To Catch a Tiger by Its Toe: The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Moral Re-Armament, and Cold War Orientalism

the journal of american-east asian relations 23 (2016) 1-26

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18765610-02302007

brill.com/jaer

To Catch a Tiger by Its ToeThe u.s.-Japan Security Treaty, Moral Re-Armament, and Cold War Orientalism

Chelsea Szendi SchiederMeiji University

[email protected]

Abstract

This article discusses a global theatrical spectacle that Moral Re-Armament (mra), a spiritual movement originating in the United States, produced in 1961. mra used con-temporary protests in Japan, and actors ostensibly involved in them, as a strategy to bolster its authority in the context of U.S. Cold War policy in East Asia. How it claimed to represent Japan to the world and attempted to transform itself into the spokesman for the “Free World” offers insight into the symbolic position of East Asia in the United States and the areas it sought to influence during the early 1960s, a key moment in the intensifying U.S. involvement in East Asia, and offers a case through which to explore Christina Klein's model of “Cold War Orientalism.” mra tapped into this more inclu-sive discourse and also exploited ignorance in the United States about Japan to bolster widespread misconceptions about demonstrations in Tokyo. While introducing mra’s history, this essay teases out a gap between the reality and representation of Japanese politics and protest in the case of The Tiger, which reflects the historical context in which popular culture excluded real knowledge about how U.S. foreign policy affected, and often threatened, local political autonomy.

Keywords

Moral Re-Armament (mra) – U.S.-Japan relations – U.S.-Japan Security Treaty – “Cold War Orientalism” – Maruyama Masao – postwar Japanese democracy – protest

The author extends her thanks to Naoko Koda, Zane D.R. Mackin, and the Journal of America-East Asian Relations’ two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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In late February 1961, a group of thirty Japanese youths performed their self-authored play titled The Tiger for New York City audiences at Carnegie Hall. The New York Times welcomed the troupe, allegedly made up of student leaders of the “riots” that had embroiled Tokyo in the summer of 1960, with the headline “Student Rioters Due.”1 Mass unrest and demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) had made 1960 a tense year for U.S.-Japan relations, and had compelled President Dwight D. Eisenhower to cancel his scheduled trip to Japan. The Tiger advertised itself in the United States as an act of contrition on the part of young Japanese activists, and the actors even performed an apology to Ike in March 1961 in front of his winter home in California for what was reported as “the part they played in last year’s student riots.”2 The media narrative declared that their conversion from Com-munist lackeys to contrite appreciators of “Free World” values was the work of Moral Re-Armament (mra), a Christian group based in Caux, Switzerland. mra poured enormous resources into staging such theatrical spectacles, featuring non-Western actors and locales, throughout the Cold War, claiming to exert ideological influence in the fight against communism with their productions.

With The Tiger, Moral Re-Armament exploited misunderstandings about protest in the contested non-West to gain influence in the United States. The group had a longer history of exaggerating their salubrious effect on institu-tions, labor disputes, and even nations that stretched back to the missionary activities of its founder, Frank Buchman, in the early 20th Century. As the Cold War heated up in East Asia in the 1950s, mra’s focus on events in Japan mir-rored increased U.S. interest in making Japan a “bulwark against communism” in the region. mra’s play tapped into a larger strategy of using cultural events to usher in non-Western people into the U.S.-led “Free World.” It also seemed to offer a vision of global inclusion that incorporated Asian people in particular, much along the lines of what Christina Klein has identified as a discourse of “Cold War Orientalism.” However, The Tiger shows as well how that inclusive imagination actually reinforced hierarchical relationships between the West and non-West, as mra offered itself as a moral guide for populations and na-tions otherwise vulnerable to the manipulations of the Communist Bloc. This article examines Moral Re-Armament’s use of contemporary events in Tokyo, and actors allegedly involved in those events, as a strategy to bolster their au-thority in the context of U.S. Cold War policy in East Asia. In doing so, it traces mra’s background and how it came to focus on a message in line with U.S.

1 “Student Rioters Due: Japanese Will Seek to Restore Amity Impaired in June,” New York Times, 14 February 1961, p. 18.

2 “[President Dwight D.] Eisenhower Gets Japanese Apology,” New York Times, 30 March 1961, p. 18.

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Cold War strategies. It also teases out the gap between the reality and the rep-resentation of Japanese politics and protest at stake in the case of The Tiger to demonstrate that, although Japan in “Asia” played an important role in the U.S. political imaginary at the time, cultural productions that appealed to that imaginary often reproduced rather than resolved misunderstandings about the region’s politics.

This article invokes Klein’s term “Cold War Orientalism” to link mra’s pro-duction to a broader discourse at work in mainstream cultural productions about Asia in the same time period, since the play and its claims to influence existed within a larger context. The Tiger was mra’s first major production fea-turing a current political event in a non-Western nation. The show illustrates in part what Klein has identified as the U.S. post-World War ii expansionist dis-course of “Cold War Orientalism,” in which ideas of racial equality and integra-tion supplanted that of racial difference and territorial imperialism.3 This dis-course, which Klein sees reflected in middlebrow cultural production between 1945 and 1961, “imaginatively mapped a network of sentimental pathways between the United States and Asia that paralleled and reinforced the more material pathways along which U.S. economic, political, and military power flowed.”4 The Tiger—and mra’s guiding dramatic philosophy in 1960—in some ways fits into Klein’s model: Tokyo as a dramatic setting of interest represented the expansion of U.S. interests into East Asia, and the treatment of commu-nism as a moral—not a racial—defect sent a message of potential integration.

However, the case of The Tiger also powerfully illustrates how Cold War Ori-entalism reinforced ideas about U.S. moral superiority in the Cold War. mra’s use of political events in East Asia demonstrates a case in which the inclusive discourse of Cold War Orientalism maintained hierarchical relationships be-tween the “Free World” West and potential non-Western allies in Asia.5 The play’s promotional campaign makes this most uncomfortably clear, as it ad-vertised The Tiger as a chance for Asian actors to “apologize” for protesting against their government and its role in bolstering the U.S.-imposed military framework of the postwar period. mra was able to utilize ignorance in the United States about domestic politics in Japan to bolster the common mis-conception that riots under the direction of the Soviet Union and Communist China had wracked Tokyo in 1960, and its citizens mistakenly had rejected

3 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For more on the importance of race in the U.S.-Japan conflict during World War ii, see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

4 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, p. 17.5 Ibid., p. 11.

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the goodwill overtures of the United States. mra’s play The Tiger thus offers a historical case in which popular culture excluded real knowledge about how U.S. foreign policy affected, and often threatened, local political autonomy and, while it ostensibly allowed Japanese voices to explain the political con-text, it demonstrated at the same time a willful dismissal of Japanese debates about democratic process and protest.

