If you can't beat them, join them, the article says.
If you can't join them because you weren't born into an excessively wealthy family, eat them.
If you can't eat them, they're rich that is, because they're people and that's illegal.
Steal from them and then brag about it on Twitter.
Add to start with the opening paragraph, not the title of this article, which is
Canadians are now stealing overpriced food from grocery stores with zero remorse.
As they should, I guess.
This is from blogto.com, so it's from Toronto.
Obviously highlighting the vast uptick, well, more than an uptick in the cost of everything,
including groceries.
This article is just talking about shoplifting from stores and how groceries are becoming
very overpriced.
It goes on to say, some are fed up with the bullshit.
It seems that they're willing to risk criminal charges, theft under $5,000 to stick it to
the system or, you know, avoid starvation.
Good point.
Dr. Sylvian Charlebois, a frequent media commentator and senior director of the AgriFood
Analytics Lab at Halifax's Dalhousie University reported this week that while grocery theft
has always been a major problem for the industry, it's now worse than before, after more than
a year of price hikes due to or under the guise of inflation.
Yes, thank you for adding that.
Yeah, we were just talking about that the other day actually and how some of these grocery
store chains have reported their highest earnings in a while.
I just looked it up in a CBC article from November 16th, 2022.
Probably the biggest grocery chain in Canada is Loblaws in the west of that superstore,
and I think in the east it's just called Loblaws.
Loblaws profits up 30% led by booming sales of, led by booming sales.
I don't want to click on it to see the whole article title, but I think that's enough.
That's exactly what we were just talking about.
It's up 30% quarter three year over year, just massive growth.
Not only that, a year ago they announced that they're freezing all their prices of their
no-name brand and that just came off.
But we were also just talking about the fact that they're guilty of shrinkflation.
They froze prices, but they participated in shrinkflation.
Technically, they didn't freeze the prices because they're selling you less product
for the same price.
Which I had noticed firsthand.
Not that I ever really noticed shrinkflation.
I mean, we did that whole episode on shrinkflation, but it's actual products that I'm buying,
that I'm seeing are going down in the quantity you're getting.
But now they're free to increase the prices as well as shrink it on us.
So back to this article.
With relatively narrow profit margins in grocery, the amount is huge.
To cover losses, grocers need to raise prices.
So in the end, we pay for grocery theft and I guess the major profit that they're making.
In the average family of four expected to spend less than 16,000 on groceries this year,
roughly $1,066 more than they did in 2022, which is about 7%.
The food bank used spiking to new all-time highs.
Some might argue that Canadians are already paying dearly for groceries of a different
kind, which I think is kind of funny given what we were just talking about because they're
making pretty good margins right now.
And I find this is kind of a very roundabout and a different way of saying that the masses
are subsidizing a small number of people to be able to afford to eat.
They're just going about it in a legal way and then we all end up paying for it.
Although it's not taxes, they're raising the prices for all of us.
So technically we are paying for these people to eat in just a very roundabout way.
It's true.
It's just socialism by another name with corporations involved,
which is entirely satire on my end.
I do not mean that as socialism.
This is the shittiest form of socialism you can get.
If you're too poor to afford food and the government doesn't give you any options,
taking food from a corporate grocery train to survive doesn't sound like theft to me,
wrote another, inspiring a now viral response from Charleboix himself.
You think it is appropriate to shoplift while grocery shopping just because you think prices
are too high? Crazy wrote Charleboix when retweeting the author of the aforementioned tweet who had
been responding to another response to his recent grocery store staff article.
Who is Charleboix?
He's the guy that originally said something in this article.
Is it the billionaire thing? Eat the billionaires?
No, that was what I started with.
He says that basically according to some industry data and average site, blah, blah, blah.
He was the guy that was originally talking.
Oh, is he the one that was saying that it's all inflation's fault so don't blame the grocery
stores? Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah. Okay. Makes sense.
Charleboix kind of reminds me of that politician that was saying,
you know, prices are going up so just cancel your Netflix subscription.
Truly sage advice.
Yeah, exactly.
And then in response to that, Netflix made the entire company look so shitty with their
no sharing accounts anymore.
Yeah.
So they obliged us all to take that into account.
Yeah, they did.
But yeah, that's basically what the article is saying.
It does go on.
But I think that gave us a good conversation for a starter.
And now it's probably time to get on to the real topic.
Yeah, I just want to add one thing more at the end.
I adamantly disagree that the entire cost of living increase that we've seen over the
last year is just inflation.
No, there's no way.
Companies reaping record profits off of the entire mindset that it's oh, just inflation.
So they can do whatever they want.
Yeah, that's basically what it is when they're profiting so much.
And yeah, I think we have all literally heard the ethical quandary of would you steal bread
to feed your family.
So I think we're all ethically pretty okay with people stealing food.
Yeah, to eat, especially when they can't afford.
We're all feeling the pinch right now.
The groceries have gone drastically up in cost.
And yeah, I agree with you.
And although I'm not advocating for you to steal, I understand where these people's mindsets
are.
I think that's a good way to end that.
I agree.
And with that, we can get on with the episode.
From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a Journey to the Fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe.
And based on your willingness to click on this episode, apparently your go to source
for Japanese history.
People usually look for podcasts who can actually speak the language of the region.
But hey, to each their own.
We are your passingly speaking English hosts, Taylor and Chelsea.
Here today, following up on an episode that came out two weeks ago, we had a recording error.
So unfortunately, we have to rerecord this, but it'll be just as good as the first time.
And either way, nobody really knows.
Today, we are following up on the Japanese war crimes with a bit of a history of World
War II Japan to about the 1980s.
I think that's the best way to explain it.
Just have to interject because everybody does know because you just told them.
Yeah, but they can't know which one's better.
They can only hear this one.
It's true.
This is the best one.
It is the best one.
It is most importantly, the most recorded one.
Yeah, exactly.
Only Craig knows the other one.
I call this period the postwar Japan era, although technically it's a bit of a lie
because I'm going to start this well before postwar Japan just for ease of understanding.
But there's a couple episodes that are going to be coming out in the next little while
that I think we need this historical understanding of Japan to really fully appreciate the next
episodes.
I think this is a lot of fun and there's some crazy stuff that happens that nobody really
talks about.
Despite it being just normal history, I think it's something that is a fringe topic,
at least in Western culture, because we really like to focus on ourselves and ninjas.
There's one thing I know about Japan is ninjas.
And I think we've already done this talk on a previous episode.
So let's just get to it.
Japan was a bad dude, I think is a good way to put it during World War II.
They saw Europe doing their colonialism era and they said, hey, me too.
