The Man Who Came Back

His enemies closed in around the little man in the antique wing collar, their curved samurai swords sharpened for his political execution. "You answer in a strong voice, and you look healthy," a conservative mocked him. "The fact that the Prime Minister is able to appear at all ... is due to our spirit of chivalry," taunted a Socialist. At one point during his long inquisition before the Diet, 76-year-old Shigeru Yoshida, Premier of Japan for seven years, began to defend himself, but lost his way through his notes. "Ah ... ah ... ah," he mumbled, shuffling his papers. "Ah ... ah ... ah," his enemies mimicked him in pitiless unison.

One day last week, Japan's right-wing conservatives and Socialists ganged up against Yoshida in unnatural alliance. "It is hereby resolved," they moved, "that the House of Representatives does not trust the Yoshida Cabinet. It has continued, without definite objectives, the maladministration of the Occupation; it has indulged in secret diplomacy; it has blundered in economic policies at home. Public sentiment has become nauseated . . . and voices clamor for change." This coalition of right and left could muster a clear majority: 120 conservative "Japan Democrats" and 135 Socialists v. 185 for Premier Yoshida's conservative Liberal Party.

Around a table where chrysanthemums were set in a Chinese vase, the Yoshida Liberals brooded and concluded that defeat was sure. At 1 p.m. on the 13th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Liberal Party made its decision: to resign before a vote. It remained solely thereafter to inform Shigeru Yoshida, and to lay the hara-kiri knife of resignation before him. The party's chosen emissary for this work, a hawk-faced man, turned pale at the prospect of facing the old autocrat, but complied.

The Purged. The following day another old man, a friend turned enemy, took Yoshida's place as Premier of Japan. Ichiro Hatoyama, 71, crippled from a stroke, hobbled through strewn flashbulbs to an inner room of the Diet, where he faced the press. "I would like to awaken the people," he said, "to a deeper, more serious sense of their independence as a nation ... I intend to institute a careful review of the laws made under the Occupation, upholding those with merits, and discarding those with demerits."

Ichiro Hatoyama paid scant attention to his own Occupation demerit, the fact that Douglas MacArthur had purged him from public life for "ultra nationalism . . . supporting aggression . . . duplicity." Later Hatoyama remarked: "One American told me--it may have been flattery--that my purge was the Occupation's greatest mistake."

Impulse & Imperialism. In Tokyo several years ago, Hatoyama and Yoshida got into a venomous conversation. "Do you really want to be Premier so much?" asked Hatoyama. "I don't want to be Premier; you're the one who does," answered Yoshida. They understood one another perfectly.

Hatoyama's father (a Ph.D. from Yale) and Hatoyama's mother were so anxious for their boy to become a statesman that the mother determinedly read biographies of great men during her pregnancy, hoping thereby to exert a prenatal influence. Hatoyama responded to his destiny: he became a Tokyo city councilman at 27, a Diet member at 31. But the greatest prizes eluded him. Hatoyama's mien was courtly, his thinking was conservative, but Hatoyama had an impulsive nature. In a prewar Diet noted for brawls, he developed a great reputation as a fistfighter. Once, made angry by something a Premier was saying, Hatoyama rushed up to the dais and tore up the Premier's notes.

During the 1930s Hatoyama supported the imperialism of his seniors, and served in two Japanese Cabinets. He stumped Europe and the U.S., defending the Japanese invasion of China as a step necessary for "the happiness of the Chinese people."

After Pearl Harbor, however, Hatoyama broke with the militarists, fearing disaster. Hatoyama sat out most of the war on his farm.

"I Can't Understand It." A few months after the surrender, Ichiro Hatoyama founded the Liberal Party and led it to victory in the 1946 elections. He was designated Japan's first Occupation Premier and was getting ready to present his credentials to the Emperor when a message came down from the Occupation. Hatoyama had been purged as "undesirable." Hatoyama was shocked. "I can't understand it," he muttered, "I just can't understand it." The fact was that a left-wing U.S. journalist had translated a prewar book of Hatoyama's with glowing references to Hitler and Mussolini, and had presented the evidence to Occupation authorities. Right-Winger Hatoyama has insisted ever since that he was framed by Communists.

The purged Hatoyama bequeathed the Liberal Party--and in effect the prime ministry--to Yoshida. Yoshida accepted the job only as "a son-in-law under apprenticeship." But when Hatoyama was depurged five years later, Yoshida blandly refused to step down, on the ground that Hatoyama's stroke had made him "too frail" to serve.

Insult & Instability. In triumph last week, Premier Hatoyama got in a few insulting slaps at his fallen enemy. "I will not be arrogant--like Yoshida," he told newspapermen. He would not move into Yoshida's official residence, because "it's much too luxurious for me." Henceforth, added Premier Hatoyama, there would be no more official Buicks and bodyguards, no more big parties for foreigners. And there would be other changes.

For Foreign Minister, Hatoyama named Mamoru Shigemitsu. who served as Foreign Minister to Tojo and later signed the surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. Five more of Hatoyama's ten top ministers were men listed as "undesirable" by Douglas MacArthur's Occupation. The new Foreign Minister guardedly noted that his policy would be "cooperation with the free nations, particularly the U.S. and Britain," but his first concern was nonetheless to move Japan towards increased trade with Red China. "Motionless, diehard anti-Communist diplomacy," said Tokyo's daily Yomiuri Shimbun, "runs counter to the current of the times."

Right-Winger Ichiro Hatoyama, a sick man eager for office, paid a high price for his Socialist support, promising to convene general elections (in which the Socialists are expected to make considerable gains) before the end of March. So Hatoyama can run little more than a caretaker government. At best, for several critical months there can be no real stability in Japan. At worst. Hatoyama and Shigemitsu may set Japan moving farther and farther from Yoshida's pro-Americanism, more and more towards neutralism.

*Behind him (with crutches), Foreign Minister Shigemitsu.

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