Hirohitler on the Rhine: Transnational Protest Against the Japanese Emperor’s 1971 West German State Visit

Around noon on 25 September 1971, a white rental car approached the Sakashita gate on the southwest side of Japan’s Imperial Palace in central Tokyo. When confronted, four student protesters sprang out of the vehicle wielding staves and throwing smoke bombs and bottles. The four surged past the initial guard and attempted to break into the palace grounds, struggling to open a locked door to the inner palace before fleeing. These men and women were members of Okiseii (Okinawan Youth Committee), a group affiliated with the Chūkaku-ha (Central Core Faction) a major faction of Japan’s New Left student movement, Zengakuren (All-Japan League of Student Self-Government). ¹ Okiseii stormed the palace wearing white construction helmets with both the Chūkaku-ha factional logo and their own printed on the side, a symbol of their factional affiliation within Japan’s New Left. ² The Imperial Palace Break-in Incident (kōkyo rannyū jiken), as it was later known, was part of a larger series of protests around Tokyo that day, including almost one thousand Chūkaku-ha protesters just outside the palace. ³ While also denouncing US and Japanese imperialism, common themes for the anti-imperial left in the era of the Vietnam War, a unique target of these protests was the Japanese emperor himself.

A week earlier on the other side of the globe, two left-wing West German groups held a conference entitled ‘Down with Japanese Imperialism’, which similarly targeted the Japanese monarchy. ⁴ In West Berlin the newly re-founded Communist Party of Germany (KDP) formed the League against Imperialism (Liga gegen den Imperialismus). The group’s inaugural actions included the so-called ‘Japan Campaign’, which was successful enough that it made the Japanese news as Hantei Renmei (Anti-Imperialist League); some noted the participation of Japanese exchange students with particular concern. Around the same time, at Bonn University, left-wing students founded an ad-hoc Komitee Kampf dem japanischen Militarismus (Committee for Struggling against Japanese Militarism or KOKAJAMI). ⁵ The League against Imperialism would go on to unite thousands of anti-war protesters and anti-imperialists on issues like the Vietnam War, Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, and even the supposed revitalization of West German imperialism aimed at both Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. ⁶ Yet, protest against Japanese imperialism in general and the Emperor in particular was the catalyst for the League against Imperialism’s founding and one of its most concerted protest actions of the early 1970s. Why, then, were left-wing student protesters, located a world apart, simultaneously denouncing the septuagenarian figurehead monarch of Japan?

The histories of Japan and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s have largely been told in similar ways, even if the parallel developments and interactions are rarely noted. ⁷ Broadly, the scholarship has followed comparable debates about the positive and negative outcomes of the social, political, and cultural upheaval of the decade. The West German historiography used to split on the lines of seeing the cultural effects of the 1960s as a positive outcome – spurring social movements like the environmental and women’s movement – and the radical politics as a negative one. ⁸ Japan’s 1960s have largely been portrayed in the same way: while prolific street battles between students and police supposedly did not spur change, the citizen anti-war protests have been held up as a new and progressive form of social movement. ⁹ The simultaneous emergence of urban guerilla movements in both states has only helped portray the radical politics of the era as the culmination of the ‘bad' 1960s. Groups like Sekigun-ha and Rote Armee Fraktion (both ‘Red Army Faction') have been portrayed as a kind of ‘death' of the New Left in the 1970s. ¹⁰ In many cases, these accounts are influenced or even written by the former participants, which tend to privilege certain groups and narratives over others. ¹¹ More recent scholarship has moved away from the paradigm of a good cultural and bad political 1960s, however, both by moving beyond the standard narratives which are disproportionately told by former participants and by including new voices. ¹²

The transnational turn has also challenged explanations for the radicalism of the 1960s found purely in generational or national terms. Especially in the case of West Germany, historians have shown the inspiration radical students took from their counterparts in the United States and actors struggling for liberation in the so-called ‘Third World’. ¹³ More recent scholarship has taken these connections across borders further, showing that West Germany was part of a truly global moment. ¹⁴ The literature on Japan’s place in the ‘Global 1960s' is far less robust than the case of West Germany and other European cases. Newer attempts to show the transnational influences of phenomena like student protest tactics or the ideas of Black nationalism have followed a similar pattern that privileges exchanges with the US, however. ¹⁵ These transnational approaches show that for both Japan and for West Germany, the radicalism of the 1960s cannot be explained merely by looking towards the fascist past or by viewing the conflict as one over a young democracy. Building on these studies of ideas and people crossing borders, this article presents an under-studied moment of exchange in the wake of 1968. The active attempts to learn from those struggling against seemingly similar issues reveals that both Japanese and West German radicals were part of a wider network of activists – even if that connection was often more imagined than concrete.

This article examines attempts by activists in both West Germany and Japan to understand and reach out to each other through protest against the state visit of the Japanese Emperor to West Germany in October 1971. ¹⁶ Sharing information between Japanese and West German protesters in the wake of 1968 formed the basis for demonstrations against Hirohito in West Germany. This entanglement occurred through holding conferences and exchanging students, as well as distributing magazines and pamphlets. Protests against Japanese imperialism, largely seen as renewed attempts at the economic domination of Asia, and the Emperor in particular displayed specific examples of Japanese anti-imperialists attempting to forge international connections and West Germans acting as a receptive audience. For West German protesters, the Emperor represented not just a reminder of past crimes, but also a symbol of dangerous imperialism in the present – especially their own state’s newly revitalized economy and supposed attempts at economic expansion.

