Swing to the Left

Japan's ruling Liberal-Democrats went into last week's elections seeking a two-thirds majority in Japan's Upper House, hoping to be able to revise Japan's "MacArthur Constitution" to make possible faster and more open rearmament. They came out of the election lucky to have held their own 122 seats (out of a total 250), had to watch their smaller ally, the Green Breeze Society, take a beating. The gainers were the recently united Socialist Party, which picked up twelve seats.

The Socialists played on the divisions and infirmities in the regime of eccentric Premier Ichiro Hatoyama. They also made hay with increasing Japanese sentiment against rearmament. To have a bigger force than today's token army, argued Socialist Secretary Inejiro Asanuma, would require U.S. aid and "U.S. control of Japanese affairs," and would "attract the hostility of Japan's neighbors." The U.S. did not help at all by letting it be known that it was greatly increasing its military aid to Japan, possibly by as much as 13 times, or by releasing a report on its land-requisitioning for military bases on Okinawa.

Japanese nationalists have been making much noise about Japanese landowners on Okinawa being dispossessed by U.S. forces. Under the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the U.S. got control of Okinawa and the Bonin Islands (Iwo Jima) for as long as it feels a military need to be there. As the election neared, the government tried to hop on the bandwagon by criticizing U.S. occupation policies too, but it was too late.

Japan's swing to the left is apt to mean more trouble for the U.S. With more than a third of the House in their hands, the Socialists can block any rearmament move, make trouble for U.S. occupation forces. Already, in the flush of victory, they banged the drums of anti-U.S. feeling. Some Japanese papers have been playing up Okinawa horror tales of G.I.s raping little girls and beating up farmers who resist land requisition, and of the U.S. taking farmers' little plots to build golf courses and expensive lawns for American occupiers. Socialists even suggest that if the U.S. would only return Okinawa, Russia might be induced to hand back the Kuriles.

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