Enjoyment of Life

The Japanese Premier who was able by an amazing fluke to attend his own solemn Buddhist funeral and admire the hundreds of wreaths prominent persons had sent to be piled around his coffin was Admiral Keisuke Okada (TIME, March 9). Japanese Army youngsters thought they were killing Premier Okada when they were actually killing his brother-in-law, a Japanese Samurai who bravely pretended to be the Premier (see cut).

The Samurai brother-in-law's sacrifice was in one respect vain. Admiral Okada, after his spectacular "resurrection," found it impossible to remain Premier because of pressure from the middle-aged Japanese Radical-Militarists whose young Army assassins so narrowly failed to kill him. Admiral Okada last week had retired from office into deepest political oblivion--his career assassinated by weapons more subtle than the bullets which slew his brother-in-law.

Tokyo continued under martial law. Last week 1,320 Japanese private soldiers who conducted the assassinations and seizures of Government buildings were released from custody and returned in good standing to their regiments "because they merely obeyed the commands of their officers." Two of these officers committed harakiri, but the rest were alive and well last week. Every Japanese knew that the Radical-Militarists were still assassination-minded in case the new Cabinet of hard, spry little onetime Foreign Minister Koki Hirota does not give Japan the drastic social and economic overhaul which they demand.

Mostly of peasant blood, the Radical-Militarists want Japan's great capitalists and its moderately prosperous middle-class squeezed for the benefit of its farmers and fishermen, who since the Machine Age have been grinding out their lives in increasingly abject toil. Thus every Japanese businessman scanned with excruciating qualms every phrase of the Hirota Cabinet's first declaration of policy when it belatedly appeared last week. Its language was high-flown. "With a sense of awe and deep responsibility," preambled the Premier, "I have obeyed the Imperial command to organize a Cabinet after the recent extraordinary affair."

Well might Japanese financiers shiver as the Cabinet declaration went on to promise to "reform finance and economy . . . through measures for improvement and stabilization of the people's living so that all the subjects of the Emperor may enjoy their life. . . . The Government will not be shackled by custom but will effect reforms suited to the times."

This, if taken at face value, might presage a most radical socio-economic New Deal. Japanese businessmen hoped they found a possible joker favoring the status quo. The declaration, having first harshly pledged drastic changes, then softly added, "The Government will avoid needless haste."

In whip-hand Radical-Militarist circles the Hirota Cabinet declaration was greeted with the criticism that it was couched in too general terms, the Radical-Militarists demanding that "each ministry should announce concrete plans." First to do so was the Home Ministry, now headed by a Japanese Civil Service career official of great gumption, Mr. Keinosuke Ushio. "I am taking immediate steps to inaugurate nationwide health insurance," he barked. "Thus the Home Ministry will 'stabilize the people's living.'"

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