Japan: The Right Eye of Daruma

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When a Japanese prepares to make a wish, he is apt to buy a one-eyed doll modeled after the famed Buddhist monk Daruma, who founded the Zen sect 1,500 years ago. Then, if his wish is fulfilled, he completes the Daruma’s missing eye as a symbol of gratitude for otherworldly intervention. Last week, in the Tokyo headquarters of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Premier Eisaku Sato dipped a sumi brush into an inkstone and with swift strokes daubed in the dark right eye of his Daruma. “The eyes,” he remarked when he had finished, “are as big as my own.”

And well they might be. Sato’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party had entered Japan’s tenth postwar election with the expectation of a setback. The government was wreathed in a “black mist” of Cabinet-level corruption charges, harassed by catapulting consumer prices and a hostile press. Besides, there was worry about the reaction of a nervously pacifist nation to Sato’s support of the U.S. stand in Viet Nam. In view of all this, many conservatives feared losses of as many as 40 seats in the 486-man Lower House. But when the votes were in, Liberal Democrats commanded 285 seats—seven more than they had held last December when Sato dissolved the Diet. Japan’s second-ranking Socialists barely held their own level from the last House (141 seats). The burgeoning, Buddhist-backed Komeito Party—the “clean government” arm of the militant Soka Gakkai sect—captured 25 seats, emerging as a new force in Japanese politics, one with which the Liberal Democrats might ultimately become allied. As a result of last week’s elections, Japan can now count on many more years of the sort of relatively reasoned and reasonable rule that has made it an island of prosperity, democracy and stability in a widely chaotic Asia.

Calm Contrast. The conservative victory was in part due to the threat of that chaos, as exemplified by the demonic doings of Red China’s Mao Tse-tung and his rampaging Red Guards. Japan had been moving closer to China during recent years, but most Japanese were appalled and repelled by the events of the past several months. It was in this mood that they voted, and their votes were as much against the pro-Peking direction of the Japanese Socialist Party as they were for the conservatism of Sato. Japan feels that it is staring over the brink of madness, and it does not like what it sees.

The vote underscored the importance of a stable Japan in the future of Asia, and pointed a path of sanity and soundness that runs in calm contrast to the instability that has characterized the 18 years of Communist China’s post-revolutionary history. After all, it is a scant quarter-century since Japan itself went wild and sent its aggression spilling across the Pacific from Singapore to Pearl Harbor. That adventure cost Japan 1½ million lives and taught a proud nation the humbling lesson of pragmatism.

Pragmatism came easily at war’s end. Adaptability has always been a Japanese virtue, just as violence is a Japanese vice. Over its history, Japan has absorbed religions and ideologies, art forms and technologies more readily than any other nation in the world; yet it has at the same time retained a tough inner core of national identity. Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, who believes that Japan in the last year has taken over from China as the dominant shaping force of Asia, last week assessed Japan’s new role in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “Not so much because it is a Pacific land, but because it is a thoroughly modernized country, Japan is as much a natural partner and ally of the U.S. as any country in Europe.”

Growing Investment. As the world’s fifth-ranking industrial power (behind the U.S., Russia, West Germany and Britain), Japan is far and away the richest nation in Asia. Its 1966 gross national product of $100 billion represented a steady 10% annual growth that has varied little since 1950. Japanese businessmen have worn their own commercial path throughout Southeast Asia. Hong Kong at sundown becomes a Japanese city, its harbor dappled with the neon reflections of pink, blue, red and green signs that announce Sony and Daimaru, Minolta and Canon. In Djakarta, the grey-white slabs of Japanese-financed hotels and office buildings thrust with ultramodern exuberance from the scabbed red roofs of Dutch colonial slums. Since the signing of the Korean-Japanese Normalization Treaty in 1965, the Japanese presence in South Korea has redoubled: Japanese tourists swarm through Seoul, businessmen enjoy the gamy delights of the Walker Hill sex complex, and Japanese Corona taxi-cabs—now assembled in Korea—throng the streets. In Taipei’s elegant hostelries, pin-striped Japanese papa-sans and their kimono-clad ladies queue up for bus tours to the Japanese-style inns that dot Taiwan’s craggy green coast.

