Tightening the Screws

On June 19, the day Dwight Eisenhower is scheduled to arrive in Tokyo, Japan's revised, ten-year security pact with the U.S. will automatically become law--provided that the Japanese Diet is still in session. Last week, as the capstone of their fanatical drive to kill the treaty, the 165 members of the Diet's Socialist minority solemnly vowed to resign en masse, a move that they hoped would simultaneously force immediate dissolution of the Diet and topple the government of Premier Nobusuke Kishi. To supplement these "parliamentary tactics," the Socialists screwed up to more frenzied pitch than ever their fortnight-old campaign of violent demonstrations against Kishi and the Eisenhower visit.

Dear Students. For a start, a student mob stormed Kishi's Tokyo residence, where 500 police waited nervously under a green flag reading "Dear Students, Please Do Not Enter." The mob pulled down an iron gate, temporarily captured five riot trucks and launched a lusty exchange of stickwork that left 83 policemen and 20 students injured. Next targets were the railway stations, where the students joined the big Red-tainted labor union Sohyo in setting up a general strike for the following morning. The method: strangling commuter traffic by kidnaping motormen.

All through the predawn hours, the mob squatted on the tracks, stopped 650 trains, and hustled the motormen away in taxis, consoling each captive with a 1,000-yen note ($2.80), which a Sohyo organizer peeled from a thick wad of bills in his hand. With traffic effectively halted, mobs snake-danced through the streets, paraded past the Diet and the U.S. embassy, shouting "Down with Kishi" and "Eisenhower don't come." Ranging from Communists to Kabuki actors,* the mob included one group whose banner bore a likeness of Christ; true to the left-wing bias common among students at missionary-founded schools in the Far East, a contingent even showed up from St. Paul's University, partially supported by the U.S. Episcopal Church.

On to Hagerty. Few of the marchers knew or cared that the new treaty actually increases Japanese control over U.S. bases (TIME, June 6). They were mainly out to get Kishi by whatever means. Nobody professed hatred for Eisenhower, but Sohyo Secretary General Akira Iwai warned: "If he comes at this time, the anti-Kishi feeling will be directed at him as well." When Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty arrives to work out advance arrangements, added Iwai, "We will make him the target of a May Day-scale demonstration to persuade him that the trip be canceled." But, as of early this week, the trip was still on.

As much as anything else, Kishi's political survival was threatened by rival leaders in his own Liberal-Democratic Party, who see the time as one of opportunity for their own political advancement rather than as a crisis for Japan. "Kishi should quit immediately," said one group of Liberal Democratic wheeler-dealers after a flurry of meetings last week. And when the Premier approached Japan's N.A.M., the powerful Federation of Economic Organizations, for $250,000 to publicize his stand, he was turned away with the remark: "Money is hard to come by these days." Nonetheless, at week's end Kishi grimly went on television and announced once more his determination to stick. "If I resigned under pressure of violence," he said, "democracy in Japan would be destroyed."

* But many of the stars were in the U.S. for three weeks of performances (see THEATER).

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