Helmeted demonstrators on a grassy bank, armed with flagpoles, c. 1970s. Photo credit Takashi Hamaguchi
On this day in 1966, the Japanese government announced the construction of an airport on farmland in rural Sanrizuka, without permission of displaced locals. The struggle was led by the Sanrizuka-Shibayama United Opposition League against Construction of the Narita Airport, which locals formed under the leadership of opposition parties the Communist Party and Socialist Party. The struggle resulted in significant delays in the opening of the airport, as well as deaths on both sides.
At its height, the union mobilised 17,500 people for a general rally, while thousands of riot police were brought in on several occasions.
The area around Sanrizuka had been farmland since the Middle Ages, and, prior to the 1940s, much of the land had been privately owned by the Japanese Imperial Household.
Many locals were economically reliant on the Imperial estate at Goryō Farm, and local farmers had a strong economic and emotional attachment to the land. After Japan's defeat in World War II, large tracts of royal land were sold off and subsequently settled by poor rural laborers.
In the 1960s, the Japanese government planned to build a second airport in the Tokyo area to support Japan's rapid economic development. After meeting resistance from locals on the site's first chosen location, the rural town of Tomisato, the government was donated remaining land in Sanrizuka by the Imperial Family.
Locals in Sanrizuka were outraged when the government announced its plans. The Sanrizuka-Shibayama United Opposition League Against the Construction of Narita Airport (or Hantai Dōmei) was formed in 1966, and began to engage in a variety of tactics of resistance, including legal buy-ups, sit-ins, and occupations.
Meanwhile, the Japanese radical student movement was growing, and the League soon formed an alliance with active New Left groups; one major factor drawing the groups the together was that, under the US-Japan Security Treaty, the US military had free access to Japanese air facilities. As a result, it was likely the airport would be used for transporting troops and arms in the Vietnam War.
The demonstrators built huts and watchtowers along proposed construction sites. On October 10th, 1967, the government attempted to conduct a land survey, backed by over 2000 riot police. Clashes quickly broke out, and Hantai Domei leader Issaku Tomura was photographed being brutalized by police, further inflaming anti-airport sentiment.
Protests further grew and intensified over the next few years as the state pressed on with attempts to build the airport. Protestors would dig into the ground, build fortifications, and arm themselves against police. Construction was delayed by years, and the conflict would cost the government billions of yen.
On September 16th, 1971, three police officers were killed during an eminent domain expropriation. Four days later, police forcibly removed and destroyed the house of an elderly woman, an incident that became yet another symbol of state oppression to the opposition.
One student committed suicide, saying in his suicide note that "I detest those who brought the airport to this land". In 1972, the protestors built a 60 meter-high steel tower near the runway in order to disrupt flight tests. Conflict continued through much of the 1970s.
In 1977, the government announced plans to open the airport within the year. In May, police destroyed the tower while demonstrators attempted to cling on to it, provoking a new wave of widespread conflict. One protestor was killed after being struck in the head by a tear gas canister. In March 1978, the first runway was set to open, but a few days prior, a group of saboteurs burrowed into the main control tower, barricaded themselves inside, and proceeded to lay waste to the tower's equipment and infrastructure, delaying the opening yet again to May 20th, 1978.
Resistance continued after the airport was opened. Although many locals began to accept the airport and leave the land, the focus of Hantai Dōmei shifted to opposing plans for additional terminals and runways, as the airport's current size still only reflected a fraction of initial plans.
Clashes continued through the 1980s - on October 20th, 1985, members of the communist New Left group Chukaku-ha broke though police lines with logs and flagpoles, successfully attacking infrastructure in one of the last large-scale battles of the resistance campaign. Guerilla actions and bombings continued as late as the 1990s.
Although this campaign of resistance has largely shifted out of public attention in Japan, its presence is still felt: until 2015, all visitors were required to present ID cards for security reasons, and the airport still remains only a third of its initially-planned size. The Sanrizuka Struggle has never completely ended, and the Opposition League still exists and holds rallies.
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weird infodump
What can or should you do when someone is factually wrong? This already sounds really bad but lesgoooooOkay I was watching an audio guy on sloptube talk about THE WII'S AUDIO IS A BIT MORE COMPLICATED (it isn't, it's very similar to the Gamecube, PSP or probably PS2) which was cool, except he sorta handwaved Dolby Pro Logic II as "a surround processor that looks at the content of your sound and makes it surround".
This is sort of true, kinda, but it's not remotely specific enough: you use phasing, panning and other weird shit to make a stereo master that will both sound okay on two speakers, and have the Pro Logic II tech in your AV receiver use an algorithm of sorts that reads those phase changes and panning as denoting specific channels. If something is panned equally between the left and right stereo channels, Pro Logic II routes that sound to the center speaker. If a sound in the left or right channel is phased +90° or -90°, Pro Logic II will send them to the rear left or rear right speaker. It also grabs the bottom ~100Hz of the whole signal to route to the subwoofer. Its predecessor, the 1982 Dolby Surround (later upgraded to Pro Logic in 1987) was sort of lame in only having one rear channel, but Pro Logic II can actually produce very impressive five-channel results, my favourite example being Metal Gear Solid 3 on PS2.
