It was the beginning of the third strike, which would last 195 days. Watanabe's position was that Toho was 2 billion yen in arrears, with three times as many employees as required for its current film output - precisely the kind of pressure that had led the animators to make themselves useful on production where animation might not have been totally necessary. The [worker] union chairman protested that today's Toho had been formed by the forced wartime amalgamation of several different companies, and that the studio was now required for a new purpose....
Instead, Watanabe fired 266 people in 1948, including 'communist party members, sympathisers and all 42 animators'....The remaining staff members were hardly any more fortunate, suspended in May and then informed of the company's indefinite closure in June.
By August staff at the rival studios had now occupied the buildings, and stood ready to fight over the materials and machinery left in each - in the event of studio bankruptcy the film stock, costumes, cameras and lights would all be valuable assets. In a lively section of his memoirs, Kurosawa Akira reported the Toho faction manning the barricades, led by an actor in a cowboy hat. Meanwhile, the electricians repurposed their lamps their lamps as spotlights to ward off night attacks, and the special-effects department installed wind machines at the barricaded gates, with sacks of cayenne pepper primed in the event of an enemy assault...Meanwhile someone had a large sign that read: "Culture cannot be destroyed by violence".
Watanabe fought back with impressive overkill: fifty trucks that unloaded 2,000 riot police, accompanied by an unspecified number of bulldozers, six armoured card, a unit from the US First Cavalry and, as if the situation were not surreal enough already, three reconnaissance aircraft and seven American tanks. The incident became notorious in Japanese film history, in that 'Everything came but the battleships'.
I had a quick skim through that thread and I think I'll have fun reading through it all later today, seeing how everyone digested the film and all that. It's a very interesting film and requires a lot from its audience but I find it very rewarding 
