Mister Japan

As he surveyed the blue Pacific from his villa in the resort town of Atami last week, Japan's Premier Nbbusuke Kishi had an ache in his stomach ("Probably an off-color shrimp"), but he had joy in his heart. A year ago, Kishi's control over his faction-ridden Liberal Democratic Party was shaky and his popularity with Japan's masses at an alltime low. Last week his control over his cohorts was clear and undisputed, and his stock with the public soaring. "Today," said a Western diplomat, "Kishi is Mister Japan."

Best measure of able Premier Kishi's growing strength lay in the confusion displayed by Japan's opposition Socialist Party, which flirts with Communism, seeks to promote Japanese ties with Red China, and hotly opposes Kishi's efforts to refurbish Japan's mutual defense pact with the U.S. Buffeted by three crushing local and national election defeats in the past 16 months, the Socialists gathered last week under huge red flags in Tokyo's Nine Steps Hall, to debate the reasons for their fading popularity and to patch up party squabbles. But after five days of noisy fist shaking, they were more divided than ever.

Trouble began when left-wing leaders of Sohyo, the General Council of Japanese Labor Unions, tried to pin the blame for the party losses on a right-wing faction accused of criticizing the Socialist campaign against the U.S. security treaty and of "opposing the description of the Socialist Party as a class party." The right-wingers, led by veteran 68-year-old Suehiro Nishio, who has the support of more than a third of the Socialist members of the lower house of the Diet, promptly walked out of the hall, agreed to return only on condition that the left wing stop pushing its pro-Communist foreign policy and "class party" domestic line.

A major Socialist split had been averted, but the discord, which was there for all to see, would make it easier for Kishi to sell the public on his proposed new pact with the U.S.; in fact, according to the pollsters, a surprising 63% of the people were now in favor of his treaty proposals.

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