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Military revolution or coup? Many Japanese farmers were anti-Django

The month after Miyake Darci was arrested, on February 19, 1972, the United Red Army carried out the Asama Sansou Incident in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, taking hostages and barricading itself inside. It was a season of heated politics.

Osamu Toyama

Osamu Toyama (72, Shizuoka Prefecture), who wrote "A Hundred Years of Water" (revised in 2012) from his own unique perspective, read the serial "50 Years Since the Start of Military Rule" that was published on page 2 last week and said, "I realized that we didn't know anything at the time."

Toyama, who studied at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law, Doshisha University in the early 1960s, right around the time of the 1960 Security Treaty protests, was at the epicenter of student activism in Kyoto. "It was a time when left-wing students would come before class and always give agitation speeches. There was an incident where a lot of right-wing students, mostly from the sports club, stormed into a left-wing rally. So when I came to Brazil, I felt like 'the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Governments here is doing the same thing.'"

Toyama, who moved to Brazil in 1966 and worked as a reporter for the São Paulo Newspaper in his first year, was close to the student movement and wrote articles that satirized the military government. "The next day, President Mizumoto came storming in, looking pale and angry. I was shocked. He said, 'Are you trying to destroy the newspaper company?' Japanese-language newspapers were also under surveillance at the time. Even we reporters didn't know at the time that Japanese leftists were being killed, much less reported," he recalled. In other words, the colony was left out of the loop.

"From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, I went to DOPS (Social and Political Police) to cover a number of times. At the time, there was an eerie, murderous atmosphere, and it left a strong impression on me, making me think, 'Ah, this is a battlefield.' I didn't know anything at the time, but looking back now, it makes sense," he reminisced.

At that time, Toyama recalls that at the end of each year, Romeu Tuma (CEO of DOPS from 1977 to 1982) and Raudo Natel (Governor of the Sao Paulo region from 1971 to 1975) would visit Mitsuto Mizumoto, president of the newspaper. The Japanese-language newspaper's stance was clearly in favor of the military government.

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Junji Abe, Lower House Member

When asked about his opinion on 50 years of military rule, Junji Abe (73, second generation), a member of the lower house of the National Diet, replied, "It's about 'revolution,' right?" The Brazilian newspaper writes it as "Golpe (coup d'état)," but those who are in favor of it use "Revolucao (revolution)," and opinions are divided.

"In 1963, the year before the revolution, I was 24 years old and I went with about 10 of my friends from Mogi to Brasilia to speak to Tamura Yukishige, a member of parliament. I was truly shocked when I heard him say, 'I'm worried that Django (President Joan Goulart) will implement land reform.' I immediately went home, discussed it with my parents, and started an opposition movement."

The 1960s, when many Japanese worked in agriculture, was also the heyday of the Cochia Sangui and the Nanpaku Agricultural Cooperative. "Japanese people had worked hard to acquire land and made a living from farming. When I thought that their land would be taken away from them for next to nothing as a result of land reform, I couldn't keep quiet."

It was not surprising that he felt closer to the military government than to Django, who sympathized with communism. So when the "revolution" occurred, he was actually on the relieved side. "When General Castelo Branco was in power, the idea was that civilian rule would be restored in two or four years. But he died in a strange way in a plane crash, and no one expected it to last for 21 years after that," he said, in an unexpected turn of events.

Once the military government seized power, it began to distance itself from the people and act on its own. Around 1968, it began to intensify its crackdown on left-wing students, which led to Operation Bandeirantes in 1969 and DOI-Codi in 1970.

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*This article is reprinted with permission from the Japanese-language newspaper Nikkei Shimbun (April 8, 2014).

© 2014 Nikkey Shimbun