The Japanese government has nevertheless been unwilling to allow the full impact of its national prosperity to permeate the rest of Asia. Fearful of evoking the specter of Japan’s wartime “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” conservative Premiers have shied away from government involvement in the aid and development of the region. But over the past year, Premier Sato has moved quietly and in typical “low posture” to take Japan into a more active Asian role.

“We are trying to develop a soft cushion of economic development around China,” says one Japanese Foreign Office expert. This “encirclement by prosperity” resulted last April in the largest all-Asian conference that Tokyo had witnessed since General Hideki Tojo’s original Co-Prosperity Sphere conclave ia 1943. Six Asian nations attended—Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos and South Viet Nam, while Cambodia and Indonesia sent observers. The consequent exchange of information about economic aid needs and Sato’s reminder that Southeast Asia receives only $2.50 per capita in foreign aid from all sources (v. $5 for Africa and $6 for Latin America) led the Singapore Straits Times to suggest that “a miniature Asian Marshall Plan” might emerge from the conference. Japan could conceivably be the sponsor.

One of Sato’s most farsighted moves has been to join Asian regional groupings (TIME Essay, Feb. 3), which do not commit Japan to an aggressive foreign policy but will probably involve the country with its Asian neighbors. One organization in which Japan already has a stake is the Manila-based Asian Development Bank, whose first president is a former government finance adviser, Takeshi Watanabe, 60. With its $200 million funding toward the 32-nation bank’s $1 billion capitalization, Japan matched the U.S. contribution. Said Sato: “A cornerstone is now being laid by all of us to establish a new era in Asia.”

Japan’s new Overseas Youth Volunteers are Asia’s first Peace Corpsmen, and though they so far number fewer than 100, they represent another indicator of Sato’s outward thrust. Stationed from Southeast Asia to East Africa, they are skilled in auto repair and agriculture, nursing and nutrition, use their spare time to teach such Japanese native skills as origami and karate. Despite their Asian eyes and skin color, the Japanese Peace Corpsmen find it as challenging to relate to underdeveloped Asia as do their round-eyed American counterparts. For all their own appetite for sashimi (raw fish) and sea urchin’s eggs, they have difficulty stomaching such delicacies as Philippine balut, an embryonic duck egg.

Thawing the Permafrost. In his efforts to free Japan of the legacy of inaction caused by World War II’s defeat, Sato has reoriented the nation’s relations with both of Asia’s Caucasian powers: Russia and the U.S. The Soviets still hold substantial territory in the formerly Japanese Kurils and the island of Sakhalin. Yet the two countries last year agreed to establish consulates and jointly develop (at a cost of $150 million) the natural gas reserves of Sakhalin. To thaw the permafrost in relations dating back to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-06, Tokyo and Moscow are planning an exchange of airline flights over Siberia and a possible joint effort in Siberian economic development. Still, the frost is deep, and “technical details” crop up continually.

The chief policy problem plaguing Tokyo and Washington is the Japanese public’s attitude toward Viet Nam. Sato privately approves the U.S. involvement, and indeed was on the verge of sending a token number of troops to aid Saigon before the U.S. buildup and the bombing of the North began. Now, he has had to be careful. Since World War II, the Japanese have become pacifistic to the point of violence, as they showed in the 1960 riots that canceled Dwight Eisenhower’s visit. The Mutual Security Treaty between the U.S. and Japan comes up for renewal in 1970, and although Sato does not anticipate a repetition of 1960’s uproar, he cannot afford to give ammunition to the Japanese left by committing his nation to open support of the U.S., let alone a combat role in what most Japanese consider should be an internal Vietnamese war.

Veiled Apprehensions. If 1970 is a year that Sato views with veiled apprehensions, 1968 is one that he awaits with eagerness. Next year will mark the centennial of the Meiji Restoration, the year that Japan broke out of its feudal, introspective cocoon and entered the real world. Since that time, the four islands of Nippon have moved from an era of swordplay and armor to one of supertankers and transistors.