And they got on board with that.
So this is where we're actually going to start.
And it's with some of the things that Japan did during World War II, not the war crimes,
just its expansionist views.
And we're going to start it with its expansion into what's considered Manchuria, which is
Korea and the northern part of China just above Korea, which Japan occupies during World War II.
So how does this actually come about?
There's a few events that people look to as to what actually happened here.
The first one taking place on September 18th, 1931, a Lieutenant Toimori Kawamoto of the
Independent Garrison Unit of the 29th Japanese Infantry Regiment detonated a small quantity of
dynamite close to a railway line owned by the Japan South Manchuria Railway near Mukden,
which is now Shenyang.
The guy wanted to basically destroy the rail line and make it look like it was the Chinese
that did this when it was very clearly just the Japanese army.
The hilarious thing is that the explosion was so weak that it actually failed to destroy
the tracks and trains just easily passed over it like less than five minutes later.
Japan not wanting to actually have to put any more effort into a false flag event just
invaded anyways.
The Imperial Japanese Army accuses Chinese dissidents of the act and responds with a
full-scale invasion that led to the occupation of Manchuria, in which Japan established its
puppet state of Manchukuo six months later.
And then since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, there had been many small incidents
along the rail line connecting Beijing with the port of Tianjin, but all had subsided.
On this occasion, a Japanese soldier was temporarily absent from his unit opposite Wanping,
and the Japanese commander demanded the right to search the town for him.
When this was refused, other units on both sides were put on alert with tensions rising.
The Chinese army fired on the Japanese army, which further escalated the situation.
Even though this is all about like a Japanese soldier that went missing, he ends up showing
up and they're like, well, screw this.
Everything's gone to shit.
So let's start a war.
You can't just be like, oh, there you are.
Let's drop everything.
Our bad.
It's called the Second Sino-Japanese War.
A lot of historians will actually point to this as the actual start of World War II.
This is in 1931, so technically it could be the start.
It really depends on who you ask though.
Interesting.
So Japan's set up, this is basically a colonized state so that it could build industry.
It set up a ton of industry in here.
And when it would go into countries and set up all these factories and supply lines,
they would be run by what's called the Zaibatsu.
Zaibatsu are large family controlled vertical monopolies.
So it would be a small group of Japanese business people or well-off families would own a holding
company that would own everything right from the mine to the place where the tank gets made,
to probably the shipping company that would take it to where the tank needs to be.
That would all be owned by one family who would end up being extremely wealthy.
What's that called?
Is that a monopoly?
Yeah, it's called a vertical monopoly.
The most famous version that you would see historically referenced in Western culture
would be Ford because Ford would buy the rubber plants where their tires were made.
Like they would buy everything to make sure that they owned everything.
Yeah, but in Japan, they specifically call these Zaibatsu.
People got extremely wealthy off it and there's famous names that you would know.
I believe Mitsubishi's one of the families that own Zaibatsu.
So not just German companies exist from this World War II era into today and are well known.
I just wanted to set that up because it will come up in later episodes,
but that's all I'm going to talk about about Manchukuo or Manchuria for now.
All in all, the following are the areas that Japan
invaded and occupied during World War II.
And this, I think it's an exhaustive list, but I don't know for sure.
Almost all the coastal areas of the Republic of China,
Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, which was a US territory at that time.
British Hong Kong, British North Borneo, British Protectorate of Sarawak,
which is now part of Malaysia, British Malaya, which is now Malaysia and Singapore.
The Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia, British Burma, which is now Myanmar.
The US territory islands in the Western Pacific, Guam,
Thuik Islands, things like that.
Australian territory of Papua New Guinea, which was at that time called the
Australian territory of Papua.
British West Pacific Islands, the Solomon Islands,
Gilbert Islands, Ellis Islands, things like that.
And parts of the Aleutian Islands, which is Alaskan territory in the US.
Holy crap, that's a lot.
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot.
They had a huge empire that nobody really talks about.
Yeah.
No, I had no idea.
And except for the coastal areas of China, all regions and countries that Japan invaded
during World War II were originally occupied or colonized by European powers,
which I think they were justifying as like Europeans are not better than us.
Asians are superior and we should be.
This is purely speculation on my end.
We should be the ones working together to put Asia forward.
So they colonized instead.
During this colonization area, Japan likely killed around 31 million civilians
throughout these territories with anywhere from 10 to 20 million of these civilians
coming just in China, like just massive numbers.
That's the end of the World War II part.
We're going to skip way ahead, like 10 years now to post World War II, to the date,
August 15th, 1945, where Imperial Japan surrenders to the Allied powers.
I think everybody kind of knows what happened here.
There was famously two bombs dropped.
I forget their names, but there were famously two bombs dropped on Japan.
And they said, yeah, maybe we shouldn't be doing this.
The US definitely didn't have to drop both of them.
They likely would have surrendered with just one.
But in any event, they do surrender on August 15th, 1945.
And what happens from here?
September 1945 to April 1952, the Allies of World War II,
which includes all of the Allied powers, including the USSR,
occupied Japan and attempt to transform Japanese society
from an authoritarian regime into a democracy.
To manage Japan under the Allies,
General Douglas MacArthur constituted the supreme commander of the Allied powers,
which is called SCAP.
It was a management organization of about 2,000 officers from the Allied powers,
also commonly known as the General Headquarters.
So two things that might come up is GHQ and SCAP.
That's what I'm referring to.
They're both the same thing.
Try and remember.
Because MacArthur had a huge influence on the people of Japan, GHQ and SCAP,
also are interchangeably used to refer to MacArthur and his bureaucrats,
rather than just the organization itself.
SCAP went right into reforms as soon as it landed.
Basically, they got there in September and they said,
Kate, we're going to do these few things.
Chelsea, some of these are going to sound really interesting.
And especially when you look at it, like this is more or less driven by Douglas MacArthur.
He's an American general.
So you would think, okay, he's bringing capitalism to these boys
so that they can't fall to communism.
What they consider protecting from communism
might not be what we would consider it today.
So, okay, good to know.
First and foremost, those zaibatsu, those vertical monopolies,
they want to dissolve all of them.
Okay.
They don't like the idea of vertical monopolies.
So the first thing they want to do is dissolve all of those.
They also start drafting the constitution for Japan,
which grants and enshrines freedom of speech.
They release all political prisoners,
who were mostly socialists and communists,
that were held during the wars by the monarchy of Japan.
They also enact the three labor laws to protect workers' rights,
trade union laws, labor standards law, and the labor relations adjustment law.
SCAP also worked with Japanese leaders to disband the Japanese military
and purged leaders from government posts.
