The Face

Two thousand shivering workers gathered outside the steel plants and shipyards of Amagasaki one day last week, crowding and craning for a look at an old, partly paralyzed man bundled inside a black Chrysler Imperial. He did not appear, but from a loudspeaker hooked up with the car, his deep voice boomed out: "My friends, I am Ichiro Hatoyama." The crowd waited for him to continue.

"What's the matter--can't you clap? Can't you hear me?" asked the loudspeaker. A burst of laughter exploded from the crowd. "My face isn't much to look at," Hatoyama went on, "but at least you can hear my voice."

For two busy, windswept days last week, Japan's Premier toured Osaka and Kobe, the Pittsburgh of Japan, in a brisk, U.S.-style election campaign. He made a big hit. A caretaker Premier for only ten weeks, savvy Old Politician Hatoyama was determined to win a longer lease on the job. He did not hesitate to promise the moon, or to strum the samisen strings of renascent Japanese nationalism.

He jeered at the way bureaucrats, during the regime of his predecessor Shigeru Yoshida, got together with wealthy industrialists "to play mah-jongg and golf and let their work go." He promised lower taxes and more housing. He promised trade with Red China and Russia, and said this would "create conditions which will contribute to world peace." The obliging Russians, not missing a trick, last week offered to start negotiations for normal relations at the place "the Japanese government considers most adequate" (Japan has already designated New York City as its choice).

At airports and train stations, the fast-moving Premier drew people by the thousands where other politicians did well with a few hundred. When he went from city to city by car, workers poured to the curbs and farmers leaned on tools along the fields to cheer. "I do not care about any political speeches," explained an elbow-churning man in Osaka, "I just want to see the face."

Only Emperor Hirohito himself could attract such attention. With a nationwide election less than a fortnight away, 72-year-old Ichiro Hatoyama seemed to be establishing himself as the most popular politician in postwar Japan.

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