As an American, I did not support the Yoshida foreign policy in its entirety. But as an observer of leaders and leadership, I can appreciate its soundness from his standpoint and the enormous boost it gave to Japan’s economic recovery.
Before the realities of the Cold War began to press on Japan and the U.S., MacArthur had thought Japan could become a new kind of nation: an economic powerhouse that had renounced forever the intention of resorting to war to solve its disputes with other nations. He used the phrase Switzerland of the East, and the idea was written into the MacArthur constitution as Article 9, the “no war” clause.
Vernon Walters once told me, “Most generals see only to the end of war. MacArthur looked beyond war.” Article 9 of the Japanese constitution is the most concrete proof that MacArthur, who had seen firsthand the horrors of two world wars, dreamed of a world in which war would no longer be necessary. Unhappily his optimism was premature. By the late 1940s many Americans believed that the enactment of Article 9 had been a mistake. With the Soviet Union and, after 1949, Communist China on its western flank, Japan needed some means of self-defense. When the Korean War broke out, MacArthur took most of his troops to Korea and in their place created an indigenous 75,000-man Japanese security force—later called the Self-Defense Force. Yoshida believed that Japan had renounced offensive war but had not given up its natural right to defend itself from aggression by others. He quickly set to work, over the opposition of the Socialists and a pacifist public, to make the new force as effective as possible.
Obviously 75,000 men, however effective they were, could not defend an island nation one and a half times the size of the United Kingdom. But Yoshida resisted pressure for further rearmament, both before independence in 1951 and after. His reasons were largely economic. “Under the present economic conditions,” he said, “the construction of a single battleship would upset the whole of government finance.”
Truman had assigned John Foster Dulles to work out the details of a peace treaty between Japan and the Allies, and Dulles used his position to try to influence Yoshida to rearm Japan. But when he first mentioned the subject, the Prime Minister replied, “Don’t talk nonsense.” Nonetheless the issue remained alive in the Eisenhower administration, and it remained a concern of Dulles after he became Secretary of State.
Before I left on my 1953 trip, Dulles suggested that I address this sensitive issue publicly in Tokyo to test the reaction in both the U.S. and Japan. In a luncheon speech at the Japanese-American Society on November 19, I pointed out that the situation had become radically and dangerously different from what it had been when the U.S. imposed Article 9 on Japan. Our hopes for a peaceful world, free from the threat of armed conquest, had been shattered by the Soviet Union’s aggressive actions.
Article 9, therefore, had been a well-meaning mistake, I said. “We made a mistake because we misjudged the intentions of the Soviet leaders. . . . We recognize that disarmament under present world conditions by the free nations would inevitably lead to war and, therefore, it is because we want peace and we believe in peace that we ourselves have rearmed since 1946, and that we believe that Japan and other free nations must assume their share of the responsibility of rearming.” The Japanese press gave the speech banner headlines. Not surprisingly, major emphasis was put not on my call for rearmament but on my admission that the U.S. had made a mistake.
Yoshida’s reaction was polite but noncommittal, and he stuck to his position until his retirement in 1954. Since then Japanese defense spending has crept upward, but it still comprises less than one percent of Japan’s gross national product, whereas the U.S. spends six percent and the Soviet Union as much as eighteen percent of its GNP on defense. While the Self-Defense Force has grown substantially in sophistication and more than tripled in size, it is still ridiculously inadequate; Japan, for instance, has two-thirds fewer men in uniform than North Korea.
I believe it is imperative that Japan take on more of the burden for its own defense. However, I cannot fault Yoshida for disagreeing. One of the marks of a good foreign policymaker is the degree to which he obtains the best possible deal for his own country at the least possible cost. By this criterion Yoshida’s was an excellent policy.
Like many of his policies, it was also dangerous for him politically. By opposing large-scale rearmament but supporting and encouraging the Self-Defense Force, Yoshida received none of the political benefits that a pacifist policy would have given him at a time when pacifism was widespread in Japan. At the same time, by putting Japan’s security under the wing of the U.S., he incurred the wrath both of pro-rearmament rightists and of anti-American leftists.
