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All But One. More important than U.S. face was the question of what last week's events in Tokyo implied for the future course of U.S.-Japanese relations. Though the new treaty had been formally ratified, the triumph they had scored might well embolden Japan's leftists in their avowed purpose of bringing down one conservative government after another by violence—a process which could ultimately render effective U.S. use of Japanese bases impossible. If necessary, U.S. forces in the Pacific could abandon their Japanese bases and still carry out all their commitments save one—prosecution of a renewed war in Korea. But to with draw U.S. staging and support bases to Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines would vastly increase the demands of U.S. Pacific strategy on U.S. manpower, money and military equipment; without Japan's great Yokosuka and Sasebo naval yard, the Navy alone would probably have to double the number of men and ships assigned to the Seventh Fleet.
Beyond purely military considerations lay the vital importance of U.S.-Japanese political and economic cooperation to the whole free-world position in Asia. A Japanese accommodation with the Communist world, asserts Douglas MacArthur II, would almost certainly start the rest of the non-Communist Asian nations "running foot races to Peking to sign up with what they would consider to be the wave of the future." Aware that some dismiss him as an alarmist, MacArthur nonetheless insists that "without the great arc of free Asia of which Japan is the keystone," the U.S. system "could never survive."
The End of Sleep. A hundred years ago last week, after watching Japan's first envoys to the U.S. ride up New York's Broadway, Walt Whitman wrote:
I chant my sailships and steamships threading the archipelagoes; I chant my stars and stripes fluttering in the wind; I chant commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work—races reborn, refresh'd; Lives, works, resumed—the object I know not—but the old, the Asiatic resumed as it must be . . .
Twice since Perry, the stars and stripes have, as Whitman foresaw, sparked rebirth in Japan. To what object is little more certain now than it was in 1860.
Despite the cries of "Yankee, go home" that rang through Tokyo last week, there were still grounds for hope that the object might be a mutual one. Tokyo's optimists hoped that ordinary Japanese, whose bitter memories of right-wing militarism have long blinded them to the danger of a left-wing power seizure, might at last be awakened to the Communist threat by the spectacle of the Red-led violence. For the U.S., shocked at last into an awareness of what was at stake in Japan, Douglas MacArthur II held out a vision of what could be. Said he: "If the Japanese can stop the extreme left from paralyzing democracy and get on with the orderly development of the economy, Japan has a big future in Asia and in the world. Japan is proof positive that Asia does not need communes and Communism, that a free society can, without regimentation, make tremendous progress."