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Once upon a time, goes a story, there was an Emperor who was particularly fond of cherries. When he discovered one day that the sparrows were eating his cherries, he decreed that all sparrows must be killed or driven away. But with the birds gone, the beetles abounded. They overran the orchards and devoured the crops. The Emperor, rueful of his error, ordered the sparrows back.
It is now ten years since the Allies drove the Japanese back to the cage of their meager islands and forbade them ever to bear arms again. It is three years since the West ruefully reversed course, gave the Japanese their independence, and bade them rearm and join in the defense against Communism.
But the restless, dynamic and ingenious people of Japan are not so movable or removable as the Emperor's sparrows. These sparrows have the vote. With pencil and ballot box, they notified the outside world last week that Japan has emerged from the passivity of defeat to seize and assert its independence.
Souls in Nirvana. By the millions, the Japanese went to the polls to elect a new parliament. The last blandishments blared from loudspeaker trucks. An enormous white vinyl balloon in the shape of a pigeon bobbed in the sunshine over Tokyo, soliciting votes for the Democratic Party of Ichiro Hatoyama, the caretaker Premier who aspired to a longer lease on the job. The election was as orderly as any in the West, but with occasional trimmings that were made in Japan. In the templed city of Nara, officials rejected the request of eleven Buddhists who, engaged in a religious retreat, insisted that they needed absentee ballots. "Despite the fact that our bodies will be here on election day," they pleaded, "our souls will be in Nirvana." Some 38 million other Japanese, a remarkable 75.8% of the electorate,* clambered to the polls.
In the dingy Tokyo headquarters of the Democratic Party, the sounds of celebration began almost with the first returns. Though the Democratic Party is only three months old, it stole the thunder, many of the members and thousands of the votes of the recently dominant Liberal Party. Each time a Democrat's election was clinched, party workers pounded a lacquered drum and the crowd shouted, "Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!" By morning they had banzaied themselves hoarse.
The man who made the victory relaxed under a prebreakfast massage in his 13-room, Western-style house on a hill in central Tokyo, while supporters trooped in with sake, beer, and trays of tai fish for a long day of celebration. For most of his adult life, Ichiro Hatoyama has longed to govern Japan. In fact, even before he was born, his politician father intended him to be a politician, and his mother, a woman of learning and vigor who believed that a child in the womb is shaped by the mother's thoughts, carefully limited her pregnancy reading to biographies of great men and politicians. "I do not wish to give birth to a child with a small mind," Haruko Hatoyama wrote in her diary.