Toward the Rising Sun

It was time for Japan to get a new Prime Minister. Enfeebled Ichiro Hatoyama, 73, who had held the job since 1954, had agreed to step down once a peace treaty with Russia was signed and Japan was admitted to the U.N. These ambitions achieved, he could go--and whoever was chosen by his party, the ruling Liberal-Democrats, would become the country's Prime Minister. In symbolic anticipation of a decision about to be cast, the artificial trees in the lobby at Tokyo's Sankei Kaikan theater were festooned with large paper dice. The red curtain rose to reveal the elders of the party wearing white rosettes and seated onstage, with a huge rising sun as a backdrop.

Three candidates for the succession, all hale and heartily conservative but not a great deal younger than Hatoyama, presented themselves: Nobusuke Kishi, 60, the party's crafty, pushing secretary-general; Mitsujiro Ishii, 67, its astute planning chairman; and Tanzan Ishibashi, 72, oaken-faced Minister of International Trade and Industry. With no real dispute about policy between them, all vied in vowing to "clean up the party and restore ethics," and boasted of their health. Kishi pointed out that he was the youngest; Ishibashi crowed that "I can eat and drink anything," and that he sleeps well. Amidst reports of big bribes being offered for votes, Prime Minister Hatoyama hobbled, stiff-legged and leaning on an aide's shoulder, to the microphone, and asked for "a clean election."

Greying, thickset delegates in Western business suits, some wearing white gauze masks against the cold-catching season, tramped heavily across the stage to drop their white ballots under the full glare of spotlights and the eyes of Japan's 300,000 TV set owners.

On the first ballot Kishi was way out front, and Ishii, finishing third, was automatically eliminated. On the second ballot Ishii threw his strength to Ishibashi, and it was enough to give Ishibashi a narrow victory over Kishi, 258-251.

Twice-Flunked Liberal. U.S. officials in Tokyo are inclined to regard Ishibashi as "anti-American," but then, all three conservative candidates, with an eye on Japan's postwar generation of new voters and its rising Socialist tide, have been talking up the need of a "readjustment" of U.S.-Japanese relations.

A self-taught economist who likes to be called "a liberal with a small '!,' " Ishibashi is the Tokyo-born son of a Buddhist priest. He twice flunked exams for medical school, then turned to philosophy. He lost his first job as a cub reporter for skipping the facts on his first assignment--a double suicide--to write a learned discourse on self-destruction. For the next 30 years he wrote for, edited, and finally owned the influential Oriental Economist, preaching a laissez jaire doctrine of economic expansion to Japan's warlords before and during World War II. Made Finance Minister in the postwar Yoshida Cabinet, he favored letting prices soar to spur productivity, but ran head on into the U.S. Occupation's deflationary policies. Reversing an earlier clearance, MacArthur purged him from the Cabinet for having written an "imperialist" article in the Oriental Economist--a slight that Ishibashi has never forgiven. Ostensibly devoting all his time thereafter to his pet hobby of painting porcelain, he quietly joined with Hatoyama to topple Yoshida, and in 1954 became Trade Minister.

A burly, bushy-browed man who boasts of his ability to down vast quantities of sake without effect (most Japanese get tiddly after a few snorts), Ishibashi is, says one of his younger associates, "ideal as Japan's new leader, because he is the one person who opposed the Japanese militarists and was not cowed by the occupation." To put Japan's estimated 5,000,000 unemployed to work, he urges the floating of road-building bond issues. "People say inflation is written on my face," he says, then adds dogmatically: "I don't mean to brag, but my economic policy is the only salvation for Japan."

Heart-to-Heart Talk. After his victory last week, Ishibashi declared: "I intend to carry out my ideas--and if some people don't like them, that can't be helped. I intend to push trade with Red China and with Russia. Restoring diplomatic relations with China is not for me an immedi ate target. The most pressing problem is adjusting relations with the U.S. There must be greater equality between the two nations. To correct this, we must change the situation of entrusting Japan's defense completely to the U.S. I intend having heart-to-heart talks with America, starting with the defense issue."

In the U.N., and outside it, Japan will probably cooperate with and hope to dominate the Afro-Asian bloc. Japan's conservatives see Japan's sun rising again, and want reccgnition as a leading Pacific nation, perhaps the "leader of non-Communist Asia." (Of India, one Japanese says disparagingly: "How much steel has Nehru got?") As an "ally, not satellite," of the U.S., Ishibashi's Japan will probably seek a bigger say in Okinawa's future, ask for increased U.S. backing for Japanese economic expansion in Southeast Asia, while also demanding freedom to trade with Red China.

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