It would have been politically easier for Yoshida to profess some form of pan-Asian neutrality. But he knew neutrality was meaningless for a weak country and reminded those who disagreed of an old Japanese adage: “The frog in the well doesn’t know the dimensions of heaven and earth.”
Yoshida was realistic enough to know that Japan needed protection from its enemies. He was practical enough to know that the Japanese people could not afford to pay the cost of that protection by themselves. And he was shrewd enough to know that the U.S. would pay instead.
Yoshida’s security alliance with the United States became the most divisive foreign policy issue in Japan. Critics said it turned Japan into a virtual U.S. colony. Riots over its renewal in 1960 caused President Eisenhower to cancel a visit to Japan, and it remains a source of controversy twenty years later. Despite the criticism, however, the pact contributed enormously to Japan’s development into an economic superpower.
If he had given in to the simplistic “Yankee go home” jingoism of his opponents and entered what they euphemistically called “an overall peace”—an arrangement that would have included China and the Soviets and deprived Japan of the protection it needed—MacArthur’s Switzerland of the East might have become the Finland of the East, a Communist satellite in fact if not in name. Instead Japan was able to devote itself single-mindedly to creating an economy and a standard of living that are the envy of almost every nation on earth.
Yoshida lived another thirteen years after leaving office in 1954, and he derived enormous satisfaction from seeing his policies bear fruit. His opponents said he would make Japan “the orphan of Asia.” Instead he helped make her a giant.
• • •
One reason his policies did bear fruit was that they were tended from 1957 until 1972 by his successors, first by Nobusuke Kishi and then by Hayato Ikeda and Eisaku Sato, both graduates of the “Yoshida school.” I had the good fortune to know all three and found them to be world statesmen of the first rank. It is a truism of leadership that great leaders rarely groom younger men because they are so captivated by their own accomplishments that they cannot imagine anyone taking their places. Yoshida was a notable exception.
I have often been struck by remarkable similarities between Yoshida and West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer. Both ruled when they were in their seventies. Both courageously opposed the totalitarians who controlled their countries in the 1930s. And both presided over the resurrection of defeated countries and their transformation into economic superpowers. In 1954, on Yoshida’s world tour, the two men met in Bonn. Yoshida admitted to Adenauer that he had always imagined himself engaged in a kind of friendly competition with the German since their circumstances and backgrounds were so similar.
There was one crucial difference between them, however. Yoshida carefully prepared his Finance Minister, Ikeda, to follow in his footsteps. Adenauer treated his equally capable Finance Minister and successor, Ludwig Erhard, so shabbily that Erhard could not control his emotional distress in discussing it with me in 1959.
Yoshida was not necessarily less of an egotist than Adenauer. It is in fact the ultimate in self-gratification for a leader to see his policies continued long after he leaves the stage. The trick is for him not to become convinced that he is the only actor who can play the part. Adenauer fell into that trap. Yoshida gracefully avoided
it.
I had known Sato before I became President, and I negotiated extensively with him during my presidency. The most significant outcome of our talks was the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972, and even then it seemed that Yoshida was a party to our conversations. Sato mentioned his mentor often. When a Sato emissary came to Washington in advance of our meetings for preliminary talks with Henry Kissinger, he used a pseudonym to enhance security. The name Sato’s envoy chose was “Mr. Yoshida.”
Yoshida remained in touch with MacArthur until the general’s death in 1964. He had hoped to see MacArthur in September 1951, when the U.S.-Japan peace treaty that MacArthur had made possible was signed, but Truman and Acheson spitefully refused to invite the general to the ceremonies at San Francisco. The State Department also told a disappointed Yoshida that it would be “inappropriate” for him to visit MacArthur in New York before returning to Japan.
