Qualified Triumph

Blinking in the glare of TV lights and mopping his face with a large handkerchief. Ichiro Hatoyama sat confidently in the Diet last week, waiting to be elected Japan's new Premier and watching the members drop their votes in a black-lacquered box. All the conservative parties had agreed to support Hatoyama. and his only opponent was Mosaburo Suzuki, onetime ricksha boy who has become leader of the Diet's left-wing Socialists. The vote for Ichiro Hatoyama: 254-160. Climbing into his wheelchair, Hatoyama rolled around the chamber on a triumphal tour, brandishing a glass of beer (strictly a photographer's prop, since Hatoyama, on doctor's orders, takes nothing alcoholic).

The triumph, like the glass of beer, was not all it appeared to be. Shigeru Yoshida's Liberals, who have not forgiven Hatoyama's Democrats for the ousting of Yoshida after seven years as Premier, voted for Hatoyama as they had promised. But in the balloting for Speaker and Vice Speaker of the Diet's lower house, the conservative Liberals joined with the Socialists to defeat Hatoyama's two Democratic candidates. A Liberal was voted in as Speaker, a Socialist as Vice Speaker. This successful Liberal-Socialist maneuver showed that the new Premier might be at the mercy of similar anti-Hatoyama combines on graver issues at any time in the future.

Hatoyama's first choice as Defense Minister was Kichisaburo Nomura, the one-eyed ex-navy officer who was feigning negotiations in Washington as Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Protests came thick and fast: since Japan's constitution requires civilians in Cabinet posts, ex-admirals do not qualify. In the U.S. view, Nomura would have been a better choice than the man who actually got the Defense Ministry post; Arata Sugihara, a bureaucrat-turned-politician who has egged on Hatoyama to more and more flirtation with the Communist powers. Washington was pleased, however, with the retention as Foreign Minister of one-legged Mamoru Shigemitsu, who signed Japan's surrender on the Missouri in 1945. Shigemitsu is a sober, careful man who can be counted on to restrain, as much as he can, Japan's overtures to Russia and Red China.

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