In his dealings with Americans, Japan's Premier Nobusuke Kishi likes to portray his nation as the one sure bulwark against Asian Communism. He even argues that the U.S. ought to underwrite a $700 million to $800 million fund to make sure that Japan, rather than Communist China, wins economic leadership of Southeast Asia. Yet six weeks ago, when a "private" Japanese delegation signed a $196 million trade pact with Red China. Kishi gave the deal his blessing. Nor did he boggle at the key condition extracted by Peking: establishment in Tokyo of a Chinese Communist trade mission with quasi-diplomatic privileges, including the right to fly Red China's five-star flag over its headquarters.
But others did boggle. Nationalist China called it the first step toward full diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Peking, and retaliated by slapping a boycott on Japanese goods, thereby trying to force Japan to choose between the chancy Red barter deal and its solid trade with Formosa ($149 million last year). And so began the battle of the flag.
Unfazed. heavy-lidded Nobusuke Kishi blandly assured Formosa that he did not intend to recognize Peking, and that, far from conceding that the Reds had a "right" to fly their flag in Tokyo, his government would "do its best" to dissuade them from doing so. But, shrugged Kishi, if Peking's representatives insisted, their flag would be entitled to Japanese police protection—not under the rights of diplomatic courtesy but under ordinary laws against trespass and property damage. Last week, reportedly after pressure from the U.S. State Department, warning of the economic and political consequences of a prolonged breach with Japan. Nationalist China reluctantly swallowed this face-saving formula, canceled its boycott on Japanese imports.
The Burning Desire. Kishi's enemies, making a pun on his name, call him ryō kishi—meaning, roughly, "one who tries to keep a foot on both banks of the river." During the three years he spent in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison as a "war crimes suspect"—he was General Tojo's Commerce and Industry Minister—Kishi claims to have been seized by a "burning desire" to see Japan rebuilt according to democratic principles. Yet, as Premier, he has surrounded himself with a kitchen Cabinet composed of men like bull-necked Nationalist Okinori Kaya, 69. Kaya, who was Tojo's Finance Minister, spent ten years in Sugamo as a "Class A war criminal," now argues that Tojo's chief mistake lay in starting war before Japan had an adequate industrial base and sufficient oil supplies.
Egged on by such advisers, Kishi has chipped away at the Anglo-Saxon political concepts of Japan's 1946 "MacArthur Constitution." presses for at least a partial return to the hierarchical, authoritarian traditions native to Japan. By order of the Kishi government, Japanese schoolchildren will soon find themselves doing playground drill in the militaristic prewar fashion, and will be subjected to regular doses of "moral education."