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The Traveling Salesman. Because he takes seriously the truism that without trade Japan must die, Kishi has been an indefatigable traveling salesman for his country. In striped trousers and glossy top hat, he has ranged through Southeast Asia to persuade Japan's neighbors from Formosa to India that prosperity lies in the combination of "American capital, Japanese technology and local resources." Last summer he swept across Europe and Latin America to gain buyers' recognition for Japan and assure foreign governments and industrialists that the bad old days of imitative and poorly made Japanese products were gone forever. He has been helped by the increasing popularity—and quality—of Japanese art, furnishings, cameras and tiny transistor radios, and by the self-imposed Japanese quotas on exports, which are intended to reduce the cries for protective tariffs.
During postwar years, when Kishi was making his bid for power, he often used a standard ploy of the political outs in Japan : he criticized the men in power for being too pro-American, and some nervous officials in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo warned that he was anti-American. When Kishi's office approved a $196 million private trade pact with Red China, they saw their worst fears confirmed. But, in actuality, Kishi was what he has always been: pro-Japanese.
In dealing with Peking, Kishi was also under constant pressure from businessmen who argued that it was economic lunacy for Japan to import high-cost coking coal, iron ore and soybeans all the way from the U.S. when they were easily available and cheaper next door in China. His political rivals, from ex-Prime Minister Ishibashi to the ousted Ichiro Kono, warned Kishi he would "miss the bus" if he did not at once enter into normal relations with the Reds.
In his pragmatic fashion, Kishi never went that far. The $196 million trade pact was abruptly canceled by Peking in a pettish squabble about a Chinese trade delegation's right to fly the Red flag in Tokyo. Plainly, the Reds planned to use trade only as a lever and a weapon. Red China launched a short-lived but damaging trade offensive in Southeast Asia and undercut Japanese prices by 10-12%. The negotiators sent by Peking to Japan proved to be more interested in drinking innumerable cups of green tea than in progress ; they blandly offered ridiculously low prices for Japan's products and demanded sky-high prices for China's. And because Kishi held them off, he was denounced by Peking as having the hallucinations of an idiot and, said the Red propagandists, incurred the "enmity of 600 million Chinese."
In contrast, Kishi could see, the U.S. was supplying economic aid and buying more Japanese goods than any other single country — particularly the fine-quality consumer items that are too expensive for the rest of Asia. The U.S., moreover, is the guarantor of Japan's security in the shadow of the two Red giants of China and the Soviet Union. Moved by pragmatism, not pro-Americanism, Kishi realizes that his nation's best and most vital interests are served by close cooperation with the U.S. both in trade and defense.