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The Cold Impression. This problem is not one that disturbs the practical man from Choshu. Astute, chain-smoking Nobusuke Kishi has reconciled the Western and Eastern elements in Japanese life as easily as he has Japan's militarist, aggressive past and its democratic present. Kishi means "riverbank," and Japanese make a pun on his name—ryo kishi, meaning roughly, one who tries to keep a foot on both banks of the river. But his first name signifies "trust," and, in his three years as Prime Minister, Kishi has strenuously sought to prove that he can be trusted by one and all—by the Japanese who remember him as a member of the Tojo Cabinet that snuffed out their civil liberties, by Americans who know him as one of the signers of the declaration of war against the U.S., and by the people of Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to Burma, who profess to see a disturbing family likeness between Kishi's dream of an "Asia Development Plan" and wartime Japan's "Co-Prosperity Sphere."
His detractors grumble that, "once a minion of the military, Kishi now loudly sings the popular songs of democracy with a perfect ear for the tune." The most common charge is that he is full of guile, and one critic cried, "A rose has thorns; Kishi slashes with a smile." The Prime Minister pensively concedes that "I give a very cold impression. Soft-spoken as I am and gentle as I look, I am generally regarded as a hard person. There seems to be something lacking in my face."
It is a face that delights Japanese cartoonists: prominent teeth, long ears, a crumpled and receding chin. But Kishi's heavy-lidded eyes glitter with intelligence, and his slight, 134-lb. body packs pride, power and passion—a perfect embodiment of his country's amazing resurgence. In the knife-flashing political intrigues of pre-and postwar Japan, Kishi has been both daring and surefooted. His friends are intensely loyal; his enemies have a way of abruptly toppling from power. In Kishi seeming indecisiveness is often strength. A Japanese who has known him for years says: "Sometimes Kishi seems to be wavering aimlessly from side to side on an issue, or even wavering from issue to issue. Yet those who know him well are aware that he moves forward in his own way and in his own time toward a set goal. If he meets strong opposition, he tries another direction. But he is consistent."
Name Changing. Kishi's life began under a handicap. The Japanese have a saying that "no sensible man who owns so much as a cup of rice will become a yoshi." A figure of fun, very much like the henpecked husband of the West, the Japanese yoshi is a man who marries in the fashion of a woman, i.e., he surrenders his own name and becomes the adopted son of his wife's family. Both the Prime Minister and his father were yoshi. Originally the system provided a means of mobility in caste-ridden Japan, and merchants—who were ranked just above pariahs in the social order—could move up in class by marrying daughters of poor but proud samurai. This did not apply in the case of the Kishis, father and son, since they were already of the samurai class.