These activists, largely students, but also members of other protest movements, may have held different views, but they all subscribed to similar ideas about what defined ‘imperialism' and the emperor’s role in this global system of oppression. Some identified specifically as ‘anti-imperialists’, while others shared in the same critiques of capitalism and imperialism without taking on that particular label. In both Japan and West Germany, these activists had seen themselves as struggling against authoritarianism, war, and the state for years as part of the global explosion of New Left thought. At the same time, the fight against imperialism was a particular one. Far from the embodiment of a new, peace-loving Japan, the emperor was seen as an agent of an imperialist Japan that looked to re-embark on economic expansion and exploitation, especially in Southeast Asia. These protesters’ discussions of the visit tapped into a strain of thought that had already been building at major conferences in West Berlin and Tokyo in 1968: that the Vietnam War was part of a global strategy of imperialist nations to control the world. West Germany and Japan were presumptive successors to US imperialism involved in attempts to dominate Southeast Asia in particular and the world in general. This image of imperialism drew from the legacies of Marxism-Leninism and a global language of anti-war protest, yet the specific interaction of protesters shaped the concept in important ways. By examining anti-imperialist protest we can reexamine the origins and inspirations for radical politics in West Germany in the global 1960s.

On the morning of 11 October, the Japanese emperor and his wife, accompanied by an entourage of 38 attendants, politicians, and diplomats, flew into Bonn-Cologne airport escorted by four West German fighter jets. At the airport, a contingent of Bundeswehr soldiers and around 1000 Japanese and German citizens, including a sizeable community of ethnic Japanese from Düsseldorf, waving both national flags met the Emperor and Empress. A Bundeswehr military band played the Japanese national anthem, which, as the press noted, had been composed in 1870 by the German military conductor Franz Eckart. The pair then drove through Bonn, where bilingual posters declared: ‘The people of the world hope for peace and harmony for the Shōwa imperial reign.' ¹⁷ Emperor Shōwa (translated as ‘Harmonious Peace'), but better known in the West by his forename, Hirohito, had been on the throne since 1925, spanning the entirety of the Second World War, the breakup of Japan’s colonial empire, and US occupation. ¹⁸ While the emperor had traveled to Europe before in the 1920s while he was crown prince, the 1971 trip to Europe and the US was the first time in history that a sitting monarch had left Japan – a development that required a hasty constitutional change to delineate the transfer of imperial authority. ¹⁹ In 1971, the emperor and empress toured a handful of Western European states including Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, yet the pair scheduled the most time in Bonn. ²⁰ In West Germany, the couple met with important figures, including both the Federal President Gustav Heinemann and Chancellor Willy Brandt, and took in German cultural performances. The visit included a visit to the Beethoven House, Cologne’s iconic cathedral, and a much-publicized cruise on the Rhine where the teetotal monarch received over 100 bottles of German wine. ²¹ While the trip was intended as a way to sell a peaceful, international Japan to the world, the visit was also a key moment of anti-imperial protest.

In the history of West German political protest in the 1960s, visits by foreign monarchs and state leaders were often a catalyst for notable demonstrations – most notably the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s president Moïse Tshombe in 1964 and the Shah of Iran’s visit in 1967. Protests in these years are largely considered the key events for West Germany’s student movement Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student League, or SDS), which reached its peak in 1968 and disbanded in the years shortly before the Emperor’s visit. The Shah’s visit was a particularly foundational event: in West Berlin, a protester named Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by a West German police officer (only later revealed to have been an East German agent) at his first ever demonstration, representing one of the most pivotal moments in the history of the West German 1960s. Bonn University also saw major protests against the Iranian monarch. ²² The capitol would again be a major site for protest after the Japanese government announced in early 1971 that the Japanese Emperor and his wife would travel to Europe.

Even before the emperor and empress departed from Haneda airport in September 1971, anti-war and anti-imperial students had begun planning protest actions. Okiseii, in concert with Chūkaku-ha, believed that the trip to Europe was a ruse shielding the true nature of the monarch: a war criminal who had needlessly sacrificed the lives of so many Okinawans in the last months of the Second World War. ²³ Chūkaku-ha claimed that sending the emperor abroad was a mask for rehabilitating the image of the Japanese government in the eyes of the world, certainly one goal of the trip, but students integrated the visit into their anti-imperialist worldview, seeing it also as a step towards reviving the Japanese military and colonial empire, even if only in economic terms. ²⁴ Some students protested the day of the departure as well. A group calling themselves the ‘Stop the Visit to Europe' student faction (Hōō Soshi) had announced mass protests at the airport, including reported threats of ‘guerrilla activity’. Chūkaku-ha and another New Left faction Front both mustered around a thousand protesters in parks around Tokyo; however, Haneda remained quiet. ²⁵ Even so, the protests and break-in incident made international news, including the influential West German weekly Der Spiegel. ²⁶ These Zengakuren protests set the tone for the imperial trip, and despite positive official commentary and media reporting, protest would follow the imperial couple to Europe.

