the storms of June are over: but the Japanese sky is still full of clouds. The recent high-tide of the anti-Kishi movement, whose crest was the massive resistance to the new US-Japan Security Treaty, washed away the visit of President Eisenhower. Nevertheless, the Premier and his Liberal-Democratic Party won the summer. The ever-increasing petitions (signed by more than ten million people, and endorsed by almost all the major commercial newspapers) that the Lower House should be dissolved before the ratification, were disregarded. The new Treaty became effective, though the Opposition declared it null and void. Kishi has gone, but the Kishi-policy has survived.
It is too early to estimate the general political significance of the resistance. The new Security Treaty was intended to tie Japan down for another ten years as a military base against the Communist camp in the Far East. Mr. Kishi, adhering to the familiar logic that the Cold War is “reality” and Neutralism “the nightmare”, insisted that the new Treaty would give more equal terms to Japan than the old one, which was nothing more than the bastard child of the American Occupation. The Opposition proposed that Japan should renounce, rather than revise, the old Treaty.