JAPAN: The Third Man

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Only two months have passed since enfeebled, 73-year-old Ichiro Hatoyama stepped down from the premiership of Japan and gave way to a presumably healthier 72-year-old Tanzan Ishibashi, who boasted, "I can eat and drink anything." But for exactly one-half of the time Prime Minister Ishibashi has been in office, he has been laid up with bronchial pneumonia. Last week, after elbowing their way through a crowd of spectators jamming the garden and the street outside, four doctors politely took off their shoes and entered the sick Premier's Tokyo home to make an official examination. "Apparently the main problem is his heart," the Premier's chief aide announced to the public thronging the garden.

That night, as a single light shone from his bedroom window out on the deserted street, Tanzan Ishibashi penned his resignation. "I am sorry," he wrote, "that I have inconvenienced everyone."

The resignation broke on Japan as something of a surprise, largely because the seriousness of the Premier's condition has been consistently played down by his associates, but the Liberal-Democrats were ready and waiting with a successor whose rise to premiership would be no surprise. Second-runner by only seven votes to Ishibashi when he became Premier, 60-year-old Foreign Minister Nobusuke Kishi has had the official title Acting Temporary Prime Minister throughout Ishibashi's illness. A business tycoon (steel, chemicals), he has been a shrewd backstage manipulator in Japanese politics since long before Pearl Harbor. In the early days of Japan's burgeoning Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, he was one of occupied Manchuria's top economic czars. As former Minister of Commerce and Industry in militaristic Premier Tojo's wartime Cabinet, he was clapped into jail by the allied occupation forces on suspicion of being a war criminal, later released without trial. "When I found out I was not to be indicted or hanged," he said, "I began to think about the rest of my life as a bonus to be spent wisely. I decided that Japan must have real democracy and never again adopt dictatorship by anyone—military or non-military—and never yield to extremists—Communists or fascists."

Playing the humble part of the kuro-maku—the faceless stagehand of Japanese drama who bustles about, manipulating scenery behind a black curtain in a supposedly invisible state—Kishi, in recent years, has been a potent force in Japanese postwar politics, a skillful, hardworking, practical politician with a rare skill in threading his way between the excessive views of opposing factions at home and abroad. "We are opening windows to both sides, so to speak," Kishi has said of Japan's relations with East and West, " instead of keeping one side closed as before." A Japanese patriot to the core, he is regarded as more conservative and more pro-American than Ishibashi.