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Japan's Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi is a descendant of the swaggering but practical men of Choshu. Less than a century ago his clansmen enthusiastically followed the Emperor's orders by opening fire on all foreign ships passing through Shimonoseki Strait, the narrow western entrance to the lovely Inland Sea. Retaliation came from a combined British, French, Dutch and U.S. fleet, which blew the Choshu batteries skyhigh, put ashore a landing party to seize the forts, and collected an indemnity of $3,000,000.—Impressed, the Choshu leaders fraternized with the Western officers, begged technical advice and sought to buy big guns like those that had destroyed their forts. Observes a present-day Japanese intellectual: "The men of Choshu are completely without sentiment. They act on the basis of logic and profit. Kishi is a typical Choshu man."
Prime Minister Kishi, 63, flew into Washington this week convinced that the logic of the world situation and the profit of Japan require his signature on the revision of the 1951 U.S.-Japanese Treaty. Not all his countrymen agree. In Tokyo 27,000 demonstrators battled police, and thousands of fanatical left-wing students made plain their feelings about the treaty by using the great doorway of the Japanese Diet for their own kind of public protest—a mass urination.
The students vowed to prevent Kishi's take-off for the U.S., and 700 of them seized the airport building the night before his departure last week, wrecked the restaurant and fought the police with bamboo spears and pepper shakers before they were ejected. Mobs of students lined the approaches to the airfield, prepared to stone Kishi's car or throw themselves under its wheels. But with radio guidance supplied by a hovering helicopter, Kishi's motorcade avoided what he called the "distasteful, insignificant demonstration," and he serenely took off for his meeting with President Eisenhower.
Kishi's diehard opponents protest that the treaty revision commits Japan to support all U.S. moves in the Pacific and may therefore "attract the lightning" of a Communist H-bomb attack. There are U.S. reservations about the treaty as well; many Pentagon staff officers complain that it gives Japan what amounts to a veto over the movement of U.S. troops on the perimeter of the Asian mainland.
The Losers. The treaty is to run for ten years, and its ten articles pledge that 1) both nations will take "action to counter the common danger" if the forces of either are attacked in Japan, though not elsewhere, 2) "prior consultation" will be held between the two before U.S. forces in Japan receive nuclear arms, 3) Japan is released from further contributions (now $30 million a year) for the support of U.S. troops in the islands. In Kishi's words, the treaty will create an atmosphere of "mutual trust." It inaugurates a "new era" of friendship with the U.S. and, most important, of independence for Japan.