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When a Japanese prepares to make a wish, he is apt to buy a one-eyed doll modeled after the famed Buddhist monk Daruma, who founded the Zen sect 1,500 years ago. Then, if his wish is fulfilled, he completes the Daruma's missing eye as a symbol of gratitude for otherworldly intervention. Last week, in the Tokyo headquarters of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Premier Eisaku Sato dipped a sumi brush into an inkstone and with swift strokes daubed in the dark right eye of his Daruma. "The eyes," he remarked when he had finished, "are as big as my own."
And well they might be. Sato's conservative Liberal Democratic Party had entered Japan's tenth postwar election with the expectation of a setback. The government was wreathed in a "black mist" of Cabinet-level corruption charges, harassed by catapulting consumer prices and a hostile press. Besides, there was worry about the reaction of a nervously pacifist nation to Sato's support of the U.S. stand in Viet Nam. In view of all this, many conservatives feared losses of as many as 40 seats in the 486-man Lower House. But when the votes were in, Liberal Democrats commanded 285 seats—seven more than they had held last December when Sato dissolved the Diet. Japan's second-ranking Socialists barely held their own level from the last House (141 seats). The burgeoning, Buddhist-backed Komeito Party—the "clean government" arm of the militant Soka Gakkai sect—captured 25 seats, emerging as a new force in Japanese politics, one with which the Liberal Democrats might ultimately become allied. As a result of last week's elections, Japan can now count on many more years of the sort of relatively reasoned and reasonable rule that has made it an island of prosperity, democracy and stability in a widely chaotic Asia.
Calm Contrast. The conservative victory was in part due to the threat of that chaos, as exemplified by the demonic doings of Red China's Mao Tse-tung and his rampaging Red Guards. Japan had been moving closer to China during recent years, but most Japanese were appalled and repelled by the events of the past several months. It was in this mood that they voted, and their votes were as much against the pro-Peking direction of the Japanese Socialist Party as they were for the conservatism of Sato. Japan feels that it is staring over the brink of madness, and it does not like what it sees.
The vote underscored the importance of a stable Japan in the future of Asia, and pointed a path of sanity and soundness that runs in calm contrast to the instability that has characterized the 18 years of Communist China's post-revolutionary history. After all, it is a scant quarter-century since Japan itself went wild and sent its aggression spilling across the Pacific from Singapore to Pearl Harbor. That adventure cost Japan 1½ million lives and taught a proud nation the humbling lesson of pragmatism.