• • •
When Yoshida made a state visit to Washington in 1954, he became the first Japanese leader since the war to visit the U.S. Senate. As Vice President, I was the Senate’s presiding officer, and I had the distinct privilege of welcoming him. It was a measure of how much progress he and MacArthur had made since the end of the war that I was able to introduce him as “a great friend of the United States and the cause of freedom.” The Senate responded by giving him a standing ovation.
Yoshida left office the following month after a no-confidence vote in the Diet against his fifth government. For a variety of reasons, many of which were beyond Yoshida’s control, his popularity had reached a low point. Some members of his government were implicated in a shipbuilding scandal. Characteristically he was being criticized by some for being an American toady and by others for failing to obtain enough American aid during his visit to Washington. And finally, many conservatives who had been purged by MacArthur were now back in action and angling for power. That he held onto the premiership and accomplished as much as he did for more than a year and a half after the end of the Occupation and the political purges are testaments to his skill and resilience.
Yoshida left office reluctantly, and the circumstances of his departure were messy. He had always been undiplomatically blunt toward those who opposed or displeased him, even when he was a diplomat; once in the 1930s he advised a bothersome superior to either calm down or commit himself to an insane asylum. As Prime Minister, on visits to Japanese zoos he would call the monkeys and penguins by the names of prominent political figures. His freewheeling behavior entertained the Japanese people and helped ease the humiliation of defeat and occupation, but it also bruised the tender egos of his enemies.
They avenged themselves in the end. The late-1954 Diet debate over the no-confidence resolution was brutal. Once Yoshida paused over his notes and said in a moment of confusion, “Ah . . . ah . . . ah.” His opponents yelled back cruelly, “Ah . . . ah . . . ah.” In mid-December, Yoshida’s leftist and conservative opponents joined forces against him and passed the no-confidence measure. It was considered unlikely that he could win yet again at the polls; Yoshida, now seventy-six years old, had finally been beaten.
No Japanese Premier except Sato has matched Yoshida’s seven years and two months in office, and none has had to endure the atmosphere of sweeping, sudden change and political instability in which he governed. Yoshida held power through a military occupation and the brief burst of nationalism that followed it, the Korean War, the dizzying inflation of the late 1940s and the equally dizzying economic surge of the early 1950s, and the establishment of social and governmental reforms that shook Japan to its foundations.
For a while after leaving office he slipped into the obscurity that usually envelops a defeated politician. But his protégés, Sato and Ikeda, made regular trips to Oiso for advice and counsel. He wrote his memoirs and articles and eventually undertook occasional diplomatic missions for his successors. After a few years had passed, the extent of his vast contribution to Japan’s stability and economic vigor began to be appreciated more clearly. By the time of his death, he was a respected elder statesman.
Today, almost thirty years after the end of his career, Yoshida is viewed with renewed respect by a new generation. When Japanese politicians visit me, they often tell me how much they admire not only his accomplishments but also his personal example—his courage, his absolute forthrightness, his willingness to stand up to enormous political pressures in defense of his beliefs and Japan’s interests. Just as de Gaulle and Churchill will live on in the collective memories of their nations, especially in the example they will provide for generation after generation of young people, so Yoshida has taken on new life in Japan.
• • •
In 1960, in the midst of my campaign for the presidency, the eighty-two-year-old Yoshida was once again summoned from retirement at Oiso to serve his country. The Japanese government asked him to head a delegation to Washington to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the first Japanese diplomatic mission to Washington. We invited him and Madame Aso to our home. After dinner Yoshida gave me a carving that he said had been specially made for me by a Japanese artist. With the campaign very much on my own mind, I could not help smiling appreciatively when Yoshida mentioned, in a studiedly offhanded way, that the work’s title was “Victory.”
After the election that November he sent me a very gracious note describing the outcome as “sad” and saying that he hoped I would come back to lead again “at home and abroad.” I particularly appreciated it then, because such gestures mean more in defeat than they do in victory, and from him, because it was a gesture he no longer had to make. During his years in office Yoshida had developed into a tough, skilled politician whose enemies accused him of being ruthless and selfish. I knew better, and I cherished the fact that in that difficult moment he showed himself to be a loyal friend.
