The No. 1 Objective

FOREIGN RELATIONS (See Cover) The battle began at dusk under a driving rain. In four days Dwight Eisenhower was due to arrive in Tokyo, and, simultaneously, the revised U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty would pass its last legal hurdle in Japan. With unflagging fanaticism, Zengakuren, the tightly disciplined, Communist-led student federation, mobilized its forces for a supreme assault on the government of Japan's wispy Premier Nobusuke Kishi.

Against the 4,000 steel-helmeted cops guarding Tokyo's Diet building, Zengakuren threw in more than 14,000 students who charged with cries of "Kill Kishi," "Down with the treaty," "Ike, stay home." Pulling away a barricade of parked police trucks, 3,000 of them finally thrust their way into the Diet compound, beating off police counterattacks with volleys of stones and pointed sticks wielded like spears. Meanwhile, those who remained outside set fire to 17 police trucks by stuffing burning newspapers into their gas tanks.

Not until after 1 a.m.--while the stu dents were dancing around the flames and singing the Internationale in one of the indelible mob scenes of the cold war-did the cops get the order that no Japanese government has given its police since 1952 : use tear gas. Eagerly, Tokyo's much-misused police complied, then sallied forth and chased the half-blinded Zengakuren diehards away from the Diet area. By dawn, the city's hospitals had treated 600 police and 270 students, and for the first time since the anti-treaty demonstrations began five weeks ago, Zengakuren had a martyr--a 22-year-old coed trampled to death by her own comrades.

Next day, as thousands howled their rage outside his residence, weary Nobusuke Kishi met with his Cabinet for the second time in 24 hours. After a brief session, he emerged to announce to newsmen the decision to ask President Eisenhower to cancel his trip. Then, in a gesture that emphasized the rebuff the U.S. had suffered, Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama formally reported the decision to a dark, ruggedly handsome man who bears a name all Japan once honored. For Douglas MacArthur II, U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo and the principal architect of present-day U.S. policy toward Japan, Kishi's retreat was an unhappy confirmation of his own growing doubts about the Ike visit. With a mixture of relief and bitter regret, Mac-Arthur phoned the news to the Eisenhower party in Manila.

Tangibles & Intangibles. To most Americans, the spectacle of a Japanese government announcing that it could not guarantee the physical safety of the President of the U.S. came as a bitter shock.

In the years since V-J day, the U.S. and Japan had developed a bond unique between an Occidental and an Oriental nation. The ties ranged from the nostalgic memories of Japan brought home by hundreds of thousands of ex-G.I.s to such carefully nurtured manifestations of official friendship as the "sister city" agreement concluded last month between New York and Tokyo.

Along with the intangible bonds went some highly tangible ones. Between military spending and outright aid, the U.S. has pumped $6 billion into the Japanese economy since 1945. The U.S., which buys nearly one-third of Japan's exports, is Japanese industry's best customer abroad, and Japan, which gets nearly a third of its imports from the U.S.. is the U.S.'s biggest foreign market after Canada. Seemingly firm in its U.S.-designed democracy. Japan had long appeared the cornerstone of free-world strength in Asia.

The Magnet. But last week, like a householder who suddenly discovers that his backyard has become a battlefield, the U.S. was brutally awakened to the fact that Japan has become a cockpit in the cold war. The wonder was that it had not happened sooner, for Japan has long been the central focus of the Communists' covetous eyes.

Already possessed of the world's fourth largest industrial base--and the biggest outside the Occident--Japan boasts a rate of economic growth (gross national product up 11% in 1959) so whopping as to make Red China's vaunted Great Leap look like an arthritic shuffle. Added to the already formidable resources of the Communist camp, the productive capacities of Japan's nearly 93 million skilled, industrious citizens would bring the Reds far closer to equality with the free world. But, more important, so long as Japan's people continue to enjoy democratic government and the highest living standards in the Far East, Red China's dreams of political domination over all Asia are likely to remain only dreams. Given U.S. cooperation, Japan could, as Premier Kishi dreams, become a base for the expansion of free enterprise throughout Southeast Asia.

