Maiden Martyr for "New Japan": The 1960 Ampo and the Rhetoric of the Other Michiko

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Shōda Michiko, the commoner who married Prince Akihito in 1959, gained iconographic status in the media (Bardsley 2002). Around the same time, another Japanese woman who happened to have the same given name attracted as much if not more attention. Her name was Kanba Michiko. A Tokyo University coed and Zengakuren activist,1 Kanba was killed in a violent confrontation between Ampo protesters and the police in June 1960. This essay examines the rhetoric surrounding Kanba Michiko and her death that appeared in a popular weekly magazine, Shūkan Asahi (Asahi Weekly). I describe how Shūkan Asahi portrayed the Ampo struggle as a polarized opposition of old, diehard fascism pitted against a newly emerging democratic force, with the fascist camp having the upper hand until the sacrificial death of a maiden martyr. As I hope to show, this clearcut depiction inevitably positioned the middle-class nuclear family as the critical element in the Ampo protests. Moreover, as I will argue, by positing the death of the maiden as a case of thwarted motherhood, Shūkan Asahi limited the definition of women’s political activism to forms of middle-class motherhood. In this sense Shūkan Asahi’s portrait of Kanba Michiko not only echoed the prewar ideology of a nonpolitical “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbō) but reflected and foretold the rise of “housewife feminism” in postwar Japanese society as well.