Failure?

How much political responsibility had three years of U.S. occupation brought to Japan? Not enough to keep Tokyo's Kosuge prison from bulging last week with financiers and high government officials involved in the Showa Denko bribery case.

Most important of Kosuge's new inmates was Takeo Kurusu, chief of the government's Economic Stabilization Board. With him were the Vice Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, the chief of the Accounts Bureau of the Finance Ministry and the chief of the fertilizer department of the Commerce & Industry Ministry. More were coming in all the time. As Warden Kojiro Ito rearranged his cells to give individual attention to the Oh-mono (big shots), police arrested former Deputy Prime Minister Suehiro Nishio, who left the government two months ago under suspicion of taking bribes. Premier Hitoshi Ashida and his cabinet resigned the next day.

The Showa Denko Co., cause of Ashida's downfall, is Japan's biggest postwar producer of chemical fertilizer. It received nearly 3 billion yen in loans from the Japanese Reconstruction Finance Bank--two-thirds of the total allocation for fertilizer industry loans. In return, Showa Denko spent at least 200 million yen in bribes to government officials, politicians and financiers, and for illegal expenses.

In a Closet. Politicians have always been bought and controlled in Japan; but no prewar scandals revealed such spectacular corruption as the Showa Denko case. Japanese newspaper readers began to laugh when cops flushed Banboku Ono, secretary general of the Democratic Liberal party, out of a linen closet in an inn in Kyoto where he was in hiding. They laughed again when Cabinet Member Takeo Kurusu rushed into print with an announcement that he, personally, was not involved with Showa Denko. Next week government agents raided Kurusu's home and slapped him into Kosuge.

The disintegration of the Ashida cabinet left Japan in a political vacuum, just when a special Diet session was due to discuss a new minimum wage level for government employees (present level: about $14 a month). More serious was the resulting complete disillusionment with his government displayed by the Japanese man in the street. The U.S. had given Japan a new constitution, new slogans, new faces. It had not changed the real constitution of Japan--the skein of bribery which had held the country before the war and which continued to exist behind MacArthur's upright back.

In a Huddle. The next cabinet will probably be formed around the conservative Democratic Liberal party, led by stuffy, blundering ex-Premier Shigeru Yoshida. His personal unpopularity with other Japanese conservatives, as well as with progressives and with SCAP, might induce the Liberals to put up some more acceptable front for Yoshida.

The leaders of Japan's four major parties last week got together to bargain for posts in the new cabinet. Cynical Japanese newsmen drew up and published a roster of their own, made up entirely of high officials now held in Kosuge prison. Just then, police announced the latest Showa Denko arrest: Kosuge's Warden Ito was charged with accepting bribes from his Oh-mono to help them communicate with their colleagues still outside.

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