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JAPAN: Bonus to Be Wisely Spent

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TIME

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Japan’s Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi is a descendant of the swaggering but practical men of Choshu. Less than a century ago his clansmen enthusiastically followed the Emperor’s orders by opening fire on all foreign ships passing through Shimonoseki Strait, the narrow western entrance to the lovely Inland Sea. Retaliation came from a combined British, French, Dutch and U.S. fleet, which blew the Choshu batteries skyhigh, put ashore a landing party to seize the forts, and collected an indemnity of $3,000,000.—Impressed, the Choshu leaders fraternized with the Western officers, begged technical advice and sought to buy big guns like those that had destroyed their forts. Observes a present-day Japanese intellectual: “The men of Choshu are completely without sentiment. They act on the basis of logic and profit. Kishi is a typical Choshu man.”

Prime Minister Kishi, 63, flew into Washington this week convinced that the logic of the world situation and the profit of Japan require his signature on the revision of the 1951 U.S.-Japanese Treaty. Not all his countrymen agree. In Tokyo 27,000 demonstrators battled police, and thousands of fanatical left-wing students made plain their feelings about the treaty by using the great doorway of the Japanese Diet for their own kind of public protest—a mass urination.

The students vowed to prevent Kishi’s take-off for the U.S., and 700 of them seized the airport building the night before his departure last week, wrecked the restaurant and fought the police with bamboo spears and pepper shakers before they were ejected. Mobs of students lined the approaches to the airfield, prepared to stone Kishi’s car or throw themselves under its wheels. But with radio guidance supplied by a hovering helicopter, Kishi’s motorcade avoided what he called the “distasteful, insignificant demonstration,” and he serenely took off for his meeting with President Eisenhower.

Kishi’s diehard opponents protest that the treaty revision commits Japan to support all U.S. moves in the Pacific and may therefore “attract the lightning” of a Communist H-bomb attack. There are U.S. reservations about the treaty as well; many Pentagon staff officers complain that it gives Japan what amounts to a veto over the movement of U.S. troops on the perimeter of the Asian mainland.

The Losers. The treaty is to run for ten years, and its ten articles pledge that 1) both nations will take “action to counter the common danger” if the forces of either are attacked in Japan, though not elsewhere, 2) “prior consultation” will be held between the two before U.S. forces in Japan receive nuclear arms, 3) Japan is released from further contributions (now $30 million a year) for the support of U.S. troops in the islands. In Kishi’s words, the treaty will create an atmosphere of “mutual trust.” It inaugurates a “new era” of friendship with the U.S. and, most important, of independence for Japan.

Only 14 years ago such a treaty would have been unthinkable, and that it would be signed for Japan by Kishi, inconceivable. Then, Japan was a nation in ruins: a third of its factories had been leveled by U.S. bombers; eight of every ten ships in its merchant fleet lay at the bottom of the ocean; its exhausted population faced starvation. And Kishi himself was cleaning latrines in Sugamo Prison while awaiting trial as a war criminal. Defeat was so complete and catastrophic that the Japanese seemed to take an almost perverse pleasure in the totality of their humiliation. “Shigataganai—it can’t be helped,” they shrugged. “We lost the war.”

Yet Japan, going into the 1960s, has risen phoenix-like from the ashes. The Japanese people are 25% better off than they were before the war, even though 20 million more of them are crowded into an area 52% smaller than their old territory. Japan’s industrial growth has soared to its highest rate ever, enough to double the national income every ten years. Its tiny farms (average size: 2½ acres) are so intensely cultivated that they have one of the world’s highest yields. Nearly every Japanese family owns a radio, one in every four, a TV set; more newspapers are sold per capita than in the U.S. The people of Japan are incomparably the best fed, clothed and housed in all Asia.