SCAP instituted sweeping land reforms that made tenant farmers
the new owners of the land that they had previously rented.
This was a huge blow against a previously powerful landlord class
that had supported the wartime regime.
Between 1947 and 1945, approximately 4.7 million acres,
or 1.9 million hectares, or 38% of Japanese farmland,
was purchased from landlords under the government's reform program.
And 4.6 million acres, or 1.86 million hectares,
was resold to the farmers who were working on it.
So basically they had a peasant class who was never able to really gain money
because they had to pay anything that they made to the actual owners of the land.
They got given the land more or less,
and now they actually are farmers in the sense that we would actually think of them today.
Okay, that's nice.
By 1950, 89% of all agricultural land was owner-operated,
and only 11% was tenant-operated.
So like that's pretty damn fast.
That's five years where they go where it's pretty much all tenant-operated
to 89% is owner-operated.
MacArthur's efforts to encourage trade union membership
met with phenomenal success as well.
Basically unionization was abolished during World War II.
I believe it was a little previous.
I forgot because I didn't write it in my script,
but I'm pretty sure it was abolished just before World War II.
But by 1947, 48% of the non-agricultural workforce was unionized.
So just two years later, almost half the working class was unionized.
SCAP also sought to unravel the wartime Japanese police state
by breaking up the National Police Force
into small American-style forces controlled at the local level.
And SCAP also sought to empower previously marginalized groups
that it believed would have a moderating effect on future militarism,
which groups are talking about while they legalize the communist
and socialist parties in the country,
which had been abolished under the monarchy.
They also encouraged formation of labor unions
and extending the right to vote to women.
The crowning achievement of the first phase of the occupation
was the promulgation at SCAP's behest in 1947 of the new constitution of Japan,
which most famously includes Article 9,
which says that Japan explicitly disavows war as an instrument of state policy
and promises that Japan will never maintain a military.
And to this day, Japan does not technically have a military
because in their constitution they are unallowed.
Yes.
That will come up later though,
so don't hold it up as a great thing for now.
Okay.
Next up, they basically abolished the monarchy.
Yes, there is still an emperor of Japan.
It is not what it was before though.
Japan's hereditary peerage called Kazoku
that lasted for over a thousand years in different but essentially similar forms
was abolished by the new Japanese constitution that was heavily influenced by SCAP.
This was similar to the European peerage system involved in princes,
barons, and counts that were not part of the royal family.
Also, the extended royal family called Okei and Shinoke was abolished and stripped of
all rights and privileges, transforming into commoners immediately.
And the only Japanese that were allowed to call themselves a part of the royal or nobility
after the US occupation were the emperor and about 20 of his direct family members.
This action by MacArthur and the writers of the constitution helped transform Japan
drastically by abolishing all of the old extended royal family class and the nobility class.
One of the largest of the SCAP programs was the public health and welfare
headed by US Army Colonel Crawford F. Sams.
Working with SCAP staff of 150,
Sams directed the welfare work of the American doctors
and organized entirely new Japanese medical welfare systems along American lines.
The Japanese population was in a poor state.
Most people badly worn down, doctors and medicines were scarce,
and sanitary systems had been bombed out in large cities.
His earliest priorities were in distributing food supplies from the United States.
Millions of refugees from the defunct overseas empires were pouring in,
often in bad physical shape, with a high risk of introducing smallpox, typhus, and cholera.
And the outbreaks that did occur were localized as emergency immunization,
quarantine, sanitation, and delousing prevented massive epidemics.
Sams, who was promoted to brigadier general in 1948,
worked with Japanese officials to establish vaccine laboratories,
reorganize hospitals along American lines,
upgrade medical and nursing schools,
and bring together Japanese, international, and US teams
that dealt with disasters, child care, and health insurance.
He set up an Institute of Public Health for educating public health workers,
and a National Institute of Health for research,
and set up statistical divisions and data collection systems.
So they basically completely rebuilt the hospital system
and immunization system in Japan,
because it was absolutely destroyed during World War II.
Okay.
I took a really long time to say that.
Thank you for summarizing it.
You're welcome.
And then next up, this one is huge.
SCAP also issued edict number 109 in the name of the Japanese emperor,
prohibiting POWs, cooperators of World War II,
those belonging to several secret organizations.
There's a ton of secret organizations apparently back in the day,
not like the Illuminati per se, but like one's a Taekwondo studio.
And it's like considered a secret society.
But all these people that were involved with any of these
were banned from engaging in public service in 1946.
So in 1947, the range of prohibited positions widened,
including private enterprises,
and more than 20,000 people were basically unallowed to hold jobs
because of their involvement in these things.
So either you were part of the war
or part of a secret organization behind everything.
Especially those Taekwondo secret organizations.
You never can trust them.
Hiya!
We were talking about ninjas and what we know about ninjas.
Yes.
They're mostly turtles.
But they're from New York.
Different kind of ninja, I guess.
Different kind of ninja.
And then soon after the war, SCAP indicted 70 persons as Class A war criminals,
5,700 persons as Class B or Class C war criminals.
And of these, 984 eventually end up being condemned to death,
with 920 actually being executed.
And 475 receiving life sentences.
2,944 receiving prison terms and 1,018 being acquitted.
And 279 not sentenced or not brought to trial.
So they actually did take steps to try to punish
the worst offenders during World War II, that being SCAP.
Okay.
I don't 100% trust this, but...
Okay.
I would trust it entirely and just wait and listen for
what happens in the next three episodes.
I'll be there.
You will be, in different form.
And yeah, those are all the sweeping kind of changes throughout society
that the United Force SCAP brings to the Japanese.
It was a feudal system before this where you couldn't unionize.
There was a landlord group that basically ran everything
and a few families that were allowed to run monopolies basically on anything they wanted.
And they came and changed it and they said, let's...
Oh, and sorry, there was no freedom of speech and it was illegal to be to left wing,
either socialist or communist.
I don't know how far that extended past that.
Okay.
And SCAP came in and opened everything up.
It all seems pretty great, hey?
Yeah, I think so based on what they were doing.
And this pays off greatly for Japan.
So Japan being seriously devastated during World War II lost so much of its industry,
but nonetheless, with the help of SCAP, Japan quickly recovers from the suffering,
earning the title of the Japanese economic miracle.
In Japan, industrial production decreased in 1946 to 27.6% of the pre-war level.
So let's just say like in the 1930s, that's 100% of what their output is.
Post-World War II, they're at 27%.
In 1951, they reach 100%.
So they finally reached the pre-World War II level.
And then they reached 350% in 1960.