Who Pays? If the U.S. sometimes tended to forget this, the leaders of the Communist world never lost sight of it. Red China's press gives more space to Japan than to any other nation save Russia. Peking has nakedly sought to use Japanese industrialists' yearning for revived trade with China as a weapon to undermine Japan's conservative government. More telltale yet, Japan's tiny (47,000 card carriers) Communist Party has often been allowed to sing a different tune from Moscow or Peking as part of its "lovable'' policy of courting Japan's Socialists and labor unions.*

As the Security Treaty fight began, Communist activity in Japan was vastly stepped up. Since last September, the traditionally impoverished Japanese Communist Party has become affluent enough to double the salaries of many of its workers. To finance the last five weeks' riots against Kishi has cost somebody an estimated $1,400,000 (standard pay for anti-Kishi rioters has run from $1 to $1.50, but student demonstrators have, on occasion, been paid as much as $2.80 each). Japanese security officials make no bones of their belief that at least part of the funds have been supplied by Moscow and Peking. By last week, no one could doubt any longer the prescient warning given by Douglas MacArthur II many months ago: "Moscow and Peking hive made it abundantly clear that the neutralization and eventual take-over of Japan is their No. 1 objective in Asia."

The Activist. A lifelong sportsman with a sportsman's love of bold action. Douglas MacArthur II fortnight ago decided to try to bring Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty into Tokyo by car instead of in the helicopter that stood ready at the international airport. MacArthur's explanation: As a test for Ike, "we had to find out just how far the mob would go." They found out when Zengakuren students mobbed MacArthur's limousine, tore off the American flag and forced Hagerty & Co. to retreat to the helicopter (TIME, June 20).

Even after that attack, MacArthur continued to recommend that Ike go ahead with the Tokyo visit unless the Japanese government itself asked him to stay away. But with the pointed firmness that has led one colleague to dub him "the man with the most leg drive in the Foreign Service," MacArthur also pressed Kishi's government for details of the security measures planned for Ike's arrival. When he learned that Kishi's chief security scheme was to organize pro-government demonstrations to counter the leftists, MacArthur cabled Washington that he could no longer hold to his recommendation that Ike come.

As MacArthur had clearly recognized from the start, more was involved in the struggle raging inside Japan than the possibility of mob action against Ike. At bottom, what was at stake was the U.S.'s long range interest in Japan. For in a classic sample of Communist strategy, all the trappings of democracy in Japan--a strong labor movement, a free press, an expanded educational system--were being employed to undermine the foundations of democratic government.

A Legacy from Uncle. No one is more aware than Douglas MacArthur II of the ironic fact that the weapons which the Communists are exploiting in Japan are in large part a legacy from the man he invariably calls "my uncle." When he landed at Atsugi Airport in August 1945, General MacArthur's task was to endow Japan with democratic institutions which would temper the physical power the Japanese had acquired by forced draft in the 90 years since Commodore Perry had forced them to abandon two centuries of hermithood. Through the sprawling military supergovernment known as SCAP (Supreme Commander Allied Powers), General MacArthur performed much of his mission brilliantly.

In a constitution written by SCAP's Government Section, the general gave the Japanese the liberties that some of them now seem bent on throwing away--free speech, universal suffrage, an independent judiciary. In 1949, Detroit Banker Joseph Dodge, MacArthur's tough-minded economic adviser, forced upon the reluctant Japanese a stiff dose of deflation and decontrol--and thereby laid the foundations of Japan's present economic strength. No less vital was the land-reform program which, by redistributing 4,500,000 acres of land and cutting tenant farmers from 48% of the agricultural population to only 9%, gave Japan a contented rural population that has been the mainstay of its conservative-minded governments ever since.

Time for a Change. The days of SCAP tutelage in Japan ended with John Foster Dulles' first great diplomatic tour de force --the "peace of reconciliation,'' signed at San Francisco in September 1951. But though the occupation was over, relations between the U.S. and Japan remained unequal: under the original U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty, signed along with the peace treaty, the U.S. could use its Japanese bases to support military action elsewhere in Asia, could bring into Japan any weapons it chose, including H-bombs, could even use its forces to aid the Japanese government in putting down internal disturbances. These were bonds that left Japan precious little room for international maneuver and that chafed increas ingly against dark memories of Hiroshima and the deep national pride of the Japanese people. When Nobusuke Kishi became Premier in February 1957, he was already talking of a "new era" of equality in Japanese-U.S. relations. Only ten days before Kishi took office, Douglas Mac-Arthur II arrived in Tokyo as U.S. ambassador.