The League against Imperialism’s Japan Campaign had a number of stated goals all focused on a renewed and unrepentant Japanese imperialism in Asia, and the major thrust of their thinking concerned the collaboration between West German and Japanese imperialisms. ²⁷ The group’s foundational ideas held that US imperialism was using Japan, just as it was using West Germany, to help facilitate the war in Vietnam. Though this understanding of imperialism’s ‘global strategy' was relatively widely shared by left-wing radicals, the League against Imperialism uniquely identified Japan’s role in taking over the conflict in Indochina. The group claimed that Japan still harbored dreams of an ‘East Asian Coprosperity Sphere’, a plan from the 1940s to control Asia by dominating the markets of their neighbors. In the postwar, Japan was seeking to again control Korea, which had formerly been a major Japanese colony, through capital exports and cheap labor. They argued that through war profiteering and rebuilding of the military under the guise of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), Japan was the next threat to Vietnam and its neighbors. Though there had been some discussion of Japan in anti-imperialist circles in West Germany before 1971, the emperor’s visit helped to crystalize these themes. The resolution drafted at the ‘Down with Japanese Imperialism' conference on 18 September 1971 ended with slogans against Japanese and US imperialisms and global monopoly capitalism, and declared solidarity with all struggling peoples of Asia – including rural Japan. ²⁸ In the eyes of West German and Japanese anti-imperialists, Hirohito’s visit to Bonn therefore represented the ‘conspiracy between German and Japanese imperialism' and the desire for both nations to plan their future domination of Asia and the world. ²⁹

The protest over the emperor’s trip to West Germany included street demonstrations in Bonn over the scheduled three-day visit. Various groups also planned actions across West Germany. Parallel to the Japan Campaign, the KPD also planned protests in Bonn on 12 and 13 October, in Munich, culminating in a demonstration in West Berlin on 14 October. In West Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, an estimated 1000 participants held a rally at the Technical University under the banner ‘The Criminal Role of Japanese Imperialism in East Asia’. ³⁰ The day the emperor arrived, a group of around 300 students affiliated with KOKAJAMI gathered in Bonn University’s Hofgarten and marched to confront the imperial motorcade on Friedrichstraße. The group held up signs with slogans such as ‘Hirohito is a Murderer' and ‘Hirohito is a Fascist and a War Criminal' in both Japanese and German. Japanese exchange students also put up banners reading ‘Go Home Tennō’, again in both languages, along the motorcade’s route. ³¹ Protests continued in Cologne where the couple planned on visiting the Japan Cultural Institute on 13 October. Conflict around the Cultural Institute, where students held a sit-in and attempted to block nearby streets, mirrored similar protests in the Vietnam War era, especially at the West Berlin Amerika Haus, a cultural institute that drew some of West Germany’s most contentious demonstrations in the 1960s. ³²

The imperial trip abroad and the state visit to Bonn in particular were attempts to accomplish two things: the first was to sell a ‘new' Japan to the world and the second was to celebrate a longer history of cooperation between Germany and Japan. The figure of the emperor himself was a crucial element in these ventures and the subsequent anti-imperialist rejoinder. In a communication with European diplomats, which was reprinted in the Japanese press, the emperor wrote that Japan was a friendly nation that had been able to ‘with great effort, overcome the difficult era’. On the trip, the emperor was ‘a symbol of the Japanese people’s collective desire to achieve world peace’. ³³ The statement acknowledged attempts to overcome the past, at the heart of which was a tension between the presentation of an introspective ‘Seibutsu Gakusha Tennō’, or ‘biologist emperor’, and Hirohito, the wartime leader of the Japanese military. Both the West German and Japanese press noted the emperor’s hobby of studying marine biology in profiles. ³⁴ This was an image that the trip clearly attempted to cultivate – as diplomatic negotiations about the imperial visit often specifically requested visits to zoos and botanical gardens. In Bonn, the monarch set up a meeting with marine biologist Hjalmar Thiel, who had been in contact with the emperor since 1967 when the Japanese embassy sent an academic paper authored by Hirohito to Hamburg University for review. ³⁵ For some, the image was an effective one. The FAZ described the emperor as a ‘cultivated professor emeritus' and the empress, in a decidedly gendered and orientalist phrase as a ‘porcelain figure’. The conservative Die Welt called the monarch a ‘model of humility' and proudly recounted an anecdote of the emperor quoting Goethe to US General MacArthur upon Japan’s surrender – solidifying his cultured image. ³⁶