So it just continues to skyrocket after that.
Yeah.
And by the end of SCAP's occupation of Japan in 1952,
Japan was reintegrated into the global economy to eliminate the motivation for imperial expansion
and rebuild the economic infrastructure.
However, rapid economic growth also brought huge issues for poor working classes.
And the struggles between the working class and capitalists in Japan
deteriorated as the reconstruction work progressed.
So yes, it is great that everything expanded so fast.
They ran into huge inflation.
The workers not only formed trade unions, but also united with communists,
the peasants, and poor urbanites in their struggle.
Japan's rapid economic development also brought serious inflation.
From September 1945 to August 1948, prices in Japan increased by more than 700%.
Holy shit.
So in three years, 700%, which furthered the unrest.
Under these reformations, activism and with the help of SCAP authorities,
nearly 5 million workers joined the labor movement by December of 1946.
At first, MacArthur was confident about labor movements because,
quote, working classes are the strongest single bulwark of the new democratic regime, end quote.
And the number of organized workers continued to grow from 5 million in 1946
to 6.7 million by the end of 1948.
And from 1946 onwards, the labor movement in Japan began to gradually move beyond the vision of SCAP.
Led by the Japanese Communist Party, the Socialist and Labor Unions,
Japanese workers launched a series of strikes.
Some of these strikes continued to focus on improvements for working conditions and labor rights,
but some were dedicated to impacting or even reconstructing the nation's political system.
In May 1946, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida blamed radical labor movements for their misuse of democracy
and reiterating that both capitalists and workers cooperate for the same purpose of increase in production.
SCAP retaliation also came very soon, starting with the cabinet's Imperial Ordinance Number 311,
which imposed fines and hard labor of up to 10 years for taking part in, quote,
acts of prejudicial or occupation objectives, end quote, followed by the usage of police enforcement.
Nonetheless, strike action continued in various fronts and some of the strikes went well,
such as the September 1946 strike, which was conducted with MacArthur's acquiescence and
achieved some success.
The subsequent strike in October, however, was condemned by Yoshida, and the resulting
conflict eventually made MacArthur change his position completely.
And in the same month, MacArthur and Japanese Emperor agreed on the point that labor movements
could be highly vulnerable to manipulation by political opponents.
So yeah, they start to unionize and because all the prices are going up like mad and they're
working fairly hard, they want better rights.
So they start striking for them.
And at first, MacArthur is on board with it and he's like, yeah, that's how a healthy society
should work is that workers, if they're not being treated right, they strike, they try to get better
working environments, whether that be through higher wages, shorter hours, safer environments,
what have you.
But eventually it starts to really strain on the economy.
So he changes his mind and he actually thinks that might lead to communism.
But for a while, the labor movement actually sees MacArthur is on their side.
So they keep going and in solidarity with socialist, communist and independents began
to prepare for a general strike on February 1st, 1947.
And Chelsea vaguely knows what a general strike is now after a few episodes.
Generally.
But then again, I didn't get it right.
That's true.
The general strike demanded both the solution of labor problems, food shortages and inflation
and the resignation of the Yoshida cabinet.
And on January 18th, the union sent an ultimatum to the government demanding that the worker
demands be resolved by January 31st.
MacArthur originally remained reluctant to ban the strike outright, merely issuing an
informal warning to the unions and sending a document to the strike leader stating that
he would not permit a coordinated action by the organized labor to provoke a national
calamity by general work stoppage.
However, the unions ignored MacArthur's warning since they thought that SCAP would not violate
its own newly issued labor rights laws, which say that workers are allowed to strike.
On the afternoon of January 31st, MacArthur issued a formal directive prohibiting the
general strike that was in the process of being prepared.
And after the ban was issued, SCAP negotiated with the strike leaders and eventually the
strike leaders agreed to cancel the strike.
Although the negotiations went well, leftists, especially members of the Japanese Communist
Party subsequently became hostile towards the occupation authorities.
So this is all building towards something and a huge event kind of happens near the
end of 1947.
Up until this point, communism has more or less stayed out of Asia.
The US is looking for a place to kind of have its, what would be a good word, its pillar
to hold up and kind of control everything in Asia.
And they had their pick of the litter, like China's right there, Korea's there, Japan's
there.
There's a bunch of tiny island countries, but they're really nowhere near Japan, China
and Korea in terms of power.
So which one was kind of going to be the US's satellite state for kind of pushing everything
they want in Asia?
It was up in the air and nobody really knew which one they were going to go with.
And MacArthur actually wanted China to be its puppet state in the area.
However, on December 7th, 1947, the Chinese Civil War ends and communism wins.
This scares the hell out of a lot of people and it changes kind of the direction of everything.
Okay.
I didn't know that because I was like, hold on, aren't there like some pretty communist
countries over in that neck of the woods of the world?
I guess they weren't communist at that point.
They were not.
No, a lot of them are still just recovering from being colonized by Japan.
Uh, yes.
Which actually leads to some revolutionary ideas coming out.
And especially a lot of them were just liberated from Europeans and then liberated from Japan.
So they've been under two different groups.
So yeah, there's changes coming and they're slowly starting to show up.
The changes communism.
Yeah.
Okay.
So now the options of what the US can actually use as their puppet state changes significantly
and they look at Japan and they say like, okay, looks like this is where we're going
to have to go.
That's fine.
As a result of the loss of China to the Chinese communists and the subsequent Sino-Soviet
treaty, the CIA and US military intelligence gained the rationale necessary to collaborate
and support the Japanese right and particularly the Yakuza.
Those guys are going to come up in the next episode.
The Yakuza.
Douglas MacArthur held a general dislike of the OSS, which I believe is the precursor
for the CIA and prevented the OSS and CIA from operating in Japan until 1950.
And as a result, many of the intelligence operations undertaken during the early phase
of the occupation were delegated to the military intelligence, particularly the US military
intelligence, particularly the G2.
So with that kind of little middle history in mind, we're going to continue on with
the story of how unions are doing.
Okay.
On July 22nd, 1948, shortly after the formation of the new cabinet, SCAP asked the Ishida
cabinet to pass an order banning strikes by 40% of workers in public industries throughout
Japan.
The order sparked oppositions and protests from a variety of workers, teachers and civilians
in Japan who considered it a violation of the constitutional freedoms and basic labor
laws, and more than 100 people were arrested during the wave of opposition.
The Soviet representative in the Allied council for Japan and all non-US members of the Far
Eastern commission in Washington also expressed opposition to the order.
The order was finally carried out despite heavy opposition that led to the fall of the
ruling coalition, anti-American sentiment and the expansion of left-wing forces followed.
