Spring 1969: Tachikawa Airfield is of extreme importance to the United States’ Vietnam War. A coalition of peasants who already fought against its expansion in the mid-1950s as well as various factions of Japanese student and anti-war movement(s) tries to sabotage air traffic. As the war ends, the differences between the groups re-emerge …

Olaf Möller

In an attempt to get on the right side of the former occupiers in the late summer of 1955, the government under Prime Minister Hatoyama approved the US armed forces’ plans to expand Tachikawa Airfield – against the people’s wishes, if need be. Naturally, the people took straight to the barricades. A number of violent clashes ensued, starting on September 13th and narrated in this work’s precursor “People of Sunagawa: A Record of the Struggle Against the Military Base” (1955). At the end of this agit-treatise of solidarity with the peasants and students we see images of what was presumably the first Japanese mass protest in front of the US Embassy since the end of the occupation.

Olaf Möller