DANGER IN THE FAR EAST

...The treaty is an unhappy aftermath to a treatment of Japan by America more magnanimous than most treatments of vanquished nations by victorious powers...

...The facts seem to lie between the opposing explanations...

...If we listen to some American rebuttals, clean-living G.I.'s are being enticed into drunkenness, drug addiction, and venereal disease by wicked Japanese prostitutes, with the connivance of the Japanese authorities...

...At the same time, as many Japanese as possible should be transferred to less sensitive positions, and severance pay given to any who lose their jobs...

...Ending of the Occupation and re-establishment of Japanese independence were made conditional on its acceptance...

...They have one point in common—to reduce the elements of involuntary dependency in Japan's relations with the United States, and increase the elements of voluntary alliance...

...More important, they would also be astute political moves from a selfish American viewpoint...

...The Americans believe these facts related, since the Japanese Communist Party has tried to infiltrate the strategic ranks of the base workers...

...Many of its features, as we shall see, resemble the Nineteenth Century "unequal treaties" to which Asians are hypersensitive...

...The Ryukyu Islands...

...America occupies these islands, Japan wants them back, and the inhabitants prefer Japanese to American rule...

...It might have the added advantage of calling a Russian bluff...

...This would be expensive for the Americans, but the only alternative seems to be observance of the Japanese labor code in both letter and spirit...

...The American military in 1957 deposed the popularly elected Mayor Senaga of Naha, the largest city...

...Japan also promises to provide the Security Force with bases, financial assistance, "logistic support," and so on...

...It includes a majority of Japan's youth, intellectuals, and urban workers...

...Japanese labor law, on the other hand, safeguards the civil rights of workers more carefully than does American...

...This chain stretches north from Hokkaido to Kamchatka, roughly paralleling the Siberian coast of the Soviet Union...

...They accused him of Communism and had imprisoned him previously for sheltering a Japanese Communist fugitive...

...One possibility might be to give Japanese authorities, local as well as national, the power to declare questionable areas off limits to Security Forces personnel, and to give Japanese police the power to enforce these regulations along with the American M.P.'s...

...Here are delicate issues, where mutual recrimination abounds...

...Labor Problems...

...Dismissal of workers on political grounds is forbidden without proof of specific betrayal of trust...

...If they did defy Japanese opinion, the result would be a worldwide propaganda campaign against arrogant "American Imperialism...

...Before Japanese pressure builds up to a threatening point, the United States should amend certain provisions of the Japanese-American Mutual Security Treaty and its supporting Administrative Agreement, which have galled the Japanese and inspired anti-American agitation in Japan...

...The Left mak*s up a full third of Japan's electorate...

...In the summer of 1957, following talks between Premier Kishi and President Eisenhower, plans were formed to withdraw American ground forces almost completely, but leave naval and air units in Japan...

...Budget Problems...

...Their opposition appears to be gaining strength, to the point of sporadic outbreaks of resistance by peasants and fishermen when farm land or fishing grounds are taken over under the treaty for military facilities...

...Termination Procedure...

...secret American information sometimes appears in Japanese political and technical magazines...

...The population of the Ryukyus and other offshore islands south and southwest of Japan is racially and culturally related to the mainland Japanese and is even more nearly Japanese in sentiment and allegiance...

...When the United States granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, it was under no Philippine compulsion...

...On the other hand, the Security Forces should not have to shut up shop in consequence of a single captious "Yankee Go Home" majority in the Japanese Diet...

...Modifications should be made in the procedures by which the Security Forces acquire land for expansion of their facilities...

...We believe it is high time for the United States to make another such gesture in the Far East...

...An expensive concession has been the steady transfer of American installations away from large cities, where they remind the Japanese of the equivocal character of Japanese independence, to comparatively secluded areas where they must often be rebuilt completely...

...and thus avoid the persistent "too little—too late" of Western concessions elsewhere in Asia...

...Another possible procedure might be to permit termination by simple majorities in two or three successive Diets...

...Instead they have remained under American military government and have been highly fortified...