And then around this time comes out what's called the Truman Doctrine, which is this is
when people consider the real start of the Cold War is basically Truman says anywhere
that might turn communism, we're going to send as much money and military forces.
This is where they say we need a stronghold in Asia.
And this is where they say Japan's going to be at.
And in March of 1948, the US department of state sent a planner named George Kennan to
Japan to conduct an investigation of SCAP's policies in the situation in Japan.
He believed that MacArthur was pursuing a very moderate policy and Kennan organized
his own group and plotted to restrict MacArthur's actions.
Under Kennan's efforts and Washington's pressure, GHQ began to reverse policies gradually.
In late 1948, President Truman bypassed the Far Eastern commission and introduced a
directive emphasizing economic stability and in response, Japan passed an austerity plan,
basically saying you can't spend too much money or you can't raise taxes too much.
In addition, GHQ announced that its plan had a series of objectives designed to achieve fiscal,
monetary, price and wage stability in Japan as rapidly as possible.
And this plan will call for increased austerity in every phase of Japanese life.
And remember how they were striking because prices were going out of control and there
wasn't really enough food? Yeah, I remember that.
Austerity is not good for that. What's austerity again?
The government not really spending money. You can't go into debt.
Right, right, yeah, that makes sense. Austerity and the economic downturn also
contribute to the spread of communism in the education sector, which starts in September
of 1948. Students' associations throughout Japan formed called Zenka Gurans.
And these are organizations that were heavily influenced by communism, then spread on campus
and later became a part of communist movements in Japan.
In February of 1949, austerity policies ensued, cutting public spending, limiting public consumption
and reorienting industrial production towards export, not national consumption.
So they're already saying they're feeling the pinch at home and they're like,
that's great. We're not going to build anything for you. We're going to send it all out.
It seems like a good working model. So they're basically reversing everything.
This is in fact called the great reversal. These policies not only tightened and bolstered
Japanese economy and created a link between big business owners and Japanese conservative parties,
but also caused a sharp drop in productivity and massive job losses for workers and government
employees. In June, the ruling coalition decided to revise the labor union law and labor relation
adjustment law to reshape labor management relations in Japan. Both were simultaneously
used to suppress left-wing radicals and strengthen control over labor unions.
Specifically, the revised laws prohibited workers from being paid during strikes,
increased the employer's advantage in collective bargaining and required a minimum of 30 days
cooling off period between strikes and provided that unions emphasizing on social or political
movements would not be recognized by the government. Japan's workers strongly opposed these austerity
policies and had been continuously opposing them through strikes, wildcat strikes, which are
basically when the union hasn't declared a strike. It's just you walk out. All the employees just
agree to walk out and protest since March, 1949. In April at the instigation of MacArthur, Yoshida
issued the ordinance for controlling associations and others to facilitate the healthy development
of pacifism and democracy to prohibit militaristic, ultra-nationalistic, violent and
anti-democratic groups and to require each political organization to register its name,
membership, purpose and activities. And during this time, the Japanese communist party had
registered over 100,000 members. And in June, communist leaders announced that a September
revolution would be launched in the same month. Tyra and some other cities were occupied by over
500 workers. So like there's huge uprisings going on. Yeah, no kidding. The unions are pushing and
the government's trying to crack down on them. Then comes more austerity. In April, Yoshida wrote
to SCAP that he intended to lay off more than 100,000 railroad workers in order to comply with
austerity program. Shortly thereafter, Yoshida began the formal layoffs. While these layoffs
were firmly opposed by workers and railroad industry unions and numerous work stoppages,
strikes and occupations occurred, three unsolved incidents occurred during clashes between
railroad workers and the government. These are kind of crazy. On July 5th, Satonori Shimayama,
the chairman of the Japanese national railways, who had been receiving threatening letters,
disappears on July 5th and was later found dead on the tracks next to Kitasenju station. Oh no.
He became the subject of debate as to whether his death was a suicide or a homicide.
Uh, I'm going to go with homicide for sure. But this is also Japanese culture where
suicide's a little more normalized. Yeah, that's what I was just thinking as well, but I feel like
it's homicide. It's my feeling. Okay. That's good to know. There were many rumors spreading around
like what happened. And some of them were that it was the U.S. or Soviet agents who had actually
killed him as well. Like nobody knows what happened. So like to this day, we still don't
know what happened. If it was a suicide, well played. Okay, we can continue. 10 days later,
shortly after the announcement of the second round of dismissals were posted, an unmanned 63
series train in Tokyo that had been parked overnight was suddenly released and it cast
size after hitting and breaking a buffer stop, killing six people and injuring 20. Police
believed that leftists had caused the incident, arresting nine communists and a former national
driver ultimately did not reach any satisfactory conclusion. And then the last of the three
incidents happens on August 17th, a train carrying 630 people derails. It kills three crew members
on board and police subsequently arrested 20 people, most of them communists. Hi, Taylor here,
editor in chief at Journey to the Fringe. And I am going to add a little bit to what I talked about
with the Mitaka incident and the Matsukawa derailment just so that we can all be on the
same page. This comes from the Tokyo Weekender with regards to the Mitaka incident. This happens on
the same weekend as a second wave of JNR dismissals of around 63,000 employees takes place.