Although during the Cold War, Moral Re-Armament advertised itself as a non-religious internationalist group, U.S. revivalist religious traditions shaped its roots and its aspirations. mra originated in the activities of Frank Buchman, an American Protestant Christian evangelist. Buchman began his religious ca-reer as a Young Men’s Christian Association (ymca) secretary at Pennsylvania State University in the early 20th Century, and built a network of colleagues through his work there, at Hartford Seminary, and as a missionary in India and China. He developed a personal style of religious work, based on sharing, confession, and conversion in small group settings, which he then expanded to other elite colleges in the United States and England. Buchman’s attempt at a revival of religious life on campuses in the early 20th Century specifically targeted “key men” at schools—popular students, athletes, campus leaders—hoping such influential figures would draw even more converts.6 The deep commitment Buchman and his colleagues obtained from a narrow segment of the student populations at such universities as Princeton, Harvard, and Amherst fueled their grand claims about the impact of their spiritual move-ment on the lives of all students at these campuses. At this stage, Buchman dis-dained the traditional revivalist rally style, preferring to host intimate weekend gatherings that were more likely to appeal to his upper-class target audience.7 His movement also did not yet have a name. It would gain one after Buchman began to concentrate on England and seek a new base at Oxford University in 1927 in the wake of controversies in the United States. The term Buchman and his followers eventually adopted—the “Oxford Group”—may have come from the visit they made to South Africa, when the local press gave them this label. The designation lent an aura of prestige and legitimacy, while it was also a bit misleading for an originally American group with few Oxford members. Moreover, it suggested a false kinship with the influential 19th Century “Oxford Movement.”

The shift from “Oxford Group” to “Moral Re-Armament” occurred during the military rearmament that led up to World War ii, in a bid for the group to stay

6 Daniel Sack, Moral Re-Armament: The Reinventions of an American Religious Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 30.

7 Ibid., pp. 35–36.

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Figure 1 Announcement for The Tiger. Moral Re-armament Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

AQ1

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in step with the political mood in the United States. This was one more of what Daniel Sack identifies as the group’s many reinventions, which Sack classifies as part of a greater tradition present in American evangelical Christianity.8 From the late 1920s, as Buchman and his associates returned to the United States and sought out a more adult audience, they launched various city campaigns that more closely resembled revival rallies.9 They began to be more interested in political power, branding themselves as nonpolitical political actors, urging for an end to labor conflict and competition through individual reflection on one’s life and sins. Buchman argued that a nation’s problems of unemployment, strikes, and more “could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled fascist dictatorship.”10 At the time, the allure of fascism as a potential program for social unification apparently influenced Buchman’s vision for the future of the group. He also witnessed with wonder the power of the mass rallies that the National Socialists organized in Germany. It was in this moment that he coined the phrase “Moral Re-Armament” at a 1938 meeting, and his group, under this new ambitious title, reached out to the press, staged large gatherings, produced short films, and hosted “New Enlist-ment” camps, usually for groups of young men, which included physical and spiritual training.

All these activities required money. mra therefore continued the Oxford Group’s strategy of requesting funds based on exaggerated claims of influence. Buchman never had shied away from asking for what he saw as his proper reward, having been quite insistent at Pennsylvania State and Hartford uni-versities on his rights to a higher wage and status based on his estimations of his personal impact on the spiritual life of the schools.11 He and his associates also liked to maintain an affluent image, staying in posh hotels and wearing nice clothes, to fit in with the tony set to whom they ministered. Nevertheless, Buchman remained coy when asked about his group’s finances. “Where God guides, He provides” was his standard reply.12 At the same time, in speeches and letter campaigns, he persuaded wealthy sympathizers to part with their money, and in 1928 his group made tax-free donations to their newly incorpo-rated “The First Century Christian Fellowship” possible as well.13 Prominent

8 Ibid., p. 3.9 Ibid., p. 78.10 Quoted in ibid., p. 91.11 Ibid., p. 26.12 Quoted in ibid., p. 59.13 Ibid., p. 60.

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early funders included a group of wealthy New York women and the Calvary Episcopal Church in Gramercy Park, New York City. With this support, Moral Re-Armament founded a training facility at Mackinac Island, Michigan in 1942, and after World War ii, bought a bankrupt hotel in Caux, Switzerland, which became another key facility. Both held summer assemblies; in 1950, Caux host-ed 4,000 visiting “representatives” from 80 countries.14

From the early 1950s, mra branded its fundraising within the Cold War con-text and, since it had targeted ameliorating labor disputes, it sought more cor-porate funds, which it saw as “industry’s legitimate share in carrying forward the ideological answer for the democratic world.”15 mra did make enormous gains from corporate donors when it managed to defuse conflicts with unions, as it did in airline-labor disputes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The company president of Eastern Air Lines and a vice-president of Pan American gave gen-erously to mra for the changes the organization wrought in some key labor leaders.16 Ultimately, however, money came to mra from donors both large and small. In 1952, about half of mra’s yearly haul of almost one million dollars came from people or corporations in gifts of over $3,000, while 10,000 dona-tions of less than that made up the other half. Almost a decade later in 1961, mra drew thousands of contributions under $100, which still only made up a little over a percent of its annual total of $3.7 million. With this money, mra could keep its centers running, support over a thousand full-time volunteers, and produce the plays and films it saw as critical in a new, media-driven era.17

Moral Re-Armament, although it viewed communism as a dangerously god-less competing ideology, originally was not necessarily pro-United States. That aspect of its strategy emerged in the postwar period, as a response to the Cold War mood in the United States in particular. Supporters of mra have produced most of the histories about the group and their accounts retrospectively place mra firmly in the U.S.-led anti-Communist camp during the post-World War ii period.18 However, mra seems to have come to a more explicitly pro-U.S. anti-communism as a strategy to align the organization’s “ideology” with the values that became important to those close to power in the postwar United States.

14 Ibid., p. 131.15 Ibid., p. 132.16 Ibid., pp. 136–37.17 Ibid., pp. 132–33.18 For example, see Håvard J. Nilsen, “Moral Re-Armament as Network Movement,” Ini-

tiative of Change International, October 2011, http://www.iofc.org/mra-history-nilsen (accessed 23 January 2016). One notable exception is Daniel Sack’s Moral Re-Armament: The Reinventions of an American Religious Movement. The author is deeply indebted to Sack’s research on the longer history of Moral Re-Armament (mra).

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An example of how mra’s mid-1950s message, not yet entirely framed as totally pro-United States, met with suspicion rather than support is their 1955 production titled The Vanishing Island, the world tour of which drew the attention of U.S. embassies abroad. Many American diplomats reported on the play as “anti-democratic.”19 The “ideology” that mra advanced in The Vanishing Island suggested the group’s program of individual confession and repentance as superior to the communism of the Eastern Bloc, as well as the selfishness of the “Free World.” A classified Operations Coordinating Board document relayed a senior staff member’s report that the mra production “ridicules the Free World ideals and institutions, such as: freedom (portrayed as license and self-indulgence), liberty (a meaningless chant), elections (as a means to avoid responsibility), free enterprise (grasping for endless profits), and so on.”20 The play, an allegory about the struggle between the two Cold War powers, was the last one in which mra challenged such “Free World ideals,” since afterward mra turned instead toward promoting its creed as a weapon against communism specifically and used contemporary politi-cal cases in the contested non-Western world, beginning with the play The Tiger.

