An Eastern Weimar Republic?

...How long can this state of affairs continue...

...If no such decisions are forced in the future, perhaps things will be all right...

...On the one hand they can roar to the mountains and beaches on their motorcycles, pack the baseball parks and skating rinks, stream in and out of bars that offer every shade of perverse gratification, enjoy complete sexual license and take advantage of very free abortion laws...

...Most of the country's intellectual leaders have found in its behavior ample justification for the disturbances that followed...

...Yet it is possible that, given governments that make no dramatic decisions in foreign policy and confine themselves to the most limited routine of governing, with now and then a plank stolen from the Socialist platform, that the country will be so atomized that the mobs of May and June will not see fit to come together again...

...As in Weimar Germany, a period of almost no restraints at all came after a period of very harsh restraints...

...but the real danger is from highly emotional reformers who are allowed to have their way by force, and from intellectual leaders who apologize for them as generals apologized for their angry but well-intentioned juniors in the '30s...

...Distinguished visitors from abroad have not tired of pointing out similarities between the two, and when, in June, the demonstrations against the Japanese-American Security Treaty turned into open rioting, we wondered if it had finally happened...

...In Japan, much seems to be repeating itself, and one can sit and watch...

...The rioters lost their momentum and then fell to bickering among themselves, and the crisis passed, for the time being at least, on a note of high comedy...

...a person has done himself no harm by being prepared with either silence or pro-Chinese utterances...

...They have children, and nothing to fear from the United States and a great deal to fear from the other side...

...In Japan, words are not always tested against objective fact, and the tag "feudal," applied to the conservative Government today, has quite magical results in blinding people to what would seem to be the real, present danger...

...When the mainland Chinese finally have their embassy in Tokyo and "Sino-Japanese cultural exchange" gets under way in earnest, the Japanese will be the material the Chinese have always wanted to work with...

...Certainly it is oversimplified to say that the country is split down the middle: It is split a thousand ways, and threatens to split in yet more...

...This is a people that has in the past given itself to absolute principles, that has lost them, that has not on the whole been good at inventing them for itself and that evidently wishes to have them again...

...and America has given the Japanese a crisis to look forward to in 10 years' time, when the treaty arrangements are again to be reviewed...

...The Japanese intellectual has been charged above with a certain opportunism...

...These are simple facts, and they have significance because, in spite of industrialization, prosperity and a great love for refined French things and plebeian American things, the Japanese are fundamentally among the non-committed peoples...

...Conspicuous among the apologists was Dr...

...They demonstrate without permission, and an uncertain police force is reluctant to move against them...

...At the very least it can be said that Dr...

...Instead it went ahead and had its way, and it is therefore on the record as "undemocratic...

...The Japanese will have many pretty things to show the Chinese but no reason for showing them, beyond a belief that culture is good and exchange is good, too...

...They have been free on the one hand to taste of as wide a variety of pleasures as was ever put together in one place, and on the other to chip away at the pillars on which the free society rests: the courts, the legislature, the police...

...In any case, we must give up the notion that industrialization and prosperity automatically bring situations favorable to democracy...

...The stock market rallied...

...Tokyo It has been pointed out more than once in the past several months that post-war Japan has reached the full years of the Weimar Republic plus one...

...Europeans, however, saw Khrushchev's frightening performance in Paris and had a horrid vision of what they were exposed to...

...The Zengakuren students' union, apparently bilked of funds it had collected to aid its heroes, attacked the headquarters of the Communist party...

...So did the public...

...From it too the excuse of 1945 will never again have quite the same credibility...

...Had the Security Treaty been left in its old form, there would have been no grumbling, and the nation would not have been asked to do the one thing it will not do: come out as a nation and say that it chooses one bloc over the other...

...The old treaty was a relic of the Occupation, and the Japanese role in its negotiation was passive...

...It is all very odd, but the oddness arises from the fact that the use of the expression "parliamentary democracy" has misled the West into thinking that Japanese affairs and procedures should follow principles similar to those of the West...

...Is it democratic for the minority to have its way by force...

...The Japanese on the other hand, and especially the Japanese intellectuals, showed how fundamentally uncommitted they are...

...The sequence of events beginning with the U-2 probably left the whole world with doubts about American leadership...

...We are now told that the rioting, which was intended forcibly to prevent the legally constituted majority from acting, was of a democratic nature, and that Japanese democracy has taken a great step forward...

...Kaya did the easy thing when the difficult thing was far from impossible...

...Both gentlemen said that the miscreants were angry, and that we should not reprove them...

...They invariably bring problems of their own...

...We may hope that what happened in Germany will never happen again, and that we will never again have before our eyes evidence of how people did behave and how they should have behaved...

...It is not good form to suggest that an unarmed, solitary Japan—for disarmed "neutrality" is the goal of the rioters—would have anything to fear from Oriental comrades...