The finger is immediately pointed at members of the National Rail Workers Union upset at the
nationwide cutbacks. 10 people from the organization were arrested and charged with train sabotage
resulting in death. All but one of them belonged to the Japanese Communist Party. The odd man out
incidentally enough was conductor Keisuke Takeuchi who admitted to the crime. Yet, according to the
testimony of a third party, he was in a communal JNR bath at the time of the incident, evidence
that wasn't present in his trial. And in 1955, Takeuchi was sentenced to death by hanging due
to his confessions. The judge ruled that he planned and executed everything himself. The other
defendants were all acquitted. However, in a 2010 Japan Times article, lawyer Shoji Takamizawa said
that Takeuchi's confession was driven by a sense of hopelessness amid harsh prolonged and coercive
interrogations by prosecutors. In the past, police in Japan have been accused of physical and mental
torture to get defendants to admit responsibility for a crime. Many people subsequently recant their
confessions when it goes to court. Takeuchi did an about turn, regularly pleading his innocence
before dying in prison for a brain tumor in 1967. With regards to the Matsukawa derailment,
this comes from the Wikipedia page. Accident investigators found that the bolts and nuts of
the track joints had been loosened and a large number of railroad spikes fixing the rails to
the sleepers had been removed, resulting in one 25-meter section of rail shifting 13 meters in
the accident. Investigators also found a spanner and pry bar and a rice paddy a short distance from
the crime scene. Suspicion immediately fell on the Japan National Railway Union and workers at the
nearby Toshiba Matsukawa factory and the Japanese Communist Party, because of course. Ten workers
from the Matsukawa plant and ten workers from the Japan National Railway were arrested and charged
with sabotage, resulting in death. During the first ruling of the Fukushima District Court on
December 6, 1950, all 20 defendants were found guilty largely on the strength of confessions
forced by the police during interrogation. Five of the defendants received death sentences and
five were sentenced to life imprisonment. The remaining ten were sentenced to between 3.5 and
15 years. In the appeal ruling at the Sendai High Court on December 22, 1955, at which the
defendants recanted their confessions and professed innocence, three of the defendants were found
innocent and the remaining 17 were again found guilty. Four received death sentences and two
received life imprisonment. The cause of the defendants was taken up by author Hirotsu Kazuo,
who wrote an essay in the literary journal Chokoron, which led to an upsurge in support
by leading intellectuals and literary figures. And on August 10, 1959, the issue reached the
Supreme Court of Japan, which referred it back to the Sendai High Court for a retrial. In the
interim, it became public that a document confirming the alibi of the accused had been
hidden by the prosecution during the previous trials. Forensic testing showing that the
spanner found near the accident site was the wrong size and could not have been used to cause the
accident had also been suppressed. On August 8, 1961, in a retrial at the Sendai High Court,
all defendants were found innocent. So yeah, it got super messy. They still ended up doing those
layoffs and that's how the austerity keeps going and it's pissing off people and it's leading to
anti-American sentiment because they're the ones telling Japan how it has to run its economy and
basically the things to impose. And then they have a little bit of say in how they're imposing it,
but at the end of the day, it's the U.S. telling them how to do this. It's also leading to fairly
large leftist movements, including unions and socialist groups. Which is what they didn't want.
Yeah. Who'da thunk? Well played, U.S. Well played. After all these train incidents finally happen,
we enter a phase called the purges. So with SCAP support and advanced premeditation,
left-wing politician Jichiro Matsumoto, part of Yoshida's cabinet. Unfortunately,
we didn't really have enough time to explain Japan's government system, but this is more or
less somebody who would be high up in the government, but from the opposing party. Jichiro Matsumoto was
purged from Yoshida's cabinet after a vote. And in April, Yoshida pledged that he would use
extra-parliamentary means to combat the left. In June, employers began re-signing labor contracts
and firing workers with communist ideological tendencies. And in July, along with the
investigation of communists in the government, Yoshida began dismissing them. The same month,
MacArthur suggested an official ban on the Japanese Communist Party. In July, the civil
information and education division under SCAP sent Dr. Walter Eels of Stanford University on a six-month
round of lectures to denounce the left and to target JCP-controlled Zangakkuren in particular.
So they send a fairly prominent anti-communist lecturer to Japan to give them speeches on why
communism's bad. And he declared at Nagata University on July 19th that, quote,
communism is a dangerous and destructive doctrine, end quote. And Japanese universities need to
dismiss communist professors as soon as possible, which later became a nationwide sentiment widely
quoted by Japanese newspapers. Despite the fact that his lectures were not popular within the
universities, Japanese education minister Takase Sotoro secretly began firing pro-communist teachers
under the advice of SCAP. By March of 1950, more than 1,100 people had been dismissed. SCAP also
recommended the government to decommunize the civil service without establishing a formal institution.
Five days after Eels' speeches, the government announced that teachers and professors would be
allowed to participate in political groups. Activities of university professors such as
expressing their opinions are thought to be an integral part as professors. And while they said
that, the educational department and universities use various irrelevant reasons to force them to
resign. They said, oh, yeah, no, you can believe whatever you want, but that guy's haircut, man,
you can't have that kind of haircut. We're not firing you because you're communist, it's the haircut.
Obviously, it's so bad. The US State Department Office of Intelligence researchers reported that
20 to 30 professors were urged to resign during late September. In the same month as Eels' speech,
the National Railroad fired 126,000 workers. And in a report three months later, the head of
administrative management agency said the firings were based on the law and not on a purge of
communists. So, I don't know. It must be the truth. Yeah, it must be the truth. And just coincidentally,
they made the Japanese Communist Party give them a year earlier a list of all their members, which
was 100,000 people. At the time, Japanese academics considered the government's persecution of
communists to be criminal and recalling the government's suppression of left-wing ideas
before World War II. They believed that the academics should remain neutral and that sympathy
for communism should not be a reason for dismissal. On March 6th, Yoshida sent a letter to MacArthur
suggesting the formal dissolution of JCP. MacArthur replied that he did not have such authority,
but he would not oppose the resolution if it was passed by the Diet, which is the government in
Japan. In April, Eels was accused by students from Zengoku Ren during a lecture at Kyushu
University of trying to turn Japan into a US colony. The students demanded the censorship
of professors be stopped. Immediately thereafter, major industrial and business CEOs announced that
they would not hire communist sympathizers or communist students. On May 30th, JCP related
groups protested and chanted anti-American slogans in front of the Tokyo Imperial Palace. And during
the same period, Akihara published a series of articles criticizing the policies of the
occupational authorities. On June 6th, MacArthur ordered Yoshida to formally purge 24 influential
members of the JCP's central committee and forbid them from conducting all political activities or
publishing any articles and journals. The next day, the order was extended to the entire Akihara
editorial board. At the start of the Korean War, roughly 22,000 public and private employees were
forced out of their jobs due to their political views. The Japanese Communist Party's membership
also declined sharply from 150,000 in 1945 to 20,000 in 1955. With SCAP seeing what they were
able to do, they brushed their hands together and said, well, job well done. And SCAP withdraws in
1951. They leave and they force on Japan what's called the US-Japan Security Treaty. They call
it ANPO, which will come up very shortly. And it basically said it signed on September 8th, 1951.
And it's also the same time they signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty. It ends World War II in
Asia and went into effect April 28th, 1952. It does not have an end date or means of abrogation,
and it allowed the US forces stationed in Japan to be used for any purposes without prior consultation
with the Japanese government. It had a clause specifically authorizing US troops to put down
domestic protests in Japan and did not commit the US to defend Japan if Japan were ever attacked by
a third party. They said, we're going to get out of here. Okinawa is ours. We're going to put a base
here. We're going to do whatever we want from that base. In fact, we can put down protests in
Japan if we want to, but we don't have to. And if anybody attacks you, we don't have to do shit.
Sign this. That's just great. Good job, US. Immediately on signing it, most Japanese are
pissed off and they want it redone. They want it abolished. They want a new defense treaty.
