Policemen's Lot

"Regrettably," said Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, "the masses have shown a tendency of late to ignore the law."

Kishi thought he knew where some of the blame lay for the crime and violence that has rocked Japan since the end of the war: it lay on the good intentions of U.S. occupation reformers, and their determination to safeguard the Japanese against intimidating cops.

Powerless to Prevent. Japan's once-dreaded police today are circumscribed by so many restrictions, imposed in the name of civil rights, that they cannot even arrest a drunk until he hits someone. More than 450 gangs (with a membership of 12,000) roam the streets of Tokyo, and the police say they are powerless to take preventive action against them. Communist-led strikers and terrorists still control the northern town of Tomakomai (TIME, Oct. 20). In trying to do their duty, policemen, who can be haled before a Bureau of Human Rights for abusing their powers, now take their own photographers along with them to demonstrations just to prove they have not beaten anyone up. The mere suggestion of brutality can mean loss of pay or demotion.

Alarmed by the government's inability to control lawlessness, Kishi placed before the Diet a bill to restore to the police such elementary powers as the right to search suspected criminals for arms and to disperse mobs. While employers generally cheered the new bill, socialists and labor unions made angry protest.

Painful to Remember. Tempers grew so hot in the Diet that brisk fighting broke out though members themselves stayed out of the line of fire while they sent forth their male secretaries to bop one another with chairs and lunch boxes. Socialists, stirring up the ruckus inside the Diet and labor leaders calling a general strike outside it, were, said Kishi, threatening the parliamentary democracy "which you claim to cherish." But they were not the only opponents of the bill. Throughout Japan last week, responsible men and women with vivid memories of the days when the police could arrest and torture as part of the government's thought-control policy began to speak out. Among them were 1,500 Presbyterian churches of the United Church of Christ, and the Japanese Intellectuals' Congress, headed by Crown Prince Akihito's former tutor.

"Before the war," said Wellesley graduate Tamaki Vemura, director of Japan's Y.W.C.A., "I was once arrested and questioned seven hours because I had said in church, 'We are all sinners.'" Socialist Secretary-General Inajiro Asanuma told of how he would be arrested, questioned and then released at one station, only to be picked up and questioned again at another. Such memories were apparently a good deal more painful than the current lawlessness. With the sole exception of the English-language Japan Times, not a single major newspaper rallied to Kishi's side.

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