The protests against the 1960 revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty (known as Anpo in Japanese), were the largest and longest series of popular protests in Japan's history. Over a period of 15 months from March, 1959 to June, 1960, at least 20 million Japanese people took part in protest activity of some kind. Although the protests ultimately failed to prevent passage of the revised treaty, which remains in effect to this day, they did succeed in forcing the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and the cancellation of a planned visit to Japan by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The protests also produced a violent climax in June, 1960 in which a car carrying the US Ambassador and a presidential aide was attacked, forcing the occupants to be rescued by a US Marines helicopter, and an attempt by radical student activists to storm the Japanese Diet led to the death of a young female university student.

This dissertation examines the immediate aftermath of the 1960 protests from the end of June, 1960 through the end of 1964. Although the scope of this study is rather narrow chronologically, it is broad thematically, and in terms of the types of sources consulted, assessing the impact of the 1960 crisis on US-Japan relations, Japanese domestic politics, the trajectory of Japan's high-speed economic growth, the labor and student movements, Japanese intellectuals, the Japanese media, and Japanese art and literature.

I argue that the 1960 crisis precipitated or accelerated a series of transformations in Japanese diplomacy, society, and culture that reshaped Japan's domestic order and reconfigured Japan's role within the international system, setting Japan on the course it would follow for at least the next five decades.