The Gumshoe. No country could have been more suitable for Douglas MacArthur II's first ambassadorial post than Japan. By tradition, he should have become a military man: besides Uncle Douglas, the MacArthur military roster includes Douglas II's father, a Navy captain, and Grandfather Arthur MacArthur, who was U.S. military governor of the Philippines. At 13, on a courtesy visit to Japan aboard his father's ship, young Douglas--whose horizons had previously been limited to Bryn Mawr, Pa. and Washington, D.C.--decided once and for all that diplomacy was the life for him.

Back home, MacArthur went through Milton Academy and Yale, where he played guard on the 1931 football team captained by Albie ("Little Boy Blue") Booth. In 1934 he married Laura Louise ("Wahwee") Barkley, daughter of Veep-To-Be Alben Barkley. The next year he got his first Foreign Service appointment and began to display an affinity for adventure in what should have been dull diplomatic jobs. In Naples he did a gumshoe job on a network of passport forgers; in Vichy, after the fall of France, he acted as contact man with French Resistance leaders and helped smuggle out downed Allied pilots--a cloak-and-dagger existence ended only when he was interned by the Nazis for 15 months.

Professionally, MacArthur's crucial break came in 1951 when he was picked to make a three-week European tour with Dwight Eisenhower, then in the process of setting up NATO. He performed so ably that Ike drafted him as SHAPE adviser on international affairs. When Ike went into the White House, MacArthur followed him as Counselor of the State Department under John Foster Dulles. As self-styled "Chief of Staff for Conferences," MacArthur handled arrangements for the 1955 Geneva summit, traveled some 80,000 miles a year, and acquired his first major Asian experience by acting as Dulles' No. 2 man in the establishment of SEATO.

Like Dulles, he was a hard worker. Once when Dulles himself telephoned the MacArthur home asking for Doug, Mrs. MacArthur mistook him for an aide and snapped irately: "MacArthur is where MacArthur always is, weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays and nights--in that office." (Within minutes, MacArthur got a telephoned order from Dulles: "Go home at once, boy. Your home front is crumbling.") Admiring Dulles' love for uncluttered action, MacArthur also acquired Dulles' conviction that the best hope for peace lay in a network of anti-Communist alliances that the Communists could clearly understand--with each nation involved being a free and willing partner of the U.S.

The Liabilities. In his pursuit of such partnership in Japan, Doug MacArthur discovered that his legacy from Uncle Douglas included some ominous liabilities. Most obvious was Article 9 of the Occupation-imposed Japanese Constitution, which reads flatly: "Land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." With the out break of the Korean war, the U.S. did an about-face, began to pressure Japan to establish "self-defense forces." But the awkwardness of building a military machine in visible violation of the constitution has haunted every Japanese government since, has given the Socialists a powerful weapon in their unending campaign against rearmament.

More crippling yet, Article 9 has given a color of moral justification to the mass of non-leftist Japanese who simply don't want to pay the taxes to support an army. The result is that the Japanese military establishment today consists of 170,000 ground troops with World War II equipment, a 28,000-man navy with no ship heavier than 2,300 tons, and an air force that has 500 jet pilots but fewer than 400 jets.

A Drive for Trust. Though Japan clearly cannot defend itself, the attitude of most Japanese toward their military alliance with the U.S. nonetheless remains an unenthusiastic "yamu wo enai [it can't be helped]"--which lends strength to the vocal minority which openly prefers neutralism or "neutralism leaning toward China." To forestall the possibility that this situation might ultimately explode in a flash of all-out hostility to the U.S., Ambassador MacArthur soon fell in with Kishi's insistence that the time had come for American concessions designed to convert the Japanese public from yamu wo enai to a relationship of "mutual trust" with the U.S.

