Assassination of Inejirō Asanuma

The Ikeda administration had been riding high going into the election debate. Ikeda's newly announced Income Doubling Plan had proven popular, and polls showed his party in a strong position heading toward the election. However, on the night of Asanuma's assassination, approximately 20,000 protesters spontaneously flooded the streets of Tokyo calling for the entire Ikeda cabinet to resign in order to take responsibility for failing to ensure Asanuma's safety. Ikeda and his advisors worried that a new protest movement might arise that would be the second coming of the Anpo protests that had toppled the cabinet of his immediate predecessor, Kishi Nobusuke.

To respond to the crisis, Ikeda took the unusual step of delivering a memorial speech at a plenary session of the Diet on October 18. The Socialist Party Diet members vocally opposed the speech. Despite Ikeda's reputation as a poor public speaker and the expectation that he would give a short boilerplate speech, Ikeda surprised the crowd by delivering a lengthy oration in which he offered an eloquent and generous assessment of Asanuma's love for his country and the Japanese people as well as his hard work ethic.[14] The speech was reported to have moved many Diet members to tears.[15]

Ikeda's party went on to win the election, increasing its number of seats in the Diet, although Asanuma's Japan Socialist Party also fared well.[16]

The note Otoya Yamaguchi wrote with toothpaste on his cell wall before committing suicide

Following the assassination, Yamaguchi was arrested and imprisoned awaiting trial. Throughout his imprisonment, he remained calm and composed and freely gave extensive testimony to police. Yamaguchi consistently asserted that he had acted alone and without any direction from others. Finally, on November 2, he wrote "Long live the Emperor" (天皇陛下万歳, tennōheika banzai) and "Would that I had seven lives to give for my country" (七生報国, shichisei hōkoku) on the wall of his cell using toothpaste, the latter a reference to the last words of 14th-century samurai Kusunoki Masashige, and hanged himself with knotted bed sheets.[3]

The Japan Socialist Party had been an unhappy marriage between far-left socialists, centrist socialists and right socialists who had been forced together in order to oppose the consolidation of conservative parties into the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955. Asanuma was a charismatic figure who had been able to hold many of these mutually antagonistic factions together through the force of his personality.[2] Under Asanuma's leadership, the party had won an increasing amount of seats in the Diet in every election over the latter half of the 1950s and seemed to be gathering momentum. Asanuma's death deprived the party of his adroit leadership, and thrust Saburō Eda into the leadership role instead.[2] Eda rapidly took the party in a more centrist direction, far faster than the left socialists were ready to accept.[2] This led to growing infighting within the party and drastically damaged its ability to present a cohesive message to the public. Over the rest of the 1960s and going forward, the number of seats the socialists held in the Diet continued to decline until the party's extinction in 1996.[17]

Because Asanuma's assassination took place in front of television cameras, it was repeatedly shown on television for weeks and was seen by almost everyone in Japan with access to a television. Within a few weeks of the assassination, Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburō Ōe wrote two novellas, Seventeen and The Death of a Political Youth, that were obviously inspired by Yamaguchi's actions, although he was not mentioned by name.

Yamaguchi's actions and the massive publicity they received inspired a rash of copycat crimes, as a number of political figures became targets of assassination plots and attempts over the next few years.[3] Of the notable crimes inspired by Yamaguchi's attack one was the Shimanaka Incident of 1 February 1961. In this incident, Kazutaka Komori, a 17-year-old member of the Greater Japan Patriotic Party, attempted to assassinate the president of Chūō Kōron magazine for publishing a graphic dream sequence depicting the beheading of the emperor and his family. This played a role in establishing what came to be known as the Chrysanthemum taboo.[18][19]

Yasushi Nagao (left) with his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. (1961)

A photograph of the moment immediately after Yamaguchi stabbed Asanuma was taken by Mainichi Shinbun newspaper photographer Yasushi Nagao, who had been assigned to cover the debate. As Yamaguchi rushed Asanuma, Nagao instinctively adjusted the focal distance of his lens from 4,5 m (15 ft.) to 3 meters (10 ft.) and captured an extremely clear image of the assassination. Nagao's photograph won the World Press Photo of the Year award for 1960, and won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. Today it is still found in collections as among the greatest photographs of the 20th century. The photograph allowed Nagao to leave Japan and travel the world at a time when Japanese people were generally not granted permission to travel overseas. He was able to quit his job at Mainichi in 1962 and parlay his fame into a career as a freelance photographer.

Yamaguchi became a hero and martyr to several Japanese far-right groups.[3] On December 15, 1960, a large number of Japanese far-right groups gathered in the Hibiya Public Hall where the assassination had taken place to hold a "National Memorial Service for Our Martyred Brother Yamaguchi Otoya."[3] The Greater Japan Patriotic Party has continued to hold an annual memorial service for Yamaguchi every year on November 2,[4] the anniversary of his suicide. An especially large event was held on November 2, 2010, the 50th anniversary of his suicide.[3]

On 12 October 2018, Gavin McInnes of the Proud Boys, along with members of the group, participated in a reenactment of the assassination at the Metropolitan Republican Club.[20]

• Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674984424.