Along the craggy coastline of Honshu stretches the “Tokaido corridor,” pegged at one end by Tokyo and at the other by Kobe. Within its compass lie Japan’s six largest cities and an urban-industrial complex that produces 67% of its manufactured goods—along with most of the problems of identity and adaptation found in today’s Japanese society. Under the chill gaze of sacred Mount Fuji, a man-made morass of concrete, steel and glass belches smoke and grime in a manner quite contradictory to the verses of the 8th century poet Akahito Yamabe, who wrote:

So lofty and awful is the peak of Fuji

That the clouds of heaven dare not cross it.

Apart from the clouds of industry, Fuji today is challenged by both the contrails of Japan Air Lines’ 22 jets and the blue exhaust of Honda’s Formula I Grand Prix cars, which snarl in blurring white circles on a race track at Fuji’s base.

Nearly half of Japan’s 98 million citizens live within the Tokaido corridor. Yet there are patches of refreshing relief from the pressures of mankind: groves of gracefully pirouetting pines, solemn stands of cedar, miniaturized terraces redolent of tangerines and tea. A bone-rattling bus ride from Nagoya can put a harried city dweller aboard a boat on the Gifu River, where—with a giant bottle of sake and the boon companionship of a river geisha—he can watch the cormorant fisherman sweep downstream.

Pushers & Smoke. The Tokaido, studded with quaint inns and hubristic history, can now be traversed in three hours flat by means of the Hikari, a sleek supertrain whose name, if not quite its speed (125 m.p.h.), means “light” in Japanese. The city dweller of the Tokaido is confronted with problems endemic to urban life everywhere. His highways thunder to the rush of 15 million speeding trucks, cars and motorcycles. Commuter trains on Japan’s excellent railway system must hire “pushers” to jam the passengers into the steamy cars. A lack of sewerage results in the use of “vacuum trucks,” the odoriferous tank cars that daily pump out the cesspools of the cities. And while the Japanese are better off economically than all other Asians, worldwide they still rank only 21st (after the Italians) when it comes to per capita income: $740 a year. The average Japanese family of 4.05 persons lives in only 2.94 rooms, and only one Japanese in 46 has an auto.

The cities in which they live along the Tokaido have characters all their own. Yokohama is an industrial jungle that spills multicolored smoke from its mill plants, obscuring the intestinal tangle of pipelines and giant tanks constituting the Mitsubishi petrochemical works. From Nagoya, with its aircraft plants, its brooding feudal castle and gold-scaled carp, one can view gleaming reaches of the sea dotted with high-prowed tankers and freighters—a reminder that Japan is the world’s leading shipbuilder. Near Toyota City, home of Japan’s biggest automobile manufacturer, graze herds of hand-massaged, beer-fed beef cattle, source of the best steaks in Asia. Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan, was once a quiet, quaint haven of shrines and gardens, temples and teahouses; today it is fighting off the threat of factory-produced textiles that compete with its exquisite, hand-woven silks.

The city that in every sense serves Japan as a capital and captivator is, of course, Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolis (pop. 11 million) and the one place where every success-minded Japanese must live if he hopes to make it. With its “warehouse-modern” high-rise buildings and its nightmare traffic, it appears at first glance an unsightly sprawl. Yet it is also a continuous wonder, with its department stores that have fish ponds on their roofs, its five symphony orchestras, its three new playhouses, including a striking new 1,750-seat National Theater. The Ginza, a cliché as much as a street, remains a nocturnal delight for its gauzy girls as well as for its combination of New York nerve and Zen delicacy.

Benefits of Affluence. The average Japanese is challenged and excited by the clash of tradition and innovation. He sees no absurdity in sitting on a tatami mat in loose-flowing kimono to eat a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee; Premier Sato himself practices the tea ceremony on Sundays, then goes out for an afternoon of golf. Japanese husbands still keep their wives in virtual seclusion and entertain their friends and business acquaintances in the most garish of geisha houses, but the tune in both milieus is likely to be a Western rock ‘n’ roll number.