I saw Yoshida for the last time in 1964 at Oiso, after a meeting scheduled for the spring of that year was delayed by a sadly ironic twist of fate. I was making a tour of the Far East that spring, and Yoshida had invited me to a luncheon at his home. But on April 5, four days before I arrived in Tokyo, MacArthur died, and Yoshida and Madame Aso left immediately for the United States to attend the funeral. The dinner was rescheduled for the following November, when I visited Asia again.
Our forty-mile automobile ride to Oiso, through traffic jams worse than those on the freeways of Los Angeles, was grueling, but the journey was well worth the trouble. Yoshida met me at the door, wearing a kimono. At our previous meetings he had worn western clothes and even shown a particular fondness for high Victorian collars. Seeing him for the first time dressed in traditional Japanese garb reminded me once again of the extent to which this product of Meiji Japan was an amalgam of eastern and western influences. Of all the Japanese leaders I have known, Yoshida was paradoxically the most western and yet the most Japanese. I learned later that, when he was Army chief of staff in the 1930s, MacArthur sometimes wore a kimono in his Washington office.
Yoshida’s home, which had a spectacular view of Mount Fuji, was comfortably large but not ostentatious. It reflected the impeccable taste of Madame Aso, who again served as our hostess. Its decorations and furnishings reflected the usual Japanese eye for proportion and balance, but in Yoshida’s case the balance was between things western and things eastern. Western books stood alongside works of Japanese art. Yoshida slept on a futon mattress rather than a bed, but on the terrace, where dinner was served, he had a western-style table and chairs rather than a low-slung Japanese table. Even the meal he served us combined Japanese and western dishes.
In a conversation that ranged widely over the world scene, Yoshida reflected on his trip to Versailles with Count Makino. In discussing my 1953 statement on rearmament, one of the other guests got the date of it wrong. Before I had a chance to say anything, Yoshida quickly corrected him. I thought to myself that the speech must have made more of an impression on him than he had let on at the time.
He expressed a par
ticular interest in de Gaulle and in my evaluation of the French leader. I told him that I did not wholly support de Gaulle’s international policies, especially his ambivalence toward NATO. I suggested that de Gaulle’s international “high posture,” to use a characteristically Japanese term, was possible because of his domestic successes and his popularity in France. I added that in view of Japan’s economic strength, the Japanese government, like de Gaulle, was in a position to play a “high posture” role in international affairs—provided Japan developed a stronger military capability. I expressed my firm conviction that “Japan must not become an economic giant and remain a military and political pygmy.” As he had in 1953, Yoshida politely but firmly turned my suggestion aside.
In retrospect the most significant subject of our talk over dinner in 1964 was China. It was a conversation we had begun eleven years before, when I first met him in Tokyo. At that time Yoshida, an “old China hand” from his days as a diplomat, told me that he had made a lifelong study of Chinese culture and retained a deep respect for it. He believed that just as no invader had ever been able to conquer China permanently, the invasion of communism would inevitably fail in its attempt to overcome centuries of Confucian influence. Chinese intellectuals, though in temporary eclipse in 1953, would eventually prevail over the Communist ideologues, Yoshida said.
However, Yoshida disagreed with the then-prevalent view that Chiang Kai-shek might still have a role to play on the mainland. Yoshida argued that although Chiang was himself a Confucian scholar, he had irreparably alienated the intellectuals, and that this was politically fatal. On this point he disagreed with Emperor Hirohito, who had still been strongly supportive of Chiang when I saw him during the same visit.
Yoshida’s almost instinctual philosophical affinity with the Chinese impelled him to believe that increased trade between China and the non-Communist nations of Asia would ultimately cause China to throw off communism in favor of free enterprise. Like Eisenhower, he passionately believed that trade between potential enemies could lead to peace. He also felt that China’s intervention in Korea was an aberration that resulted from its concern about a possible threat to its own borders. He believed the Chinese were essentially a peaceful people who would only resist aggression, not initiate it.
Leaders Page 17
