airport before its opening.

To understand this struggle, one must also understand the general context of
Japan. Since 1955, Japan has been in a system of dominant party democracy where
the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) forms a class of bureaucrats almost
untouchable in collusion with proven private interests. This party born out of
Cold War anti-communism also served as an institutional machine to recycle
figures of fascism.

The United States refusing to ban the Japanese Communist Party for diplomatic
reasons, it gradually put in place an important repressive arsenal. The protest,
in particular students, will have no other choice than in turn to increase its
level of action to resist against an inflexible and brutal government.

As such, the struggle of Sanrizuka is symbolic. It brought together vast
intergenerational political forces during the second half of the period of
intense social protest and even beyond. The construction of the airport could not
be completed properly, its extensions were particularly difficult because of the
peasants who managed to keep their land and that is without counting the many
acts of sabotage that have enameled the following years.

The expulsion of February is therefore to be understood in this continuity of
resistance. This step-by-step defense by activists and residents still has an
economic character of blocking airport extensions but also a symbolic aspect.

While the revolutionary fire that animated the country has died down, rare are
the possibilities of recalling that there still exists in the alliance between
students, workers, peasants and peasants, another path than authoritarianism. of
the PLD. We therefore salute the resistance of our comrades whose struggle has
inspired many others.

Corentin (UCL Alsace)


https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lutte-anti-aeroport-au-Japon-L-echo-d-une-epoque-revolutionnaire
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca