"Don't Hug Me Too Tight"

From Tokyo this week, on the tenth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin cabled a report on the state of Japan:

SIX years ago, Emperor Hirohito, speaking to his people in the hour of defeat and surrender, composed a poem:

Man should be like the manly pine That does not change its color Though bearing the fallen snow.

Pearl Harbor Day, 1951, finds Japan a rising sun once more, and the snow on the manly pine melting fast. The most dynamic, aggressive and industrialized people in Asia are again preparing themselves for the responsibilities and delights of sovereignty. Already the scene is changing. Trim, alert members of the National Police Reserve (nucleus of the army Japan must inevitably raise to defend herself) train with U.S. carbines, mortars, bazookas and light machine guns. The old zaibatsu (financial cliques) are reviving under new names. Recently a dozen offspring of the old Mitsubishi Commercial Co. combined into four large firms.

Are these only the normal manifestations of a vigorous people coming once more into their own? Japan's approaching independence portends an all-important shift in the balance of power in Asia.

For the present and for the foreseeable future, Japan is solidly encamped with the free world. But she is going to stay in camp on her own terms. Unfortunately stubborn SCAP brass give little if any indication that they appreciate the difference between an army of occupation and a security force in a sovereign nation. The occupiers' unwillingness to give up the privileges--the luxury houses, the cheap and plentiful servants, the free schools--they have enjoyed for six years is understandable enough; the men who have run the most benevolent occupation in history have little to apologize for. But they have a lot to learn.

For Foreigners Only. The Japanese are tired of the irritating inequalities of occupation. They have had more than enough of the sleek new cabs for "tourists" or "foreigners only," the so-called specialty stores that sell luxury goods, tax free, to foreigners only. In Tokyo alone there are more than 40 beer halls, off limits to Japanese, where Japanese-made beer sells for a little under 20-c- a bottle; the same beer, with tax, can cost the Japanese 90-c- or more a bottle. SCAP has started removing some of these irritations, but meanwhile it is adding others. During the past few months, the U.S. Army has replaced its inconspicuous jeeps with a fleet of 800 sleek, wide-bodied, olive-drab sedans, which use up more parking space in Tokyo's already jampacked streets, while apparently serving no more useful purpose than a softer ride for occupation brass.

It is no secret that SCAP's proposals for carrying out the terms of the security pact amount to little less than straightforward continuation of many aspects of the occupation. Ridgway's advisers would like to keep the Dai Ichi Building (No. 1 symbol of the occupation), the Imperial Hotel, the Ernie Pyle Theater and a host of lesser buildings and facilities in the Tokyo area. Even more important, particularly in the Orient where the word itself is anathema, the Army wants complete extraterritoriality for its military and civilian personnel. The prospect of such privileges led one member of the Japanese House of Councilors to speak of "a new occupation."

Yen for Neutrality. Most thinking Japanese recognize that the security pact is as much if not more to Japan's immediate advantage than it is to the U.S.'s. They know that Japan has, as yet, no army, navy or air force; and that the U.S. will defend them if they are attacked. But there are dissidents, daily growing more vocal, who want no part of the U.S. protection or alliance. Three completely divergent groups--the liberal intellectuals, the resurgent militarists and the Communists--are united, for different reasons, in a cry that Japan remain neutral between the free West and the Russian East.

The motives of the Communists, who are a real but not immediate threat, are obvious. The liberal intellectuals frankly fear the militarists and think the best way to keep them from coming to power again is to keep the nation's armaments down and its foreign policy neutral. The militarists want the U.S. to give Japan the skeleton of an army, navy and air force (which the U.S. is planning to do) and then get out. Once in power, they want to be free to make their own deals with the camp they think will win.

One of the militarists' more vocal spokesmen is bullet-headed, bullet-riddled ex-Colonel Shigenobu Tsuji (30 times wounded in campaigns in China, Burma, Malaya and India). Tsuji crackles as he talks, speaking, as he puts it in the Japanese phrase, "with his drawers down." He is on the government's purge list, but makes no effort to hide his contempt for the purge and for Liberal Premier Yoshi-da's administration. He has written a book in which he seriously questions whether the U.S. can win an all-out war with Russia. Tsuji wants U.S. arms but he does not want to be bound in partnership with the U.S. Says he: "I like you, but don't hug me too tight."

Spree with Profits. These restless groups are simply a shadow of a more acute danger that haunts Japan: a major economic crisis.

Like Britain, Japan must import raw materials from which to fashion exports. And, like Britain, Japan cannot earn enough dollars with her exports to pay for her imports. Before the Korean war, Japan was on the ragged edge of bankruptcy. Since the war, Japanese businessmen have reaped huge profits from more than $500 million in U.N. orders (e.g., freight cars, transportation services, repairs to U.N. tanks, planes, ships and artillery pieces). They have enjoyed the profits without assuming the responsibilities of war.

A U.S. bicycle manufacturer, for instance, is strictly limited in the amount of nickel he may use. Japanese manufacturers may use all they can buy. Japanese businessmen have plunged into a spree of lavish (and tax free) expense-account entertainment, bigger and shinier foreign cars, extravagant nightclubs and pleasure palaces. The sight of an oxcart stopped beside a Cadillac or a Jaguar is no novelty in downtown Tokyo. In this spendthrift, neon-lighted economic chaos, gangsters, blackmarketeers and slick operators--U.S., Chinese and Korean as well as Japanese--wax fat and prosperous. More & more worried Japanese are aware that the imperial city is in danger of becoming another Shanghai.

The Russian and Chinese Communists are getting in the act, too. Last month Russian trade representatives asked to talk with Japanese Diet members. Said the Russians: "It pains us to see Japan import coal from the U.S. at $30 a ton when it can easily be imported from Sakhalin at $10 a ton." Of the Chinese Communist desire for direct barter trade, one Japanese businessman quipped: "It's really quite simple. The Chinese Reds want to swap their coal and iron ore for some of our light consumer goods--armorplate, steel rails, generators and locomotives."

The businessmen may joke now, but as Japan's dollar shortage worsens, the appeal of Russian coal at $10 a ton and Chinese iron ore at $8 to $12 a ton is going to become more & more attractive.

Last week Detroit Banker Joe Dodge, a SCAP financial consultant, departed for the States after nearly a month of high-pressure conferences with the Japanese government. Before he left, he warned the country that unless it tightens its belt and mends its ways, it faces economic collapse. His warnings could not be heard above the din on the Ginza, where the Christmas shopping rush was on. Urban Japanese have taken to Christmas as enthusiastically as they took to baseball half a century ago. The Ginza's stalls were packed to their rickety rafters with U.S.-style toy tanks, jeeps, cigarette lighters and waltzing bears. The Colosseum-like Nichigeki Cinema Palace featured a stripteaser who solemnly went through her act to alternate strains of White Christmas and Silent Night.

The Mocking Laugh. Not all of Japan could be painted in such somber or such gaudy colors. The G.I.s and U.S. civilians who made the occupation a success enjoy a broad base of respect among the Japanese. The Japanese have also heard Vishinsky's mocking laugh at disarmament, and they are hearing, increasingly, the sound of Russian military preparations in the Far East. By heavy bomber, Vladivostok is less than three hours from Tokyo.

The next few months and the next few years will be equally difficult for both the U.S. and Japan. Japan must recognize that sovereignty in 1951 does not mean what it meant in 1941. The U.S. must recognize that full and equal partnership is the only basis for mutual, long-term friendship in the face of a common enemy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.