Japan: Toward Leadership

Propped up in bed in a Tokyo hospital, retiring Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, recovering from a throat tumor, took up writing brush and rice paper. At the plea of his hopelessly deadlocked party, he stroked off a note choosing his own successor. Two hours later, Eisako Sato, 63, the dynamo of five former Cabinets, became the tenth Prime Minister of postwar Japan—and, all but inevitably, a man destined to guide his nation along a new course, for, after 19 years of penance, Asia’s only fully industrialized country seems about to reclaim its place as a world power. Said Sato in his first nationwide television address as Premier: “Japan’s international voice has been too small.” How would it be made louder?

Natural Place. Obviously the Japanese no longer dream of empire or of the tyrannical “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” that led them to war. But Japan wants gradually to free itself of its dependence on the U.S. and take a role in the free world’s fight for peace. Thanks to Ikeda, it is already quietly giving $600 million a year in aid to underdeveloped nations, and this summer pledged more if necessary. It would like a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Its government has been considering offering Japanese troops as a permanent U.N. security force. It would like to be given a free hand with its giant cultural cousin, Red China, both to win a place in the potentially enormous Chinese market and to try to conciliate between Peking and the West.

Washington sometimes seems nervous at the thought of a too independent Japan, which is bound to the U.S. in a protective—but also restrictive—mutual security treaty that runs through 1970. Actually, given the present dangerous unbalance in the Far East, nothing could be more advantageous to the U.S. than a strong Japan resuming its natural place as the economic and political leader of Asia.

To achieve this will not be easy. Japan has many clients in Asia but few friends. Their fellow Asians consider the Japanese a strange hybrid of Oriental past and technological present. Despite Japan’s impeccable—indeed, almost mouselike—postwar behavior, its very forward stride manages to recall to some the brutalities of industrialized Imperial Japan. Less than two months ago, Japan’s proposal to send out its own peace corps was rebuffed unanimously in Asia—although it was welcomed in Africa.

National Pride. Above all, Japan itself is still ambivalent about playing a strong international role. By and large, the Japanese still dread the prospect of rearmament, which is the only means by which their great economic power can express itself as a political power. But amid unprecedented prosperity and new national pride, the Japanese are gradually beginning to understand the responsibilities that go with leadership. And they are learning that all great powers must somehow create an atmosphere in which they will be accepted as leaders.

Fortunately, no man is better prepared to create the atmosphere—and provide the leadership—than the new Premier. A career bureaucrat, Sato was one of the chief architects of Japan’s miraculous industrial expansion. In the important ministry of trade and commerce he became one of the foremost exponents of Japan’s increased international involvement. Although his rival for the premiership, Ichiro Kono, won worldwide acclaim as the top organizer most responsible for the success of the Tokyo Olympics, Sato really had the inside track. He has been Ikeda’s heir apparent for more than four years—ever since his elder brother, Nobusuke Kishi,* resigned in the wave of leftist riots that forced the cancellation of President Eisenhower’s projected visit.

Ironically, Sato’s first potential crisis was a threatened wave of leftist riots in protest against another U.S. visitor—the nuclear submarine Seadragon, which called last week at the Sasebo naval base on the southern island of Kyushu. But Japan has come a long way from 1960. There were some nasty-looking demonstrations in Tokyo and elsewhere, whipped up by the Socialists and Zengakuren, the far-left student organization. Cops banged heads as fluttering banners inveighed against Showa no kuro bune—the Black Ship of the Enlightened Peace Era. But the left-wingers were divided and the people generally unimpressed by scare slogans about the dangers of nuclear radiation. Most Japanese calmly watched the arrival of the submarine on television. Sasebo itself was so quiet that Seadragon’s crew took turns going shopping.

*Who adopted his wife’s maiden name, a common practice in Japan.