...Maximum limits should be set on the size of the financial subvention to be provided by the Japanese each year for the logistic support of the Security Force, but the most delicate budgetary problem relates to Japan's appropriations for its own defense force...

...This procedure has given rise to outright anti-American riots, which were notably successful at Sunakawa on the outskirts of Tokyo...

...Subsequently he served as a tax economist in Japan, visiting professor to Japanese universities, and a United Nations representative there...

...In the San Francisco Peace Treaty the Japanese government suspended its sovereignty over these islands—of which the most important is Okinawa—under the presumption that their control would go to the United Nations...

...They aim to make Japan's status less like an occupied area, and more like an equal partner such as Britain or France...

...The issue of Japanese trade with China does not, however, involve the security treaty or the administrative agreement in any direct fashion...

...During the war he was a Navy language officer and POW interrogator in the Pacific...

...The details of the present-day charges are not clear, and neither is the extent to which the Mutual Security Treaty is really involved...

...A possible solution would be a requirement for Japanese Diet approval of any expansion of Security Forces land holdings in land-poor Japan...

...Socialists, Communists, and minor Left parties unite with the Nationalists of the extreme Right in demanding abrogation of the treaty and agreement as colonial and imperialistic...

...The location: Japan...

...Formally, by the text of the Treaty, the Japanese government invites American troops to remain in Japan as a Security Force until the two countries agree that Japan can defend herself...

...Japan cannot simply withdraw the invitation...

...for the return of some of the islands, especially the Habomai group nearest to Hokkaido, but the Russians have been intransigent...

...Morality Problems...

...This might not accomplish a great deal...

...It would be a costless move for the United States to renounce any rights to military installations of any kind on any territory which may be returned to Japan by the Soviet Union as a result of negotiations between the two countries...

...From the beginning the treaty and the administrative agreement have been anathema to the Japanese Left...

...Security on the American bases in Japan leaves much to be desired...

...The contests there are between disguised Communist and open Socialist parties, both anti-American...

...Japanese law regarding prostitution has only recently become puritanical, and its enforcement may never reach the general American level...

...Unless similar action is taken in the other islands, or unless United Nations trusteeship is established, there is every prospect of another Cyprus in the Pacific...

...Since that date, they have been under Russian occupation...

...No treaty amendment can do away with this chronic source of Japanese-American ill-feeling...

...There are widespread complaints that the civil rights of leftists and pro-Japanese Ryukyuans are being suppressed...

...Surely it would be preferable to forestall any such dilemma by generous unilateral modifications of the treaty, before the hostile pressure has built up too far, MARTIN BRONFENBRENNER, professor of economics at Michigan Slate University, is currently on his fifth postwar visit to Japan...

...The procedure reminds the Japanese of the Maiji Constitution of 1889, under which a series of subtle provisions placed the Army and Navy budgets effectively beyond the control of the Diet...

...The islands were Japanese-owned and Japanese-inhabited until 1945...

...The ending of the Occupation was another astute political move from a selfish American viewpoint...

...But possessing inadequate evidence against individuals, some American commanders would like to "purge" all their leftist Japanese employees, using the standards used to weed out "security risks" in America...

...A method should be set up within the treaty whereby the Japanese government could, if it so desired, withdraw its invitation to the American Security Force, without either removing the "no-war" clause from its Constitution or extra-constitutionally building up its "defense forces" to the level the Americans deem adequate...

...American personnel are subject to Japanese law and courts in connection with all criminal and civil suits arising outside their specific duties, which are construed quite narrowly as in the Girard homicide case...

...A formal organization to modify the treaty was also established in Tokyo in the spring of 1957...

...Japanese labor leaders are predominantly Socialist or Communist in sympathy, and are in no mood to tolerate exceptions to Japanese labor law, particularly exceptions resembling the Taft-Hartley Act or "McCarthyism," two of their pet abominations...

...America may soon face a new crisis in the Far East—not of Communist making but of our own...

