When Tokyo's streets fill with thousands of stone-throwing rioters, the men who sent them there are seldom to be seen. Top planners of Tokyo's riots:
Inejiro Ascmuma, 63, chairman of the Socialist Party. A gravel-voiced orator as round as he is tall (weight: 225 Ibs.), Asanuma is admiringly called "the man locomotive." Thick-headed as well as hamhanded, Asanuma graduated from W'aseda University and promptly became a labor agitator. When a minority group of moderates bolted the party last November because of disgust with the Socialist leadership's parroting of the Communist line, Asanuma was elected chairman of the remainder. Before the split, the Socialists polled a total of 13 million votes, v. 23 million for Kishi's Democratic Liberals.
An indefatigable speechmaker of the shirt-sleeve-and-galluses school, Asanuma seems seriously to believe that Japan is a U.S. colony. When he is with his friends, Asanuma bursts into violent denunciations of U.S. imperialism as the "common enemy" of Japan and Red China. But with Americans he sweatily protests he is not anti-U.S. The growing violence in the streets and the cancellation of Eisenhower's visit appear to Asanuma as an augury of total victory. He boasts: "We are now on top!"
Akira Iwai, 38, secretary-general of Sohyo, a federation of 22 left-wing labor unions with a membership of 3,500,000. On finishing junior high school, handsome, hard-driving Iwai worked as a grease monkey on the Japanese National Railways. After the war. he first won the leadership of a youth section of the union, then became a hard-boiled strategist in a series of railway strikes. Nine of the 22 Sohyo unions —including the railroaders—are run by "secret" Communists, and they supply much of the marching manpower in the blocks-long demonstrations. Iwai's boys also helped out by wildcat strikes that stalled streetcars and commuters' trains. Japan, according to Akira Iwai, "is under the control of American and Japanese capitalists," and he opposes the Security Pact because it "can only antagonize our two powerful neighbors on the continent," Red China and the Soviet Union. Sohyo is nominally run by fat, moonfaced Kaoru Ota, 48, but the real power is firmly in Iwai's ambitious grasp.
Nobuo Aruga, 22. one of the major leaders in the rotating top leadership of Zengakuren, the student federation claiming to represent half of Japan's 677,000 undergraduates. A fourth-year law student at Tokyo University, he is soft-voiced, polite and smiling, comes of a middle-class family. His father was an army colonel in Manchuria, spent three years as a Soviet prisoner of war, and has no sympathy with Nobuo's ideas. His mother loyally supports her son, but Nobuo says patronizingly, "Being a woman, she knows nothing about it."