Even before The Tiger, however, the mra was eager to represent itself as aligned with the United States, inasmuch as such an alliance could confer legitimacy and authority upon the organization’s ventures. As early as 1944, Buchman declared his interest in connecting his spiritual teachings with glob-al politics, in particular wanting to translate his teaching “in terms of American ideology.”21 At many moments, mra was able to exploit conflicts and lapses in coordination between branches of the U.S. government. For example, during the global tour of The Vanishing Island in 1955, mra managed to gain allies in Congress and through those connections finagle U.S. Air Force (usaf) trans-port, thereby legitimizing itself. Its members declared themselves stranded in Manila, and arrived at their next destination with U.S. military conveyance, much to the annoyance of U.S. embassies abroad. “Without exception, usaf transportation was interpreted as us sponsorship and subsidization,” one U.S. official observed. “Because of this interpretation, the United States was often blamed for the mra group’s ill-mannered behavior and aggressive

19 J. M. Schwarz to Dr. H. S. Craig, “Subject: The Tour of Moral Rearmament's (mra) ‘The Vanishing Island’,” Operations Coordinating Board, 30 August 1955, Declassified Docu-ments Reference Resource (Detroit, mi: Thomson Gale).

20 “Moral Rearmament’s ‘The Vanishing Island’,” Operations Coordinating Board, June 1955, ibid.

21 Sack, Moral Re-Armament, p. 146.

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actions.”22 In this classified document, he provided as well a descriptions of the actions of mra members during their mid-1950s global tour of Asia, which in-cluded “high pressure tactics” demanding free accommodations and financial support, misuse of the names of local dignitaries for promotional purposes, and “false claims of political world-healing when actually mra offered a na-ive ideology that was described anywhere from ‘simple’ to ‘putrid’.”23 This state document reveals why readers of mra’s own internally produced evaluations of its successes with local populations, relying for proof on financial support or the flattering words of local dignitaries, need to take them with several grains of salt.

mra’s choice of the 1960 mass demonstrations in Tokyo as a theme for one of its more ambitious productions was thus part of a strategy to claim exten-sive influence based upon misguided conceptions in the United States about the dynamics of spectacular recent events in Japan. In the United States at the time, the general perception of protests in Tokyo in May and June 1960 against the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty—Anpo—was that the “Commu-nists” orchestrated them and student groups were the agents of this plan to disrupt relations between the United States and Japan and to drive Japan into the Communist Bloc. This myth of a general Communist conspiracy wreaking havoc in Tokyo was one that then-President Eisenhower also offered. He at-tributed the general protests in Japan to the machinations of the Soviets and “their associates in Peiping” who “went to great lengths and expense to create disorder in Tokyo” and thereby forced him to cancel his scheduled visit in June 1960 to Japan. In his televised address to the American people upon his return from his tour of the “Far East,” minus Japan, he characterized this as typical Communist behavior. “We in the United States should not fall into the error of blaming ourselves for what the Communists do,” he declared. “After all Com-munists will act like Communists.”24

mra’s turn to theatrical productions as a major part of its outreach activi-ties also mirrored thinking at the top levels of postwar U.S. governance. Eisen-hower long had been an advocate of a campaign to “win hearts and minds” in the developing world. Indeed, he had participated in the drafting of a 1951 policy paper titled Education and National Security that concluded economic

22 Schwarz to Craig, “Subject: The Tour of Moral Rearmament’s (mra) ‘The Vanishing Island’.”

23 Ibid.24 “President Reports on His Trip to the Far East,” News of the Day (Commentary by

Michael Fitzmaurice), 1960, British Pathé, http://www.britishpathe.com/video/eisenhower -reports-on-far-east-trip (accessed 22 May 2015).

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and military dominance was not enough to battle communism.25 After the limitations of conventional military force in combating Communist expansion became apparent in the Korean War, culture became another battlefield for the United States in the Cold War.26 mra embraced both the anti-Communist message and the ideological method. Its chosen vehicle for its message—a the-atrical production—also fit in with interpretations in the United States of how the devastating images of the protests in Japan inflicted humiliation on the U.S. cause. Making a parallel between news audiences and popular culture au-diences, one popular publication noted that the “riots” threatened to appeal to a global audience, and turn it against the “Free World” under U.S. leadership.27

Moral Re-Armament repeated and reinforced the widespread misconcep-tion that mass demonstrations in Tokyo in 1960 were the result of a Commu-nist conspiracy. It also joined in spreading the message that countering that conspiracy required persuading a global audience of its existence as a serious threat to the “Free World.” As a result of its efforts, mra was able to insert itself into a simplistic and pro-U.S. policy perception of the political landscape in postwar Japan. The program for The Tiger opened with this explanation:

In an exchange of letters between [Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin and [Chinese Communist leader] Mao Tsu Tung [sic] in 1953, it was decided that Japan would be taken over in 1960. What happened in Tokyo last June was a bid to achieve this goal. Exploiting misleading slogans, the Communists succeeded in dividing Japan within itself, and using the bit-terness and disappointment of the youth.28

Playing “The Tiger” of the title is the disembodied voice of the shadowy specter of Communism in China.

25 Naoko Koda, “America’s Cold War and the Japanese Student Movement, 1948–1973,” un-published PhD dissertation, New York University, 2015, p. 62.

26 Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 2009), 14. For more on the cultural programs the United States promoted to strengthen ties with Japan during the Cold War, see Fujita Fumiko, Amerika bunka gaikō to Nihon [American Cultural Diplomacy and Japan] (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2015).

27 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, p. 142. In the case of East Asia in particular, the assessment was not all wrong. One Japanese scholar was surprised at how frequently intellectuals he met in China, Korea, and Taiwan brought up the 1959/1960 protests as part of the Cold War experience in East Asia. Sherif, Japan’s Cold War, p. 204.

28 Moral Re-Armament, “The Tiger,” playbill, container 418, Moral Re-armament Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress [loc], Washington, D.C.

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With The Tiger, mra offered an explanation to people in the Americas of how Tokyo both became embroiled in riots but also escaped an actual revolution that mostly fit with the U.S. view of events. A student at the University of Waterloo, who both saw and participated in a staging of The Tiger at a mra conference in Rio de Janeiro, described the play as detailing “how the Commu-nists used fear, hatred and corruption in students, business men and politicians to cause the June riots which almost put Japan behind the bamboo curtain.” The play stressed that it was thanks to the efforts of Moral Re-Armament that the Japanese students were able to emerge from the yoke of Communist con-trol. “Many dedicated Marxists changed,” the Waterloo student reported, “and are now living a superior ideology.”29 Radio advertisements for the staging of The Tiger at Carnegie Hall echoed the claim that The Tiger would tell the story behind the Tokyo “riots.” Tickets were given out without charge to those who called and requested them.30 In reality, the issue was less one of Commu-nist control and more one of protest on behalf of democratic procedure and

29 Malcolm Cock, “Return to Rio…Part iii,” The Coryphaeus, University of Waterloo publica-tion, 25 January 1962, pp. 1–2.

