Ordeal by Mob

The plane bearing Press Secretary James Hagerty was not due until 3 p.m., but by midday, 20,000 people had converged on Tokyo's International Airport. On the terrace of the terminal building were gathered middle-aged men and kimono-clad women sedately clutching small U.S. and Japanese flags. Near by stood several thousand right-wing toughs of the Great Japan Patriotic Party waving huge Rising Sun banners and shouting nationalist slogans. But the majority of the crowd was made up of Sohyo labor unionists and Zengakuren students carrying signs that read HAGERTY GO TO THE HELL, WE DISLIKE IKE, IKE AND U-2 NOT TO JAPAN. The signs were in English, and clearly intended for U.S. photographers and, eventually, the U.S. public.

On the only highway leading away from the airport, 1,500 students squatted in a human roadblock. They had chosen well: a spot where the road curves and rises sharply as it emerges from an underpass. U.S. Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II landed at the airport in a green Marine H13 helicopter. Asked if he and Hagerty would take the helicopter or a car into Tokyo. MacArthur said, "What the hell, we will drive, of course."

Roadblock. As Hagerty's Lockheed Super Constellation touched down from Okinawa, 30 minutes late, a wild melee broke out on the terrace between the right-wing and the left-wing toughs. Some 2,000 police surged forward to separate the combatants, while the sedate elders looked on in dismay. Ambassador MacArthur welcomed Hagerty and his companion. Appointments Secretary Thomas Stephens; the three paused briefly for photographs and then hurried to the ambassador's official black Cadillac. It sped off, followed by two Fords carrying six U.S Secret Servicemen. Just nine days later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was scheduled to drive the same route with Emperor Hirohito by his side. All three cars bowled along at high speed, but as the Cadillac emerged from the underpass and ascended the curving rise. MacArthur's Japanese chauffeur saw the students squatting en masse on the road and braked sharply.

The Cadillac swerved to the right and stopped; the two Fords halted bumper to bumper behind it. Instantly the squatting students hurled themselves forward. They beat on the car with fists and poles, hammered its body and kicked the locked doors. Glass cracked in the windshield. The mob began rocking the car in rhythmic time to a chant of "Go hoh-mu, Ha-gachee!" or "Yan-kee. go hum!" Thousands of other students who had been snake-dancing and marching near by rushed to join in. A Socialist member of Parliament, wearing a red sash, looked on approvingly from the sidelines and puffed at a cigarette.

Fish in Bowl. Two student organizers, armed with whistles, clambered onto the Cadillac's roof and bawled to their follow ers: "Use no violence!" Obediently, the mob ceased rocking the car and began singing the Internationale. The six Se cret Servicemen pushed their way through and ranged themselves around the Cadil lac, facing the singing, shouting crowd. The student leaders obligingly helped, linking arms to keep their followers from pressing too close. Overhead, like fish in a fishbowl, several helicopters went round and round in the watery sky. When the Marine H13 helicopter roared low over the car, the crowd hurled stones and broken poles at it. Each time the heli copter tried to land alongside the road way, the crowd rushed forward so that the chopper had to veer upward or risk injuring the demonstrators.

Behind the car's closed windows, James Hagerty composedly smoked a cigarette and took pictures of the gibbering crowd with a small Japanese camera. After a quarter of an hour, the 2,000 policemen who had been left behind at the airport terrace came marching slowly across the grass, wearing white cotton gloves and carrying yellow guidons marked with their squad numbers. The police forced open a path through the mob and the Cadillac inched forward, and then, as more and more students squatted in front of it, halted again, surrounded by swirling red flags.

Fast Pheasants. Finally the police man aged to clear a grassy space by the road side, and the Marine helicopter dropped down only 50 feet from the stranded Cadillac. In the order of their seating, Mac-Arthur. Stephens and Hagerty emerged from the car. Secret Servicemen tried to hurry Ambassador MacArthur toward the waiting helicopter, but he ordered them to walk, not run. The instant Hagerty was aboard, the chopper rose like a whirring pheasant. The takeoff was so fast that the last of the Secret Servicemen tumbled from the open door and fell six feet to the ground. The three Americans had been mob-bound for 70 minutes.

The rescuing Marines landed Hagerty, Stephens and MacArthur at Hardy Barracks, where a waiting embassy car whisked them the ii miles to the ambassador's residence, taking them in the back way to avoid thousands of demonstrators crowded around the front gate. At 8 that evening, still without having dined, Hagerty pugnaciously faced a microphone-laden table and a clutch of U.S. and Japanese reporters.