Pro Logic II is slightly obscure because it never really got a chance to shine; Dolby Surround/Pro Logic was a staple of common mass-market VHS format videotapes and even Laserdiscs from the early 1980s to mid 1990s, but Pro Logic II came around in 2000, well after both Laserdisc and DVD had introduced Dolby Digital and DTS to the mass market in the 90s, which are digital formats that carry six (left, right, center, L surround, R surround are 5, sub is .1 so 6 channels lol) channels of discrete audio, no matrixing or phasing or panning of stereo required. It is a great system, the old Pro Logic had its rear channel limited to 7KHz max frequency response, but all channels of Pro Logic II are capable of full-frequency response.
In film terms Pro Logic II was never really used, outside of a few junky low-budget DVDs where they didn't want to re-encode the film's multichannel mix for Dolby Digital, and so just reissued the old Pro Logic track, stuff like the Maple DVD of The Running Man, or the 1997 Director's Cut of Blade Runner. The point of Pro Logic II was apparently more to offer better upmixing of stereo films/music/games to 5.1 channels, which it does acceptably, like Low by David Bowie sounds kinda cool in Pro Logic II.
Where Pro Logic II really found its use was in games, though - while the Xbox could encode Dolby Digital on the fly and many of its games have discrete multichannel surround, the Gamecube and Playstation 2 were basically incapable of proper multichannel in games. (Save a few weird four-channel implementations of DTS seen in GTA Vice City or SSX3) The vast majority of high budget games on PS2 and Gamecube used Pro Logic II, like Okami and Shadow of the Collossus, or Super Mario Sunshine, F-Zero GX and Star Wars Rogue Leader. Plus, if a game was primarily targeting Xbox or PC, like Ubisoft's Splinter Cell or Prince of Persia games, they'd almost always have a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on those platforms, but Gamecube and PS2 nerds could still get that experience with Pro Logic II. It worked pretty well, the X-Wing demo from Rogue Leader where the fighter flies in a circle around the room is very cool, and again the ambient wildlife sounds and directional footsteps in Metal Gear Solid 3 are great. Encoding a stereo track with Pro Logic II was also very space efficient compared to the gigabyte or two you'd have to set aside for Dolby Digital, since Pro Logic II is just two channels. Great for the Gamecube's tiny DVDs!
So when the Wii came about, it was very similar architecturally to the Gamecube, all ATi graphics and PowerPC 750 based CPUs, allowing devs to happily reuse their PS2 and Gamecube era SDKs and engines, like you saw Ubisoft do with the Jade Engine. Since the Wii was a Real Prole Console and discrete multichannel audio is bourgeois decadence, the vast majority of high-budget Wii releases used Pro Logic II, or later IIx for 7.1 channels, or even IIz with height channels up high. Just off the top of my head, all of the Wii releases of Call of Duty used it, Prince of Persia Forgotten Sands used it, Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 used it, The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess uses it, Sonic Colours & Unleashed use it. This is deeply interesting to me personally, because this matrixed stereo-to-multichannel audio shit goes back through the 1970s, to the Sansui QS four-channel matrix Dolby Surround was initially based on, and alllllll the way back to the 1960s, when Wendy Carlos was hanging out in a university auditorium and wired a bunch of big speakers together before making Switched-On Bach in four channels. This is the final resting place of matrixed audio basically, films and music had long since forgotten Pro Logic and its runt siblings in favour of proper discrete stuff, but Pro Logic II in games is pretty good honestly.
Now, while I realise that this is all basically shit nobody cares about, the audio guy in the video talks in extreme depth about ADPCM and other compression formats the Wii has, among other things, so the lack of detail on this is weird. He has some weird wiki page where he says that only like ten wii games use Pro Logic II, which as you can see is a deeply grievous factual error. It's a huge portion of the Wii's audio output to just brush aside, especially considering that audio guy again has a pretty deep understanding of the audio formats the Wii uses to play stereo music, up to and including MIDI-style sequencing. Sort of a shame.
I'm kind enough not to demand his execution for this,
but I also felt the strong urge to post basically this rant under his video. I did not however, because I can sort-of sense that people fucking hate when you crawl out of the woodwork to spew information upon them, they see the correction as an attack on their bloodline or smth. Personally, when I post about say, Tactics Ogre, I'm always desperately hoping that some nerd DOES rise from the gutters to shower me with knowledge about the game, so that I may expand my understanding of it, but my brain is deeply funny/unfunny depending on your perspective.
So, is this shit I should just not ever say at all? Is there a specific set of wording rules I can follow so as not to cause problems with it? Should I just give zero fucks and school funnyboys about stuff like this anyway???
Just post it. If you don't want the streamer to think you're being mean you can just say, like, "Loved the video otherwise" or something at the end
I might fucken do it :)
It's YouTube comments
As long as you're not being a slobbering racist it's a step up from the norm