Japan: Demo in the Damp

It was No theater at its most negative. Through a misty drizzle, the gleaming forest of black umbrellas and red, blue and yellow banners moved down Tokyo’s neon-lit Ginza. “Down with the Sato government!” bellowed the Zengakuren students, Socialist Party workers and Sohyo union members, as they marched past hordes of riot cops in blue plastic helmets with Plexiglas face shields. Then the drizzle gave way to a pelting downpour, and what had been billed as the boldest anti-government “demo” in five years sputtered out like a drenched fuse.

The marchers were protesting the Japan-South Korea Normalization Treaty, ratified by banzai vote in the Diet a week earlier when Premier Eisaku Sato’s Liberal Democratic floor managers bulldozed the opposition Socialists with a post-midnight roll call. Japan’s leftists claim that the treaty will somehow lead to Japanese involvement in the Viet Nam war.

Conditions for Savagery. With delaying tactics in the Diet and demonstrations in the streets, the leftists hoped to paralyze the government and pull down Sato just as they had his brother, ex-Premier Nobusuke Kishi, after the 1960 Japan-U.S. Security Treaty was signed. No such luck, for this time the Japanese public simply was not responding to the leftists’ highly indignant cries. For one thing, it was all too obvious that the treaty with Korea, which restores relations between the Asian neighbors for the first time since World War II, has no military clauses. Moreover, the conditions for street savagery that prevailed in 1960 have been dulled by a steadily improving economy.

Nonetheless, the agitation served to call attention to the substantial—and growing—opposition in Japan to the Viet Nam war. The giant Sohyo labor union claims to have garnered 8,000,000 signatures already on an antiwar petition. Polls show that 75% of the Japanese public opposes the bombing of North Viet Nam. “Asian problems should be solved by Asians,” wrote Editorialist Shizuo Maruyama in the Japan Quarterly. Last week a group of 30 Japanese intellectuals took a full-page ad in the New York Times protesting the war.

A Change of Posture. Key molder of Japan’s antiwar “moodo” has been the Tokyo daily press, which has consistently criticized American actions in Viet Nam while buying Hanoi’s propaganda line at face value. Until recently, U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer responded with a “low posture,” mildly stressing patience and asking Japanese to try to understand the American position. Then, last month, Reischauer, a student of Japanese history whose wife is a daughter of one of Japan’s leading families, decided to tackle the Tokyo press head on.

Citing an Asahi Shimbun poll that claimed 42% of all Japanese believe that the loss of South Viet Nam to Communism would have no effect on Japan, Reischauer took editors and public alike to task for “serious misapprehensions.” In his new “high posture,” Reischauer specifically attacked Foreign Editor Minoru Omori of Mainichi Shimbun (circ. 6,400,000), who, after watching a North Vietnamese propaganda film, declared that the U.S. had bombed a leprosarium near Hanoi “for ten days straight.” First response to the Reischauer speech was indignation, but eventually Reischauer’s reputation paid off. Much greater attention is now being paid to the American side of the Viet Nam war, and Asahi (circ. 8,000,000) is currently running a series from Washington explaining the U.S. view.

But Reischauer’s work notwithstanding, Viet Nam remains a potential Achilles’ heel for Premier Sato, one which the leftists would dearly love to exploit. Having failed to bring him down over the Japan-South Korea treaty issue, they now will doubtless shift their emphasis back to Viet Nam.