30 Script for radio spot for The Tiger, container 418, Moral Re-armament Records, loc.

Figure 2 A performance of The Tiger in Recife, Brazil. The Yomiuri, July 26, 1961.

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Japanese autonomy from U.S. influence. The eventual quieting of protest had little to do with mra’s intervention; indeed, sources in Japan at the time do not mention the group as an actor at all. The Tiger masqueraded as fact, but was a complete fiction.

Sparking the 1960 demonstrations in Japan were protests against the revi-sions to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that contained a critique of the nation’s cozy relationship with U.S. Cold War military policy. However, the irony of Eisenhower’s and mra’s black-and-white analysis of the event was that much of the protest ultimately rallied around arguments to protect Japan’s nascent postwar peace and democracy, which the Allied Occupation had delivered in the immediate postwar period. The Japan Communist Party ( jcp) itself be-came legal under U.S. Occupation policies as part of an initial drive for de-mocratization and demilitarization of Japanese politics and society. The jcp and the Japan Socialist Party ( jsp) acted as key opposition parties to Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) during the process of treaty revision; however, contemporary observers and subsequent scholars also illuminate the multitude of citizens’ groups that participated in the protest and demonstrations of 1959 and 1960.31

Although The Tiger reiterated the narrative of many American observers, who interpreted the anti-Anpo protests of 1959 and 1960 as “anti-American rioting,” internal conflict over renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty actually reflected a strong anti-war sensibility rather than out-and-out anti-Americanism. The treaty originated in the negotiations between Japan and the United States that ended the Allied Occupation in 1952 and incorporated Ja-pan into the larger framework of U.S. postwar military strategies in East Asia.32 Under the terms of the treaty, American troops waged the first hot war of the Cold War in Korea (1950–1953) from bases in Japan and the U.S. military

31 Although the Japan Socialist Party ( jsp) and labor dominated (with the Japanese Com-munist Party acting as an observer) the secretariat that led the “People’s Council to Stop the Revised Security Treaty,” 134 groups joined the Council and many more groups par-ticipated in the protests. See Justin Jesty, “Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage & Grief: Hamaya Hiro-shi's Photos of the Anti-Security-Treaty Protests,” mit Visualizing Cultures, http://ocw.mit .edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/tokyo_1960/anp2_essay01.html (accessed 23 March 2014); Nick Kapur, “The 1960 us-Japan Security Treaty Crisis and the Origins of Contemporary Japan,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2011; Simon Andrew Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

32 George R. Packard, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1966), 4.

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continued to occupy Okinawa. Although the Korean War had jumpstarted manufacturing in postwar Japan, for a war-weary population, the threat of be-ing dragged into another conflict because of an alliance with the United States felt very real. One major newspaper’s public opinion poll in the summer of 1959 showed that almost half of the people questioned feared that the new treaty would increase the chances that Japan would become involved in war.33 Some protestors also sought neutrality and normalized relations with China.

mra’s delivery of Japanese apologies to U.S. audiences reflected its empha-sis on personal conversion and apology as a way to forge harmony in interna-tional affairs. But it also elided the actual concerns of many protestors that the Japanese government’s handling of the treaty revisions suggested not only a threat of becoming entangled in U.S. military actions abroad, but also of a return to authoritarian governance at home. Even if many Japanese citizens did not understand the terms of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and perhaps also favored an alliance with the United States over one with the Communist Bloc, Kishi’s administration came across as arrogant and insensitive to public concerns.34 In addition to opposition mounting on the street, quarrels broke out within the Diet itself on 19 May 1960. Physical scuffles between the jsp-led opposition and the ruling ldp concluded with the admission of five hundred police officers to remove the Socialists, who had attempted a sit-in to block the ldp.35 Amid the confusion, a decision to defer the vote on approval of the new treaty resulted in a situation in which, instead of requiring an affirmative vote, the revision automatically gained Diet approval on 19 June 1960 if the upper House of Councilors took no action against it. The press reported the events as the ldp securing unilateral approval of the treaty.36 Maruyama Masao, argu-ably the leading intellectual of the day in Japan, in a speech appealing to his audience to fulfill the democratic promise of a postwar rupture from Japan’s militarist history, likened Kishi’s “surprise attack” to the Japanese bombing of

33 A 19 July 1959 Tokyo Shinbun poll showed that 44.5 percent of respondents agreed with this statement, whereas half of that—21.5percent—thought the new the U.S. Japan-Security Treaty would make Japan more secure. Ibid., p. 148.

34 Opponents of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty also reminded the public of Kishi Nobusuke’s wartime involvement in the industrial development of colonial Manchuria and service in the wartime cabinet of Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki. Ibid., p. 197. U.S. Occupation authori-ties had held him in Sugamo Prison as a suspected “Class A” war criminal, although they later “de-purged” him as U.S. Cold War policy shifted in the late 1940s. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War ii (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 454.

35 Kenji Hasegawa, “In Search of a New Radical Left: The Rise and Fall of the Anpo Bund, 1955–1960,” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 3, no. 1 (2003): 75.

36 Packard, Protest in Tokyo, pp. 240–42.

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Pearl Harbor in 1941.37 As Maruyama's dramatic analogy illustrated, many ob-servers of the chaos in the Diet defined the ldp as a threat to Japan's nascent democracy, and even an act of war.

Maruyama Masao also made a powerful argument in defense of protest in the name of democracy, which offers an example of the kind of dynamic debates that The Tiger flattened to appeal to Western audiences. In an article the Mainichi shinbun published over three days in January 1959, Maruyama outlined the difference between what he saw as the outdated “static” model of feudal Japan and a modern “dynamic” society. Although Maruyama’s anal-ysis shared much with U.S. modernization theorists who defined societies along a spectrum of stages considered progressively more or less advanced or “mature,” his interpretation of street protest was much more generous.38 Maruyama saw the ideal modern democracy as a dynamic one in which peo-ple did not strictly adhere to their socially defined roles, and politics was not left only to politicians. In response to people who attacked labor and citizen's movements as unnecessary because Japan was now a democracy, as well as to those who interpreted social movements as superfluous extra-parliamentary noise, he noted that such criticism defined “democracy” itself as a status, rather than what it really should be, which was a process.39 Indeed, Maruyama most likely would have judged Eisenhower's declaration that “Communists will act as Communists” as backward and feudal thinking; the U.S. president assigned a priori categories in which the “good guys” were inherently good, and the “bad guys” inherently bad, rather than considering the concrete situation and dynamic contexts and actors. No Communist himself, Maruyama never-theless dismissed the attitudes of “professional anti-Communists” as having little to do with the real nature of Communist philosophies and societies, and being “no more than an ornament for those in power now.”40 That is to say, democracy depended more on a dynamic process of engagement in politics—including protest—than on a committed hatred of communism. Such an emphasis on the politics of action and protest also ran counter to mra’s insis-tence on harmony.