MacArthur's first drive for mutual trust came in early 1957 when, against the opposition of U.S. military men, he successfully argued that G.I. William Girard (TIME, May 27, 1957 et seq.) be tried in a Japanese court for his killing of a Japanese woman (which got Girard a three-year suspended sentence). Another notable MacArthur victory over the Pentagon was his success in securing a reduction of U.S. forces in Japan from some 100,000 to about 50,000. His key play for a new era in U.S.-Japanese relations began when he started to hammer out with the Japanese Foreign Office a revised Security Treaty.

To offset Socialist cries for a complete break with "U.S. imperialism," MacArthur plumped for an agreement highly favorable to Japan, which Kishi could point to as proof that the U.S. and Japan were now equal partners. The original Security Treaty had tied Japan to the U.S. in perpetuity, had entitled the U.S. to "come to Japan's defense" whether or not Japan so desired. The new treaty was limited to ten years, at which point Japan could refuse to renew it, and pledged the U.S. to "consult" with Japan before reacting militarily to a threat to Japanese or Far Eastern security. Implicitly--and by Japanese interpretation--the new treaty gave the Japanese government a veto power over the kind of weapons the U.S. could maintain in Japan as well as over deployment of Japan-based U.S. forces.

Back to Marx. At this point, Douglas MacArthur II ran smack into two more unfortunate monuments to his uncle's administration of Japan. In the heady early years of the occupation, General MacArthur was somehow persuaded to let SCAP's Labor Division fasten onto Japan a set of labor-relations laws that gave Japanese unions a readymade war chest by imposing the dues "checkoff," and saddled the country with minimum standards for working hours, accident compensation, etc. matching those of the U.S. Desperately short of trained leaders, the unions all too often turned to Socialist and Communist agitators, who set about converting the labor movement into an anti-American political tool.

Even more ominous for Japan in the long term were the consequences of SCAP's educational reforms. Basic occupation policy on education was laid down in 1946 by an Education Mission heavily loaded with men who were devoted to the doctrines of Pragmatic Philosopher John Dewey. They failed to recognize that what Japan's children needed was not to learn to adjust to the shattered society around them but to be provided with a faith to replace the one Japan had lost. Simultaneously, SCAP's Information and Education Section set out to fill Japan's schools with teachers avowedly opposed to prewar Japanese policy. Thus encouraged, most of Japan's educators reverted to the Marxist beliefs so many of them had held in the 1920s. Nikkyoso, the 600,000-member Japanese teachers union, soon fell under Marxist domination. Preached at in their classrooms, often encouraged to skip school for political demonstrations, a whole generation of Japanese has grown up in an atmosphere of reverse McCarthyism.

The "Don't Knows." What made the unholy Marxist alliance between Japan's labor leaders and intellectuals particularly dangerous was the passivity of Japan's masses, who still cherish great respect for their nation's anarchic intelligentsia and are so reluctant to take a stand on anything that opinion polls regularly turn up a majority of "don't knows." When the Red-led unions and students launched their increasingly violent campaign against Kishi and the treaty, the majority of conservative-voting Japanese almost certainly disapproved--but did nothing.

At the start of the conflict, Douglas MacArthur II clearly underestimated its potential dangers to the U.S. Though he warned, "I don't exclude physical violence and mob scenes," he admittedly did not foresee the possible mobbing of Dwight Eisenhower himself. The miscalculation was understandable. When Ike's trip to Japan was planned five months ago, it was assumed that he would arrive in To kyo fresh from Moscow, impregnable in the mantle of a peacemaker and relaxer of East-West tensions. Another misadventure MacArthur could not reasonably have been expected to foresee was how fatally Nobusuke Kishi would play into the hands of his opponents.

Half a Rifle. On the evening of last May 19, when the lower house of the Diet was scheduled to consider the Security Treaty, its Socialist minority sought to prevent the session by barricading Speaker Ichiro Kiyose in his office. When Kiyose called in 500 cops to break the blockade, the Socialists walked out of the session entirely. At that, Nobusuke Kishi--a man with an un-Japanese addiction to direct action--persuaded his Liberal-Democratic majority to pass the treaty then and there.

