Troubled Springtime

For the Day of Independence, Emperor Hirohito composed a special poem:

Winter's winds have died away. The long-awaited spring is here. Cherry blossoms are blooming full

today. Now is the nation's springtime.

Blinking in the unfamiliar glare of political freedom, the Japanese torpidly responded to their long-awaited, cherry-blossomed independence. But within three days, they were jarred fully awake. Most rudely jarred were some 300,000 workaday Japanese who poured past the willows and oaks of Tokyo's huge Meiji Park in a peaceful May Day demonstration. In matters of minutes, they were captives of the Communists.

All along the line of march, Communist messengers ran up & down relaying orders. At Hibiya Park, one of the parade's non-Communist organizers worriedly pleaded through an improvised megaphone for the marchers to disband and go home. But he was scarcely heard above the steady chant of the Communists. "Yankee, go home!" they screamed, "Yankee, go home!" The Reds whipped nearly 10,000 into a follow-the-leader frenzy and suddenly turned Tokyo's May Day observance into an anti-American riot.

Methodically, the Reds tore flags and placards off poles that turned out to be carefully prepared spears and clubs, and turned toward their main objective--the broad Imperial Plaza, which had been declared off-limits to the May Day demonstrators.

Hit from Behind. On the gravel paths and carefully groomed sod of the Plaza, by the 250-year-old Imperial moat, a bloody, violent scene burst into life. The Internationale roared in a thousand throats and the Communists brought out of concealment rocks, bags of offal and vicious, steel-reinforced bamboo spears. They surged toward thin cordons of police. In the first wave marched spear-and club-wielders. Behind them, in the classic tactic of trained street fighters, were ranks of stone-throwers. Messengers scurried between the lines to transmit orders from leaders, and on the sidelines girls stood by to help the wounded to safety. Infiltrators sneaked behind the police and, with the sickening crunch of brick against skull-bones, felled cop after cop.

Slowly the 400 beleaguered police were reinforced, with tear gas and eventually with more than 1,600 policemen. Sending up white clouds of tear gas and firing over the rioters' heads, they gradually regained control. Finally, after 2 1/2 hours of hand-to-hand combat, the Communists withdrew from the Plaza, leaving behind a litter of moaning and bleeding victims, torn flags, broken clubs and spears.

"Most Regrettable." Then they twisted through the street traffic in search of foreigners' cars--particularly the olive-drab sedans of U.S. Army units--to punch out their windows, terrify their passengers and overturn or burn a dozen empty cars. Two U.S. sailors caught up in the frenzy were dumped into the Imperial moat while a dazed Japanese stood near by muttering, "Most regrettable; most regrettable."

By sunset, in a twilight brightened by the burning automobiles, the Communists' carefully planned day's work came to an end. Behind them lay two dead and 1,454 injured, 131 of them critically.

Plain Japanese were shocked. Throughout the next day, American victims were deluged with flowers and personal calls of apology from private citizens and government officials. For the left-wing but non-Communist leaders of Japanese organized labor, the riot was a painful but profitable lesson. The man who had coalesced his unions with the Communists, Minoru Takano, secretary general of the council of trade unions, needed no further tutoring. "Now," said he, blinking from behind oversized spectacles, "I can see that the Communists did not intend to abide by the rules. There will now be a change of policy toward the Communists."

The May Day violence, and the shock it produced, were also, oddly, helpful to 73-year-old Premier Shigeru Yoshida, the cigar-puffing Liberal (i.e., conservative) who has been trying to push through the Diet a stringent anti-subversive bill to control Japan's numerically small (70,000) but well-organized Communist Party. Not only Communists and left-wing laborites, but also many Japanese intellectuals and several influential newspapers opposed the bill: to them it smacked too much of the thought-control that plagued Japan in the bad old days. After May Day, Yoshida was sure of getting his bill passed without trouble.

Out of the Woodwork. Worrisome as the Reds are, the bigger threat to Premier Yoshida and to his country's new springtime comes from his right. Japan's old ultra-nationalist crowd is coming out of the woodwork and doing its termite best to destroy the veneer of democracy erected in six years of U.S. occupation. The once-powerful zaibatsu cartels, once dismembered "forever" by the conquerors, are taking on arms & legs again. Survivors of the wartime Tojo cabinet, recently depurged, are forming a new far-right political party.

It is here, paradoxically, that the Communists come back in. Japan has always depended on trade with the Asiatic mainland, particularly China. The ultra-nationalists see Japan's future in terms of cooperation, or even coalition, with the Communists of China and Russia.

The platforms of the Communists and the ultra-nationalists in Japan read like pages out of the same book. Both preach Japanese neutralism in the cold war, both oppose the U.S.-fostered Constitution which denounces war, both cry for abolition of the Japanese Peace Treaty and the Japanese-American security pact and for withdrawal of U.S. forces. On rearmament, and on restoration of Emperor Hirohito to his former supremacy, the far left and far right differ--the nationalists favor both, the Communists oppose both. Communist directives proposing a "temporary popular front with the rightists" have already been circulated.

"You Americans," remarked a Japanese government official last week, "are inclined to forget that these people will one day spill over on the mainland again. If they can't spill over as conquerors, they will spill over as partners."

But it was too early in Japan's new springtime to predict such dire weather. It all depended on how 83 million Japanese absorb the lessons in freedom still to come. Two days after the first bloody lesson, the Emperor appeared in the Plaza, overflowing this time with a peaceful 10,000. He, at least, had changed since defeat: he spoke with a personal "I," not the old imperial "We." Pleased but a little bewildered by the "Banzai!" that reverberated from his palace walls, the tiny, spectacled man in the silk topper spoke humbly to his subjects. "Let us thoroughly embrace the tenets of democracy and keep faith with other nations," he pleaded. "Let us solidify the foundations of our state . . ."

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