...In May and June it began to seem that there were the beginnings of one Weimar institution that had so far been lacking, the private army...

...stand might not jeopardize the future of Japan...

...It is all very odd...

...Seishi Kaya, the president of Tokyo University, whose statement justifying the June 15 student uprising is ludicrously similar to a statement by General Araki justifying an assassination 25 years before...

...One should not conclude, however, that there is no cause for concern...

...The minority says that it resents not having been allowed a chance to talk over the troublesome matter of the treaty, and yet it opposed extension of the Diet, thus blocking the occasion for talking...

...There was a quick drawing together of the West, as of people who see that they may not be wholly adequate to one another, but that without one another they are nothing...

...Popular suspicion of Russia had its beginnings before the Meiji Restoration, but in the Japanese view of China a certain wishfulness prevails...

...The minority also says that the majority should have consulted the electorate, and yet virtually everyone agrees that the majority would have won again...

...The Japanese —at any rate the two-thirds of them who have escaped the grind of the farms—have for at least the latter half of these 15 years been among the freest people in the world...

...The week of June 15 did indeed seem like the eve of a revolution...

...Now the nation was asked to commit itself, and it split itself rather than do so...

...I am on rather good terms with one of the exceptions, a lady writer, and I heard her discussing with her anxious-faced daughters the question of whether a pro-U.S...

...There was an element of expediency in the nearly unanimous opposition of the articulate intellectuals to the Kishi Government and the revised Security Treaty, and in their support of the Moscow-Peking policy of unarmed neutrality...

...This is by way of suggesting that Japan is not a Western nation and does not behave as such, and that sinister comparisons with Weimar Germany are not necessarily final...

...Much depends on whether or not the most valuable lesson from the recent unpleasantness has been learned: not to force the Japanese to a decision...

...Day after day trade unionists were able to take over the heart of the city without police opposition...

...The nearly unanimous intellectual opposition to the Government and the Security Treaty in May and June suggests either a want of courage to take an unfashionable stand or want of insight in examining a problem so complex as to make unanimity almost unthinkable...

...Never was the docility of the Japanese masses more apparent...

...Were there horrible dynamics by which the too free society pulled up quivering and demoralized at the end of a fixed period of time...

...On the other Edward Seidensticker, translator of several Japanese novels, has reported from Japan for over a decade...

...If disaster comes again and anyone survives, it will be very difficult to accept the explanation one listened to with sympathy in 1945: that the individual was powerless...

...There is another way in which the Japanese have shown themselves to be very much a part of Asia, and rather remote from the West...

...The city was passively turned over to the demonstrators day after day, and no one protested—not the taxi driver and the shopkeeper who lost business, not the subway commuter who was forbidden to alight at certain stops for several hours a day, not the ordinary citizen whose chances of being robbed rose sharply while the police were elsewhere, not the shoe-shine boy who was ordered to move on so that fund-collecting students (without permits) might have his corner of the station...

...Yet nothing went quite as it should have...

...This is a country without native intellectual defenses, peculiarly vulnerable to secular absolutes, given to civic violence, tending to be exces-sivly sanguine about the intentions of the Communist world—and particularly China...

...There will be agitation against American bases, it is true, and particularly for the return of Okinawa, where there are to be elections shortly...

...They raid the Diet (Parliament) building from time to time, and show their contempt for its works by urinating on the speaker's desk...

...The labor movement is not united, and the conservative party that rules the country is far from united...

...Japan has a history of its own, rich in equally sinister parallels...

...Much more to the point, however, is what might be described as the intellectual defenselessness of the Japanese...

...Never before was it clearer that the Japanese had their own way of doing things, that Westernization had not made a Western nation of Japan...

...The Americans were faltering, and in their faltering might bring unpleasantness to other people, and so the time had come to think of moving on...

...The anti-treaty, anti-Eisenhower demonstrations were in large measure a result of the U-2 incident and of Khrushchev's remarkable performance in Paris...

...The disturbances call for reflection on the question of mass guilt...

...One can hardly blame the daughters...

...The Communist secretary general then denounced the Zengakuren as "a hireling of American imperialism...

...There can be no question that it exists—one only has to note the discrepancy between what eminent Japanese say in conversation and what they say in print...

...The Government and the police are not above suspicion, to be sure...

...The Chinese will have a reason for every picture they show and every word they print in Japan...

...hand, they are able to attack the courts in a manner that would be actionable in most democracies— judges have even been intimidated with impunity...

...The Japanese have an Asian faith in the virtues of consultation and compromise: When the minority disapproved of the revised Security Treaty, the majority should have withdrawn its immediate claims, settled down for a long bout of "talking things over," and taken action only when—if ever —the minority had been mollified...