Japan
Page 27
In the fifties and on into the sixties, Japan was clearly producing its own version of modern mass society, not yet quite as affluent as that of the West, but perhaps for that very reason more lively. The long hundred-year race to catch up with the West, renewed with increased vigor after the setback of the war, was paying off. Japan was beginning to draw abreast of the leading countries of the world and was far outstripping the others. It was clearly becoming a tremendous success. The chief impression the cities of Japan gave was one of vitality, cheerfulness, and unbounding vigor. All the arts, both native and Western, flourished exuberantly. Tokyo alone had some five fully professional symphony orchestras. It also offered an unsurpassed variety of cafés, each with its own musical specialty, and its restaurants were as varied as those of any city in the world. Intellectual life was more vigorous and prolific than ever before. Imaginative literature and films abounded. The pleasure districts of Tokyo, with their nightclubs, cabarets, bars, cafés, and fantastically variegated neon lights, became probably the biggest and gaudiest in the world.
UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos
A human sea meets the ocean on the Shonan beaches near Tokyo.
Almost all Japanese homes, rural as well as urban, included a color television set. Virtually everyone had a good camera. Small washing machines and electric refrigerators became commonplace. Electric rice cookers and numerous other mechanical conveniences eased the life of the housewife, and many homes and apartments had electric air conditioners. Even the family car began to make its appearance, though with disastrous consequences for Japan’s inadequate road system. The English word “leisure” became the catchword of the day, and everyone spoke of the “leisure boom.” Professional baseball games, skiing resorts, and summer beaches were all inundated with people.
The dark mood of the early postwar years had been largely dispelled, and akarui, meaning “bright,” became the favorite adjective to describe “life,” “society,” and almost anything else to which it could be logically affixed. Even rural Japan shared in the new life. A television set bringing its citified fare into the farm household, a motorcycle and later a small truck or family car, a party phone operated by the local agricultural cooperative—such things deeply affected the lives of those on the farms. The gulf between rural and urban Japan produced by an earlier stage of modernization began to close.
Many of these changes, of course, had their seamy side, as did the economic growth that had helped produce them. Generation gaps widened, as children raised under postwar conditions developed attitudes that conflicted with those of their parents, who deplored the casual manners, spendthrift ways, and lack of discipline of their children. Some of the ills of most industrialized, urban societies became more evident. A sense of alienation and confusion was felt by many people, adrift in the human sea of the modern city. Crime and juvenile delinquency seriously worried a people accustomed to strict obedience and strong family bonds. As the postwar black market faded, one began to hear of yakuza, the Japanese gangsters, who specialize in loan sharking, protection rackets, and strong-arm services for shady politicians and businessmen. It should be emphasized, however, that coping with such ills was minor when compared to the much more severe adjustments being made in the urban industrial societies of North America and Europe. By comparison, Japan was extremely orderly, amazingly free from crimes of violence, and, if anything, still too tightly structured socially, with its heavy educational pressures on youth, its career-long employment in large business, and its discouragement of lateral movements in jobs and of freer, more personalized styles of life.
Despite Japan’s growing prosperity and social stability, political tensions remained severe throughout the fifties. Confrontation was more prevalent than the traditional Japanese spirit of compromise and consensus. Although the Socialists were confident that they would eventually come to power through a parliamentary majority, they were discouraged at the slow rate at which the conservative vote declined and theirs increased. The left wing of the party and the Communists to their left saw no reason to compromise with the conservatives and were eager to disrupt the rule of the Liberal Democrats, by force if necessary.
Life in Japanese cities, particularly Tokyo, was characterized by constant political demonstrations. In the new democratic Japan perhaps the most frequently heard word was demo, but ironically this stood for “demonstration” rather than “democracy.” Confrontations in the streets were encouraged by the inflamed rhetoric of the press, which tended to lean to the left. Confrontation also spilled over into the halls of the Diet, where there was little cogent debate but countless efforts to disrupt parliamentary processes. On critical issues, the opposition forces would try to obstruct the holding of sessions by keeping the speaker in his office by force or to disrupt the procedures on the floor. Interpellations were designed to trap the responding officials into some unwise or poorly phrased statement, which could then be used to divert debate from the original issue. Roll call votes were requested as often as possible, and were slowed to a virtual standstill by the “ox walk,” the snaillike pace the opposition Dietmen took as they walked up to the ballot boxes. The LDP retaliated by “ramming” through necessary legislation, sometimes by surprise sessions and votes. This led to outcries over the “tyranny of the majority.” Constant trouble in the Diet forced the LDP to limit controversial bills to a few particularly crucial ones each session. The result was a considerable restraint of its powers despite its sizable parliamentary majority.
