Japan

on the World Today

THE Japanese Left is facing a crisis over peace. When Sōhyō, the sprawling labor federation organized by the Occupation to combat Communism, held its annual convention last summer, the principal subject discussed was not the plight of the worker, faced with inflation and a possible recession. It was peace, Sōhyō decided to ally itself with peaceful forces throughout the world; and while this commendable undertaking was not described in the detail it might have been, the progress of the debate made it fairly clear which forces in the world are peaceful and which are not.

Mao Tse-tung and Molotov are peaceful. Sir Winston could be if he attacked Senator McCarthy. President Eisenhower would have an awfully hard time being peaceful, and presumably rebellious workers in East llerlin are not, since Sōhyō voted to ignore them.

The left-wing Socialist Party (the Japanese Socialists are split), with which Sohyo is allied, has a slightly different program for peace, however. In November the party published a comprehensive policy statement including, over strong Sōhyō opposition, a reaffirmation of its support for a Third Force. This apparently comes to something like Nehru’s Arab-Asialic neutralism, though with t he proviso that at least as far as Japan is concerned the Third Force must be unarmed.

Left-wing Socialists are at pains to make it clear that they are disgusted as anyone at American knavery. For the sake of peace, however, someone has to be cool and unemotional, aware of the good and the bad on both sides and ready to mediate. The argument, may seem like a quibble over whether the United States is The only leper in the world or just the most malignant of the world’s lepers. Its real significance, however, lies in the fact that a new Popular Front seems to be on the way, and Sōhyō’s leaders are all for it, while the faction at present in control of the left-wing Socialists is deeply suspicious.

A hero has just ridden out of the Socialist Motherland to take charge of the Popular Front. Ikuo Ovama, a left-wing scholar who took refuge in tho United States in 1952 and who taught at Northwestern Universily until his return to Japan in 1947. was awarded a Stalin Peace Prize in 1952. Last year, by a devious and illegal route, he arrived in Moscow to claim it.

Thereafter he traveled widely through the People’s Democracies, encouraging them with the nows that even in Japan democracy is not yet dead. Late in 1953 he returned to Japan, duly anointed but for some reason without his prize money, which he was not able to get out of the Soviet Umom. Ovama s reception has been tempestuous, and it is assumed that he will in to organize all the peaceful forces in Japan.

Books and magazines for peace

There are two and a half times as many publishing houses in Japan as there were in the top pre-war year, and at that there are only two-thirds the number there were in 1948. It was a great surprise to everyone when the president and vice-president (the president’s wife) of the Mikasa Shobd, a medium-sized publisher of translations, went underground some time ago because the publishing house was not able to meet its bills. Hundreds of companies in much worse financial condition continue to ignore this fact month after month.

In this welter of confusion stands one lofty fastness, the Iwanami Shoten. Its position of preeminence has no counterpart in the Fnited States but is a little like that of Gallimard in France. Iwanami books come out in uniform gray jackets, and the Ivvanami shelf in a large downtown Tokyo bookstore that classifies its books by publisher looks a little the way a hard lump of used Bibles might look in a New York remainder shop.

For all its staid manner, however, Iwanami is at the very forefront of the light for peace. The I wanami Symposium on Literature, a ponderous eight-volume work designed, cynics say, to make it unnecessary for country schoolteachers to read anything else, generally favors the socialist-realist view of literature. Bungaku (Literature), one of Iwananti’s monthlies, shows much the same bias in its little-magazinish way. It once took up the Sartre-Camus debate, for instance, and concluded that Camus represented the courageous but ineffectual voice of the dying past, while Sartre represented the voice of the buoyant future. Bungaku often seems less concerned with whether a man can write than with whether he is peaceful and democratic.

Then there is Sekai (The World), Iwanami’s monthly political-literary review, which almost is the fight for peace. Sekai sent a wave of excitement over the country when it came out before the end of the Occupation with a special number criticizing the San Francisco Peace Treaty as weighted heavily in favor of the United States.

Sekai is an upstart that has won a following almost entirely on the basis of its peace treaty number and a most aggressive pursuit of the advantage since. It has looked wilh approval on germ warfare charges against the United Nations in Korea and on evidences that the United States and Syngman Rhee started the whole unfortunate Korean a affair, and it is always happy to find new evils attendant on American bases in Japan.

Monthly magazines like Sekai are read by the intelligentsia, by the people who go to foreign movies and who like to be seen dipping into Sartre. When one moves on to the less discerning masses, the situation is not so clear.

Japanese newspapers

Of the four large daily newspapers, three are conservative and doggedly pro-American, while the fourth, the Asahi Shimbun, bears watching. The Asahi is the largest and most influential of all — how influential one can perhaps imagine by thinking of the New York Times with a circulation of some 6 million. The Asahi is a brilliantly edited newspaper, and the immense affection in which it is held by its readers suggests how good it is at giving them what they want.

From the end of the Occupation until early last fall, the Asahi seemed to be making itself the vehicle of the peaceful forces. It worked itself into a fury over the Rosenberg case, which it found to be evidence that democracy was failing in the United States, and almost every day it went into lengthy complaints because someone had been refused an American visa or because American soldiers simply would not learn to behave like good Japanese.

