The Anti-Kishi Riots

Day after day, tens of thousands of noisy marchers poured through the streets of Tokyo. Gong-clanging Buddhists snake-danced with plump bobby-soxers, tram drivers and dockworkers before the granite walls of the Diet; other thousands jammed the streets outside the U.S. embassy, stamping their feet and chanting rhythmically, "Ike don't come!" "Down with Kishi!" "Yankee go home!"

Japan was facing its biggest political crisis since the war.

Tyranny of Sorts. The shouting was aimed at the new U.S. security treaty that Premier Nobusuke Kishi had rammed through Parliament fortnight ago. To Occidental observers, the reasoning behind the uproar seemed inscrutably Oriental. The new pact actually reduced U.S. control over its leased military bases. Unlike the treaty it replaced, it ran for only ten years, after which it could be abrogated by either side. But much is irrational in Japan's politics these days. At war's end, the U.S. forced the Emperor to grant unprecedented political freedom. Ever since, the Japanese have reveled in it while giving a peculiarly Japanese twist. Favorite activity is protesting what they call the "tyranny of the majority."

Mystifying to Westerners, this phrase means to Japanese that the duly elected majority party in the Diet has passed a measure by outvoting the opposition. A more proper approach, they say, is for the majority party to water down its proposals until the opposition accepts it. Few Japanese seem to understand that such a procedure stultifies rather than promotes the processes of parliamentary democracy.

All Kishi had done was to abruptly force a vote on the treaty at a late session of the Diet. It had been under debate for 107 days, and Kishi commanded a clear majority. The Socialists, knowing they would be outvoted, boycotted the session and even barred the Speaker's way into the chamber until police arrived. But last week it was Kishi who was under attack in the press and in intellectual circles as the "destroyer of democracy in Japan."

Right Is Wrong. Fact is that since the war, Japan's intellectuals have been gripped in a sort of reverse McCarthyism; no Japanese artist, poet, professor or painter dares to be labeled a "rightist." Most a're socialists, and they pride themselves on being "agin' the government." They companionably join Communists in a bewildering array of organizations with names like Youth and Student Struggle Council, Committee for Freedom of Expression, National Conference for Reopening of Japan-China Relations. They provide the intellectual leadership for such huge outfits as Nikkyoso, the 600,000-strong teachers union; Zengakuren, a nationwide student pressure group; and, most important of all, the ultra-left-wing labor union federation called Sohyo (3^ million members), which has backed many of the recent demonstrations.

Who's Anti-American? In the biggest of last week's Tokyo demonstrations, some 60,000 youngsters shouted, waved banners and threw stones outside the Diet build ing. The Premier was trapped for eight hours before he could slip out a back way. But most participants seemed to have only the vaguest idea of what they were protesting.-"The pact opens the path to fascism." explained one demonstrator vaguely. Girls shouting "Yankee go home" were shocked at the very suggestion that they were anti-American. Americans watching the demonstrations were never molested, and one "angry" crowd politely waited while a flustered marine guard finally got the embassy gates locked before surging forward to hammer at the portals. The crowds were really shouting in support of the Communist-fueled theme that Japan, by permitting U.S. air bases and rocket stations on its soil, was "at tracting the lightning" of Russian retaliation in a world conflict.

Orchestrating the demonstrations was Socialist Party Secretary-General Inejiro Asanuma, the burly former union organizer who has been chummy with the Chinese Communists ever since his Peking trip last year. Backed by three loudspeaker trucks and hundreds of followers, he strode up to the U.S. embassy and handed Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II a truculent letter. It declared that President Eisenhower's impending visit to Japan, scheduled for June 19, "will only provoke the Japanese people, already infuriated by the passing of the security pact." Mac-Arthur retorted with a demand that Asa numa retract his widely ballyhooed statements that "the U.S. is the common enemy of China and Japan." "Not the American people," cried Asanuma. "American imperialism!" What was the difference? "Mr. Asanuma was unable to make any clear distinction," observed MacArthur in a public statement after the meeting. As for Asanuma's prediction that Ike's trip would bring disturbances, MacArthur noted that "he presumably is in a position not only to predict but to organize disorders if he so chooses."

Two on TV. Next day Asanuma showed up on TV to cry for the Premier's resignation. At his side sat Nobusuke Kishi, coldly angry. "Why should I dissolve the Diet and hold elections because of a small minority demonstrating in the streets of Tokyo?" he declared. "There have been three elections since I became Premier, and my government has won a majority in all of them. Therefore, I believe I have a mandate from the people."

The demonstrations had been more anti-Kishi than anti-security pact, and at week's end there were signs that the public was getting tired of the Socialist demonstrators. Independent newspapers, sharply hostile to the government earlier in the week, were critical of Asanuma's antics at the embassy. Snorted Asahi: "Asanuma behaved like Nikita Khrushchev." When word arrived from Washington that President Eisenhower was still determined to go through with the visit to Tokyo so long as Japan's invitation still stood, the Premier sent reassurances that "the greater part of the Japanese people will welcome Eisenhower from the bottom of their hearts."

But many true democrats, reminded of the prewar strong-arm groups that made a mockery of prewar parliamentary rule, were deeply alarmed by the trend of events. In the Diet, the opposition benches were still empty--boycotted by Socialist members who were now streaming home to whip their constituents into greater resistance to Kishi. Ugly days had passed and more could come.

-And none, apparently, got hurt. Only reported casualties: 23 policemen.

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