Student radicals were not the only ones to question this conception. On the one hand, there were West German commentators who viewed the visit as ‘primarily a political act' by a newly resurgent Japan on the global stage – not unlike West Germany’s position. ³⁷ But a scathing article in the magazine Der Spiegel showed the tensions most clearly. The report concluded that, unlike West Germany, the Japanese people had never overcome the structural and mental patterns that had led them to war – primarily represented in the continuation of the position of the emperor, which the US had decided not to abolish. ³⁸ The article claimed that 1945 could not possibly be an inflection point because the Japanese concept of time was ‘static; what happened in the beginning always remains present’. Furthermore, a lasting sense of racial superiority showed ‘the unworldliness – and naivety' of the Japanese people. ³⁹ In contrast to the West Germans who had allegedly become good democrats, Der Spiegel found the Japanese lacking in a moral and racial sense that could not be separated from their emperor. ⁴⁰ In response to Der Spiegel, the left-leaning Asahi Shinbun published an article decrying Western anti-Japanese sentiment. The Asahi noted how strange this anti-emperor article was in contrast to the generally favorable reception in the rest of West Germany. In ‘former enemy nations' like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the Asahi wrote, it was ‘reasonable that the past has been harder to let go of’, but the former German ally’s stance was more perplexing. ⁴¹ While the Japanese and West German press sparred over the Janus-faced figure of the emperor as either a wartime leader or peaceful academic, the student protesters in both nations aligned against him spoke in more urgent tones. It was not that either nation had done a better job coming to terms with the past, but that both were unrepentant and still dangerous.

Even as the West German and Japanese media tended to play down the protests against the emperor in Bonn, it is clear that demonstrators had an effect on observers of the trip. The cheerful response at Bonn’s airfield contrasted the frostier reception in some parts of Europe, including in the Netherlands, where protesters smashed the windshield of the emperor’s limousine. To some in Japan, the West Germans had ‘good manners' as opposed to their European neighbors. ⁴² Other Japanese accounts of the trip tended to emphasize pro-Japanese sentiment from a fellow nation with a miraculous economy. Students did ‘not know war' as the Asahi Shinbun wrote, and the protesters’ loud denunciations of the past and present should be taken with skepticism. ⁴³

The West German state certainly treated these protests against the emperor as serious threats to both the Japanese monarch and the public. On the first day of protests, around 80 police in Bonn met student protesters, announcing over a megaphone five times that the group would have to disperse. When the students did not disband, the police met protesters with force – deploying a new type of water cannon designed specifically with mass protests in mind. A spokesperson for the police later claimed the police had focused efforts on students making direct allusions to the Nazis, arguing that these individuals had violated Paragraph 103 of the Criminal Code, which forbade insulting a foreign head of state. ⁴⁴ The protests in Bonn resulted in a number of arrests, mainly for rioting, but also for insulting the Japanese emperor. Protesters denounced these tactics as the same kind of police ‘repression' that had been in use against SDS protests of the Vietnam War and the Shah. ⁴⁵

What would become known as the ‘Hirohito Trial' of a dozen Bonn students from 1971 and into 1975 hinged on the question of insulting a foreign head of state; however, for protesters, the trial represented the problems of the Nazi and militarist past as well as the imperialist present. Supporters of the anti-imperialist students on trial referred to the process as Sondergericht, or a ‘Special Tribunal' specifically comparing it to the extra-judicial courts used by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. ⁴⁶ At the same time, groups on the Left saw the strict police reaction to the Japan Campaign and anti-emperor protests in Bonn as proof that the West German government was conspiring with US imperialism to stifle any anti-imperial thought in West Germany against the Vietnam War. The state supposedly recognized that the struggle in West Germany was actually a struggle for the Vietnamese. ⁴⁷ Still others argued the Hirohito Trial was a part of the West German state’s backsliding into fascism, coming around the same time as the trial of the Rote Armee. These protesters claimed the police had been warned of Japanese terrorist attacks against the emperor on West German soil, which similarly connected the state response to a perceived overreaction to left-wing violence in the early 1970s. ⁴⁸

The trial of seven of the anti-emperor protesters opened in late 1974. For the accused and for their anti-imperialist supporters, the trial quickly became a referendum on the Japanese emperor and the West German state. Among the students charged with insulting a foreign head of state was Bonn University history student Hannes Heer, a major figure within SDS and an important participant in the protests against the Shah in 1967. ⁴⁹ The accused argued that the Japanese emperor was not a current ‘head of state' and did not fall under Paragraph 103; however, their defense also attempted to argue that the protesters had not been wrong to call the emperor a ‘war criminal' and a ‘fascist’. They were reinforced in this argument by a letter of support signed by 20 Japanese academics and 14 European Asian specialists submitted to the court on the third day of the trial. The letter backed up the accused claims that the emperor was responsible for the war, not just because he was in direct control of all political and military decisions but also because the social construction of the Japanese state under the Tennōsei (emperor system) placed him in a commanding role for the people as well. ⁵⁰

Foremost among these expert opinions was historian Inoue Kiyoshi, an outspoken critic of Japanese militarism and the emperor. On 25 June 1975, the defendants submitted a brief to the court on behalf of Inoue, citing him as an expert witness. The defendants used Inoue’s work on the International Military Tribunal Far East after the Second World War to show two things: that the emperor was responsible for the war, which the Allies recognized at the time and, more importantly, that all military decisions had to have originated with the monarch. In this case, citing Inoue’s work from the late 1960s on the Tennōsei, the students argued that the Japanese state had used a false 2000-year history to ‘implant' the emperor as supreme leader into the consciousness of the Japanese people. This system, with an unquestioned leader at the top, was the true driving force in modern Japanese history. More specifically, Inoue had already argued that the Imperial Conference of 7 July 1941 had proved the emperor’s role in deciding for war in the Pacific – and eventually in then-French Indochina. ⁵¹ The trial, which seems to have ended without a conviction or much fanfare from protesters or the media not long after 1975, shows the deep commitment of these protesters to their anti-Japanese imperialist stance. ⁵² Moreover, the reliance on Inoue and the famous historian’s letter of support indicate that even after the emperor had departed, West German and Japanese anti-imperialists sought and obtained connections.

