JAJ44 Shibuya incident

It’s podcasting time! This is Just Another Jerk, Dispatches from Japan. I’m your host Jonathan Isaacson. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Rate, review, and share! Boom! Let’s get right into today’s story.

It’s June of 1946 in Tokyo. Shibuya to be precise. It’s less than a year since the end of WWII. Japan is still in a pretty messed up state. We won’t go into too much detail about WWII and immediate post-war era Japan. But we do need to talk just a little about some of what happened in that war. I think most people in the US and I imagine other English speaking countries learn more about the war in Europe than they do the war in Asia. Which were, quite frankly, two separate wars that happened to be going on at the same time. I mean, yeah, the Axis powers formed an alliance, but Italy and Germany didn’t really do much to help Japan directly, and vice-versa.

So, super quick version of the Asian theater of WWII. Late 30s, Japan goes all colonial. Starts trying to take over all of Asia. The main conflict is the second Sino-Japanese war. China and Japan had fought a war in the late 1800s, which Japan won, which then signaled that, oh, Japan is now the chief military power in the far east. And Japan goes on from there to colonize places like the Korean peninsula, a lot of China, including Taiwan, even getting into southeast Asia and extending into south Asia. So, yeah, by the time WWII pulls the second Sino-Japanese war into the larger conflict, Japan is in full-on colonial power mode, with all the shitty stuff that comes with that.

WWII happens, and the US bombs the crap out of Japan, including Tokyo. In a single operation - Operation Meetinghouse, which happened on the night of March 9 into the morning of March 10th, 1945, 41 square km (16 sq mi.) were destroyed and 100,000 civilians died with more than a million made homeless. Now, I’m not here to litigate whether or not the US did the right thing - some have called the bombing of Tokyo a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure, while at the same time, the industry of Tokyo was spread out, interspersed with residential neighborhoods, so to destroy Japan’s capacity to produce materiel, well...yeah. I’m not a war expert. So I’ll leave it there. Just know that, right or wrong, a whole lot of Tokyo was destroyed in WWII.

And this is a very quick little side note - this is a big reason why Tokyo looked so modern in the 1980s and early 1990s. Pretty much the entire city had been rebuilt in the past 30 or 40 years. Actually, WWII was the second time in the 20th century that a large percentage of Tokyo had been destroyed - 1923’s Tokyo earthquake and ensuing fires had also leveled a huge area of the city.

So, that’s our background for today. Colonialism and carpet bombing.

It’s June 1946 in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Not a lot of, well, anything functions fully at this point. There is a scarcity of pretty much everything. Which leads to, not surprisingly, black markets. At this point in history, black markets are literal markets. And in the Shibuya area, one of the large black markets is controlled by Chinese residents of Japan. Which I think really means mostly Taiwanese - remember, this is before the split between the PRC and ROC. And Taiwan was fully colonized by Japan, so there were a lot of Taiwanese Chinese living in Japan. So, from now on, if I use Chinese or Taiwanese, they are interchangeable for this story, because in this context, yeah, they really were interchangeable. So, yeah, the Chinese / Taiwanese residents were in control of a major black market in Tokyo. And a quick terminology note - Zainichi. It means a foreigner residing in Japan, and it’s used almost exclusively for Korean and Chinese/Taiwanese people who have always lived in Japan, because their families came during the colonial period. So yeah, the Zainichi Taiwanese residents were in control of a major black market in Tokyo.

Which didn’t sit well with a lot of Japanese people, including the police. Because racism. The police ordered the Taiwanese run black market to close down. Which was met with protest and some violence.

