JAPAN: The People Speak

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Three weeks after the rioting throngs in Tokyo forced the cancellation of President Eisenhower's visit to Japan, one section of the Japanese people got their first chance to express their feelings on 1) how they felt about the new U.S.-Japanese security pact, and 2) Premier Nobusuke Kishi, whose Liberal Democrats had approved it. The vote took place in relatively remote Aomori prefecture, which is coincidentally the site of one of the largest U.S. Air Force bases in Japan. There Liberal Democrat Governor Iwao Yamazaki was running for reelection. His Socialist opponent went all out to argue that a vote for Yamazaki was a vote for U.S. bases, for Kishi, and possibly for war. Last week Aomori's farmers and fishermen responded by giving Yamazaki 45,000 votes more than he had received in 1956, to defeat his Socialist rival 295,000 to 186,000.

Japanese pundits viewed the results with caution. While Yamazaki has been an able governor with a strong popular following, the election took place during the planting season, and the turnout was only 62% of the voters. But at the least, the Aomori election was strong evidence that the frenzied mobs that had snake-danced around the Diet for days on end (another 25,000 turned out on call last week to demonstrate against the pact) were not the expression of some deep country-wide revulsion against Kishi's policy of alliance with the U.S.