The image of Hirohito presented by these demonstrators represented a blending of both Japanese and German past and present, yet protest against the Japanese monarch became much more urgent as a direct line to both the crimes of the past in the Second World War and the crimes of the present in the Vietnam War. A major slogan of the protests denounced ‘Hirohitler' which merged the names of both Japan and Germany’s wartime leaders, and therefore crimes, into one. ⁵³ A cartoon of the emperor, appearing on 60,000 fliers passed out during the Japan Campaign, blatantly depicted these perceived entanglements. The image was of the elderly Japanese monarch bowing deeply, with his body making up the shape of a gasmask-covered face crying a single tear. The emperor looks up from his bow to glance at his shadow – a Nazi swastika. ⁵⁴ In one sense, it is clear that anti-imperialists saw the visit through the lens of the German wartime experience. At the same time, the figure of Hirohito was also continuity with past crimes as the wartime leader of Japan and a member of the fascist Anti-Comintern Pact: as one sign put it, the emperor was also ‘Hitler’s sworn friend’. ⁵⁵ ‘Hirohitler' was an encapsulation of the shared dark past for both nations, which called into question Japan’s claims of reformation while simultaneously condemning the West German past. Students in SDS often linked their protest to the Nazi past and referenced the continuities with the crimes of the 1940s, yet the figure of Hirohito presented a uniquely concrete representative of that very past.

Agitation against the emperor among Japanese and West German students did not simply concern the Second World War; rather, the analysis of Japanese imperialism was filtered through the lens of America’s war in Indochina. When the emperor faced criticism in places like the UK and the Netherlands, the focus was aggression against their former empires and victimization of POWs. ⁵⁶ For West Germans, protest came from a decidedly different angle: specifically emphasizing Asian victimization. A major slogan of the protests read: ‘Hitler – six million Jews. Hirohito – 50 million Asians.' Indeed, this formulation conflated Asian victims of wartime Japanese imperialism with Jewish victims, contrasting starkly with other European anti-emperor protests. A further implication of this slogan, that the Japanese emperor was actually worse than Hitler, also hinged on Asian victims. Another slogan used at the protests, ‘Hitler 1937 – Hirohito’, referencing the Japanese invasion of China –implied that the emperor was not only worse, but an earlier iteration of the German dictator. ⁵⁷ Citing Japanese crimes as early as 1937, betrayed an important element in the anti-imperial thinking of 1971, which concerned itself much more with the People’s Republic of China and, ultimately, Southeast Asia. The night before the demonstrations in Cologne, the police caught a woman painting the side of the Japan Cultural Institute. On it, she had scrawled a Nazi eagle clutching a swastika with the words ‘Japan-West Germany-USA' underneath. ⁵⁸ When these students thought of Asian victims in imperialist war, they were also thinking of the Vietnamese.

Indeed, materials analyzing and denouncing the imperial visit largely concerned themselves with what West German and Japanese exchange students saw as Japanese imperial ambitions in Southeast Asia. This was the case with a pamphlet published by a group of Japanese students in West Germany called Der Japanische Jugendverband in Deutschland (Japanese Youth League in Germany). ⁵⁹ The group, which did not give an indication of their membership, put out the 40-page pamphlet Die neue japanische Expansion in S-O-Asien (New Japanese Expansion in Southeast Asia), in September 1971 in response to the impending state visit. In this analysis, the emperor – who had been responsible for wartime aggression against Asia – was now visiting Europe in an attempt to make a revived Japanese capitalism palatable to the world. ⁶⁰ The Japanese industrial class, meanwhile, was finally realizing its former dreams, but this time in a ‘Lesser East Asian Coprosperity Sphere’, through economic exploitation in South Korea and Taiwan. This was a common refrain in Japanese anti-imperial discourse in the 1960s and 1970s and it had now made it into the imaginations of their West German counterparts. As the Japanese economy improved, the Japanese Youth League claimed, it needed new sources of raw materials for its industrial expansion, and an ‘overheated' US economy due to the Vietnam War effort provided Japan with an opening. ⁶¹

For the Youth League, Indochina was the true vehicle for Japanese imperial regeneration – both in terms of facilitating the US war effort and as a target for the new Japanese empire. The economic miracle of the 1960s had come at the expense of development projects in neighboring countries, most clearly South Korea after the normalization treaty in 1965. Similarly, keeping up with US war demands was lucrative but demanding on Japanese industry. Therefore, the Japanese monopoly capitalist class needed the raw materials and cheap labor of Vietnam – as well as Thailand and the Philippines – to fuel their regeneration. This, the Youth League argued, was how Japan’s economy had grown so rapaciously through the 1960s, and how it planned to compete with and eventually overtake the US and Europe among the imperialist nations. Not unlike in the Korean War two decades earlier, Japan benefited from war procurements and armament production; however, the deepening crisis in the US war in Indochina had an even greater value to Japan – allowing it to both cooperate and compete with US imperialism. ⁶² These ideas were largely representative of how Japanese anti-imperialists understood the revitalization of Japanese imperialism after 1965, and found echoes in the cooperative anti-emperor protests put on by West German and Japanese students. Another flier, written by an ad-hoc ‘German-Japanese Student Committee’, also stressed the role of the Japanese armament industry and the SDF, a defensive military expanded in the 1950s. They ended their flier with ‘The new invasion of Tenno [sic] domination in Asia has already begun!' and a handwritten note in broken Japanese echoing a common slogan normally aimed at the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos: ‘Victory to the Struggling People of Japan!' ⁶³