I could see it. Many on the Japanese left and even some conservatives on the right were united
in hoping to chart a more neutral course in the Cold War and thus hope to get rid of the treaty
and the US-Japan alliance entirely. The left don't like it that they're being told the way
they need to think and specifically like communists and socialists are being outlawed again or have
been and they're subservient to the US. They would rather have their own path. The conservatives
also feel that way and a little bit of the sentiment of we wore this great power and now
we're subservient to the US. This is seven years after the end of the war. There are many people
that believe in the empire. I mean, the empire is one thing, but the US just coming in and being
like, you're going to do this now. You have no choice is another thing. They signed that treaty.
And then in 1959, the Liberal Democratic Party, which is the ruling party for most of Japan's
history, proposes a new agreement that was more favorable to Japan and wanted it in place for a
visit from Eisenhower that then Prime Minister Kishi had planned. However, the opposition by
the Japanese socialist party who really disliked the agreement, controlled only about a third of
the seats in the diet, lacked the votes to prevent the ratification. So socialists would use a variety
of parliamentary tactics to drag out debate in hopes of preventing this new treaty, the new
ANPO from being ratified before Eisenhower was supposed to arrive on June 19th. This next part
is just ridiculous. So the Prime Minister, Kishi, he wants to get a new treaty in place so that he
can look great and have a celebration when Eisenhower gets here in about a month with
Eisenhower's visit approaching fast. Kishi really wanted to ratify the treaty in time.
And moreover, the diet session was scheduled to end almost a month earlier on May 26th in the late
evening on May 19th. Kishi took desperate measures of suddenly and unexpectedly calling for a 50 day
extension with the diet session in defiance of long standing tarlentry norms and over the opposition
of many members of his own ruling liberal democratic party. When socialist diet members
staged a sit-in in the halls of the diet, Kishi took the unprecedented step of calling 500 police
officers into the diet chamber and having opposition lawmakers physically removed from the premises.
So the LDP can't get what they want done because the other members of the government won't play
along. They're just doing a sit-in. They won't vote or do anything. So he calls in the cops,
he tells them to pull them out of the building and they pull all of the members of the opposing
party out of the building. So the only people left in the building are the LDP members,
the liberal democratic party. They passed this extension and a final shop came after midnight,
just after the extension was approved when Kishi then called for the immediate ratification of his
treaty. With only members of Kishi's own party present, the revised security treaty was approved
by the lower house of the diet with no debate and only a voice vote. Basically, he did this just in
time so that this would go into effect by June 19th. Yeah. And like super sketchy way, like calls
in the cops and gets everybody removed so there's no no votes. I was just gonna say so that it goes exactly how he wants.
This is called the May 19th incident. They're so creative in this episode. Yeah, a lot of incidents
around here. Japanese people saw this as shocking unsurprisingly. So it leads to protests in late May
and into June. The anti-treaty protests greatly increased in size as many citizens took to the
streets to express their outrage and the aims of the protests expanded from protesting the security
treaty to ousting Kishi and protecting democracy. The largest protests around the national diet,
the U.S. embassy and the prime minister's official residence of Tokyo occurred on a near daily basis
and large-scale protests were staged in city centers all over Japan. In June, the Sohyo Labor
Federation carried out a series of nationwide general strikes and a June 15th strike involved
6.4 million workers across the country making it the largest strike in Japanese history.
Like that is massive. Yeah. And then there's a couple things, Chelsea, don't laugh yet. Okay.
This next one's called the Hagerty incident. Okay. Not so obvious yet. And then then there's the June 15th incident.
Okay. That wasn't a laugh. So these protests are going on and Eisenhower's business coming up on June 19th.
So Eisenhower sends his press secretary, James Hagerty to Tokyo on June 10th and he arrives at
Tokyo's Haneda airport to make the advance preparations for Eisenhower's impending arrival.
Hagerty was picked up in a black car by U.S. ambassador, Douglas MacArthur II, the nephew of
the famous general. That's not the only nepotism in that family either. Douglas MacArthur's dad
oversaw the Philippines after the American Filipino war. So that's usually how it happens,
isn't it? Yeah. So U.S. ambassador to Japan, Douglas MacArthur II picks up Hagerty and then
he immediately deliberately provokes an international incident by ordering the car to be driven into a
large crowd of protesters. However, the protesters surround the car and they start cracking its
windows and they smash out its tail lights and they rock it back and forth for more than an hour
while standing on the roof and chanting anti-American slogans and singing protest songs.
Ultimately, MacArthur and Hagerty had to be rescued by U.S. Marines in military helicopters,
creating imagery of the so-called Hagerty incident that was transmitted by newswire around the world.
Now, I actually think there's a pretty famous photo if you just type in Hagerty incident
of this whole thing going down. Yeah, there's some very famous. I wouldn't say very famous.
There's lots of photos of this and it's just, yeah, helicopters. Yeah. I was just going to say
the main one is a helicopter going in to rescue them and just so many people. Yeah, that is a
lot of people, like a lot. Like one you probably wouldn't just drive your car into. Yeah, let's
just drive into the car. No matter who is it. And then MacArthur II sounds like an absolute dumbass.
First off, he drives into the protest and then they have all these photos and he's like, oh,
this will incentivize the Japanese government to crack down harder on protests. However, this
action backfires and instead Eisenhower sees this as a safety risk and they start to take this visit
away. They're like, yeah, I don't think we should take Eisenhower to Japan anymore. Yeah, he seems
not very brave. That is a huge crowd. So that happens. Ridiculous, like two ridiculous events
and they just call them incidents. Like, I'm sure you could come up with such better names. There
probably are better names in Japanese. We just don't translate them well enough. It's true, but
I do like it. I like the names of the incidents. They're very creatively named and you know exactly
what they're talking about. They're very straightforward. They are very, there's no guessing. So next we move
on to the June 15th incident. So this is four days before the Eisenhower thing was supposed to happen.
As part of the anti-treaty coalition's 24th United Action, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched
on the national diet in Tokyo. In late afternoon, the protesters were attacked by right-wing
ultra-nationalist counter protesters who rammed them with trucks and attacked them with wooden
staves spiked with nails, causing dozens of injuries from moderate to severe, including
several hospitalizations. And just a few minutes later, radical left-wing activists from the
nationwide student federation, the Zagakuren, smashed their way into the diet compound itself.