Mob Under Control. In his prepared statement, Hagerty said that the demonstration was obviously "carefully planned by a group of professional organizers. The singing of the Internationale as they stoned, shattered windows, cut the tires and tried to overturn the ambassador's car in which we were riding suggests that they may not even owe their allegiance to Japan." Added Hagerty grimly: "I don't think the Japanese people will permit President Eisenhower to be treated the way we were."

The Japanese people do not have much to do with Tokyo's trained mobs. The mobs' spearhead is the Zengakuren students' federation which claims to represent half of Japan's 677,000 undergraduates. Since the war, Zengakuren has been dominated by Communists. But after a particularly obstreperous show of May Day violence brought the wrath of the Japanese public down on their heads, the Reds lost their nerve and announced that in the future they would be "lovable." This concession outraged many Zengakuren hotheads who labeled the Communists "sissified," and voted into the top leadership a toughminded Trotskyite group, which is now called the "mainstream faction." Mainstreamers are so far out politically that they consider Khrushchev a "traitor" to the proletariat. As a result, Communist students are considered "moderates" by the Japanese press in contrast with the club-swinging mainstreamers. But it was the Communist "moderates" who besieged Hagerty's car at the airport.

Zengakuren's leadership has become extraordinarily efficient at organizing riots, equips picked agitators with whistles and megaphones to direct the mobs, pays them $1-1.50 a day for their efforts. Manpower is supplied by Sohyo, a combine of 22 left-wing unions with a total membership of 3,500,000, and the Socialist Party, which has a voting strength of 15 million.

Rope Enough. The question that most bothered the newsmen was one that Hagerty could not be expected to answer. Why, they wondered, did the Japanese police permit the students to block Hagerty's route without even trying to disperse them? The answer supplied by Japanese claiming to be in the know: the Kishi government decided to allow the demonstrators plenty of rope in order to shock the Japanese public into active support of the government's often thwarted demand for sterner measures against leftists, including Kishi's demand for more powers for the badgered police. Said one Japanese: "Hagerty was used as the guinea pig in this experiment."

Candles & Lanterns. Next day, the leftists filled Tokyo's streets with 150,000 demonstrators. Carrying candlelit lanterns and marching 30 abreast, the column streamed from the Diet building to the U.S. embassy. With 8,000 police looking on, they stopped a bus bearing 20 of Kishi's Liberal Democrats, poked sticks through the windows, dragged out three of the legislators and roughed them up. Some 4,000 students laid siege to Pre mier Kishi's suburban home to prevent his leaving to keep an appointment with Jim Hagerty -- an appointment Kishi denied having.

Jim Hagerty spent the day indoors at the home of Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama. He met for several hours with Foreign Office aides and at dusk left quietly for the U.S. airbase at Tachikawa, west of Tokyo, catching only a fleeting glimpse of the lantern parade as he departed.

As Hagerty flew off to Alaska to meet Eisenhower (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), he left behind him an exultant anti-Kishi coalition, which seemed confident that it had the government on the run. Should Eisenhower now visit Japan, cried the Socialists, it could only be for the pur pose of propping up the tottering power of Kishi, and that would represent an interference in the internal affairs of Japan.

There were also ominous signs of a weakening of nerve among non-Communist Japanese. Three former Premiers--ex-Imperial Prince Naruhiko Higashi-Kuni, Tetsu Katayama and Tanzan Ishibashi--urged that Kishi resign and the Eisenhower visit be postponed, and that the question of the U.S.-Japanese security pact be decided by a new government after a national election. "There is no other way to save Japan's democratic government," said the ex-Premiers. Big businessmen of the Japan Employers Federation felt that Eisenhower should still come, but with the reservation that after the ratification of the U.S.-Japanese treaty (scheduled for June 19, the day of Ike's arrival), Premier Kishi should resign and call new elections. There were indications that factional leaders within Kishi's own party were sharpening their knives in order to dispose of the Premier and take his place.

But at week's end, Nobusuke Kishi was at last exhibiting some of the resourcefulness for which he has long been noted. His Liberal Democratic Party plans to "recruit" 200,000 welcomers to line Eisenhower's ten-mile route into Tokyo. Some 500 buses have been chartered to transport 7,000 flag-wavers to the airport. The 25,000 police will be augmented by 50,-ooo pro-Kishi students who will guard the road to the airfield. Kishi hopes that the presence of the Emperor at Ike's side will be an added protection.

But the worry was not over, for the demonstrators were no frenzied mob carried away by fury or passion. Instead, all week long they reacted on cue from their leaders, and every blow seemed as stylized and dispassionate as a Kabuki play. There will be a demonstration. And it will be just as violent--or as mild--as the left-wing strategists choose.

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