JAPAN: Bonus to Be Wisely Spent

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Back in Tokyo, Kishi had a run-in with yet another Minister of Commerce. While the minister was absent on a tour of the Dutch East Indies, Kishi and one of his former Manchurian aides drew up a drastic plan to increase bureaucratic control of Japanese industry and to draft into the factories some 250,000 women, ranging from housewives and geisha girls to prostitutes and the actresses of the Takarazuka Girls Opera—an outfit that was owned by Kishi's boss. The Commerce Minister raced back to Tokyo and denounced the plan as "sheer Communism!" Kishi again resigned. But less than six months later, the Commerce Minister was out of a job and replaced by Kishi in the new Cabinet formed by his old friend, General Hideki Tojo. Kishi had at last reached ministerial level—just in time to participate in the decisions leading to Pearl Harbor.

Kishi served the Japanese war machine faithfully and well, and he makes no bones of it. When a newsman tactfully suggested in 1957 that Kishi had no option but to accept the Emperor's decision to go to war, he replied curtly: "I have no wish to defend myself that way. All the state ministers were responsible for assisting the Emperor to make the decision." As always, Kishi had a practical plan. Japan, he argued, was using only 10% of its production in the war with China ("Chicken feed!"), and by properly organizing the remainder could win quick military successes in Asia, and then negotiate a settlement with the U.S. and Britain that would leave Japan in control of most of the Pacific.

Kishi was right about the quick victories (Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines), wrong about being able to get a quick peace. As the fortunes of war worsened, he reacted just as had his Choshu clansmen in the affair of Shimonoseki Strait. At a Cabinet meeting in April 1944 he told Tojo: "Saipan is Japan's lifeline. If Saipan falls, surrender. It is the silliest thing on earth to keep fighting after that." Tojo shouted angrily: "Don't poke your nose into the affairs of the supreme command!" Thirteen days after the bloody U.S. conquest of Saipan, Tojo's Cabinet fell.

Because he had openly declared that the war was lost, it was an uncomfortable time for Kishi. He was followed about Tokyo by the secret police, and devoted himself to writing a long defense of his position that no newspaper dared print. After his suburban house was burned down in an air raid, Kishi and his wife and two children went back to Yamaguchi. He was lying sick in bed when the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, only 70 miles away.

Cell Thoughts. Japan's surrender soon followed, and Kishi wondered whether he should wait for arrest by the Americans or commit suicide. A large family conference of Satos and Kishis assembled in his sick room to argue the question. One of his old schoolteachers tactlessly reminded Kishi of his fiery arguments in favor of hara-kiri when he was 16 years old. Kishi's answer was to brushstroke a short poem, which translates: "In another role, I shall commemorate the just war forever." This is nearly as obscure in Japanese as it is in English, but one thing was clearly apparent: Kishi did not intend to kill himself.