The purpose of this article is to examine what actually happened in the Suita incident, a well-known political riot in postwar Japan, and how the incident was told and reconstructed after it took place. The Suita incident is famous in the history of Japanese social and political movements for its nonviolence, cooperation with Korean Japanese, and the victory in a trial which lasted for 20 years. However, even though this incident is well known and often recounted, and although it critically influenced the Japanese Communist Party, which organized the incident, there are few studies which clarify “what happened”, and “how events are narrated” by whom, how and why. Therefore, using documentary resources and interviews with the participants, this article first looks at “what happened” in the Suita and Hirakata incidents, and then examines how these two incidents have been recounted and their images have been molded by three component entities, namely the Japanese Communist Party, Korean Japanese, and the Japanese government. The “Suita incident” was, in a sense, very useful for all three, and all three profited from it by making partisan speeches on this political riot, slanted in a particularly favorable way for each.
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