Affluence and stability at home and growing economic bonds with the United States abroad did not lessen the severity of the political division over the American relationship. The recovery of Japanese self-esteem made the presence of American troops and bases in Japan all the more galling. Dependence on the United States for some 30 percent of Japan’s trade seemed to some to increase the danger that Japan would be swept up into America’s “imperialistic” policies and prevented from developing its own socialistic society. For progressives, the American alliance, instead of offering security at very little financial cost, seemed more to threaten Japan’s hoped-for peaceful neutrality.
Almost anything that some Japanese objected to in postwar Japan could be blamed at least in part on the United States. If even the French could decry “coca-colonization” and “Franglais,” it is small wonder that many Japanese worried about the “Americanization” of their culture. There was, indeed, a huge influx of English words and American ways. It should be noted, however, that virtually all of this came at Japanese instigation, and that the English words greatly enriched the language. They were used in inventive new ways and provided a vast and useful vocabulary that was not only more international but also less cumbersome than words invented by combining polysyllabic Japanese stems, and more aurally understandable than terms derived from sound-alike Chinese words. Thus English terms had great vogue not just because they were stylish but because they were useful.
Concern over American domination of Japanese foreign policy was more valid. The Japanese government had elected to take a “low posture” internationally, attempting to remain out of sight, as it were, behind the diplomatic and military skirts of the United States. At the same time, however, Japan did its best to develop trade and amicable relations with all parts of the world, in so far as this was possible within the strictures of American foreign policy. De Gaulle is said to have spoken contemptuously of the Japanese prime minister as seeming like a transistor salesman. But the Japanese policy paid off, and the country was able to develop quite satisfactory economic relations with most lands, while avoiding the tensions of international politics and the costs of a large military establishment.
Japan, however, did encounter some problems with certain countries. Hatoyama, on becoming prime minister in 1954, made a special point of trying to work for an independent Japanese diplomatic position, concentrating on the “normalization” agreement with the Soviet Union finally mad
e in 1956. This did clear the way for Japanese admission to the United Nations, but it did not lead to a massive Japanese exploitation of Siberian gas and oil resources, as was hoped for at various times. The problem was not American hostility to the scheme but rather the immensity and difficulties of the undertaking, distrust between the Japanese and the Soviets, the incompatibility of the two economic systems, and Japanese fears that the project might worsen relations with China.
China presented a special problem. Whatever the regime that ruled this vast continental mass might be, the Japanese people as a whole tended to look on China with romantic warmth as the source of their civilization—their Greece and Rome, as it were. This attitude was compounded by a sense of guilt over wartime misdeeds in China and by the lure of the hundreds of millions of potential customers next door—a lure repeatedly felt by much more distant Americans. Japanese businessmen, particularly those in the less prosperous fields, kept hoping that deft political maneuvering might somehow open these supposedly lush new pastures.
The Japanese government, eager for trade with any country, devised the slogan “the separation of politics and economics” to justify Japanese recognition of the Nationalists on Taiwan and trade with both Chinese regimes. Peking, however, was not very cooperative, since the Communists hoped to put pressure on Japanese politics by manipulating the Japanese desire for trade. Seizing on a minor incident, in which a rightist youth tore down a Chinese Communist flag in Nagasaki in May 1958, Peking cut off all trade with Japan, and it was some years before it was restored to significant levels. Nevertheless, most Japanese continued to hope for better relations with their great neighbor and were deeply dissatisfied with the existing situation, which they in general blamed on America’s intransigent China policy. Socialist and Communist leaders beat a path to Peking, where some of them joined the Chinese authorities in public statements that “American imperialism” was the “common enemy” of the Chinese and Japanese people.
Such attitudes toward China, combined with growing leftist irritation and anxiety over the presence of American troops in Japan, sharpened tensions within Japan over relations with the United States. Occasional incidents involving American servicemen or the extension of airfield runways to accommodate larger planes—an issue of particular sensitivity in land-hungry Japan—could easily be stirred up by the press into major crises. American testing at the atoll of Bikini in the mid-Pacific resulted in an accidental nuclear fallout on a Japanese fishing vessel in March 1954, and the subsequent death of one crew member stirred vast resentment and, with absurd hyperbole, was linked with Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the third atomic bombing of humanity. Annual memorial meetings held at Hiroshima on August 6, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb, grew into mammoth protests against nuclear testing by the United States (the activities of the Soviet Union in this regard were largely overlooked) and were expanded into general attacks on Japan’s ties with the United States.
By the late fifties the prewar politicians were mostly old men. In December 1956 Hatoyama had to resign the prime ministership because of ill health, and his successor, another prewar politician, had to do the same within two months. On February 25 he was followed by Kishi Nobusuke, an ex-bureaucrat who, as a former member of Tojo’s wartime cabinet, epitomized what the progressives feared. When Kishi held a general election on May 22, 1958, however, the LDP won a clear majority of 57 percent of the popular vote and 287 seats in the lower house to 166 for the Socialists.
