Man to Watch

Smilingly acknowledging the banzais of his welcomers, Japan's Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi returned to Tokyo last week from a six-nation tour of Southeast Asia. Then he went off to the pines and waterfalls of a mountain resort to prepare himself for a more crucial assignment, his state visit to the U.S. next week.

Kishi is a Japanese leader of whom the U.S. is going to be hearing a lot. A staunch conservative, he is the first postwar Japanese Premier whose political record (which includes a three-year stretch in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison as a war criminal) does not permit his opponents to accuse him of being a puppet of the U.S.

In the four months since he assumed the premiership, Kishi has refused to be scared by left-wing Japanese political attacks against U.S. bases in Okinawa, but at the same time has made it clear that he thinks the U.S. should relinquish some of its control over Okinawa's civil administration. He has stoutly opposed both the U.S. and Russian refusal to halt H-bomb tests, but he has gone publicly and vigorously on record in favor of a common front against both Russian and Chinese Communism.

Kishi's tour of Southeast Asia was designed as a prelude to his U.S. visit: he wanted to claim to speak for Asian opinion. In New Delhi Kishi outlined to Jawaharlal Nehru his own plan for a U.S.-financed billion-dollar Asian development program, listened in mild surprise when Nehru labeled the idea "American aid in disguise." In Rangoon Kishi impressed his Burmese hosts with Japan's desire to supply technical know-how to other Asian nations. Somewhere along the way he came down with a case of dysentery. (It may be pure coincidence, but the head of the presidential household in Burma was sacked after Kishi was served a fish course that had been too long out of the water.)

In the Nationalist Chinese capital of Taipei on Formosa. Kishi was met by a crowd of more than 600, whisked off from the airport in a 15-car motorcade to the official guest house, which housed the Japanese Governors-General in Japan's prewar days as ruler of Formosa. Kishi presented Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek with two embroidered silk comforter covers (a standard Japanese wedding gift), received in turn from the Gimo two grass bed mats and a decorative ship model fashioned from pale pink seashells. The old enemies got along quite well.

In Formosa Kishi called British unilateral abandonment of the Communist China trade differential (TIME, June 10) "regrettable." But in Washington he is expected to make a strong presentation of Japan's case for similarly increased trade with Red China.

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