37 J. Victor Koschmann, “Intellectuals and Politics,” in Postwar Japan as History, Andrew Gordon, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 395–423, 408.

38 For more on how modernization theory operated in area studies and policy from the late 1950s to the 1970s, in particular in the case of studies of places like Japan, see Harry Harootunian, History's Disquiet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 34, 61.

39 Maruyama Masao, “'Dearu’ koto to ‘suru’ koto” [“To Be and To Do”], Maruyama Masa shû [Maruyama Masa Collection], vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996): 23–44, 36.

40 Ibid., pp. 34–35.

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The context in which student protest spearheaded many demonstrations in 1960 Japan also did not make its way into mra’s portrayal, which advertised itself as featuring student leaders of the Tokyo “riots.” In the contemporary accounts both inside and outside Japan, activist students captured the pub-lic imagination and defined the year of political turmoil. The actions of more aggressive student activists, such as breaking into the Diet grounds, prompted criticism. However, framed within a common interpretation that the inac-tion of ordinary people during Japan’s wartime had allowed a militarist gov-ernment to wage war, students’ willingness to take risks at demonstrations also garnered respect from influential elements of Japanese public opinion.41 A great deal of student activism took place under the banners of the Zen-gakuren (an abridgement of Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sōrengō of All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Association), a nation-wide student association founded in 1948 as a national coordinating body of self-governing associations at various universities. Zengakuren was not inherently leftist; it collected dues automatically out of student tuition, and its founding principles were those of democracy, academic freedom, and political autonomy. But its active members were often left-leaning.42 By the time of the 1960 mass protests, however, the students who led the mainstream core of the Zengakuren actually had broken from the jcp.43 These activists included Kanba Michiko, a female student at the University of Tokyo, who died in the clashes between protestors and police on the evening of 15 June 1961. Citizens’ groups and the mass media transformed Kanba, a student leader of the left-leaning but anti-jcp student group Bund, into a maiden martyr for Japan's fragile postwar democracy.44 Kishi also stepped down from the office of prime minister in the wake of the demonstrations.

In contrast to the complex and often sympathetic role students played in the anti-Anpo protests, mra hoped to harness the international infamy of mass protest and the Zengakuren in particular to attract audiences. In splashy

41 George Packard, hardly sympathetic to the strategies and the politics of the Zengakuren, nevertheless noted that “the student activists threw themselves into causes with raw energy and naïve idealism, and were tolerated, if not openly admired, by much of the rest of society.” Packard, Protests in Tokyo, p. 96. A contemporary Japanese example is Ōe Kenzaburō, “Zengakuren kamatoto o hinan suru” [“Critiquing Zengakuren’s Naiveté”], Fujin kōron [Ladies’ Review] (February 1960): 62.

42 Matsunami Michihiro, “Origins of Zengakuren,” in Zengakuren: Japan's Revolutionary Stu-dents, Stuart J. Dowsey, ed. (Berkeley: The Ishi Press, 1970), 48.

43 Hasegawa, “In Search of a New Radical Left,” pp. 75–92.44 Chelsea Szendi Schieder, “Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left,

1957–1972,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2014.

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advertisements in major newspapers, such as The New York Herald Tribune and The Washingon Post, the group advertised The Tiger as made up of “the men who took part” in the Tokyo “riots” of 1960.45 The roster of the cast and crew for the mra play was an impressive list of who’s who among the prodigy of the powerful in 1960 Japan. Missing, however, were any actual leaders of the mainstream Zengakuren who organized the anti-U.S.-Japan Security Treaty protests.46 Notwithstanding, in interviews with the press, the Japanese stu-dents involved in The Tiger spoke on behalf of “Zengakuren” and declared the June 1960 mass demonstrations to be Communist-inspired and anti-United States.47 Their statements confirmed U.S. narratives about the protests in Tokyo. As one headline in the New York Herald Tribune trumpeted, “Japanese Students Admit Tokyo Riots Were Anti-U.S.”48 In another article, a Japanese cast member declared that “we students were used as a spearhead for the Com-munist movement by Peking and Moscow.”49 Moral Re-Armament also publi-cized endorsements reiterating the view that Communists spearheaded the 1960 demonstrations. The playbill for The Tiger included an alleged quote from former Prime Minister Kishi that, without mra’s intervention, “Japan would be under Communist control today.”50 Kishi’s endorsement, and his appearance in subsequent mra promotional materials, demonstrated the group’s strategy of seeking out “key men” to influence opinion and, in this case, its outreach to ldp politicians in particular. mra used such “authentic” non-Western voices to take credit for the political quietude that followed the spectacular 1960 anti-U.S.-Japan Security Treaty protests in Tokyo.

45 The New York Herald Tribune, 15 February 1961, p. 14; The Washington Post, 3 March 1961, p. 12.

46 The cast lists of The Tiger include eight male students (many of whom were members of university debating societies) and a few young women, including Fujiko Sohma, grand-daughter of Yukio Ozaki (who gave the cherry trees to Washington, D.C. when he was mayor of Tokyo), Yoriko Shibusawa, a diving champion and great-granddaughter of “the founder of modern industrial Japan,” and Sayako Udagawa, daughter of the Chief Jus-tice, Family Court. Also in the cast were several farmers who belonged to the Seinendan, Takasumi Mitsui of the Mitsui Foundation and his wife, Nellie Valentin (a singer from the Philippines), and Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. “The Tiger,” Promo-tional Matter Folder, 1961, container 418, Moral Re-Armament Records, loc.

47 New York Herald Tribune, 19 February 1961, p. 23.48 Ralph Chapman, “Japanese Students Admit Tokyo Riots Were Anti-U.S.,” New York Herald

Tribune, 19 February 1961, p. 23.49 Rosaland Massow, “23 Students Here in mra Drama,” New York Journal-American, 19 Feb-

ruary 1961, p. 18-L.50 Quoted in “The Tiger,” Lisner Auditorium performance invitation, mra, container 418,

Moral Re-armament Records, loc.