The Japanese also rocks like his Western peers, to angst and overcrowding. The Japanese suicide rate is the highest in Asia (16.1 per 100,000), and hypochondria is a national disease: Japanese gulp patent medicines and pep pills at a rate that would shock the most bilious of Americans; Tokyo’s “sex drugstores” offer cheap cure-alls for every imagined sexual flaw.

These conflicts are expressed less articulately by Japan’s cameras, transistors and supertankers than by its arts. Japanese writers, in particular, have turned inward upon the soul of a nation in which modern technology and traditional culture uneasily cohabit. This confrontation is symbolized in the work of many of Japan’s contemporary novelists, but it shows up in a lyrically macabre vein in the works of Yasunari Kawabata, 67, a classmate of Premier Sato’s (Tokyo University, ’24). His Sleeping Beauties, for example, is the story of an impotent old man who sleeps with drugged virgins, watching but never touching. The novel’s explicit anatomical detail expresses Japan’s tension between action and imagination, and opts for uncommitment out of fear that involvement leads only to tragedy.

In contrast to Kawabata is the work of Novelist Yukio Mishima, 42, who is also a pop singer, moviemaker and swordsman in the traditional kendo vein. Mishima believes in “martial power” and expresses Japan’s violent streak. Other writers, like Kobo Abe, 42, author of Woman in the Dunes, and Kenzaburo Oe, 32, whose novel, A Private Matter, will be published in the U.S. soon, espouse Maileresque sentiment and pacifism, reflecting the fear of modern life felt by many uprooted Japanese.

Cinema is Japan’s most active art form. Last year its studios produced 442 feature-length films, a world-record output, that ranged from the existential etchings of Akira Kurosawa, 56 (Rashomon, Ikiru), to the prurient “erodutions” and monster fantasies that thrill both Japanese and American drive-in audiences. Director Kon Ichikawa (Fires on the Plain) is currently at work on a joint Japanese-Italian production titled Toppo Gigio’s Pushbutton War, in which a mouse ends the threat of thermonuclear conflict. Top box office in Japan of late has been a cycle of films (15 in all) about a blind 19th century swordsman named Zato Ichi, who wanders picaresquely about, cheating at cards, killing samurai and seducing girls—an expression of Japan’s concern with intuitive skill and blind luck.

Identity & Anonymity. In the plastic media, Japan has only a few artists who adhere to the ancient skills.* Most Japanese painters, printmakers and sculptors today are slavishly imitative of the West. One exception: Sculptor Masayuki Nagare, 43, who served a prewar apprenticeship to a Kyoto swordsmith before becoming a frustrated kamikaze pilot in World War II. He acquired his feel for stone toward war’s end when, standing on the runway awaiting a call to suicide that never came, he hefted smoothly polished rocks and felt “oddly composed.” Nagare’s masterwork, now at Manhattanville College, is a 600-ton, 2,300-piece wall called Stone Crazy.

With Japan spending $18.3 billion a year on new construction, it is little wonder that Japanese architects have emerged as Asia’s foremost designers. The mind behind Tokyo’s soaring, $8,300,000 Olympic Gymnasium is Kenzo Tange, 55, a slim, courtly Osakan who reflects Asia’s concern with “the great incompatibles: the human scale and the superhuman, identity and anonymity.” In such works as the Hiroshima Peace Museum and the crossshaped Cathedral of St. Mary in Tokyo, Tange broke boldly from Japanese tradition. Using pilotis and steel, he generated a sense of boldness rather than the customary low-to-the-ground humility based on Japanese wooden construction. In a land with virtually no urban planning, Tange has mapped a $50 billion renovation of Tokyo. He warns that unless planning is undertaken now, the megalopolis of Tokaido, which by century’s end will contain 80% of the Japanese population, can become an Asian version of Bosch’s hell.