The Comeback. Japan did not lift itself by its own sandal straps. Since the war U.S. aid has averaged $178 million a year; a serious business recession was eased by the 1950 Korean war, which poured vast sums into the Japanese economy; war reparations in kind to Southeast Asia have kept factories humming; and the very high rate of capital investment is possible since Japan spends little on armaments. But major credit belongs to the Japanese themselves. In a typically Japanese swing from one extreme to another, they shook off the apathy of defeat, and with skill, hard work and enthusiasm began rebuilding at home and recapturing markets abroad.

Yet, as always, Japan remains the land of contrasts and contradictions. The flourishing economy consists of “elephants and fleas,” i.e., giant automated factories in the midst of millions of family workshops whose low-paid women employees make everything from toys to machine parts. The universities are jammed, but students must often sell their blood to pay tuition and may commit suicide if they fail to get a job on graduation. The cities blaze with neon lights, teen-age girls in pony tails squeal their delight in “rockabilly” singers, and the streets resound to jukebox music and the clatter of pachinko (pinball) machines. But in most of Japan, marriages are still arranged by traditional matchmakers, business deals are still settled in geisha houses, and wives still greet their husbands on hands and knees. Laments a young sculptor: “It is impossible for us not to lead a double life, half Japanese, half Western. The result is that we are frustrated, and do not know whom to turn to or what road to follow.”

The Cold Impression. This problem is not one that disturbs the practical man from Choshu. Astute, chain-smoking Nobusuke Kishi has reconciled the Western and Eastern elements in Japanese life as easily as he has Japan’s militarist, aggressive past and its democratic present. Kishi means “riverbank,” and Japanese make a pun on his name—ryo kishi, meaning roughly, one who tries to keep a foot on both banks of the river. But his first name signifies “trust,” and, in his three years as Prime Minister, Kishi has strenuously sought to prove that he can be trusted by one and all—by the Japanese who remember him as a member of the Tojo Cabinet that snuffed out their civil liberties, by Americans who know him as one of the signers of the declaration of war against the U.S., and by the people of Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to Burma, who profess to see a disturbing family likeness between Kishi’s dream of an “Asia Development Plan” and wartime Japan’s “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

His detractors grumble that, “once a minion of the military, Kishi now loudly sings the popular songs of democracy with a perfect ear for the tune.” The most common charge is that he is full of guile, and one critic cried, “A rose has thorns; Kishi slashes with a smile.” The Prime Minister pensively concedes that “I give a very cold impression. Soft-spoken as I am and gentle as I look, I am generally regarded as a hard person. There seems to be something lacking in my face.”

It is a face that delights Japanese cartoonists: prominent teeth, long ears, a crumpled and receding chin. But Kishi’s heavy-lidded eyes glitter with intelligence, and his slight, 134-lb. body packs pride, power and passion—a perfect embodiment of his country’s amazing resurgence. In the knife-flashing political intrigues of pre-and postwar Japan, Kishi has been both daring and surefooted. His friends are intensely loyal; his enemies have a way of abruptly toppling from power. In Kishi seeming indecisiveness is often strength. A Japanese who has known him for years says: “Sometimes Kishi seems to be wavering aimlessly from side to side on an issue, or even wavering from issue to issue. Yet those who know him well are aware that he moves forward in his own way and in his own time toward a set goal. If he meets strong opposition, he tries another direction. But he is consistent.”

Name Changing. Kishi’s life began under a handicap. The Japanese have a saying that “no sensible man who owns so much as a cup of rice will become a yoshi.” A figure of fun, very much like the henpecked husband of the West, the Japanese yoshi is a man who marries in the fashion of a woman, i.e., he surrenders his own name and becomes the adopted son of his wife’s family. Both the Prime Minister and his father were yoshi. Originally the system provided a means of mobility in caste-ridden Japan, and merchants—who were ranked just above pariahs in the social order—could move up in class by marrying daughters of poor but proud samurai. This did not apply in the case of the Kishis, father and son, since they were already of the samurai class.

