Defeat in the Diet

Ever since Japan regained independence eleven months ago, 74-year-old Premier Shigeru Yoshida has had to battle his own political supporters as well as his opponents. Last week, in the Diet's lower house, Yoshida drummed his fingers on his desk while members filled up a black-lacquered box with yellow (aye) vote markers--and thereby kicked him out of office. Of the 229 Diet members who voted no confidence in Yoshida, 22 were members of his own Liberal Party; 218 Liberals stuck with their Premier.

Yoshida's intraparty troubles stem from a promise he made in 1946, when he took over the party presidency from Ichiro Hatoyama, who had just been declared by Douglas MacArthur to be ineligible for any office of public trust. Yoshida assured Hatoyama that he would step down if Hatoyama should ever be eligible to hold office again. When the occupation ended, Hatoyama was free to play politics, but Yoshida hedged. Last fall, when the Liberals won a slim majority in the Diet, Yoshida--who controlled the party machinery--got himself renamed Premier. Hatoyama gave in but did not give up; his followers have been itching for a chance to overthrow Yoshida.

The Insult. Fortnight ago their chance came. Yoshida was under attack in the press for following a foreign policy "subservient" to that of the U.S. Socialists accused him of rearming Japan before Japan can afford rearmament; rightists warned that he is not rearming Japan fast enough to meet the Communist threat. (Hatoyama favors direct rearmament, wants to remove the disarmament pledge which MacArthur put into the Japanese constitution; Yoshida prefers the subterfuge of a national police force.)

In the Diet, all opposition parties ganged up on Yoshida's plan to take Japan's police and school systems out of the hands of local government, where the U.S. occupation placed them, and set them under the national government. The Yoshida program, they said, was a reversion to "evils of the past." Needled by opposition, delays, Yoshida lost his temper, called an opposition member an idiot. In the excessively polite Japanese language, this was an insult indeed. Though he hastily apologized, the opposition pressed home a vote of censure, followed it up with the nonconfidence motion. Yoshida thereupon dissolved the Diet, forcing new elections, to be held April 19.

Possible Coalition. Yoshida boasts that his party will win a greater majority in the new elections than they got in October. But with Hatoyama and his dissident Liberals running on a splinter ticket, Yoshida may get beaten. The opposition is scattered, but might unite in a coalition headed by Hatoyama or by one-legged Mamoru Shigemitsu, the Progressive Party leader, who, as Foreign Minister, signed Japan's surrender aboard the Missouri, and was convicted as a war criminal.

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