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Even before the 1960 demonstrations, mra had invited over one hundred members of the local youth associations (seinendan) to join a global mra conference at Mackinaw Island in Michigan, targeting Japan as a new frontier in their quest for global influence.51 In the wake of the Tokyo protests in July 1960, mra brought several Japanese delegates to their training center in Caux, Switzerland. Aside from students, the group included politicians, union lead-ers, and labor representatives from various company unions.52 Although, as the official literature of the mra branch in Japan documents, this group of Japanese students included both those who had and had not been involved in street demonstrations in 1960, once in Caux, they faced many questions about the recent events, and in particular the actions of the student movement, since the news had made its way into the headlines around the world. The invited students wrote the play The Tiger, originally performing it at Caux, and, after encouragement and with mra backing, the play went on to do a world tour, which took it through Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia, and included the performance at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

The play was less an explanation of the recent past, however, than a gam-bit to influence the future. In using the cultural strategy of staging theatri-cal performances, mra contributed to the idea that the Cold War and the Communist threat were more about “winning hearts and minds” than about resources or material issues and the moral guidance of Moral Re-Armament was as important as material and military resources. As an mra tract translated into Japanese in the mid-1950s explained, the organization hoped to help West-ern politicians who troubled themselves over “what to do with Asia” prevent the spread of communism which required that the money the United States poured into Asia economies needed “an ideological support plan.”53 Public fig-ures who spoke on behalf of Moral Re-Armament in the United States also sold the idea that it was an ideal supplement to U.S. financial aid. Rusty Wailes, an Olympian, declared at an mra event that in touring South American and bringing the Americas together ideologically, “The Tiger and the mra force is

51 mra ajia sentaa [mra Asia Center], “Tsumetai sensō to mra” [“The Cold War and mra”], mra ajia sentaa [mra Asia Center], http://www.mra-reunion.com/MRA40/ HTML1/09/0902.HTM (accessed 27 May 2015). For seinendan wartime mobilization among rural youth across the Japanese empire, see Sayaka Chatani, “Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895–1945,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2014.

52 “Zensekai o sekken shita geki ‘Taigaa’” [“‘The Tiger’: The Play that Conquered the World”], mra ajia sentaa [mra Asia Center], http://www.mra-reunion.com/MRA40/HTML1/13/ 1302.HTM (accessed 17 May 2015).

53 Peter Howard, The World Rebuilt, Sōma Yukika trans. (Tokyo: mra House, 1955), 87.

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doing the job America has spent billions of dollars for and has not done.”54 In recommending a strategy to match U.S. military might, mra also emphasized the kind of “sentimental pathways” with Japan that Klein identified as key to the Cold War Orientalist discourse in the middlebrow American imagination. But mra advocated leveraging a kind of missionary influence in East Asia, rather than a full integration of Asian people’s voices and views.

This emphasis on cultural productions resonated with anti-Communists in Hollywood, who also saw themselves as participants in a global battle for moral authority. In a letter to the cast of The Tiger, Norris Poulson, the may-or of Los Angeles at the time, and silver screen personalities including John McCrea and Ginger Rogers, among others, made this declaration of support: “The stage and screen are on the front line in today’s ideological struggle.” They welcomed the cast to the United States, and praised them for “equipping the free nations of the world with an ideology to outmatch Communism and an-swer its causes.”55

While mra and its supporters bandied about the word “ideology,” however, the group’s own promotional materials were often long on conversion narra-tives and testimonials, and short on the details about the nature of its belief system. A full-page advertisement mra ran in The Torrance Herald in 1961 touts Moral Re-Armament as a Free World counter-ideology to Soviet ideology. “It is not a matter of left or right: it is a matter of right or wrong,” the advertisement vaguely declared.56 “Not left, not right, but straight” was a common tagline in mra promotional materials.57 A Japanese student participant in The Tiger also echoed this theme, while noting that the transformation of the world had to come from within. But mra certainly preferred describing its program as an “ideology,” rather than a philosophy or a religion. In edits to a speech one of the Japanese student actors in The Tiger was to deliver at a promotional event, the reader insisted on changing “philosophy” to “ideology.”58 A Japanese banker invited to Caux who wrote about his experience there in the early 1960s was

54 “Saturday dinner for Japanese to join force in Chile,” 11 November 1961, container 418, Moral Re-Armament Records, loc.

55 Cadre of Commissioner Harold C. Patterson to Cast of “The Tiger, “From Los Angeles,” New York, 20 February 1961, ibid.

56 “A Tidal Wave of Hope,” The Torrance Herald, 28 December 1961, http://www.torranceca .gov/archivednewspapers/Herald/1961%20Dec%2017%20-%201962%20April%2019/PDF/00000156.pdf (accessed 2 February 2016).

57 Mitsui Takasumi, “The Tiger,” May 1962, container 426, Moral Re-Armament Records, loc.58 “Nanbei o mawaru mra kōen ‘tora’” [“‘The Tiger’ Tours and Performs in South America”],

Shakaijin [Member of Society], 156 (April 1962): 48–52, 49.

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emphatic that “mra has nothing to do with religion.”59 Another Japanese speaker noted when he promoted mra to a group of businessmen in the United States, how frequently “people have the funniest ideas about mra.” He countered this, declaring that mra was not a new religion, was not a “non-smoking, non-drinking association,” but was a force to fight communism by curing “the disease of democracy”—“individual selfishness, corruption, and degeneration.”60 During this period, mra distanced itself from its religious roots in hopes that it would become a kind of official program for the U.S.-led Cold War order. It sought to be inclusive of peoples from other religious traditions, but on its own terms, insisting on its influence as an argument for affirming its moral authority.

The script of The Tiger offers some insight into how mra narrated its ideological power not only to fight communism, but also to heal “Free World” society. Most of the action in The Tiger takes place in one household, with some street scenes of the student-led 1960 demonstrations. The members of the nuclear family at the center of the plot represent an aspect of then contemporary Japanese society— Emiko, the daughter, is a modern young woman more interested in tennis and fashion than in politics; the father is a powerful, but corrupt industrialist; Akira, the son, is a member of Zengakuren and a participant in the demonstrations. Prompting the key turning point in the drama is the return of Tamano, a fellow student and friend of Akira. He recently has returned from an mra conference in Europe and shares sto-ries of his conversion at Caux with everyone he meets. To Akira’s parents, he relates how

I realized that if I was going to save Japan, I had to start with my own life. We students have talked so high and lived so low. At Caux, they gave me four standards honesty, purity, unselfishness and love—all absolute, mind you. And for the first time I took a straight look at my own living. There was my mother. She trusted me, but she had no idea what was going on. I had to write to her and be honest about the shame-ful life I was living in Tokyo and ask her forgiveness. I can tell you, it was the toughest thing I ever did in my life, but I knew it was where I had to begin.61

59 Kudō Shōshiro, Tomo arite tanoshi [Enjoy Being Friends] (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no nihonsha, 1961), 79.

60 Chiba Saburō, “business breakfast 12/18/61,” container 418, Moral Re-Armament Records, loc.

61 “The Tiger,” script, 1961, ibid.

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This is as deeply as the play goes into the ideology of the Moral Re-Armament.However facile the explanation of Moral Re-Armament’s “ideology,” in The

Tiger, the example of one converted individual soon influences others. Tama-no’s moral admonition that change in society begins within oneself persuades the entire family, including Akira, who has suffered an injury in the demonstra-tions. His words prompt a reconciliation between the two men in the family; father and son make earnest apologies. The son apologized to his father for hating his father’s excesses, the father to his son for becoming cold and heart-less when he could not get over the humiliation and defeat of the war. The father finally reaches the conviction that Japan has a greater calling than to imitate the United States or “sell out” the nation to make profits trading with China. “Japan has a destiny of her own and the millions of Asia are eagerly waiting for it,” he declares. “Japan is meant to be the lighthouse of Asia.” Now unified in a domestic setting made harmonious, a microcosm for Japan’s larger political context, father and son turn their thoughts to the demonstrators out-side, eager to mobilize “all that energy and passion to build a new world.”62 Although portrayed as a Japanese-led change of heart and direction, the im-plication within the play was that mra would fuel the “lighthouse” and guide Japan’s transformation.

