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Along with the intangible bonds went some highly tangible ones. Between military spending and outright aid, the U.S. has pumped $6 billion into the Japanese economy since 1945. The U.S., which buys nearly one-third of Japan's exports, is Japanese industry's best customer abroad, and Japan, which gets nearly a third of its imports from the U.S.. is the U.S.'s biggest foreign market after Canada. Seemingly firm in its U.S.-designed democracy. Japan had long appeared the cornerstone of free-world strength in Asia.
The Magnet. But last week, like a householder who suddenly discovers that his backyard has become a battlefield, the U.S. was brutally awakened to the fact that Japan has become a cockpit in the cold war. The wonder was that it had not happened sooner, for Japan has long been the central focus of the Communists' covetous eyes.
Already possessed of the world's fourth largest industrial base—and the biggest outside the Occident—Japan boasts a rate of economic growth (gross national product up 11% in 1959) so whopping as to make Red China's vaunted Great Leap look like an arthritic shuffle. Added to the already formidable resources of the Communist camp, the productive capacities of Japan's nearly 93 million skilled, industrious citizens would bring the Reds far closer to equality with the free world. But, more important, so long as Japan's people continue to enjoy democratic government and the highest living standards in the Far East, Red China's dreams of political domination over all Asia are likely to remain only dreams. Given U.S. cooperation, Japan could, as Premier Kishi dreams, become a base for the expansion of free enterprise throughout Southeast Asia.
Who Pays? If the U.S. sometimes tended to forget this, the leaders of the Communist world never lost sight of it. Red China's press gives more space to Japan than to any other nation save Russia. Peking has nakedly sought to use Japanese industrialists' yearning for revived trade with China as a weapon to undermine Japan's conservative government. More telltale yet, Japan's tiny (47,000 card carriers) Communist Party has often been allowed to sing a different tune from Moscow or Peking as part of its "lovable'' policy of courting Japan's Socialists and labor unions.*
As the Security Treaty fight began, Communist activity in Japan was vastly stepped up. Since last September, the traditionally impoverished Japanese Communist Party has become affluent enough to double the salaries of many of its workers. To finance the last five weeks' riots against Kishi has cost somebody an estimated $1,400,000 (standard pay for anti-Kishi rioters has run from $1 to $1.50, but student demonstrators have, on occasion, been paid as much as $2.80 each). Japanese security officials make no bones of their belief that at least part of the funds have been supplied by Moscow and Peking. By last week, no one could doubt any longer the prescient warning given by Douglas MacArthur II many months ago: "Moscow and Peking hive made it abundantly clear that the neutralization and eventual take-over of Japan is their No. 1 objective in Asia."