Mister Consensus. The man whose task it is to prevent that and other calamities from overtaking a rapidly growing Japan is Premier Eisaku Sato, 65. Reserved and calculating, Sato keeps his own counsel in a manner that would appeal to Lyndon Johnson. Yet when it comes to political combat, his timing is as sharp as that of a karate blackbelter. All of his toughness and calculation are aimed at consensus, an achievement of the most vital necessity in a nation whose political parties are fulminatingly factional and whose societal fabric is stitched together from feudal loyalties. As “Mr. Consensus,” Sato has had plenty of training.

The son of a samurai-turned-sakebrewer, Sato was born in the somnolent town of Tabuse, on Honshu’s far eastern coast, just 100 miles from the Straits of Tsushima, where in Sato’s fifth year Admiral Heihachiro Togo destroyed the Russian fleet. That was the year of Japan’s greatest military success, but little of it rubbed off on Eisaku. Sato’s older brother, Nobusuke Kishi,* was the star of the family, graduated second in his class at Tokyo University law school (Sato was much lower). In 1941, Kishi became one of the youngest Cabinet ministers in Japanese history when, at 45, he became Hideki Tojo’s Minister of Commerce and Industry.

Sato, in the meantime, spent 13 years in Kyushu, Japan’s remote and rural southern island, working as a railways bureaucrat. There he learned the trick of office consensus, if only to keep the trains moving. Twice he was sent to China as a railways adviser during the Japanese war there, and during World War II served as director of a motor pool. He also contracted a serious case of typhus, and while recuperating read an article on the passivity of the Asian masses by U.S. Author Pearl Buck that changed his way of thinking. “Reviewing the past of Japan,” he says, “I felt there had been something essentially wrong about our approach to government. It was vitally important for me to know just what the masses aspire to and think; very important to live among the masses and seek a new way for Japan.”

His chance to act on that belief came in 1947, when Sato was tapped for the Cabinet and supervised Japan’s rise from the ashes of American bombing. Then, in 1953, he was accused of accepting a $55,000 bribe from shipowners, and in the uproar that followed, he resigned. Sato maintains to this day that the money was a political contribution and that he merely failed to register it according to the law. He returned to power after his former classmate Hayato Ikeda took over the Liberal Democratic leadership in 1960. Sato became Minister of Olympic Construction, and for his excellent performance won respect and a new shot at power. After Ikeda fell ill with a terminal cancer in November 1964, Sato’s long wait was over: he succeeded to both the party presidency and the premiership.

With his skill in the art of ambivalence and his constant concern with consensus, Sato is an irritating leader to the more Westernized of Japan’s interi (intellectuals). Today, at 65, he is a ponderous speaker but a man of steadying weight in a nation ready to take off in many directions. He reads “middlebrow” samurai novels (the Japanese equivalent of westerns), and watches with benevolence the careers of his two sons, Ryutaro, 38, an oil-company executive, and Shinji, 34, who works for the Nippon Kokan steel company. To the looks of a Kabuki actor, Sato adds a very calculating eye for his own position and a buoyant sense of balance when it comes to his party.

A Party & a Half. The real challenge to Sato comes from his own party’s endemic factionalism. The Liberal Democrats, themselves a postwar coalition of Japan’s conservatives and liberals born in 1955, operate on a system called oyabun-kobun (leader-adherent) that closely resembles the ward-based political structure of American politics in the late 19th century. In his battle to retain the presidency of the party last December, Sato had to meld the miasmic wishes of a dozen cliques in order to stave off the challenge of former Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama. He won with a hefty 119-vote margin. The “black mist” corruption charges raised by the left—charges that, in typically Japanese style, were never substantiated (TIME, Nov. 4)—did little damage to the party’s immediate aims.

