JAPAN: The Anti-Kishi Riots

• Share

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.