This precipitates a long battle with police who beat the unarmed students bloody with their batons
in front of mass media reporters and television cameras. The police finally succeed in clearing
the diet compound after 1 a.m. But in a struggle, a young Tokyo university student by the name
Michiko Kamba is killed. So after this violent June 15th incident, pressure mounted on Kishi to
cancel Eisenhower's visit. Kishi had hoped to secure the streets for Eisenhower's visit by
calling out the Japan Self-Defense Forces and tens of thousands of right-wing thugs that would be
provided by, I don't want to say who, but it's the Yakuza. Basically he gets the Yakuza to come out
as they're the counter protesters. That will come up later. But didn't Eisenhower already cancel
his visit? I don't think it was formally. It was more so just like he was thinking of canceling it.
He was just thinking of not showing up at that point. Yeah. And then things were just getting
out of hand. He was like, yeah, this is looking pretty risky. Let's play it by ear right now.
This happens. Their parliament building gets held by protesters for a day and Eisenhower's like,
guys, I really don't think I should go. And Kishi, the prime minister was like, no, don't worry about
it. We're going to call in 10,000 soldiers. We're going to have Yakuza everywhere. We're fine. Don't
worry about it. But Kishi's talked out of these extreme measures by his cabinet and thereafter
had no choice but to cancel Eisenhower's visit and take responsibility for the chaos by announcing
his own resignation on June 16th. On June 17th, newspapers across the nation, which had previously
supported the protesters in their struggle to oust Kishi, issued a joint editorial condemning
violence on both sides and calling for an end to the protest movements. Nevertheless, the largest
single day of protests in the entire movement took place on June 18th, the day before the treaty
would automatically take effect. And the June 18th. So Kishi stepped down, but nothing regarding
the ANPO treaty stopped. It's still going through. So on June 18th, there's a huge protest. Hundreds
of thousands of protesters surrounded the national diet, hoping to somehow stop the treaty by yelling
loud enough, I guess, which is apparently a rule in Japan. If you reach a certain decibel level,
they have to do what you want. Yeah, I can't argue with it. The protesters remain in place until after
midnight when the treaty automatically took effect. With the treaty in place and Kishi's
resignation becoming the official on July 15th, the protest movements really lost momentum. Although
the anti-treaty coalition held a few more united actions, turnouts became low and the movement dies
away. What comes from this? Well, 1960 ANPO protests had ultimately failed to stop the revised US-Japan
security treaty from taking effect, but they did force the cancellation of Eisenhower's plan visit.
Kishi was succeeded as prime minister by Hayato Akita, who took a much more conciliatory stance
towards the political opposition and announced the incoming doubling plan, which is basically
we're going to double the GDP over the next 10 years to redirect the nation's energies away from
contentious political struggles and towards a nationwide drive for rapid economic growth.
And basically they say, like, look, just ignore politics. We're going to double the GDP. Everybody's
going to be happy. Okay. And everybody kind of just goes along with it in Japan somewhat.
Yeah, that was the redirection incident. Yes. The anti-American aspect of the protests and
the humiliating cancellation of Eisenhower's visit brought US-Japan relations to their lowest
ebb since the end of World War II, which is of course when they dropped nuclear bombs on.
Yeah, that was pretty low. So that's pretty low.
The incoming administration of President John Kennedy responded by taking a more gentle approach
to US-Japan relations. Kennedy appointed sympathetic Japan expert and Harvard University
professor Edwin Reichauer as ambassador to Japan. Instead of, you know, that second MacArthur who
just seems like a jock. Dude, you should totally just drive that car into the protest. It'd be so
cool. It really should have been the MacArthur incident. It really should have been. And Kennedy
should have appointed the next MacArthur in line. It's true. Next MacArthur.
JFK also invites Akita, the prime minister, to be the first foreign leader to visit the United
States in his term in office. And at their 1961 summit, promised Akita he would henceforth treat
Japan more like a close ally such as Great Britain instead of like how, you know, you know how
SCAP and the in-between period was basically them telling them what to do. Yeah. So JFK kind of
changes how everything goes. In Japan, protests spurred a new wave of right-wing activism and
violence, including the assassination of socialist party chairman, Onijiro Asanuma. During a televised
election debate in the fall of 1960, Asanuma's assassination weakened Japanese socialist party,
which was further driven by conflicts over the conduct of the anti-treaty protests, leading to
the splitting of the broke away democratic socialist party. Japanese students who were in college or
graduate schools between 1960 and 1970 and protested against security treaty are often
remembered as the ANPO generation, suggesting the defining role the anti-treaty protests had in their
lives. However, the protests had a splintering effect on the student movement as heated discreements
over who was to blame for the failure to stop the treaty led to inviting. And yeah, I think that
catches you up for pretty much all of Japan post-World War II history. There's a few years
from there to now and recent things have happened. I will kind of get a little bit of that in here,
but from that post-World War II to now, the major party that has run Japan is the LDP,
the Liberal Democratic Party. It's incredibly conservative, but what I say, it pretty much
always runs Japan. From 1955 to today, there have only been six years where they didn't hold office.
Wow. Like they are always in power. That's crazy. And the current prime minister is Fumio Kishida,
one of the last prime ministers. His name was Shinzo Abe. He was prime minister from 2012 to
2020. He was just assassinated in 2022. It was super weird. And this is actually why I wanted
to do these episodes. There's some information we're going to talk about in the next episode.
He was giving a speech and guns are illegal in Japan. So the assailant built a shotgun at home
and killed Shinzo Abe with it. Is this the famous one or have more than one? This happened on TV.
I just talked about one. It might actually been on TV. This one just happened in 2022. Like it
was very recent. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, I'm not thinking of the same one. No. There's another
one that happened on TV to a political person. I think. Yeah. In the sixties. Yeah. Yeah. Not
the same one. No, that bad. I actually just talked about not that long ago. But yeah, from here,
we're going to talk about the more clandestine side of Japanese history during this time. But
this is where this episode ends. Chelsea, anything you want to add? No, that was a nice brush up on
what I knew about Japanese history between the periods that we were just talking about
and all those incidents. The one thing that I forgot, unfortunately, to add to the script,
which came up in the last episode I want to talk about more was the train incidents because there
was more information. It was super sketchy how they all went down, but maybe I talk about them
in the next episode. I can't remember. I guess we'll all find out together. Yeah. But in the
meantime, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea, trying to remember what we cover and what to do
about things. We are Journey to the Fringe. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
We'll be back for more incidents. This is what is known as the Journey to the Fringe incident.
I know. I'm going to start naming major things that happened in my life in an incident. Bye.
I bet you we are there. And if you really want to communicate with us and give us ideas for new
episodes or tell us that we're wrong and terrible, either way, please send us an email at journeytothefringe
at gmail.com. For now, I'll see you in the next episode.