The play also revealed how repentance played a crucial role in mra’s opera-tions. This linked the Cold War mra with the early gatherings of Buchman’s Oxford Group, but encouraged individuals to confess not only their personal sins, but also confess and apologize for the sins of their nation.63 As Daniel Sack has noted, mra interpreted these apologies as policy changes on the national level, thereby claiming great influence in international relations.64 In the case of The Tiger, mra staged a series of apologies between the young Japanese cast members and U.S. political officials. This included the aforementioned meeting with Eisenhower, and a much-publicized meeting with James Hagerty. As the Eisenhower administration’s press secretary in 1960, a helicopter had to evacu-ate Hagerty during his visit to Japan when protesting students had swarmed him. The event prompted colorful headlines in the United States, such as “Fanatical Japanese Mob Hagerty” and “Helicopter Plucks Hagerty from Mob in Tokyo.”65 The mra press photograph provided a dramatic contrast; the im-age of young Japanese men smiling with Hagerty illustrated a story that made

62 Ibid.63 Sack, Moral Re-Armament, p. 146.64 Ibid., p. 147.65 “Fanatical Japanese Mob Hagerty,” The Desert Sun, 10 June 1960, p. 1; “Helicopter Plucks

Hagerty from Mob in Tokyo,” The Bend Bulletin, 10 June 1960, p. 1.

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it into several newspapers of national and local standing, perpetuating a story of international reconciliation—on U.S. terms—that mra had facilitated.66

The kind of apologies The Tiger offered mirrored many other mra-staged expressions of regret, which were entirely sentimental, did not make distinc-tions about power relationships between nations, and ultimately obscured the material and economic aspects of conflict. Some of mra’s model apolo-gies were ones from colonized people to their colonizers—at Caux in 1952, for example, an Ethiopian embraced an Italian, and an Indonesian woman apologized for her hatred to Dutch and Japanese individuals.67 This was not so far from the kind of middlebrow mainstream narratives Klein discusses in elaborating the mechanics of Cold War Orientalism. The discourse em-phasized personal friendships as a means to mend and bolster international

66 The Japan Times, 25 February 1961, p. 2; The New York Times, 24 February 1961, p. 22; The Detroit News, 24 February 1961, p. 13-A; Gloyd S. Arnold, “Foes into Friends,” Independent Petroleum Monthly (December 1961): 46–47.

67 Ibid., p. 146.

Figure 3 New York World-Telegram and Sun, February 24, 1961.

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relations. However, mra’s productions also confirmed a U.S. Cold War vision of non-Western people, who needed only to see the sense of the non-ideological (not left, not right) path of the “Free World” and overcome backward-looking feelings of hurt and hatred. The image of inclusive harmony did not preclude a hierarchy of values.

A desire to appeal to and convert the masses marked The Tiger as the prod-uct of a longer American tradition of revivalist rally. Although it featured Japanese actors, the play approached a kind of yellow-face minstrel show when performed for a U.S. audience.68 It affirmed an American sense of global events, and of the potential gullibility of non-Western people, easily hoodwinked by the claims of communism and in need of moral guidance to avoid falling prey to its godless influence. mra sought to persuade these viewers that it could offer such supervision. It advertised its form of theater as something with in-herent global mass appeal, and thus supreme importance in the battle against communism. Chiba Saburō, Japan’s minister of labor in 1954, became a spokes-man for mra and appealed to U.S. businessmen for support with his decla-ration that “communism captures intellectuals, but The Tiger grips masses.”69 Performances of The Tiger concluded with a final scene in which the Japanese actors clasped hands with participants from other places; the cast of 150 peo-ple from 28 countries in Asia and Africa. They all proclaimed their conviction in mra’s ideology. In the United States, they also offered an apology to the American people. A Japanese cast member called it “a marvelous spectacle.”70 He also related how this deeply affected audiences, spurring people to “empty their wallets” to ensure mra success. Part of the appeal for U.S. audiences was the idea that mra could carry a message friendly to U.S. interests to con-tested non-Western regions using non-Western actors. A speaker at an mra fundraising explained why a play Japanese people staged had an advantage in South America: “They can say things that Americans could not.”71 mra promised affective links across non-Western peoples, but on terms acceptable to U.S. Cold War policy.

Ultimately, the affective links Moral Re-Armament sought to forge actually reinforced material ones between the United States and Asia, as mra made soft-power claims about the clout of its theater, but also enjoyed links with the hard-power of political and financial interests. As previously discussed, its

68 The author extends thanks to an anonymous reviewer, who suggested these terms as a way into framing mra’s performances.

69 Chiba, “business breakfast 12/18/61,” container 418, Moral Re-armament Records, loc.70 “Nanbei o mawaru mra kōen ‘tora’,” p. 49.71 Ibid., p. 50.

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extensive reach would not have been possible without tremendous resources. According to mra’s own estimates, by September 1961, the yearlong tour of The Tiger—with performances 190 times in Paris and in fourteen cities in West Germany, six cities in the United States, fifteen cities in Brazil, and five cities in Peru—reached 1.11 million viewers. In addition, an estimated 10 million in South America had viewed the televised version of the play in 1961.72 mra, following the original pattern Buchman had developed, recruited “key men” among the elite of non-Western nations, who solicited funds and support from U.S. businessmen. Chiba Saburō, concluding his pitch to U.S. businessmen about the power of mra’s theatrical productions, noted how “we need a lot of money,” adding that “I am sure God will provide us.”73 His remarks echoed the mra pattern of requesting funds without requesting funds. There is also evidence of how Japanese business leaders sought to gain more than the moral high ground with their support of mra. As one supporting politician noted, head of “the Electric Power Development Corporation reported the successful conclusion of the new Tacuma Andes Project as a result of The Tiger’s work in preparing cooperation between Peru and Japan.”74 Although mra spoke hyperbolically of its accomplishments in transforming the “hearts and minds” of the masses, its work also paved the way for economic relationships among the moneyed.

Further reflecting the eagerness of mra to wield influence in a region of strategic importance to U.S. Cold War policy, alongside the production and tour of The Tiger, the group’s fundraising in the early 1960s focused on building a new training facility in Japan to supplement mra centers in Michigan and Switzerland. At events promoting The Tiger as a success, mra members and spokespeople emphasized the need for an mra center in Japan, which they planned to build in Odawara, at the foot of Mount Fuji. To publicize support for such a project from other Asian nations, a Japanese supporter read a message of encouragement from Burmese nationalist and politician U Nu at a lunch meeting in the United States. “If we create something massive in Odawara,” he declared, “it will shift shift [sic] the attention from Peking to Tokyo, or Peking to a superior idea.”75 Such high-profile business leaders as Mitsui Takasumi, chairman of the Mitsui Foundation, also spoke out on behalf of Moral Re-Armament and its planned center at Odawara, echoing hopes that

72 “Performances of ‘The Tiger’: August 1960 to September 12, 1961,” container 418, Moral Re-armament Records, Manuscript Division, loc.