At the same time, the Kanto-Matsuda-gumi Yakuza group was running another black market in Tokyo, this one in the Shinbashi area of the city. Incidentally, at this time, the Matsuda-gumi was run by a woman. A female mob boss. Matsuda Yoshiko was the wife of the first boss of the Matsuda-gumi. So, yeah. A literal girl-boss, though maybe not the best one to claim? Anyway, the Matsuda-gumi was putting pressure on the black markets in Tokyo, trying to run all foreigners out of the business. Because the black markets were incredibly lucrative. Apparently, vendors could earn 50 yen a day, when, in the same era, teachers were earning 300 yen A MONTH. So, yeah, being a vendor in a black market could earn you more than 4 times that of a teacher. And these black markets - because the Matsuda-gumi’s wasn’t the only one - were pretty open. I read that one of the markets had an illuminated sign that was visible from something like a mile away. And the police turned a blind eye. Which, I mean, makes sense and seems to happen pretty much always. Official supply chains can’t keep up with demand in a war ravaged community. The underworld has ways. And they can get supplies and provide for the people. And the people support these illegal businesses because, well...I mean. What else ya gonna due? Starve? And the Matsuda-gumi weren’t alone. Pretty much all the Japanese actors in this story - including the police, remember - wanted to push the “Third-country people” out of the business.

So, how does colonialism add to this story? Well, due to places like the Korean peninsula, Manchuria (which is northeast China) and Taiwan being straight up colonies, there were a lot of “third-country people” living in Japan. And Japan was as racist as pretty much anywhere else in the world. And add to that, all the Japanese people who had been living in the colonies. They were being repatriated in this period. To a war ravaged country with no jobs. And a large, fairly prominent non-Japanese population.

So, despite GHQ’s directive that all “third-country people” be treated as much as possible as citizens with full rights - well, that didn’t actually happen in the ensuing turf war.

On the morning of July 19, 1946, members of one of the local Yazkuza groups told the police that some 300 or so foreigners - so Taiwanese and Korean - living in Tokyo were planning on gathering, with weapons, and converging on the Shibuya Police station.

And so the police mobilized. As did the Yakuza. By that evening, some 400 cops had assembled at the Shibuya police station. And hundreds of Yakuza members, many of whom were armed with bamboo spears.

And around 9pm that night, gangs of zainichi-Taiwanese young men showed up, also armed. And, well, all hell broke loose. Clubs, bamboo spears, metal pipes, even Molotov cocktails and small firearms. The fighting went on for a couple of hours, in what would come to be known as the Shibuya Incident. While the fighting was primarily between the Japanese and Taiwanese gangs, it seems that the police were definitely on the side of the yakuza. Which, I mean, of course they were. In the end, 8 people were dead - 7 Taiwanese young men and one police officer. At least 34 other Taiwanese men were injured seriously enough for it to have been recorded. I’m guessing there were a lot more bruises, cuts, and other minor injuries.

So, who got arrested? I mean, is that really a question? More than 40 Taiwanese men. And zero yakuza members, as far as I can tell. The men were put on trial and 35 were convicted, with sentences ranging from hard labor to deportation. Now, it should be noted that at this point, Nationalist China - what would end up being the Republic of China AKA Taiwan, in a few more years, had a major role in the governing of Japan at this point, through GHQ - the Japanese equivalent to the partitioning of Germany, right? So China was an Ally of the US, so the Chinese Nationalist government had a hand in the administration of Japan. And they used their power to make sure that their compatriots would get better treatment than they might otherwise, if it were left up entirely to the local Japanese officials. And this, according to what I was reading, was the source of some conflict between the zainichi Taiwanese and zainichi Koreans going forward.

The police didn’t get off scot free, in either the court of public opinion or in real court. The general public felt that the police had completely flubbed the situation. Not exactly sure what they would have the police rather done - help the Yakuza more or stop the whole thing. Either is entirely possible. Maybe both, even. Right wingers might have wanted the police to be more active in their aiding of the Japanese gangs, while leftists might have wanted the whole thing to have been averted? Who knows. But yeah, the government was forced to put a police officer on trial, which was a big deal. Some things never change, eh? But, yeah, that was the Shibuya Incident. A relatively minor incident in the grand scheme of things, but certainly an interesting window into a lot of issues Japan faced in the immediate post war era.

And let’s leave it there.

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