The father, Hidesuke Kishi, was a minor government official in a village on the green, indented western tip of Honshu, Japan’s main island. His scholarly attainments won him a job with the aristocratic Sato family, and he tutored their eldest daughter, Moyo, in Chinese literature. He was permitted to marry Moyo on condition that he change his name to Sato and, for the remainder of his life, was so much under his wife’s thumb that he made little impression on their ten children. The Prime Minister was the second son of Hidesuke and Moyo. In 1958, a quarter-century after the death of his parents, he recalled: “My father was a man of gentle disposition. The fostering of us, the children, was always the job of our strong-minded mother.”

Nobusuke was born in Yamaguchi, a pleasant city above the Inland Sea, on Nov. 23, 1896. From childhood he had drummed into him the glories of the Sato family, the Choshu clan and the warrior class. Aristocratic Moyo Sato constantly reminded her son that their ancestors had been charged by the Emperor with guarding Shimonoseki Strait, the gateway to the Inland Sea. Her uncle was a major general who founded the Japanese cavalry; her brothers and sisters married into top families, including the Matsuokas and Yo-shidas. “Never forget you are a samurai,” she said. “Never take second place.”

As a boy, Nobusuke was frail, and so swarthy that his schoolmates called him “Darky.” He was also proud and conceited and “was always picking fights with bigger and older boys,” a habit he has not yet outgrown. In middle school, Nobusuke wrote an essay praising the suicide of General Maresuke Nogi, the hero who captured Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War and later disemboweled himself on the death of his beloved Emperor Meiji in 1912. The act had shocked the West and produced a critical editorial in the London Times, but Nobusuke hailed it as an example of virtuous idealism.

At 16, it was Nobusuke’s turn to follow his father’s footsteps as a yoshi. A marriage was arranged for him with his cousin Yoshiko, the daughter of his father’s brother. Although the marriage did not take place for another seven years (Yoshiko was only eleven at the time), Nobusuke resumed his father’s name of Kishi and was stricken from the Sato family register.

“The Razor.” At Tokyo’s Imperial University, Nobusuke Kishi majored in law and graduated with top honors; a friend recalls that he also “drank a lot of sake and knew a great many young Tokyo actresses.” In the political arguments that raged at school, young Kishi emerged as a conservative and a fiery nationalist. His hero was Kita Ikki, a right-wing radical who wanted Japan run by a military junta and called for the conquest of Manchuria and Siberia. Kishi was less happy about Ikki’s attacks on private property and free enterprise; when some of Ikki’s thugs tried to beat up a professor whose opinions they disliked, Kishi withdrew as a disciple.

He was already showing the adaptability that makes opponents claim he strives to be all things to all men. Though a right-wing nationalist, he was also a friend of many left-wingers who later became the leaders of Japan’s Socialist Party, and the friendships have endured. Graduating in the cherry blossom season of 1920, the newly married Kishi became a civil servant in the Ministry of Commerce and for the next 16 years was indistinguishable from thousands of other bureaucrats. Clutching his newspaper and a black umbrella, he commuted between his modest home in suburban Shinjuku and a governmental beehive in Tokyo’s busy Kasumigaseki district. Though he looked and acted like all the others, his quick wit and swift grasp of facts and situations won him a new nickname: “The Razor.”

Kishi got two tours of duty abroad, visiting the U.S. and Europe to inspect iron and steel plants. He learned to play golf in Philadelphia in 1926 and on his return home became a popular member of foursomes with big zaibatsu business men who were painstakingly learning the Western game. He also had difficulties with his superiors. In 1936 a new Commerce Minister, resentful of Kishi’s golf and restaurant dates with such influential businessmen as Sugar Magnate Aiichiro Fujiyama and Steelmaker Yoshisuke Aikawa, complained: “Kishi behaves as if he were the Minister instead of me!” Relations got so bad that Kishi quit and went to Manchuria as industrial adviser to the Japanese puppet government.

While Kishi had been climbing the bureaucratic ladder, Japan was convulsed by a struggle between parliamentarians and militarists. Two Prime Ministers were assassinated by nationalist gunmen, and other top officials killed and wounded. The government struck back by executing 13 army officers for conspiracy, and sending Kishi’s discarded hero, Kita Ikki, to a firing squad. But victory went to the militarists. Ignoring orders from Tokyo, the Kwantung army occupied all of Manchuria. By 1937, when full-scale hostilities with China broke out, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet could only be appointed with the approval of the army.