73 Chiba, “business breakfast 12/18/61,” ibid.74 “Senator Kimura [Tokutarō] at farewell for tiger in Tokyo,” 1962, container 426, ibid.75 Masa Shibusawa, “12/17/61 talk,” container 418, ibid.

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it would “strengthen friendly relations amongst the Asian nations and con-tribute to the establishment of a permanent peace in Asia.”76 These kinds of statements reinforced the idea of Japan as the “bulwark against communism,” which had guided U.S. foreign policy in East Asia since the Communists gained control in China in October 1949 and undergirded U.S. support for the friendly ldp. While mra certainly exaggerated its understanding and influence in the contested non-West during the Cold War, its actions reflected larger trends in U.S. foreign policy and the interests of powerful segments of the business world.

It is impossible to gauge mra’s effect based on its own claims, but it did prove itself supple enough to tap into various popular concerns at different times. As a result, it managed to attract material support and more general interest, particularly in its cultural campaigns in the period in which it pro-duced The Tiger. In the late 1970s, director and scholar Richard H. Palmer pointed out that while consistently overlooked in theatre history, in terms of sheer viewership numbers between the years 1940 and 1964, “the success of the mra theatre eclipsed any comparable producing organization in the left-wing theatre.”77 While mra’s claims that it saved Tokyo from Communist overthrow are demonstrably false, the tour of The Tiger still raises questions about how, for example, a Peruvian peasant village might respond to a visiting international production about events in Tokyo. What kinds of meaning did such a performance have, not only as propaganda but also as spectacle? The allure of mra proved downright baffling to many, prompting the influential U.S. conservative magazine National Review to describe the organization as cultish, facile, and—ultimately—“metaphysically jejune.” And yet, the same publication reported that when it published an article that criticized mra in 1956, it “drew a record volume of angry mail.”78 mra may have had a limited ideological impact and a simplistic view of aesthetics and politics, but it also built an organization with notable transnational reach.

In the case of mra of the early 1960s that produced and toured the play The Tiger, the group framed its production within the various motivations and understandings that constituted U.S. Cold War anti-Communist strategy, including that non-Western peoples were potential allies that the United States should woo to “Free World” values. At least in 1961, mra had hopes not only to tour The Tiger, but also to trot out a stable of exotic plays, including El Condor

76 Mitsui, “The Tiger.”77 Richard H. Palmer, “Moral Re-Armament Drama: Right Wing Theatre in America,” Theatre

Journal 31, no. 2 (May 1979): 172.78 Ibid.

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(by Peruvian students), The Dragon (by Taiwanese students), and The Elephant (by Indian students).79 To persuade both the West and the non-West of its ex-tensive influence, Moral Re-Armament hoped to mobilize non-Western youth from all parts of the globe. This was part of a larger movement of employing cultural events to propel political integration of the contested sites in the non-West into a U.S.-led Cold War order.

With the rise of national liberation movements throughout the non-West, global intellectual and cultural perceptual frameworks about Asia shifted in the late 1960s and 1970s.80 Maoism inspired radicals across the globe; the Vietnam War challenged U.S. hegemony. While counter-cultural forces rear-ranged the landscape of domestic politics in the “Free World” West, scholarship on Asia also changed dramatically during this period. Young scholars launched critiques attacking previously hegemonic models for analyzing Asian societ-ies, economies, and cultures, which they argued had done little to understand Asian societies on their own terms and more to serve U.S. Cold War interests.81 Key radical critiques of U.S. Cold War involvement in Asia also reflected the rise of what Judy Tzu-Chun Wu identifies as “radical orientalism,” in which revolu-tionary nations and figures in Asia became romanticized in the United States. Although it retained an East-West binary at the heart of previous incarnations of orientalism, it also reflected a move that subverted long-cherished hierar-chies.82 It was difficult to claim a position of moral authority for U.S. interests in the face of such challenges, particularly framed in the militant style that the term “re-armament” evoked. Over the 1960s, mra’s popularity declined after it suffered a series of leadership crises in the wake of Buchman’s 1961 death. The organization still exists, although under a new name—Initiatives of Change—and with a focus shifted from international theatrical spectacles to workshops designed around developing “trustbuilding,” “ethical leadership,” and “sustain-able living.”83

Nevertheless, the kind of orientalist prejudices groups such as Moral Re-Armament forged and exploited in the Cold War have a long afterlife in U.S. popular culture.84 Even in an age of ever increasing information and

79 Chiba, “business breakfast 12/15/61.”80 Fabio Lanza, “‘America's Asia?’ Revolution, Scholarship, and Asian Studies,” in Asian-

isms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration, Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski, eds. (Singapore: nus Press, 2016), 136.

81 Ibid., p. 141.82 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism

During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2013).83 Initiatives of Change, http://www.iofc.org/ (accessed 30 April 2015).84 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, p. 266.

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globalized communications, misunderstandings about domestic politics abroad still structure how government and non-government leaders sell U.S. foreign policy to the public. Some recent examples are controversial measures to reinterpret Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution and promote “proactive” peacekeeping. Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, who also served as head of the ldp, announced his determination to advance these policies in his address—in English—before a joint session of the U.S. Congress on 29 April 2015 that received little coverage in the Japanese press. Abe made the explicit link with Japan’s Cold War alliance with the United States, declaring how it was this alliance that led to victory in the Cold War. Significantly, he also invoked the figure of Kishi Nobusuke, his grandfather, who stood before Congress in June 1957 and announced his commitment to the United States based on shared devotion to “democratic principles and ideals.”85 As in the case of the Kishi administration, Abe’s forceful passage of a U.S.-supported bill through a reluctant legislature in Japan also prompted massive demonstrations out-side the Diet throughout the summer of 2015. Compared with the events of 1960, however, very few U.S. media sources reported the political fracas in Japan. And so, the popular misunderstandings upon which the binational alli-ance has rested persists, but the underwhelming public reaction in the United States demonstrates how Japan has faded as a site of contestation in the U.S. imagination.

85 Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, “Toward an Alliance of Hope,” Address to a Joint Meeting of the U.S. Congress, 29 April 2015, Prime Minister and his Cabinet, http://japan.kantei .go.jp/97_abe/statement/201504/uscongress.html (accessed 1 February 2016).

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http://japan.kantei.go.jp/97_abe/statement/201504/uscongress.html

http://japan.kantei.go.jp/97_abe/statement/201504/uscongress.html

Author Query

AQ1: Please provide citations for all figures.

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Documents

To Catch a Tiger by Its Toe: The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Moral Re-Armament, and Cold War Orientalism