The League against Imperialism published their own lengthy pamphlet in response to the imperial visit with the intention of contextualizing the rise of Japanese imperialism and the current efforts to revive dreams of empire. The book, Der japanische Imperialismus: Dokumente und Analysen zur Entwicklung des Klassenkampfs in Japan (Japanese Imperialism: Documents and Analysis of the Development of Class Struggle in Japan) drew on of a number of sources to create an anti-imperialist source book for struggling against the threat of Japanese imperialism. The first half of the book, dedicated to tracing the years from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to 1945, was mainly based on translations of works by Japanese historians Inoue Kyoshi and Hani Gorō. ⁶⁴ The second section, concerning the revitalization of militarism, monopoly capitalism, and imperial ambitions in Asia since 1945, relied in part on articles from the Peking Rundschau, a German-language state organ that clearly represented the anti-imperial and anti-Japanese sentiment of the Peoples Republic of China. Yet, the majority of this analysis of Japanese imperialism came from activists in West Germany and Japan, not from Chinese propaganda.

Indeed, the book quoted directly a report from a meeting between New Left students as well as anti-imperial material meant for international consumption. In fall 1969, Christian Semler, then one of the most prominent members of SDS and a later founding member of a successor left-wing revolutionary movement, the KPD-AO, traveled to Japan. He attended the second International Anti-War Conference in Tokyo and Kyoto put on by Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei (The Communist League or, simply Bund, as a reference to the German Socialist League of the mid-nineteenth century) a conglomeration of various Zengakuren factions. The trip, conducted at the invitation of Japanese students funded by the VDS, a German student association, put Semler in contact with Bund, the farmers from Sanrizuka, anti-war GIs in Japan, and also an early iteration of Sekigun-ha. His experiences, compiled in a pair of long articles in Rote Presse Korrespondenz in 1970, helped to inform much of the debate about the state of the Japanese class and anti-war struggles on the West German radical left. ⁶⁵

Information about Japan’s anti-imperial struggle also came from Japanese protest material in English intended specifically for an international audience. The magazine AMPO served to introduce the decentralized Japanese group Beheiren (Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam) and its anti-war, anti-US-Japan security treaty stance to an English-speaking audience. The express goal, one issue stated, was ‘unified international action against Japan-U.S. imperialism’, especially through encouraging the translation and dissemination of their articles. ⁶⁶ While Beheiren activists largely attempted to avoid leftist jargon, some factions actively embraced anti-imperialism. The overt anti-imperial stance of AMPO distinguished the magazine from some of the more moderate Beheiren activists, which appealed to the KPD who used it to explain the expansion of Japanese imperialism into Southeast Asia. ⁶⁷ Indeed, the League against Imperialism also included a translation of a detailed history of the Sanrizuka farmers from a recent issue of AMPO in Japanese Imperialism. ⁶⁸ Semler’s visit and AMPO magazine were major conduits of information sharing between movements in Japan and West Germany. This exchanges of people and protest material were the basis for understanding the emperor’s state visit and helped facilitate a sense of a shared protest identity.

Japanese Imperialism’s thesis tied constant imperial expansion and aggression to the unique and pervasive influence of monopoly capitalism – first instilled through the so-called Zaibatsu industrial conglomerates in Meiji and enabled by US imperialism in the postwar. Japanese society remained in thrall to a semi-feudal class system, dominated by ex-samurai elite and beholden to a clique of all-powerful family-run Zaibatsu. The promotion of an ‘Emperor Cult' through schools and the military, meanwhile, dominated the Japanese state-society relationship. ⁶⁹ The emperor system, or ‘Tennoism [sic]’, was a ‘feudal' and ‘paternal' grounding for Japanese fascism. At the apex of this system was the ‘god-like' figure of the Emperor, who, crucially, controlled the military and therefore imperial expansion. The League against Imperialism argued that ‘unlike Nazi-Fascism’, the Tenno-centered Japanese fascism had a strict structure from top to bottom, allowing them to directly blame the ‘Tenno’s horde' for slaughtering millions of Asians in the Second World War. ⁷⁰ The comparison of Nazi and Japanese fascisms aligned with the concept of ‘Hirohitler’ as depicted in cartoon. In a way both systems were similarly evil, yet the argument was made in 1971 that the Japanese version was worse as it definitively could be traced back to one, still living, man. This flash of orientalism hinted that even ideologically aligned anti-imperialists could rely on similar stereotypes as the national press when analyzing Japanese society.