Pearl Harbor Days. In Manchuria, Kishi found himself among friends and relatives. His uncle ran the Manchurian railways; Kishi brought over Steelmaker Aikawa to take charge of factory construction, and became closely connected with General Hideki Tojo, commander of the Kwantung army. Returning to Japan in 1939, Kishi could say complacently: “Manchurian industry is my development. I have an infinite affection for this industrial world I have created.” Today, Kishi’s lost “creation” provides arms and economic muscle for Red China.

Back in Tokyo, Kishi had a run-in with yet another Minister of Commerce. While the minister was absent on a tour of the Dutch East Indies, Kishi and one of his former Manchurian aides drew up a drastic plan to increase bureaucratic control of Japanese industry and to draft into the factories some 250,000 women, ranging from housewives and geisha girls to prostitutes and the actresses of the Takarazuka Girls Opera—an outfit that was owned by Kishi’s boss. The Commerce Minister raced back to Tokyo and denounced the plan as “sheer Communism!” Kishi again resigned. But less than six months later, the Commerce Minister was out of a job and replaced by Kishi in the new Cabinet formed by his old friend, General Hideki Tojo. Kishi had at last reached ministerial level—just in time to participate in the decisions leading to Pearl Harbor.

Kishi served the Japanese war machine faithfully and well, and he makes no bones of it. When a newsman tactfully suggested in 1957 that Kishi had no option but to accept the Emperor’s decision to go to war, he replied curtly: “I have no wish to defend myself that way. All the state ministers were responsible for assisting the Emperor to make the decision.” As always, Kishi had a practical plan. Japan, he argued, was using only 10% of its production in the war with China (“Chicken feed!”), and by properly organizing the remainder could win quick military successes in Asia, and then negotiate a settlement with the U.S. and Britain that would leave Japan in control of most of the Pacific.

Kishi was right about the quick victories (Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines), wrong about being able to get a quick peace. As the fortunes of war worsened, he reacted just as had his Choshu clansmen in the affair of Shimonoseki Strait. At a Cabinet meeting in April 1944 he told Tojo: “Saipan is Japan’s lifeline. If Saipan falls, surrender. It is the silliest thing on earth to keep fighting after that.” Tojo shouted angrily: “Don’t poke your nose into the affairs of the supreme command!” Thirteen days after the bloody U.S. conquest of Saipan, Tojo’s Cabinet fell.

Because he had openly declared that the war was lost, it was an uncomfortable time for Kishi. He was followed about Tokyo by the secret police, and devoted himself to writing a long defense of his position that no newspaper dared print. After his suburban house was burned down in an air raid, Kishi and his wife and two children went back to Yamaguchi. He was lying sick in bed when the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, only 70 miles away.

Cell Thoughts. Japan’s surrender soon followed, and Kishi wondered whether he should wait for arrest by the Americans or commit suicide. A large family conference of Satos and Kishis assembled in his sick room to argue the question. One of his old schoolteachers tactlessly reminded Kishi of his fiery arguments in favor of hara-kiri when he was 16 years old. Kishi’s answer was to brushstroke a short poem, which translates: “In another role, I shall commemorate the just war forever.” This is nearly as obscure in Japanese as it is in English, but one thing was clearly apparent: Kishi did not intend to kill himself.

After serving three years in Sugamo Prison, Kishi and 18 other “Class” A war-crime suspects” were released without trial. In jail he had read Confucius, exercised, cleaned cells and latrines, despised the craven and selfish behavior of the admirals and generals in prison with him, and thought. Kishi recalls: “I had plenty of time to strip my own soul naked and study it.” He says he was “forced to the conclusion that the war had been futile from the start. I became convinced that Japan must never again be involved in war.” Finally, “when I found out I was not going to be hanged, I began to think about the rest of my life as a bonus to be wisely spent.”

