Brother Act

Considering his credentials--he is one of 467 members of the Japanese Diet--Politician Eisaku Sato was certainly getting a lot of attention. From meetings in Europe with Adenauer and De Gaulle, he whisked into Washington for chats with nearly every Cabinet member from Dean Rusk to Luther Hodges, even had ten minutes with President Kennedy on a day when the Cuban crisis was coming to a boil. As Sato moved on to the U.N. and Canada, it was obvious that he was more than just another member of the Diet. He was, in fact, everybody's odds-on choice to become Japan's next Prime Minister.

Thick-browed and youthful-looking at 61. Sato is junior member of a Kennedy-style brother act. From 1957 to 1960, Older Brother Nobusuke Kishi,* was Prime Minister. Sato served as his finance minister and chief troubleshooter among big businessmen. Though there was resentful talk of a Kishi dynasty, it soon died down, and before long the country took it for granted that eventually Sato would become Prime Minister too. When the wild, leftist-backed riots that forced Dwight Eisenhower to cancel his visit to Japan in 1960 also forced Kishi to resign prematurely, the job went to Trade Minister Hayato Ikeda.

But the job had strings. Sato, who controls 100 Diet members of the governing Liberal-Democratic Party, pledged their votes to Ikeda. Kishi did the same with his faction. Though Ikeda, 62, would like to stick around to carry through his ambitious plan to double Japan's national income by 1970, there is now rising pressure for him to step aside as early as next spring, and he may feel obliged to repay his debt to Sato.

As Prime Minister, Sato will not lack political skill. In 1954, when he was his party's chief fund raiser, he was accused of taking $150,000 in bribes from industrialists to ease antitrust laws. Replied Sato with icy aplomb: "My job was to raise party funds; I did nothing that any politician who knew his job would not have done." Like his brother, Politician Sato counts himself a firm friend of the West. Though trade-hungry Japan hopes ultimately to do some business with Red China, for the time being it has "no intention of going against free world current in relations with Communist China."

* Whose surname is different because he was adopted by his wife's family, a common custom in Japan.

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