Boomerang

The Communists, who so often accuse the U.S. of intervening in other people's affairs, make no bones about interfering in Japan's. During the closing days of Japan's general election, Peking broke off trade talks, and said that no deal was possible so long as Nobusuke Kishi, "a veteran imperialist" with "the hallucinations of an idiot," is Prime Minister. Moscow also promised Japan immunity from nuclear bombing in case of war, if it would rid itself of U.S. bases now. But when 40 million Japanese voters went to the polls last week, these Communist interventions boomeranged.

Japanese voters gave Kishi's Liberal Democratic (conservative) Party a larger majority than anyone had expected. The pundits' forecast was that Kishi would lose 20 or 30 seats; he lost only three. His party won 287 seats to the Socialists' 166, and ten of twelve independents were expected to support Kishi. The Communist Party polled 1,000,000 votes --300,000 more than in 1955,(though barely a third of its 1949 record--but it got only one seat. Beamed victorious Premier Kishi, suntanned from electioneering: "I am well liked by the people. They like my sunburned face. They trust me."

Prosperous Japan, in spite of a rapidly growing industrial working class, and a younger generation deeply influenced by left-wing pacifism, had showed itself in the election as distrustful of Socialism, strongly hostile to Communism, and friendly to the U.S.

Kishi is far from being the American puppet the Communists dubbed him during the campaign. He is pledged to demand Japanese rule for Okinawa, the prohibition of nuclear tests, and the banning of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil. But he knows that Japan's future is intimately bound up with the U.S., if it is to hold its own economically and politically against a neighboring continent dominated by the Communists from the Bering Sea to Hainan.

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