On the day of his release in 1948, while eating his first home meal of raw tuna, Kishi received a phone call from Sugar Magnate Aiichiro Fujiyama, who had cared for the Kishi family during his imprisonment. He offered Kishi the chairman ship of one Fujiyama company and a directorship in another. With his income assured, Kishi looked around him at the new Japan. The good things of the occupation—land reform, abolition of the peerage, parliamentary democracy—were balanced, he thought, by such bad things as inflation, the breakup of the cartels and the wide influence of the Communists, who had been let out of jail at the same time that Tojo and his friends went in.

The government was headed by the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, whose daughter was married to a cousin of Kishi’s. The Secretary-General of the Cabinet was Kishi’s own brother, Eisaku Sato. Prospects seemed inviting, but there was nothing Kishi could do until he was “de-purged” in 1952. He spent the time working at his industrial jobs and in profitably cultivating his wide acquaintance among businessmen.

His brother finally arranged an interview with Prime Minister Yoshida, but it was not a success. The 74-year-old Yoshida correctly saw the younger Kishi as a potential rival. Kishi regarded Yoshida as a stumbling block in the way of a fusion of all conservative factions in Japan against the Socialists and Communists.

It took Kishi only five years to get to his goal as Prime Minister. He first helped organize a new Democratic Party made up of a dissident segment of Yoshida’s Liberals and a group of “progressives.” But he was able to overthrow Yoshida only by entering into an alliance with the Socialists—even though his ultimate aim was to create an anti-Socialist force. Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, who succeeded Yoshida, had suffered a stroke, and hung on for two trembling years before resigning. He was followed by Tanzan Ishibashi, who appointed Kishi his Foreign Minister and then fell ill in turn and resigned within 63 days. On Feb. 25, 1957, at the head of a combined Democratic-Liberal Party, Nobusuke Kishi became Prime Minister of Japan.

Article IX. As Prime Minister, Kishi has had to deal simultaneously with the Socialist opposition and with his own faction-ridden party, which cannot always be depended upon for support. His longtime goal is revision of the “MacArthur” constitution (“It may take years, and I may not live to see it, but I intend to push forward until I die”). He proposes to make the Emperor again “head of state” instead of merely a symbol, to have provincial governors appointed by Tokyo instead of elected, and to alter the House of Councilors—Japan’s Senate—by substituting a number of appointed “distinguished citizens” for some of the elected members. He also aims at erasing Article IX of the constitution (“Land, sea and air forces as well as other war potential will never be maintained”).

This provision is already bypassed in a typical Japanese fashion. The 170,000 Japanese soldiers already under arms are referred to as a “Ground Self-Defense Force,” not as an army. Similarly, a division is called an “area unit,” and a tank, a “special combat vehicle.” But, under whatever name, Japan’s armed forces are small, and required to make do on less than 2% of the nation’s gross national product. Pacifism is so ingrained in the new Japan that not even Kishi is likely in the foreseeable future to get more money or more men for this anomalous army.

Kishi’s only important defeat in three years in office came when he sought to restore to the hated police some of their former authority, including the right to search suspected criminals. The response was tumultuous from those who remembered the tyrannical “thought-control” days. A brief teachers’ walkout closed half the nation’s schools. There was a rash of strikes and street demonstrations called by Sohyo, the powerful, 3,500,000-strong alliance of labor unions. Socialist delegates rioted in the Diet and tried to kidnap the Speaker to prevent a vote. When even important members of his own party proved hesitant, Kishi had to shelve the bill. But with characteristic skill he used the defeat to get rid of a potential rival, Ichiro Kono, on the ground that he had strongly pushed the police-powers bill.

If Kishi’s ambitions for the police raised some of the old fears about democracy’s hold on Japan, so has the crudity of Socialist tactics in the Diet and on the streets. Since the war the Socialist Party has steadily increased its share of the total vote, from little more than one-tenth to nearly one-third. But Kishi has gained from Socialist rashness. In the 1958 elections, Kishi for the first time limited the Socialist gains to less than 3%, and subsequent wrangling among the leaders resulted in a Socialist split between right-and left-wing factions.