Just as the Japanese Youth League in Germany had argued, the League against Imperialism concluded that through the occupation and American imperialist Asian wars, Japan was on the cusp of regaining its past imperial position. The Korean War sparked the militarist regeneration, with the abandonment of national pacifism and the transformation of security police into a full-fledged military in the form of the SDF. For the West Germans too, the Japan-South Korea treaty in 1965 marked the revival of Japanese imperialist ambition in Asia. ⁷¹ Yet, American intervention in Vietnam showed the true danger of the new Japanese imperialism. The US, which had attempted its own version of a Coprosperity Sphere after 1945 and relied on Japan to supply and guard their flanks while attacking Vietnam, was now losing in Indochina. This meant that the Japanese militarists and capitalist classes, who had until then been co-conspirators in the effort to be a ‘world gendarme' in Asia, could overtake the US at their own global game through economic penetration of Asian markets. ⁷² In all of this, the contemporary war in Vietnam was the model by which past imperialism was understood. Indeed, the League concluded that the Vietnamese struggle against the Japanese military occupation was the true model for the anti-colonial struggles in the postwar. ⁷³ Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the same time the emperor visited West Germany, a theory of global imperial strategy increasingly dominated the way anti-imperialists viewed US, as well as West German and Japanese, imperialism in Vietnam and Indochina.

The theory of global imperial strategy had formed, however, over the course of two international conferences, both held in 1968. In February of that year, SDS held the West Berlin Vietnam Congress, largely considered to be the height of West German student protest over the war, and attended by 5000 people, including many foreign students. Six months later, at the Chuo University in Tokyo, Bund held its own mass meeting against the war: the 8-3 Anti-War Conference. This was a first attempt by Bund to coordinate international action against the War in Vietnam. Christian Semler would attend the second in 1969. Among the 1000 participants of the conference were 14 representatives from the United States and Europe. Both conferences posited largely similar views: that US imperialism followed a strategic and – in a twisted way – logical plan, where the Vietnam War was the most important manifestation of the larger system. ‘Imperialism' might appear from different sources in different parts of the world; however, in the SDS view, it was still a ‘world-wide system' with ‘identical' features in different areas when examined globally. ⁷⁴ At the 8-3 Conference in Tokyo, future leader of Sekigun-ha and Kyoto University dropout Shiomi Takaya, announced a new theoretical approach to revolution that called for taking the struggle against imperialism to the global stage. At the conference, which led to a factional split within the Bund, radicals proposed an idea of the world dominated by a coalition of great imperial powers dominating ‘less advanced nations' necessitating a global civil war fought by a global ‘Red Army’. ⁷⁵ Both SDS and Bund therefore began to see Vietnam and the United Sates in a global context as a massive confrontation between the international workers movement and a constellation of imperialist powers including their own nations. ⁷⁶

The global strategy of imperialism theory was, in a sense, a parallel reading of international history after 1945 by anti-imperialists in both nations. In this reading, Vietnam was more important than a simple local liberation movement or decolonization conflict. Much of the importance of the war in Indochina was how it fit into a wide range of global agreements and international organizations. In general, the idea was that the United States had come out of the Second World War as the globe’s dominant imperial power and quickly moved to secure its interests worldwide. The Yalta agreement with Stalin, NATO, ANPO (the US-Japan security treaty), and the International Monetary Fund all represented tools in reorganizing the world. NATO and ANPO installed US military bases in key locations around the world for the US to control its satellites and intimidate its enemies. Japan and Okinawa especially acted as the launching points for military – and, as was often feared – nuclear retaliation. Where the United States could not occupy, or did not need to invade, it supported anti-democratic coups in nations like Greece, Turkey, and Persia to maintain its global strategic position. ⁷⁷ This theory of global imperial strategy, with Vietnam as the focal point of conflict and potential collapse of imperialism, was the background through which West German and Japanese anti-imperialists saw the emperor.

Included in this theory was the danger of a revitalized West German imperialism that would seek to bind itself to an old ally – a theme that had been growing in domestic anti-imperial debates even before the emperor’s visit. A revitalization of German imperialism came, just as in the case for Japan, at the hands of the United States, which had occupied West Germany, used it as a massive military base, and helped develop the Bundeswehr in the 1950s. Between 1971 and 1972, the League against Imperialism published two more numbered issues in their series inaugurated by Japanese Imperialism. The first was dedicated to Vietnam, and the third, Kampf dem BRD-Imperialismus (The Struggle Against FRG Imperialism), discussed West German imperialism. In it, the group argued that Willy Brand’s Ostpolitik policy of reengaging with the Eastern Bloc was a veiled attempt to exploit those nations and to regain the Nazi Lebensraum of the Second World War. At the same time, increased investment in South Vietnam and other international projects were new imperial ambitions in Indochina by other means. ⁷⁸ The sequence of League against Imperialism pamphlets stressed their concern that the Vietnam was the focus of renewed imperialism from both West Germany and Japan. By the 1970s, the US – through economic crisis and military over extension, both as a result of Vietnam – had lost control and new imperialists were now ready to take over and dominate the world. ⁷⁹ This, anti-imperialists argued, was the reason a rehabilitated emperor was visiting West Germany: to conspire with a newly independent fellow imperialist nation. ⁸⁰