Then it began to change — whether because it sensed that the game was going stale or because it realized it was not living up to its own high standards, or for some other reason, one cannot say. Even now it is cooler toward the United States than any of its three rivals; but it rejected the Rosenberg letters, which wore offered to it for serial publication, and occasionally it carries an eminently sensible story on MeCarthyism from a Washington or New York correspondent. The Asahi still can afford a column now and then, though, for a letter from a third-grader who longs for knowledge but can’t study because the guns are so loud.

Antiwar movies

Last year was also the year of the antiwar movie. The vogue started late in 1952 with the release of Gembaku no Ko (Child of the Atom Bomb), which was laid in Hiroshima and gave the public a sampling of the dreadfully seared faces still to be seen in that city. Himeyuri no Tō (Tower of the Star Lily) came out early in 1953 and set a new box-office record. It told the story of the Himeyuri or Star Lily Troop, a group of Okinawan normal-school girls who were used as volunteer workers by the Japanese army and who were wiped out by American artillery. Two sequels have been done on the high-school boys who died under similar circumstances a little farther south.

There have also been movies on General Yamashita, who was hanged as a war criminal in the Philippines; on Admiral Yamamoto, whose plane was shot down in the South Pacific; and on the Yamato, at the time the largest battleship in the world, which was sunk on its way to Okinawa in 1945. General Yamashita was a natural for the new vogue. The facts about his unjust trial were kept from the Japanese by the Occupation, and have as a result aroused more than their share of interest since.

The Yamato, however, seems rather to have missed the mark. The critics have found that the film is not clearly enough antiwar, and some of them have indicated an uneasiness lest it arouse in badly supervised young men the desire to become heroic naval officers.

Toward the end of 1953 the Japanese Teachers union, one of the most aggressively left-wing elements in Sōhyb, made a movie called Hiroshima, having found Gembaku no ko much too tepid. The Shōchiku Motion Picture Company refused to distribute it, on the grounds that it did little for international understanding, and the Teachers union proceeded to show it independently, with moderately good receipts.

An offshoot of the war movie, the base movie, put in its appearance at the end of 1953 with the release of a highly controversial movie called Akasen Kichi (almost untranslatable; Sinful Base might do as an approximation). Akasen Kichi told in the most vivid terms of the corruption spread by an American base at the foot of Mount Fuji. Its success seems to have been due less to its doctrinaire elements, however, than to the enthusiastic performance of Akemi Negishi, Japan’s sexiest movie actress, in the role of a prostitute.

The rage for war movies seems now to have worked itself out. Independent producers, predominantly leftist, continue to work away at the leavings, but Shōehiku has decided that t he day of the war movie is over, that 1954 is the year of the sentimental love story, and Shōehiku has probably the shrewdest planners in the business. One producer recently indicated that he would like to do a movie on the sufferings of Japanese war prisoners in Siberia. That would indeed be a new departure.

Public apathy

Japan as a whole continues to be conservative, despite the clamor on the left. The conservative government stays in power, and public opinion polls indicate that sentiment for rearmament is growing slightly. This may be due in part to the fact that Syngman Rhee last fall excluded the Japanese from some of the richest fishing grounds in the Japan Sea, and the Japanese were not able to do anything about it. No one hopes to be able to compete with the United States or the Soviet Union, but to be unable even to slap down the Koreans seems disgraceful to the self-respecting Japanese. It is interesting that public opinion polls also show the laboring class divided almost in half on the subject of rearmament, an indication that Sōhyō’s leaders have not brought a united following with them into the peace movement.

There is a flurry in the press now and then over a rally off in the provinces indicating that the extreme Right may finally be coalescing, but so far nothing seems to call for real alarm. There is also some uneasiness over the fact that the government wants to curb the political activities of teachers and to strengthen the police force,

But whatever misgivings one may have about the present Education Minister, who used to be in the Home Ministry (the old .Japanese equivalent of Beria’s M.V.D.), the fact is that the teachers do rather need sitting on. The Teachers Union of Yamaguchi Prefecture in southwestern Japan recently produced a sort of almanac for the edification of its students, with a thought for each day on American imperialism and on that intolerable evil, American bases.

Although one would hate to see the Home Ministry come back, it must be admitted that the police are weak. Only two of the seven Communist leaders who went underground in 1950 were ever apprehended.

Passive government

Far from being moved by radical forces in either direction, the present government is if any thing too passive, and that perhaps reflects a public opinion with no strong feelings other than a hope that the Japanese economy won’t fall on its face for a while.

That is not to say, of course, that there is no resentment against American policy and American bases in Japan — only that the resentment is not at the moment very dynamic. American bases rankle and will continue to rankle. They suggest that Japan is not a sovereign and equal power, and a painful sensitiveness to any suggestion that Japan might be inferior has accounted for a great deal in modern Japanese history. Indeed an observer sometimes feels that the United States could more easily get what it wants from Japan by walking out and studiously looking the other way.