The Traveling Salesman. Because he takes seriously the truism that without trade Japan must die, Kishi has been an indefatigable traveling salesman for his country. In striped trousers and glossy top hat, he has ranged through Southeast Asia to persuade Japan’s neighbors from Formosa to India that prosperity lies in the combination of “American capital, Japanese technology and local resources.” Last summer he swept across Europe and Latin America to gain buyers’ recognition for Japan and assure foreign governments and industrialists that the bad old days of imitative and poorly made Japanese products were gone forever. He has been helped by the increasing popularity—and quality—of Japanese art, furnishings, cameras and tiny transistor radios, and by the self-imposed Japanese quotas on exports, which are intended to reduce the cries for protective tariffs.

During postwar years, when Kishi was making his bid for power, he often used a standard ploy of the political outs in Japan : he criticized the men in power for being too pro-American, and some nervous officials in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo warned that he was anti-American. When Kishi’s office approved a $196 million private trade pact with Red China, they saw their worst fears confirmed. But, in actuality, Kishi was what he has always been: pro-Japanese.

In dealing with Peking, Kishi was also under constant pressure from businessmen who argued that it was economic lunacy for Japan to import high-cost coking coal, iron ore and soybeans all the way from the U.S. when they were easily available and cheaper next door in China. His political rivals, from ex-Prime Minister Ishibashi to the ousted Ichiro Kono, warned Kishi he would “miss the bus” if he did not at once enter into normal relations with the Reds.

In his pragmatic fashion, Kishi never went that far. The $196 million trade pact was abruptly canceled by Peking in a pettish squabble about a Chinese trade delegation’s right to fly the Red flag in Tokyo. Plainly, the Reds planned to use trade only as a lever and a weapon. Red China launched a short-lived but damaging trade offensive in Southeast Asia and undercut Japanese prices by 10-12%. The negotiators sent by Peking to Japan proved to be more interested in drinking innumerable cups of green tea than in progress ; they blandly offered ridiculously low prices for Japan’s products and demanded sky-high prices for China’s. And because Kishi held them off, he was denounced by Peking as having the hallucinations of an idiot and, said the Red propagandists, incurred the “enmity of 600 million Chinese.”

In contrast, Kishi could see, the U.S. was supplying economic aid and buying more Japanese goods than any other single country — particularly the fine-quality consumer items that are too expensive for the rest of Asia. The U.S., moreover, is the guarantor of Japan’s security in the shadow of the two Red giants of China and the Soviet Union. Moved by pragmatism, not pro-Americanism, Kishi realizes that his nation’s best and most vital interests are served by close cooperation with the U.S. both in trade and defense.

The logical result is the signing this week of the revised U.S.-Japanese Treaty. As Prime Minister Kishi and U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter put their signatures to paper, there is every prospect that Japan and the U.S. will stand together in the Pacific for years to come. What is not so certain is how long Kishi will survive as Prime Minister. There is no tradition of lasting leadership in Japan, and the Liberal-Democratic Party is little more than a coalition of eight major factions, each with its own leader. “They are like a pack of wolves,” says a Western observer. “If Kishi is hurt, the others smell blood, and will pile in, snarling, hoping to gain some advantage.”

In these terms the new U.S. -Japanese Treaty may well be Kishi’s monument, even if in the rough and tumble of Japanese politics it should also become in time his political tombstone. Prime Minister Kishi himself remains serenely optimistic, as befits a man who follows the philosophy of the “blue mountain in the distance.” He explains: “The road to the mountain is obscured by many foothills. Some of these must be climbed, some must be gone around, and a good road must be built as the advance proceeds. In some places there will be short cuts, but in general the going will be rough.” Rough or smooth, short cut or direct path, Kishi on his record, can be depended upon to keep climbing.

* Nineteen years later, in 1883, the U.S. gave its share of the indemnity—$785,000—back to Japan.

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