This new global role in imperial strategy also helped to explain how protesters entangled their own pasts with the other’s and with the war in Vietnam. ⁸¹ This was certainly clear among protesters who saw the fascism of the 1930s continued in the monopoly capitalism of the 1970s. For these anti-imperialists, the emperor was a direct reminder of Japan and Germany’s pasts alike, denouncing Hirohito as worse than Hitler. This included understanding the Japanese war in Nazi-German terms, as was somewhat common in the rhetoric of anti-imperial and anti-Vietnam War protesters. ⁸² When West Germans discussed Korean slave labor camps run by Japan, they explicitly called them concentration camps (KZ for the German Konzentrationslager), comparing them to the Nazi death camps. This was also the way the League and others understood Unit 731 – a secret division of the Japanese army that had developed biological weapons and tested them on Chinese civilians. At the chemical weapons installation ‘bodies were, as was customary in the concentration camps of the Hitler-fascists, burned in crematoria’. ⁸³ Evoking the past also included Germans’ own suffering in ‘two imperialist World Wars and twelve years of fascism' as an impetus to resist the state visit. ⁸⁴ This evocation of past suffering and contemporary protest mirrored the early postwar discourses of crimes in the Second World War that historians have shown to have emphasized Japanese and German suffering over that of other victims. ⁸⁵

Near the end of the imperial couple’s stay in West Germany, the Asahi Shinbun published a full-page spread of pictures documenting their trip in Germany. They included the emperor’s river cruise, a group of smiling Germans selling souvenirs, and the Empress greeting a young boy in traditional German dress. Juxtaposed next to these happy images, however, was a picture of the League and KOKAJAMI holding placards and being restrained by police in the Marktplatz. ⁸⁶ In the West German press too, commentators included demonstrations as a nasty footnote to the overall visit. Even so, the protests clearly affected the tone of the trip and how it was remembered. The Japanese media concluded that protests in West Germany revealed an unwillingness to let go of the past and laid bare an ‘anti-Japanese' sentiment still evident more than two decades after 1945. ⁸⁷ Even largely depoliticized and sympathetic portrayals of the state visit had to reckon with anti-imperialist protest, complicating the picture of the kindly academic celebrating a century of German-Japanese cooperation.

The particular kind of anti-imperialist politics that emerged around the emperor’s visit to Bonn was both a rejection of the sanitized history of Japan and West Germany in the postwar as well as a rejection of modern imperialism in Vietnam. Activists who protested the visit made the link between these issues explicit: the forces of capitalist expansion and the demand for labor, resources, and markets that had pushed Japan and Germany into fascist alliance were the very same forces that were driving US policy in Indochina. The figure of the emperor – ‘Hirohitler' – was a living reminder to protesters that these impulses had never gone away and his presence in West Germany confirmed the conspiracy to regain imperial dominance over the world. However, it was not simply a look to the past or parallel experiences in the postwar that drove these ideas about imperialism. The consistent attempts to use ‘Tennō’, the Japanese name for the emperor, in West German protest material, repeated quotation from Japanese sources like AMPO, and the active solicitation of Japanese expertise in the form of Inoue show that this moment was not simply a new way to fight old battles in Bonn or West Berlin.

Christian Semler’s trip to Japan and the archive of knowledge about the Japanese anti-imperial struggle detailed in RPK helped inform West German activists about the supposed dangers of a resurgent Japanese economic domination of Asia. Similarly, this protest was affected by the proliferation of materials like AMPO magazine, which was specifically designed to educate other movements about Japanese imperialism. Finally, beyond the solidarity expressed between Japanese and West German radicals seeing each other struggling against similar forces, the actual presence of Japanese exchange students also influenced the development of anti-imperial ideas. While these protesters drew on a global protest language and a larger ‘transnational imagination' about the Vietnam War, the particularities of the West German-Japanese exchange also mattered. ⁸⁸ This was not the kind of transnational exchange normally detailed in the history of the 1960s, which has largely identified the transfer of ideas from the US or from the Third World to the Global North. Rather, the Japanese influence on West German anti-imperialism was a moment where movements in two states of the Global North – but separated by an entire world – inspired each other.

Anti-imperialism was an ideology and a set of politics that defined the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially in relation to the war in Vietnam. While anti-imperialists may have been making broader assumptions about the world, and especially the place of West Germany and Japan within it, that did not always comport with economic reality, these were deeply and widely held beliefs among groups as diverse as radical Maoists and nominally non-dogmatic leftist citizen movements. As such, their ideas help to clarify the politics of the era and must be taken seriously. ⁸⁹ The message scrawled on the wall of Cologne’s Japan Cultural Institute under a Nazi eagle the night of 12 October 1971 reading ‘Japan-West Germany-USA' makes little sense without the context of what activists were seeing in their world. These anti-imperialists were essentially observing global structures of domination and violence and looking to oppose them through international solidarity. The most prominent example of imperialist violence that occupied these activists was the Vietnam War, but they took those same observations and applied them to their own conditions and the historical past. The emperor, a symbol of the fascist past and the unreformed expansionist capitalist powers of West Germany and Japan, had also become an emblem of the same structures that propelled the US war in Indochina. In 1971, all of it had to be resisted all at once.