Because of Japan’s economic recovery and the increased self-confidence as well as anti-American sentiments that accompanied it, both the Japanese and American governments felt it would be wise to revise the security treaty. The original pact had allowed the United States wide powers in using its bases in Japan for “the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East” and “the security of Japan.” Its forces could also be employed, if requested by the Japanese government, “to put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in Japan.” These features, together with the lack of any terminal date for the agreement, made the relationship seem semicolonial to some Japanese.
After protracted negotiations, a new Treaty of Mutual Security and Cooperation was signed on January 19, 1960. This agreement, together with its supplementary documents, made clear that the United States would consult with the Japanese government before using its bases in Japan directly for combat elsewhere in Asia, as had happened during the Korean war, or before introducing nuclear weapons into Japan. This meant in effect that the Japanese would have a veto over their use. There was also to be a limit of ten years on the treaty, after which either party could terminate it on one year’s notice.
All references to the use of American troops in Japan were also omitted. In these various ways the new treaty was obviously better for Japan than the old one, and a large part of the right wing of the Socialists, adopting the name Democratic Socialist party, decided to support it. But the other Socialists and members of the opposition decided to fight it to the bitter end, because Japan shared in responsibility for the new treaty whereas the old one had been forced on the country before it had regained its independence.
Since the LDP held a solid majority in the Diet, the leftist challenge might have amounted to only one of the many turbulent but minor incidents in Japan’s postwar relations with the Untied States had it not been for certain coincidental factors. On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 plane was downed deep in Soviet territory, and the Kremlin indignantly responded by calling off a planned summit meeting between President Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Khrushchev, to the sharp disappointment of the Japanese public. Still more unfortunate were the circumstances surrounding the proposed visit of Eisenhower to Japan scheduled for June 19, 1960. Probably wishing to have the treaty ratified by that date, even if the House of Councillors failed to act, Kishi decided to hold a sudden surprise vote on ratification in the House of Representatives in the early morning hours of May 20. Since the Socialists had been trying every possible delaying tactic in the Diet, including boycotting sessions and demanding more time to debate the issue, both the opposition and the public decided that Kishi had “rammed through” the treaty by unconstitutional or at least “undemocratic” means. Even some of his own party deserted him. Two of the faction leaders, who were both eager to replace him as party president and prime minister, had not been consulted on the decision to hold the vote and as a consequence refused to support his action.
Although Kishi did succeed in clearing the chief legal hurdle to ratification on the night of May 19–20, he had aroused popular indignation to the point of explosion. To the antitreaty clamor was added an even louder din against Kishi himself and the visit of Eisenhower. Many sincere believers in democracy felt they must come out into the streets to oppose Kishi for what they saw as his “undemocratic” conduct in not permitting the opposition to air its views fully on an important controversial issue. And many people essentially friendly to the United States voiced opposition to the American president’s visit, since it had become entangled in their minds with the debate over ratification and therefore seemed to constitute outside intervention. The powerful press was almost unanimous in its condemnation of Kishi.
The more radical groups led the attack, and large masses of the urban public responded. University students were in the forefront. The Zengakuren, an abbreviation for the National Federation of Student Self-government Associations, had been organized in 1948 and had soon become a politically active group. It was under firm Communist control until 1957 but subsequently became an autonomous movement of even more radical bent, tending toward Trotskyism or anarchism. The Zengakuren activists now found their normally more apathetic fellow students ready to follow them by the thousands in riotous, snake-dancing demonstrations through the streets of Tokyo. Labor unions, long accustomed to mass demonstrations, mobilized their followings, and housewives, shopkeepers, university professors, and other usually passive group
s joined in.
UPI
President Eisenhower’s personal representative mobbed by protesters at Tokyo International Airport on June 10, 1960.
By June the crowds of protesters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but they remained extraordinarily good-tempered and orderly compared to mobs in most other countries. Individual Americans could move about the streets without fear, little property was damaged, and injuries, usually occasioned by clashes between Zengakuren zealots and the police, were relatively few and largely superficial. Only one fatality occurred when, on the night of June 15, during the most massive and violent of the demonstrations, a female student from Tokyo University was trampled to death in the confusion. But the demonstrations were nonetheless effective in intimidating and paralyzing the government. On June 16, humiliated and fearful, it requested President Eisenhower to cancel his visit, and the American government readily complied.
During the rioting of May and June, it seemed that Japan and its democracy were tottering on the brink of chaos. But once the ratification of the treaty went automatically into effect on June 19, the vast disturbance subsided almost at once. It had served as a sort of catharsis for the frustrations of the progressives and the dissatisfactions of the city dwellers, but people in general reacted against the violence, and most of Japan had remained entirely calm. Even the newspapers engaged in some second thoughts about the turmoil they had helped stir up. Since their early development in the 1870s they had regarded themselves as outside critics of an all-powerful government, but now they began to realize that, by helping to create public opinion, they were as influential as the government and must use their power with responsibility.