...If this happens, American-Japanese friendship in Asia will suffer the same strains as Anglo-Greek friendship in the Middle East...

...Such amendments would be generous concessions...

...This treaty with its accompanying administrative agreement was part of the price Japan paid for ending the Occupation...

...The Kurile Islands...

...The Americans could sit tight under the letter of the treaty, which does not permit abrogation by Japan...

...The murky situation could nevertheless be cleared up by an explicit statement that nothing in the treaty reduces the Diet's control of the defense budget...

...If we listen to some Japanese views, expressed in books like Chastity of Japan, American G.I.'s are debauching Japanese womanhood at a wholesale rate and in full view of Japanese childhood, while Japanese authorities are powerless to intervene...

...Seven further concessions should be made voluntarily and unilaterally by the Americans to the Japanese as soon as possible...

...It has gained strength in every election since 1949 and may eventually take over the government in free elections...

...The red-light districts around Sasebo and Tachikawa would probably stay open, and would still be poor places to establish female seminaries or bring up adolescent daughters...

...A possible solution might be the replacement of Japanese workers in sensitive categories by Americans, either military or civilian...

...When the United States ended the Occupation of Japan in 1951-52, it was under no Japanese compulsion...

...The issue here involves civil rights on the one hand, military security on the other...

...The Americans wisely made a few concessions in carrying out the administrative agreement itself, despite some objection in the armed forces...

...Prostitution has been a sizable source of Japanese public and private revenue, not to mention foreign exchange...

...Land Problems...

...A minority of Americans, on the other hand, run amuck when faced for the first time with the combination of loose laws, loose women, and immunity from home-town public opinion, and compress a lifetime of high living into their tour of Japanese duty...

...If they left under pressure, their loss of face would be comparable to the loss suffered by Britain in evacuating Suez under Egyptian pressure in 1955— not to mention 1957...

...Perhaps the Japanese should be permitted to terminate the treaty by a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the Diet...

...it was also an astute political move from a selfish American viewpoint...

...This made Senaga a martyr, and a Senaga lieutenant won the subsequent election in Senaga's stead...

...The Japanese workers in American bases include a good many active Leftists...

...This arrangement was actually not "mutual" at all...

...The current procedure permits land to be taken over without the approval of any Japanese agency, although landowners are compensated at fixed prices by the Japanese...

...Denunciation of the Mutual Security Treaty by some future Japanese government would leave the United States in a delicate position...

...The Japanese have negotiated with the U.S.S.R...

...But responsibility and power would be shifted simultaneously into Japanese hands, should the Japanese desire seriously to clean up the areas...

...They cover a variety of issues, from red-light districts to territorial transfers...

...The American and Japanese military, acting separately or in concert, allegedly hide behind the provisions of the Mutual Security Treaty to railroad through the Diet without adequate discussion military appropriations which many Japanese would prefer to see devoted to welfare expenditures or returned to the people in tax reductions...

...The most important was the renunciation of extra-territoriality...

...This is particularly important in the case of the Air Force, which requires longer runways for jets than it used originally for propeller planes and which must take over level farm land for runway extensions...

...Among the reasons for Soviet intransigence is fear of American bases near Siberia, since the Mutual Security Treaty "invites" the Americans to establish such bases anywhere in Japanese territory...

...At the same time America has lessened her opposition to Japanese economic pressure for trade with the mainland of China as a replacement for the dollars spent in Japan by the American military, and Japanese trade with China is expanding...

...American popularity on Okinawa has fallen to the point where no frankly pro-American candidate has a chance in a major Oki-nawan election...

...The grant of independence was a generous fulfillment of a generous promise...

...There is agreement on only one point: most of the American base areas are what fundamentalist preachers call "Sodom and Gomorrah" or "dens of iniquity...

...The cause: The Japanese-American Mutual Security Treaty negotiated by John Foster Dulles in 1951, before his elevation to the Secretaryship of State...

...The Northern Ryukyus (the Amami-O-Shima group of islands) had been administered as part of the island of Kyushu prior to 1945, and on this basis they have been returned to Japan...