To Japanese--who hold to the characteristically Oriental belief that if the majority of a group wants a rifle and a determined minority insists on no rifle, the proper solution is to get half a rifle--Kishi's entirely legal maneuver constituted a heinous sin known as "the tyranny of the majority." And to compound this offense, Kishi had so arranged things that, if the Diet were still in session, the treaty would automatically be ratified on the day of Dwight Eisenhower's scheduled arrival. To many Japanese this seemed entirely too much like truckling to the U.S.

A Thought for Neutrals. The price that Kishi himself would have to pay for his error was now painfully clear. Courageously defying continuing riots, the strong-willed Premier kept the Diet in session until the vital moment at week's end when the revised Security Treaty at last achieved ratification. But from sources within his own squabbling party came word that Kishi would have to resign his premiership by autumn at the latest, might well be compelled to quit long before that (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Less clear were the probable consequences of last week's misadventure on the international position of the U.S. With noisy triumph, Peking hailed the cancellation of Ike's visit as "an unprecedented loss of face." But from surprising quarters of Asia came indications that, far from taking any pleasure in U.S. discomfiture, even some neutralists found in it food for sober thought about Communist imperialism. Declared Rangoon's Guardian: "The lesson of Japan is all too plain to us in Burma and in the smaller countries of Asia. None of us can afford to give the least ground to those who think nothing of using violence to force their aims and objects on a peaceable majority."

All But One. More important than U.S. face was the question of what last week's events in Tokyo implied for the future course of U.S.-Japanese relations. Though the new treaty had been formally ratified, the triumph they had scored might well embolden Japan's leftists in their avowed purpose of bringing down one conservative government after another by violence--a process which could ultimately render effective U.S. use of Japanese bases impossible. If necessary, U.S. forces in the Pacific could abandon their Japanese bases and still carry out all their commitments save one--prosecution of a renewed war in Korea. But to with draw U.S. staging and support bases to Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines would vastly increase the demands of U.S. Pacific strategy on U.S. manpower, money and military equipment; without Japan's great Yokosuka and Sasebo naval yard, the Navy alone would probably have to double the number of men and ships assigned to the Seventh Fleet.

Beyond purely military considerations lay the vital importance of U.S.-Japanese political and economic cooperation to the whole free-world position in Asia. A Japanese accommodation with the Communist world, asserts Douglas MacArthur II, would almost certainly start the rest of the non-Communist Asian nations "running foot races to Peking to sign up with what they would consider to be the wave of the future." Aware that some dismiss him as an alarmist, MacArthur nonetheless insists that "without the great arc of free Asia of which Japan is the keystone," the U.S. system "could never survive."

The End of Sleep. A hundred years ago last week, after watching Japan's first envoys to the U.S. ride up New York's Broadway, Walt Whitman wrote:

I chant my sailships and steamships threading the archipelagoes; I chant my stars and stripes fluttering in the wind; I chant commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work--races reborn, refresh'd; Lives, works, resumed--the object I know not--but the old, the Asiatic resumed as it must be . . .

Twice since Perry, the stars and stripes have, as Whitman foresaw, sparked rebirth in Japan. To what object is little more certain now than it was in 1860.

Despite the cries of "Yankee, go home" that rang through Tokyo last week, there were still grounds for hope that the object might be a mutual one. Tokyo's optimists hoped that ordinary Japanese, whose bitter memories of right-wing militarism have long blinded them to the danger of a left-wing power seizure, might at last be awakened to the Communist threat by the spectacle of the Red-led violence. For the U.S., shocked at last into an awareness of what was at stake in Japan, Douglas MacArthur II held out a vision of what could be. Said he: "If the Japanese can stop the extreme left from paralyzing democracy and get on with the orderly development of the economy, Japan has a big future in Asia and in the world. Japan is proof positive that Asia does not need communes and Communism, that a free society can, without regimentation, make tremendous progress."

*Most revealing exception: three months before the Korean war began, the Japanese Communists abandoned their "popular front" policy, adopted a tough line against imperialism. Many Red leaders were safely hidden out in Moscow and Peking before the first shot was fired in Korea.

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