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, 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 personally giving a memorial speech for his erstwhile opponent Asanuma at a plenary session of the Diet on October 18. The Socialist Party Diet members vocally opposed the speech, and Ikeda had a reputation for being clumsy with his words and in any case was not expected to say more than some perfunctory words in a short boilerplate speech. However, Ikeda surprised everyone by giving a lengthy oration in which he offered an eloquent and generous assessment of Asanuma's love for his country and the Japanese people and his hard work ethic.[7] This speech would go on to become one of the most famous Diet speeches of the postwar period, and was reported to have moved many Diet members to tears.[8]

Ikeda's party went on to win the election, actually increasing the number of seats it held in the Diet, although Asanuma's Japan Socialist Party also did well.[9]

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 on the wall of his cell using toothpaste, "Long live the Emperor" and “Would that I had seven lives to give for my country” (七生報国, shichisei hōkoku), the latter a reference to the famous last words of fourteenth-century samurai Kusunoki Masashige, and hanged himself with knotted bed sheets.[10]

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 had been a charismatic figure who had been able to hold many of these mutually antagonistic factions together through the force of his personality.[11] 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.[11] A centrist, Eda rapidly took the party in a more centrist direction, far faster than the left socialists were ready to accept.[11] 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.[12]

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. In addition, 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.[10] In particular, an attempt to assassinate the publisher of magazine Chūō Kōron in February 1961 by right-wing youth Kazutaka Komori, who like Yamaguchi was also 17 years old, was said to have been directly inspired by Yamaguchi's actions.

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

A famous 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 15 to 10 feet 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 one of the best photographs of the 20th century. The photograph made Nagao famous and allowed him to leave Japan and travel the world at a time when Japanese 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 immediately became a hero and martyr to Japanese right-wing ultranationalists. On December 15, 1960, a large number of right-wing groups gathered in the very same Hibiya Public Hall where the assassination took place to hold a “National Memorial Service for Our Martyred Brother Yamaguchi Otoya.” Right-wing groups have continued to hold an annual memorial service for Yamaguchi every year on November 2, the anniversary of his suicide, with an especially large event being held on November 2, 2010, the 50th anniversary of his death.

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