Students Give Up Vigil At Zero Hour

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29235, 20 June 1960, Page 11

Students Give Up Vigil At Zero Hour

(Rec. 10 p.m.) TOKYO, June 18. Dusty, dirty and exhausted, students who had ah day circled the Japanese Diet at jogtrot chanting anti-Government slogans, sank down after midnight and lay full length in a sea of scattered newspaper and discarded pamphlets.

At midnight, zero hour for the automatic ratification of the Japan-United States Security Treaty, only a few thousand of the 200,000 demonstrators were •tiH there. Outside one of the gates of the towering Diet building, the leaders of the day’s campaign, the Left-wing Zengakuren Students’ Federation gathered. One had his head heavily bandaged while his companions clung arm in arm fa a chain around their broadcasting truck, which all day had urged the crowds on from the Diet, past the Prime Minister's residence, through the city past police headquarters, and around ■gain. On the gates to the Diet grounds, which young demonstrators had torn down four days ■go. hung a wreathed picture of the girl student who was trampled to death beneath the feet of her excited friends as they rushed the building Three youths sat on the roof of a truck taking it in turns to give a hoarse account to onlookers of how she died, a martyr. Wherever correspondents tramped their way during the

day they found constant evidence of the organisation which had gone into the anti-security treaty demonstrations. Early in the morning, teenage boys and girls tumbled out of chartered buses clutching satchels and banners as they set foot on the ground. All around the city were placards on the end of sticks often made from similar quality cardboard. Loudspeaker trucks swept tn ahead of the marching columns directing them across intersections while young men ran up and down the lines calling directions or cues for slogans, using apparently new electronic loudhailers such as used by the police in crowd control. They cost £25 each. Flagging spirits were revived with a song from one of these loudhailers. All through the humid day they went around and on into the moonlit night with ranks of blank-faced police watching quietly. It all appeared to have involved considerable expenditure in the provision of transport, equipment and banners. Only the demonstrators did not seem interested in who had organised them.