Still, Japan’s political system is far more complicated than the Liberal Democratic Party admits. It has been described by Western observers as “a party and a half” system, with the L.D.P. being the party and the opposition adding up to the half. Japan’s Socialists, who control more than 12 million votes, are the nation’s second biggest voting bloc, but Party Boss Kozo Sasaki, 65, is a Peking-lining fanatic who is even farther to the left than Communist Party Leader Sanzo Nozaka, 74, who last year struck a course away from Peking and more toward Moscow. Toward the ever-growing center of Japanese politics stands the Social Democratic Party (with 30 seats in the Diet, third in the nation) and the newly arrived Komeito (25 seats).

As the political arm of the Buddhist-backed Soka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society), led by piously political Daisaku Ikeda, 38, Komeito attracts the new Japanese: city dwellers who have lost contact with the ward-oriented politics of their rural home towns. Komeito calls for a cleanup in the wheeling and dealing typical of Asian government. Since Japan is fated, for better or worse, to a continuing urban growth and a growing urban malaise, it is mass parties of the Komeito brand that will doubtless dictate Japan’s political future.

Cold Alliance. In at least one respect, Sato should get help from the nation’s intellectuals, who play an important political role. No longer as ritualistically left-wing as they once were, they influence foreign policy and stimulate public debate, generate national consensus or fragment it through articles in such publications as Chuo Koron (Central Forum), Japan’s leading intellectual monthly. At the cutting edge of the intellectuals today is a group known as “the New Realists,” men educated for the most part in Britain and the U.S., who bring a hard, analytical view of the world to Japan’s foreign policy.

They recognize the diversity in the Communist world, contend that unfettered by ideology, Japan should be ready for all sorts of actions or options. In their demands for a more sophisticated foreign policy, they have given impetus to Premier Sato’s idea of a Japan fully involved with the rest of Asia. Their leader is Tokyo University Professor Yonosuke Nagai, 42, who maintains that the Sino-Soviet split and the unspoken “cold alliance” between Russia and the U.S. have given Japan the chance to recover power. Thus, while Japan is undoubtedly a bulwark of democracy in Asia, the U.S. will have to learn not to lean too hard on it or to take Japan for granted. Eventually, Japan will be strong and confident enough to go her own way—and that way may not always be precisely the U.S.’s way.

For now, though, most Japanese—including many of its government leaders—are quite content to remain passive and to rely totally on trade with the West and the U.S. nuclear umbrella to prolong the 21-year postwar honeymoon of peace and prosperity. After all, Article 9 of the U.S.-imposed constitution forbids war for any purpose but “self-defense.” Japan today spends less on defense ($1.3 billion a year, or barely 1% of its gross national product) than any other major industrial nation. Indeed, the Japanese Self-Defense Force is something of a joke in an Asia that teems with massive armies. It consists chiefly of 171,500 ground troops and a navy that weighs a scant 140,000 tons—just a bit more than the combined tonnage of the Imperial Navy’s two biggest battleships. Its antiaircraft missile force—four battalions strong—is trotted out now and then, but although it can make a corner of Tokyo look like Red Square, it is still not much to rave about.

Turning Point. Sato himself is in basic agreement with the New Realists, but because of his own concern with consensus, he may have a hard time meeting their demands. Japan’s economy faces stringent problems of inflation (a 41% rise in prices since 1960), and any greater military spending could turn the Japanese boom into a pre-Styrofoam bust. What is more, the conservatives will have to adapt to the slow but consistent move of Japanese politics toward the mass, urban-based system espoused by the Soka Gakkai rather than the ward-style system of the past. “Japan is coming to a historic turning point,” says Sato. “There has to be a new ideal born in order to restore the human quality now buried in a society of affluence.”

The events of recent weeks have given Sato a lively launch pad from which to attain those goals. China’s madness makes Japan’s stability look more promising than ever. Having inherited the best of China’s traditions—wisdom and confidence—Japan can remain ahead of its neighbor for the rest of the century, perhaps for even longer. In the process, it could teach China and other countries an essentially Asian lesson of adaptability and patience. Those are qualities that the entire continent, if not the world beyond, is in dire need of learning.

* Among them Printmaker Kiyoshi Saito, who did this week’s TIME cover.

* Who carried on the family tradition of adopting his wife’s name in order to provide her family with a male heir.