The Rising Sun

In his dealings with Americans, Japan's Premier Nobusuke Kishi likes to portray his nation as the one sure bulwark against Asian Communism. He even argues that the U.S. ought to underwrite a $700 million to $800 million fund to make sure that Japan, rather than Communist China, wins economic leadership of Southeast Asia. Yet six weeks ago, when a "private" Japanese delegation signed a $196 million trade pact with Red China. Kishi gave the deal his blessing. Nor did he boggle at the key condition extracted by Peking: establishment in Tokyo of a Chinese Communist trade mission with quasi-diplomatic privileges, including the right to fly Red China's five-star flag over its headquarters.

But others did boggle. Nationalist China called it the first step toward full diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Peking, and retaliated by slapping a boycott on Japanese goods, thereby trying to force Japan to choose between the chancy Red barter deal and its solid trade with Formosa ($149 million last year). And so began the battle of the flag.

Unfazed. heavy-lidded Nobusuke Kishi blandly assured Formosa that he did not intend to recognize Peking, and that, far from conceding that the Reds had a "right" to fly their flag in Tokyo, his government would "do its best" to dissuade them from doing so. But, shrugged Kishi, if Peking's representatives insisted, their flag would be entitled to Japanese police protection--not under the rights of diplomatic courtesy but under ordinary laws against trespass and property damage. Last week, reportedly after pressure from the U.S. State Department, warning of the economic and political consequences of a prolonged breach with Japan. Nationalist China reluctantly swallowed this face-saving formula, canceled its boycott on Japanese imports.

The Burning Desire. Kishi's enemies, making a pun on his name, call him ryo kishi--meaning, roughly, "one who tries to keep a foot on both banks of the river." During the three years he spent in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison as a "war crimes suspect"--he was General Tojo's Commerce and Industry Minister--Kishi claims to have been seized by a "burning desire" to see Japan rebuilt according to democratic principles. Yet, as Premier, he has surrounded himself with a kitchen Cabinet composed of men like bull-necked Nationalist Okinori Kaya, 69. Kaya, who was Tojo's Finance Minister, spent ten years in Sugamo as a "Class A war criminal," now argues that Tojo's chief mistake lay in starting war before Japan had an adequate industrial base and sufficient oil supplies.

Egged on by such advisers, Kishi has chipped away at the Anglo-Saxon political concepts of Japan's 1946 "MacArthur Constitution." presses for at least a partial return to the hierarchical, authoritarian traditions native to Japan. By order of the Kishi government, Japanese schoolchildren will soon find themselves doing playground drill in the militaristic prewar fashion, and will be subjected to regular doses of "moral education."

Escaping Satellite. Three weeks ago Kishi braved outcries of the left in Parliament to announce that his government would regard any attack on U.S. bases in Japan or .Okinawa as an attack on Japan itself, and would, if necessary, order Japan's puny "Self-Defense Force" to retaliate against the attacker's home bases. But he was quick to claim political credit for the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from Japan last year, has also promised his H-bomb-hating countrymen that "when" (not if) Okinawa is returned to Japan, he will insist upon removal of all U.S. nuclear bases from the island.

Equivocal as his public pronouncements may be, there is no doubt about Kishi's direction. When he became Premier 13 months ago. his country was regarded by much of the world as little more than a U.S. satellite. Said Kishi himself: "Internationally our voice is still low." Unlike the ailing old men who preceded him in office.* Kishi has both the energy and ambition to regain for Japan the loud voice of a major power.

The Unalarmed. So far, official Washington has refused to take alarm at Kishi's behavior, justifying the China trade pact on the grounds that Japan must export to live, and minimizing the illiberal trend of Kishi's domestic policy by arguing that once Japan was on its own, it was bound to retreat somewhat from the alien and often visionary governmental forms imposed by MacArthur. In the long run, say Japanese specialists, the likeliest alternative to the kind of oligarchic society envisaged by Kishi would be Marxist totalitarianism. Besides, they do not think that Kishi has either the desire or the popular backing to turn the clock full back to where it stood under Tojo. And they accept a reassertion of Japanese independence as inevitable unless the U.S. is prepared to occupy Japan militarily until the end of time.

* Kishi's immediate predecessors: Ichiro Hatoyama, popularly known as "the afternoon-nap Premier," and Tanzan Ishibashi, who resigned because of illness 65 days after he took office.

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